Liberty

by Andrea Portes

  So there, now you’ve met all three of them.

  I can’t tell if you are impressed or concerned.

  Don’t worry, they all know about one another. Scout’s honor. Or, at least, they each know they are not my one and only. And I’m pretty sure they don’t care.

  (For the record, I’m sure I’m not their one and only either, although I haven’t really bothered to ask.)

  There is one thing they do all have in common. At one point or another, all three of them mentioned how baffled, annoyed, or irate they were that LexCorp is coming to our bicollege community to recruit.

  Who is LexCorp? Funny you should ask.

  LexCorp is probably the least understood and most diabolical company known to man. They make Halliburton look like Bambi. Rumor has it, the company profited by over eighty billion dollars from the Iraq War. Basically, on oil. And retrieving the oil. And overcharging the government to hire its own special workers to drill the oil. And selling the oil. Originally, they were strictly an oil company. Then they decided to branch out into coal, natural gas, and every fossil fuel known to man. But that’s not all.

  Fun fact: You know those guys who always go on the news to represent the “doubt” over climate change? The ones who say things like “The science isn’t in” and “Global warming is a hoax”? Well, those are actually just a small handful of guys. They’re called “experts.” They always have something under their name implying they are from some obscure “foundation” or “institute.”

  But, if you actually take the time to look into these so-called foundations and institutes, they are usually shells for the fossil fuel industry. Like, say, LexCorp. So, basically, LexCorp has paid millions and millions of dollars to get these guys on all the news shows, since the 1970s, to make everyone doubt the reality of climate change, thereby dooming us all. Fun fact number two: Many of these guys are the exact same guys who said smoking wasn’t bad for you. Nice bunch.

  Don’t believe me? Look these guys up. Or watch Merchants of Doubt. Go ahead. I’ll wait.

  Whistle, whistle, whistle . . .

  . . .

  Okay, did you see it? Great.

  So now you know I’m not just an insane person with paranoid delusions, and now you also know that we are stuck dealing with the coming onslaught of a warming planet compliments of LexCorp.

  I even have a T-shirt that says “LexCorp: We’re making a killing!” in 1950s supercheesy ad design. Kind of like the font from an old postcard. You’d really like it. I’ll get you one if you’re nice to me.

  Here’s something funny. LexCorp is conducting interviews here at Bryn Mawr from the suicide room. They don’t know it’s the suicide room. They think it’s just the Vandevoort Room. Because that’s what it says on the plaque. But what they don’t know is that fifty years ago, Tisley Vandevoort, heiress and debutante, committed suicide in that very room. It was all over the society pages. A real scandal. Her family, traumatized, dedicated this gorgeous, elegant room in Denbigh Hall to her. The idea being, I think, to give the students at Bryn Mawr a place to go and relax, muse, and meditate instead of killing themselves. What LexCorp didn’t realize is that no one at Bryn Mawr would ever, ever, go into that room. Because, suicide.

  The fact that LexCorp is now recruiting from the infamous suicide room suggests to me that someone on the job fair organization committee has a sense of humor.

  I bet this was their little rebellion against having to pencil in these guys in the first place. Nicely played, for sure. But LexCorp can’t be let off that easily.

  I don’t know why I think it’s my job, but it is. I won’t rest until someone calls out the demons from LexCorp on their utter degeneracy.

  If you’re guessing what I’m doing right now, you’re probably right.

  I’m walking across the green, through a tree-lined path, from my dorm to Denbigh Hall.

  To the suicide room.

  To meet with LexCorp.

  6

  I have to give it to the Vandervoorts. They really knew what they were doing. This is probably the most exquisite room on campus. Persian rugs, mahogany tables with gargoyles carved into the legs, Ming dynasty vases, oil paintings of pastoral scenes involving horses. I mean, these guys knew how to class it up.

  At the other side of the room, a pristine seating area. Two wingback chairs in a chinoiserie fabric, navy blue with some kind of birds, facing a navy couch with a complementary navy pattern. There is coral involved in the pattern to make it pop. That’s the thing about really fancy places: There’s always more humor to it than you see in the movies. A sense of play.

  Across the room, sitting in one of the wingback chairs, facing toward the window, there’s a man. I can’t see his face, but his hair is a kind of dirt brown. And he seems to have all of it.

  This is the enemy.

  This is the recruiter from LexCorp.

  This guy must have some spider sensibilities, because he is up and turning toward me just as I set foot in the room. I didn’t even make a noise.

  And now he’s facing me.

  Um . . .

  Look, I was expecting this guy to be bald, squat, and weirdly tan in that way that rich guys always seem to be. Trump tan.

  But this guy isn’t any of those things.

  He’s actually tall. He’s actually pale. And he’s actually kind of . . . cool-looking. Like his suit is a sharp, somewhere-between-gray-and-navy thing, with a kind of skinny fit I was not anticipating. And I’m not sure, but there seem to be electrons radiating all around him.

  He stops for a second. Stares.

  Maybe there are electrons radiating around me?

  We both just kind of stand there for an extremely awkward moment.

  And then he pulls himself together.

  “Paige . . . Nolan? Am I saying that right?”

  “Um, yes. It’s Nolan. Like Golan. Like the Golan Heights. The place captured from Syria and occupied by Israel during the Six-Day War, territory that Israel effectively annexed in 1981, but which remains a point of contention, évidemment.”

  (That’s French for obviously.)

  He stares at me.

  Sometimes this happens to me. Communication with other humans was never my forte.

  Now I’m going to share with you the next part of the interview, which consists of a kind of multilingual dance. Don’t worry. I’ll translate, I promise.

  “Je remarqué que vous parlez français couramment—vous considérez-vous d’être un peu français?” he throws out there.

  Do I consider myself part French? That’s not what he’s really asking, is it? I rapid-fire back en francais:

  “Either someone is French, or they aren’t. You mean, do I scorn everything and hate Americans, as the French do?”

  “Quelque chose comme ça.” He smiles. Something like that.

  Smart-ass. He has no idea who he’s dealing with. I switch to Russian. “Pochemu by ne sprosit’ menya, yesli ya schitayu sebya svoyego roda russkiy yazyk?” Then why not ask me if I consider myself to be kind of Russian?

  “Prekrasno. Schitayete li vy sebya byt’ svoyego roda russkiy?” Fine. Do you?

  Huh. So he’s trilingual. Color me bored. I switch to a kind of casual Chinese, which I’m sure he won’t speak. “Yěxǔ wǒ rènwéi zìjĭ shì nà zhǒng zhōngguó rén. Zhéxie gongsi de búxié, yînwéi xiång nî képå de gongsî zhüyåo shi méiguo.”

  Or perhaps I consider myself Chinese. Each of these countries disdains America mainly because of shitty companies like your own.

  “Se refiere a nuestra empresa que emplea a cientos de miles de trabajadores en todo el mundo. Mantiene el pan en su mesa.”

  (He’s saying they employ hundreds of thousands of workers across the world. They put bread on their tables.)

  “El pan en su mesa! No hay mesa! No hay casa! Hay solamente casa de la cartulina cuadro, por todo la familia!”

  (My response. Bread on the table! There is no table! There is no house! There is only a shanty made
of cardboard for the whole family! It’s only after I’m done that I realize we’ve switched to Spanish.)

  “Algún tipo de Latina? Cuba, tal vez?”

  “Yes. Cuban. I learned Spanish from a revolutionary. Uncle Fidel.” A joke.

  “Touché.” He gets it.

  We stare at each other. It’s not exactly cold. It’s more like an assessment and a stalemate.

  “Now that that’s over with, pleased to meet you. My name’s Madden. Carter Madden.”

  I snort. “Carter. Madden? Are you in a soap opera?”

  “Trust me. I wish my parents had named me John or Steve.”

  He reaches out his hand to shake. Do I shake this man’s hand? This LexCorp hand?

  I hesitate. He retrieves his hand. Not angrily, exactly. Something else.

  “Have a seat.”

  He gestures toward the seating area, and next thing I know, we are facing each other in our respective wingback chairs. Very fancy.

  A normal interview would be behind a desk, I assume. But I suppose they do things slightly differently here at Bryn Mawr.

  “So. You’re a fan of Sean Raynes?”

  “What? How did you know that?”

  “He happens to be all over your Twitter feed.”

  “Um. Why did you check my Twitter feed?”

  Let’s back up a second and talk about Sean Raynes. Although now people just call him Raynes. He’s that famous. And his name is synonymous with whistle-blowing.

  Here’s what happened.

  Raynes was/is a superhacker. Ultrasmart. Top of his class at MIT. Tech genius. Computer whiz. All-around superstar. When he graduates, one year early like I will, he’s recruited by the CIA. In tech. Defending against cyberhackers, terrorist attacks, that sort of thing.

  And this is all well and good. Until Raynes realizes something horrible is going on and that the horrible thing is not actually coming from cyberhackers.

  In fact, he realizes that the CIA has put a microchip in EVERY cell phone sold in the United States. The microchip stays dormant. No big deal. Until you, or your mom, or your brother, or your friend, do anything vaguely suspicious. And I do mean vaguely. Things like . . . going on vacation to Istanbul, visiting relatives in Cuba, spending a summer in Saint Petersburg. Anything. In that case, you get put on a list. And the chip becomes activated.

  Now they can follow you. They can track you. Wherever you go, they know about it.

  And this list of “suspected terrorists” should be about ten to twenty thousand people, right? Wrong. The list is over two million names long.

  Over two million people tracked, every day, on their cell phones, by the CIA.

  Yup.

  Big brother is everywhere.

  So . . . Sean Raynes discovers this. Sean Raynes has a crisis of conscience.

  Sean Raynes knows what the government is doing is wrong; he knows it’s a violation of the Constitution and our right to privacy. But he is also a good guy, a patriot, a true believer in America and all it stands for.

  So he thinks about it. He ponders and wrings his hands and spends many a sleepless night.

  And then he breaks the story on CNN.

  To Anderson Cooper, no less.

  And while that story was crashing over the television airwaves—breaking, as it were—Raynes, en route to Nepal, was forced to land in Moscow. Where he abides today, in a sort of purgatorial state.

  Putin refuses to extradite him, as he is an embarrassment to the US government. And, meanwhile, back in the States, it is becoming more and more clear that this guy is a hero.

  Statues are being raised to him, illegally, in places from Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to Echo Park, Los Angeles. In Austin, Texas, they even held a parade in his honor.

  But to many other Americans, he is considered a traitor.

  Guess which side I’m on.

  But let’s get back to the classy meeting, shall we?

  “I fail to understand why you would be searching my Twitter feed.”

  Madden feigns interest in my résumé.

  “You scheduled an appointment with us. Don’t you think it’s relevant information?”

  “I think the only relevant information is that you work for a company that has almost single-handedly stalled climate change action for thirty years, dooming all of us to runaway global warming.”

  Madden looks up.

  “I think it’s relevant information that your company profited billions of dollars off an unjustified war that killed hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom were women and children.”

  He tilts his head, looks out the window.

  “Yes, I am aware of your opinions.”

  Wait. What?

  “Then why did you . . . why are we . . . Were you hoping to convince me otherwise?”

  “No, actually. I was just hoping to meet you.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “And now that I have, I’m satisfied. Arigato gozeimas ta.”

  (That last part is Japanese. Directly translated, it means, “It has all been very good with us.” But it’s a way of saying a final thank-you. A good-bye.)

  And just like that, Madden is out the door.

  I am left there.

  In the suicide room.

  To contemplate what just happened.

  No.

  No, no, no, no, no. This is not over. LexCorp does not get the last word.

  I decide to get in touch with this guy’s boss. I’m not sure what kind of operation they’re running over there, but I’d really like to understand why anyone would be poking into my Twitter feed before an interview.

  The registrar’s office is just across the garden, so it’s really no effort to pop in. It’s a tiny gray stone building that was the original student hall of Bryn Mawr. Inside, it’s dusty, with piles of paper everywhere.

  I poke my head in to see the registrar.

  “Hello. Sorry to bother you. Do you think it might be possible to get the phone number for whomever your contact is at LexCorp?”

  The registrar looks up. She’s a redheaded woman with glasses on a chain and a burgundy cardigan.

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your LexCorp contact. I was wondering if I could get the number?”

  “I’m sorry, I’m a bit confused here . . .”

  “I just had the strangest interview.”

  “With who?”

  “With LexCorp. They were here, you know, for recruitment?”

  She takes off her glasses and stares at me, sizing me up.

  “You’re joking, right?”

  “Why would I be joking?”

  “Young lady, LexCorp has been banned from our campus since nineteen seventy-eight.”

  7

  This is the moment I should probably leave campus and never look back.

  Because what the hell was that?

  But of course, that’s not what I do.

  Instead, I just keep on going about my business, thinking possibly this fake LexCorp interview was just some figment of my imagination, some dumb fluke, nothing to see here.

  After all, I have midterms to take, papers to write, books to read. It’s not as if I have all the time in the world to contemplate the random appearance of a particularly striking person who knew my name and feigned an entire corporate interview. Weird? Yes. A possible threat to my GPA? No. Not a chance.

  And the tonic I have, the answer for quelling my thoughts, is surely one of my three not-boyfriends. Any time, day or night, I can text either Aaron from Allentown, Teddy from Santa Monica, or Patrice from Paris. No big deal. No questions. No answers. No one gets hurt.

  This random texting happens a lot.

  Once the books are closed, once the papers are written, there is that time, the witching hour, when the last thing I want to do is think but all I can do is think, and imagine, and despair. Truly despair. Like to the point of being catatonic. Unable to get off the bed. Unable to move. Frozen.

  I’ve pinpointed the moment—that moment before
the whole thing falls apart and begins to snowball. And it’s in this moment that I’ve trained myself to text. Just text. Find Aaron. Find Teddy. Find Patrice. The first one to text back is what happens next. Not the abyss. A tonic, instead. A boy to keep my mind off it. A boy to not face facts.

  But this particular evening, tonight, I have reached that moment. I have texted, but to no avail. It’s eleven p.m. and there is no sign of boy tonic. Anywhere.

  There I sit, staring at the wooden slats of the dorm room floor. They’re a kind of medium beige. At our old house, in Berkeley, my mom insisted on dark brown floors. A kind of alpine color, associated with cabins. But then the walls were white. It was a kind of stark contrast, which just happened to be perfect. That was always the way it was with my mom. She just threw things together in a way that most people would think was completely bizarre, you’d never think of it, and then you’d look at it all together in the end and it would stun you. Wow, you’d think, how did she do that?

  I’m using the past tense again.

  To describe my mom.

  I have to get out of here.

  There’s a path, down the hill behind my dorm, leading through the trees and then up the hill to town. It winds, here, at the edges of the campus, across the green and past the duck pond. Now, with the entire campus either asleep or frantically writing papers somewhere behind a dim light, there’s the strange sound of nothing. Not even white noise. Or a passing car. In the distance, above the trees, a few flickering lights in the dorm-room windows. The night owls.

  I never noticed it before. Here. This inlet. There’s a hidden little grove of elms and then, in the back, a small plaque underneath a copper statue. The statue is a man, clasped around his waist by an anchor. But he is facing the other way, against the weight of the anchor, refusing to bend under its weight. The tiny plaque, lit up, in the faintest of lights, a poem:

  DO NOT GO GENTLE INTO THAT GOOD NIGHT

  Do not go gentle into that good night,