Fortune Smiles: Stories

by Adam Johnson

  “Did the screen flash or go blue?” I ask. “Did you see a cursor blink or hear a ticking noise?”

  “I don’t remember,” he says, but he seems to make a decision about me and steps aside.

  Inside, I give the computer a quick visual. There’s a bar-coded property sticker, probably from a studio lot. “If this is a work computer, just turn it in,” I say. “Your boss will get it repaired.”

  “This guy I know, he said you fixed his computer for three hundred dollars, no questions.” He holds up three one-hundred-dollar bills.

  I pull on purple latex gloves and unplug the wireless router.

  I drop the desktop’s side panel, pull the fans, then attach an I/O cable and reboot. Soon I get the error codes and kernel logs, and while the system profiles, I insert a thumb drive that I’ve loaded with a few dozen pictures. I command the root system to search for data strings in these pictures, images that would look like nothing special to the average person—a photo of a shoulder, a table, a bedspread, a foot. But they’re really innocent corners of pictures that depict adult sexual encounters with minors. Immediately, the search results appear, and together we see the screen fill with the flashing images of his child porn collection.

  “All this stuff was on the computer when I got it,” he says. “I was meaning to get rid of it.”

  “I’m sure.”

  Then he volunteers, “There are no boys on there.”

  “Wonderful,” I say.

  I do a quick inventory—it’s all the usual fare. He’s got the Teensy Series, the Fawn Trilogy, Pale Ribbons and so on. A search like this is easy because the vast majority of child porn available to the average Joe consists of a few dozen image sets that are commonly traded back and forth or resold through zombie servers.

  I stop on an image. “You see this girl here?”

  He says nothing.

  “What’s your name?” I ask.

  He pauses. “John.”

  “You see this girl, John?”

  He nods.

  “Her name’s not really Sissy. And this guy here, in his socks. That’s the girl’s uncle. He’s doing thirty-five in federal for the extended sexual abuse of a minor.”

  “Look,” he says. He holds out the money, but I don’t take it, not yet.

  “You wanna know her real name?”

  He shakes his head.

  “Good,” I say, “because she’s all grown up now, and she has a court order—a blanket judgment against anyone found in possession of these images. That’s how you find out her real name—after your arrest, you get a writ informing you that you owe her a hundred and forty thousand dollars.”

  I survey the rest of his directories, but it’s all the standard business.

  I ask him, “You know one thing child pornographers always get wrong?”

  He eyes me suspiciously.

  “The lighting,” I tell him.

  And here is an opportunity to test the thesis of my article. I swap thumb drives and search the computer’s file formats for the signal, which is a simple ASCII string, 256 characters long. Right away, John’s porn directories light up with the beacon. I sort the pictures by date and see that the first set he bought, over a year ago, was a legendary set of scanned Polaroids nicknamed Summer Poppies, which means that whoever is tracking these images has been doing so for a while.

  John and I fall silent, staring at Poppie in her makeup and fake eyelashes, with the look on her face that made her famous. This is a series I find especially disturbing. I understand that humans are deeply corrupted and that over the course of life, each of us comes to understand the depth of our species’ sexual depravity. But in Summer Poppies, the worst perversions are candy-coated with false innocence, with bunny slippers and lollipops and Snoopy bedspreads. Here, even pearls of semen hover and catch the light.

  “There is a signal coming from this picture,” I tell John. “It’s like a Trojan horse. When you download the picture, you download the beacon. And when you connect to the Internet, the beacon goes ping.”

  “What are you talking about?” he asks.

  “Here’s the beauty of it,” I tell him. “The beacon’s not in the image but in the file format, as metadata, so you can alter the image, crop it, whatever, but the beacon is still there. No matter what you do to the picture, it can still call home, and that’s how they know.”

  “Know what?”

  “That the pictures are here, John. On your hard drive.”

  Then I notice an image that doesn’t emit the signal. It’s of a girl I haven’t seen before. And she is a girl—not a teen, not a tween, but a child. She is alone, captured from the waist up, and she wears a small yellow T-shirt. There is nothing sexualized about the picture, not even a pigtail, and she’s not on a set—there are no Hello Kitty curtains, no tripods or floodlights. No, this is a girl and she’s in someone’s kitchen and this is not a “shoot” but a normal day from her actual life, one that finds her standing next to a screen door, the diffused light from which casts a pale pattern across her skin. On her face is fear, and the wide-eyed uncertainty of what will happen next, laced with perhaps a glint of hope that she can spare herself in some way from the unknown bad thing that is about to begin. Then I see her arm is blurred, that it’s lifting—to fend something off, to latch on to an adult for security, or is the arm lifting on its own, the way arms lift involuntarily when something horrible is encountered.

  “Where did you get this picture?” I ask.

  “I don’t know,” he says. “I traded for it. I forget.”

  “Do you know this girl?”

  “Of course not,” he says. “Look, I just want my computer fixed.”

  I understand that whether a child is hurt under the bright lights of a highly produced shoot or atop the dingy linoleum of a family friend’s home, the damage is the same. But the illusion is that the latter is happening right now, not long ago, that if the right series of actions were taken, taken by anyone, even someone like me, it could be stopped.

  I copy the picture of the girl and eject my thumb drive.

  “You’ve got a bad pin on a RAM card,” I tell John. “It only fails in heavy data cascades. It’s an easy fix, but don’t bother. You need to pull those drives out of their bays and take them out back and break them with a hammer. The spindles must crack to ensure the data cannot be retrieved. Tell your boss the computer was stolen and then crack the drives. Understand?”

  He nods, but I can tell it hasn’t sunk in.

  “And don’t try to save those pictures. They know you have them.”

  “Who knows?” he asks.

  I take the cash from his hand. “Who do you think?”

  —

  At home, I walk right past my rosebushes. Inside, I turn on all the lights and pace the small rooms. The image of that girl has me completely fucked up. Everywhere I look, there she is. I am racked by the little blur of her arm. It lifts, but there’s nothing she can do to stop what will happen. Innocence is on that face, as well as knowledge of what’s to come. And the arm lifts. The past, the present and the future all exist at once. And the most fucked-up and wrong and horrible part is that I activate. It kills me to masturbate, to stand there at the bathroom sink and jerk off into the basin—when I close my eyes, I see her; when I open them, there in the mirror is myself—but it’s the only thing that will make it stop.

  I start crying while I do it, I really do, because she knows what’s going to happen, she knows it can’t be stopped, and even though you know what’s ahead, it still comes as a surprise when, after a day of sailing, after the Skipper has doled out performance ribbons to your Sea Scouts troop, and you’ve been having fun and there’s a sense of wonder and achievement after rounding the tip of Catalina Island, and despite all the times it has happened before, it takes you by surprise when the Skipper comes for you in the dark and you’re taken down to the storage cabin, with the musty smell of sail canvas and the petroleum bite of foul-weather gear. Atop a mound of the o
ther boys’ dirty laundry is where he forces you facedown. The anchor chain pulls taut against the hull, and there is no light beyond the pale glow of the bilge-pump sensor, no sound beyond the scratch of his razor stubble against the back of your neck and the cinch of his hands as he grips the straps of your life vest.

  —

  For the next couple nights, I ignore my gardening and instead initialize my computer. Here is where I keep a library of images. The pictures activate, strongly, like a muscle capable of folding you in half. There is nothing erotic about them. They are actually quite troubling. But they activate. I view before-and-after pictures, hundreds at a time, just before and just after. It helps to modify the pictures, to make a big one into little ones—focusing on a small hand, defiant, clenching the sheets, or a hand open and limp, fully relented. A single look can tell an entire story, so I often crop pictures down to the eyes—eyes fallen, eyes without focus, eyes closed, the pinwheel of an eye that’s seeing something far different than what’s before it, or a single, daring upward glance.

  When you view these pictures, the best way to handle what you must confront is to view a picture series backward: something awful is happening to a child, it becomes less bad, and less bad, then the child and the adult separate, and after talking a brief moment, they exit through different doors.

  At my computer, I do not masturbate, because that ends the sessions too soon. I can only say that in pushing me to the edge, the pictures help me find center again. I feel purged somehow. For a couple of days, I’m just like everybody else.

  I’ve read a couple of books on the topic. This One Doctor Lady writes that by watching the scenario, the victim revictimizes himself. This Other Doctor Guy’s book says that emotional development is arrested at the time of abuse, which makes you incapable of a relationship beyond the level of an adolescent. There’s only one thing I’m sure about: these experts have never been victimized—they have never even seen it. They couldn’t stand a single image. Not for a minute, not for sixty measly seconds, could they direct their gaze at a video portraying the brutalization of an innocent.

  —

  A knock at the door wakes me. It is midday. Since I sleep fully clothed, I’m able to answer right away. By sleeping with your clothes on, you don’t need to climb under the sheets. You don’t need to disturb a perfectly made bed or even fold the bed back into the couch.

  When I open the door, a police officer is standing there.

  “Those are some pretty serious flowers,” the cop says, nodding at the yard.

  “They’re from the lady who used to live here,” I tell him.

  “I’m Officer Hernandez,” he says. “Jaime Hernandez. A colleague of mine, Sergeant Rengsdorff, said I might talk with you. He said you helped crack a couple laptops a while back, that you helped with a kiddie case.”

  I nod. “That’s right. Denis. How is he?”

  “Sergeant Rengsdorff retired last year. I took his place on the Crimes Against Minors task force.”

  His phone keeps vibrating with text messages, but he pays them no mind. I peg him as the cool cop who gives out his number to the troubled and at-risk, letting them know he’s there.

  Just then Rhonza comes walking by. “You finally busting that creepshow?” she calls out. “Someone’s been peeping in the neighborhood, and I knew it was him. I could see it in his fucked-up eyes.”

  The cop lifts his hand in a semi-salute that says, I heard you, ma’am; thanks for the input.

  But Rhonza isn’t done. “Look at him,” she demands. “He got Rikki-Tikki-Tavi eyes.”

  When she’s gone, Officer Hernandez offers a knowing smile.

  “There’s one in every neighborhood,” he says, but he is now studying my eyes.

  “Please,” I say. “Come in.”

  He steps inside. “You just move in?” he asks, and I almost tell him I’ve been living here for seven years. Instead, I shut my mouth and watch him sweep his eyes along the empty white walls and blank refrigerator and neatly made foldout bed.

  “You never really get settled,” I tell him.

  “When you do, it’s time to move again,” he says, staring at the bookcase that houses my National Geographic magazines, the rows and rows of yellow spines.

  We stand at the kitchen counter. “Glass of water?” I ask. “Half-pint of milk?”

  “That’s a lot of magazines,” he says. “I didn’t know they still published that one.”

  “I have a lifetime subscription.”

  “What’d that set you back?” he asks hollowly, for he is really scrutinizing the contents of my fridge when I open it.

  “I received it as a prize when I was a boy in the Sea Scouts. I was our troop’s scout of the year, though I didn’t do anything special to earn it. It was more of a consolation prize, really.”

  The cop returns his gaze to me. “Sea Scouts?”

  “It’s just like the Boy Scouts, but on water. You learn navigation and maritime skills. The troop I was in doesn’t exist anymore. It disbanded after our troop leader took his life. He hiked up Topanga Canyon and hanged himself.”

  He watches me unfold the carton’s spout.

  “Sorry to hear that,” he says. “I’m sure his legacy lives on.”

  I take a swig of milk. “Well, the magazines keep coming.”

  “Right,” Officer Hernandez says. “I’m here because of an article on the Web. It basically says that a code can be placed in explicit imagery, that it can be tracked somehow. I can’t claim to understand it. Denis, Sergeant Rengsdorff, he said you were the guy to talk to.”

  “I know the article,” I tell him, and I explain the whole thing, about the signals and beacons, how the child pornographers seem to have no idea their files have been modified, which suggests that some agency, probably federal, has swapped the pornographers’ source files for doctored ones. Rather than shutting them down, the feds are using them to build a database of viewers.

  After I pour this information out, Hernandez stares at me a moment. Then he begins asking questions, all the right ones, about detection, distribution, how come I know so much. Then he asks me, “The guy who wrote this article, he signed his name ‘Dark Meadow.’ Does that mean something in computer talk?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Here’s what I don’t understand,” Officer Hernandez says. “If this signal, if this two-hundred-and-fifty-six-digit code is the key, how come this Dark Meadow guy didn’t publish it with the article?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe revealing that would jeopardize a major federal investigation.”

  “But didn’t writing the article do that?” he asks. “I mean, are we dealing with one of the good guys or one of the bad?”

  “I don’t understand the question.”

  “The question is simple. Is this guy trying to protect kids by alerting the authorities of a way to catch predators? Or is he trying to help pedophiles by warning them of a vulnerability?”

  I still don’t quite follow. “Information is information,” I tell him.

  Hernandez asks, “Do you know this Dark Meadow?”

  I don’t say anything.

  “Maybe I will take that milk,” he says.

  When I open the fridge, he again peers inside. There’s nothing of interest to see, just a few shelves stacked with neat rows of milk cartons.

  “If I understand you right,” he asks, “a person with this code could find all the child porn viewers in L.A.”

  “If you had the code,” I say, “you could make a real-time Google map of them.”

  I hand him a carton. He shakes it to froth the milk inside.

  “But who would you catch?” I ask. “I dig in to a half-dozen computers a day, and any number of them are loaded with porn. It comes in all varieties. So I run across this kind of stuff. And you must believe me—there is no pleasure in seeing it. In fact, it is quite painful to me. But you got to understand that most of these pictures are from ten, twenty years ago. The victims ar
e grown, the offenders are old, probably sucking on oxygen bottles somewhere.”

  “Yeah?”

  “You can’t go back in time,” I say. “You can’t stop what’s already happened. It can only be dealt with.”

  Hernandez takes a drink from his tiny carton. “You know they sell this stuff by the gallon.”

  “I like to take things in increments,” I tell him.

  “I got kids,” he says. “So I’m on this task force for personal reasons. And I’m going to share my belief that there’s no difference between the guy who rapes children and the guy who looks at pictures of children being raped. Most officers on the force think these guys should be hunted down and shot like dogs in the street. I haven’t dwelled too much on that end of it. For me, it’s the children, they’re the ones I’m concerned about. And how long ago it was that they got hurt, that doesn’t matter to me at all.”

  He regards me a moment, almost sadly.

  “Personally, I don’t think you’re one of the bad guys,” he says. “But you, whether you think you’re a good guy or a bad guy—that’s something you should be very concerned with. There’s a way you can prove to yourself that you’re not a bad guy. You can save us a lot of trouble and pass along that code.”

  He leaves his card.

  —

  I follow the cop outside and watch him drive away. From the porch, I can see the Tiger and the Cub have opened a lemonade stand. They’ve taken a table and two folding chairs into the parking lot and are sitting, waiting. They have some lemons, a sugar jar and a pitcher of ice water. The Cub’s legs swing back and forth below the vinyl tablecloth. Nobody visits their lemonade stand, including me.

  —

  Come dark, I initialize my computer and crop images for a while. This is controlled, orderly work, and it soothes me. I take the images I’ve copied from people’s hard drives, and then I crop out the erections and penetrations and grimaces. I don’t need to tell you that I hate videos. You can’t crop a video. And once it’s in motion, it’s impossible to control.

  I call up the picture of the girl in the kitchen. First I crop her photo down to an image that shows only her eyes. Save. Then I frame the pattern of light that falls across her skin. Save. I crop an image that is simply yellow—a square of her yellow shirt, nothing else. Save. And then the hand. I trim and trim, narrowing in until there is only blur. You wouldn’t even know it was a hand. Then I destroy the original. In this way, I cripple the picture’s power to hurt—it’s not child pornography, it’s not pornography, it’s not even a child. I remove what racks you, what leaves you unable to raise yourself from the bottom of the boat.