Six Degrees of Freedom

by Nicolas Dickner

  Sitting on his bed, laptop on his knees, earbuds in, two litres of no-name grape juice within easy reach, Éric is debugging code. On the screen, ten stacked windows are downloading, compiling, calculating or silently standing by. Beside him on the bed there’s a digital camera, a run-of-the-mill, low-end Canon PowerShot.

  The three budgies take wing, circle the room and come back to roost on the bookcase, where one of them punctuates the spine of a Robert Heinlein novel with a tiny semicolon of droppings.

  Lisa removes her shoes at the door and silently sets the box of ancestors down on the bed beside the PowerShot. A century of photographic technology in one square metre.

  Éric pulls out his earbuds and mutely contemplates the box for several seconds. He finally picks up the Satellite Mercury. Moulded into the plastic, a Sputnik, lightly embossed, describes an elegant elliptical orbit.

  “What’s this?”

  Lisa, beaming, drops onto the bed. “The answer to our money problems.”

  AFTER SEVEN YEARS OF HIBERNATION, Jay arrives at Trudeau airport with her still-warm passport, her letter of authorization covered with stamps and signatures, and a simple shoulder bag. No checked baggage. The authorities have given her seventy-two hours, and she is equipped for seventy-two hours. She carries no computer, memory stick, compact disc, SD card, camera or telephone, nothing that could be suspected of containing sensitive data.

  At security, they search through her things with a fine-tooth comb. They empty her zip-lock bag, sniff her toothpaste and hand cream. Every last seam in her bag is turned inside out, squeezed, inspected under a flashlight. She is directed to an office, where a female security guard photocopies her address book and empties her wallet. The guard examines the third volume of Jules Verne’s Œuvres complètes, a shockproof edition with a quilted cover. She fingers the hot-air balloon embossed on the fake leather. Evidently the guard has decided that the three cushioned millimetres of the unknown represent a national security risk, and Jay’s opinion on the matter is of no interest to anyone.

  —

  All this is the fault of Horacio Guzman.

  After smoking enough Davidoffs to bump up the GDP, after coughing for fifteen years, spitting up blood and phlegm, after metastasizing to the very core of even the lowliest vital organs, including his brain, Horacio Guzman lay down on his bed on the second floor, near the window, and stated that he had no wish to get up again.

  A little later, between two coughing fits, he asked that someone inform la Pequeña.

  The request caught everyone off guard. No one knew anymore where or how to contact la Pequeña. She had disappeared years ago. Some had even forgotten she existed. Following two weeks of intensive searching, a friend of a friend of the family managed to locate Jay at an old spam-ridden Yahoo address.

  The message consisted of five words (six counting the signature): “El viejo se está muriendo.”

  Having bought an international calling card (paid in cash) and tracked down a telephone booth, she got in touch with the Guzman clan’s headquarters. A nephew confirmed the news: Horacio was dying, Horacio was going to die. Jay promised to catch the first available flight, and hung up.

  She instantly regretted it.

  For one thing, she was not authorized to go back there. For another, she was no longer sure there was still a genuine connection between her and the Guzman tribe. The phone call had been their first contact in seven years.

  But there was little time for metaphysical questions. Horacio was coughing up whatever was left of his lungs. Jay had to act fast.

  To begin with, she had to get the travel ban lifted.

  Jay got started on her uphill battle. She invited herself to a series of offices, pleaded her case, climbed the cliffs of the hierarchy. Everywhere, she was given a cool reception. The problem was not so much her leaving as her returning to visit Horacio Guzman. Wouldn’t she rather take a ten-day all-inclusive holiday to Mexico?

  Eventually, she reached the Parole Board. After a long teleconference with a probations officer, the RCMP’s deputy divisional assistant commissioner and a mysterious Mrs. Bourassa, Jay was granted a “temporary suspension of paragraph 5(b) of Annex IV on humanitarian grounds, in consideration of her exemplary behaviour over the past six years, eight months, and twelve days.”

  The suspension would be in effect for seventy-two hours, take it or leave it.

  Jay took it.

  —

  In the end, the Jules Verne cover was slit open with an X-acto knife and probed with a flashlight; this seemed to placate the border guard. Jay is now free to collect her belongings and move on to the international zone.

  On her way to the departure gate, she expects all the same to be stopped by an airport security officer who will tell her they have changed their minds and she can no longer leave. The arrest will undoubtedly take place at any minute.

  But no one intercepts her.

  Incredulous, she clenches her jaw and holds her breath, not relaxing until ten minutes after takeoff, once the plane has turned south and left Montreal’s airspace. The engine speed changes and the seatbelt warning lights are switched off. Jay still can’t believe she was allowed to leave. She feels drained. It would not take much to make her cry.

  She spends the greater part of the flight—including the stopover in Toronto—in the depths of a bituminous slumber and doesn’t entirely wake up until the wheels hit the runway at Las Américas Airport.

  Her eardrums hurt. The plane vibrates as it slows down and then taxis smoothly along the tarmac. Jay adjusts the pressure in her ears. Some sporadic applause breaks out. Her seatmate quickly crosses herself and kisses her fingertips. A few rows down, a lady goes about pulling a bulky suitcase from the overhead compartment despite the instructions given over the loudspeakers. She drops it on a man’s head, a water bottle rolls across the floor, there’s an angry exchange in English and Spanish.

  The flight attendant makes a sudden announcement: all passengers are to remain seated and will be allowed to deplane only after airport officers have inspected the cabin.

  The aircraft parks near the gate and all the on-board systems shut down. No engines, ventilation or lighting. Clinking noises made by the expansion joints can be heard here and there. People begin to grumble in various languages. There are already signs of disobedience in first class, where passengers are mistreating the overhead compartments and the flight attendants. The hatch finally opens and two police climb aboard.

  Jay recognizes the first one. What’s his name? It’s on the tip of her tongue. He moves down the aisle looking at the seat numbers, not the passengers, as though mistrusting his visual memory. Eventually he reaches number 17B and stares Jay in the face. A few seconds of uncertainty go by; they recognize each other.

  “Usted no cambió.”

  Jay makes no reply, but she notes that, back in the day, this guy addressed her using the familiar tú rather than usted.

  The two officers escort her to the front of the airplane. She looks straight ahead, her bearing royal, ignoring the surrounding commotion. Only once outside do they signal to her to hold out her wrists. The handcuffs are oddly warm to the touch, as if they have just been removed from someone else.

  The trio walk up the boarding bridge. Through the thin walls Jay can smell the heat, the humidity, the scent of kerosene. At the boarding gate, two officers in battledress are waiting with M-16s cradled in the crooks of their arms. Somewhere in the terminal a bachata version of a Lady Gaga song is playing.

  Jay looks down the corridor leading to the immigration counters. There will be no entry stamp for la Pequeña today.

  In the airport security office, the two policemen have gone into a huddle. The older one, whose name Jay is still trying to recall, holds his cellphone to his ear while the other peruses her passport and letter of authorization. They appear to be working out the proper procedure.

  The young officer ferrets around in Jay’s bag, pulls out volume three of Jules Verne’s comp
lete works. He examines the newly slit-open cover and leafs through a few pages.

  “¿Qué tal es?”

  “Pésimo.”

  He nods.

  “A mi me gusta Émile Zola. Estoy leyendo El paraíso de las damas por tercera vez.”

  At the other end of the office, the policeman finally gets off his telephone and comes over holding the letter and frowning. The phrase “on humanitarian grounds” bewilders him.

  “Usted vino a visitar a Horacio Guzman.”

  It wasn’t actually a question, but Jay nevertheless responds with a nod: yes, she expressly made the trip to see Horacio Guzman and, what’s more, with the approval of the Canadian authorities.

  The officer folds the letter.

  “Llegó tarde. Ya murió anoche.”

  The news seems unreal. Horacio died last night? Jay can’t even muster the energy to call the officer a liar; the fact is, she takes him at his word. She knows he has no reason to mislead her. He wields total authority, absolute control over events. Todopoderoso, as they say: all-powerful, in sole command. He has Jay in the palm of his hand.

  The only thing that niggles him is the letter; it attests to Jay’s dual status—dangerous yet protected.

  He walks away without saying anything more, and the situation is left in limbo. People come and go, no one pays attention to Jay. A drunken passenger is brought in, a lost little girl, a woman who has forgotten her medications. A teenager is shoved into the office handcuffed with tie wraps and wearing three layers of sweatshirts; he’d been discovered in the landing gear of a plane bound for Miami. Jay would like to reassure him: geography has always made her sweat too. The kid does not stay put very long—they take him away somewhere. Jay cools her heels. Everyone is waiting for something, a superior’s decision no doubt.

  The afternoon goes by and the sun sets on the tarmac. Jay’s handcuffs are removed as she drowses in her plastic chair. The call comes in around midnight: immediate deportation.

  The episode draws to a close. At dawn, Jay is put on the same plane for the return flight to Canada, and she counts herself lucky not to have had another taste of the sistema penitenciario nacional.

  An officer escorts her to her seat and stays near the cockpit until it’s time to close the hatch. Jay is impassive. She holds in her lap her still-virgin passport and the slightly creased letter of authorization. When the plane takes off—at long last—she leans against the window and looks down at the forbidden country far below. The aircraft turns seaward and flies over the Caucedo maritime terminal. In the terminal yard, thousands of containers are waiting, stacked like the multicoloured pieces of some unknown board game.

  LISA WAS ÉRIC’S FIRST HACK.

  As a small boy, he would sever words and sentences. His mother had to dissect every word for him like a crayfish. On his first day in kindergarten, when he was introduced to his neighbour, the little girl with blond braids who had just moved next door to the Mirons, he had been warned to articulate É-Lii-Sa-BeTH. TH, not T.

  Éric took an instant liking to Élisabeth, and he was careful to pronounce every syllable of her given name. The elocutionary effort lasted a few days, until the É fell off. Lisabeth, Éric would say, and he said it often because they spent their days together, welded to one another. After that initial amputation, there was a brief period of wavering between Lisabeth and Zabeth before Éric finally settled on Lisa.

  From then on, Lisa has been called Lisa, and the abbreviation has contaminated their community. Her father, mother, friends, teachers, school secretary, one and all now say Lisa.

  Éric had a gift for programming.

  To everyone’s surprise, the two kids soon grew inseparable. They were thought to be different—but no, they were complementary. Éric had a geometric mind. He was fond of puzzles, detailed landscapes, symmetries. He always introduced himself the same way: “My name is Éric Le Blanc. Le Blanc in two words, like Erik the Red.” Lisa, on the other hand, was all synthesis and narrative; the overall picture and the subtexts were what interested her. When asked her name, she answered: “Lisa Routier-Savoie. About 95 percent Routier and 5 percent Savoie.”

  He was taciturn; she filled in the silences. He lived inside his head; she was constantly observing the world around her. She came up with questions and he found the answers, yet Lisa’s questions were as clever and unique as Éric’s answers.

  They felt happy only in each other’s company, like a brother and sister separated for too long. They were often found reading in a corner, seated back to back on the floor like two bodies extending from either side of a single spinal column.

  This symbiosis lasted until high school, when Éric began to suffer from an extreme form of agoraphobia. Within six months, he was practically unable to leave the house, putting an end to his ambition of becoming an astronaut. The boy who had hoped to work in the International Space Station had to settle for his bedroom.

  He enrolled in distance education and received his high school diploma eighteen months later, three years ahead of schedule. Too young to enter college—and incapable, in any case, of leaving his house—he suddenly found himself having to fill up days of solitude. How to keep busy during all those hours when his mother was at work in Valleyfield? He could have downloaded cars in flames, zombies, topless girls or the entire musical output of the 1990s. Instead, he took an interest in programming and soon began to pore over Python, C and Ruby manuals with confounding ease.

  In tandem with this passion came a revelation: everything, absolutely everything, functioned through software and operating systems. From traffic lights to vending machines, microwave ovens, telephones and ABMs, all the way to medical devices. In fact, the only thing left that was entirely analog was Mr. Miron’s Datsun Sunny.

  All at once, Éric felt as though he were wearing X-ray glasses. His environment became eminently hackable, for better or worse. He undertook all sorts of more or less successful experiments. His attempt to hack into the firmware of the family’s DVD player ended in complete and legendary failure, and Mrs. Le Blanc decreed that certain lines must not be crossed and that if ever Éric was caught hacking the neighbour’s defibrillator, she would sentence him to Internet access via the old 14.4-baud fax modem that she kept tucked away in her closet. Beneath her kind-hearted exterior, Mrs. Le Blanc was well versed in the ancient art of the threat.

  Each night, Lisa ran to the Gaieté cul-de-sac, where she took pains to disrupt Éric’s quiet routine. He spent too much time in front of the screen, the bum, and Lisa concocted a raft of nonsensical plans for him. She proposed that they cook up explosives with lawn fertilizer, build their own Van de Graaff electrostatic generator, lob a ballistic missile across the US border. One day she had the idea of reproducing Benjamin Franklin’s celebrated experiment: they would tame lightning with a kite. How could Éric refuse? The project was fun and inexpensive, and—great Scott!—it wasn’t every day you got the chance to handle fifty thousand amperes of electrical charge. Lisa prepared all the paraphernalia, but at the last minute Éric changed his mind: he already balked at the thought of leaving his house, and the muffled rumbling of thunder sealed his refusal.

  Standing under the lowering sky, the kite held under her arm, Lisa watched the twenty-thousand-metre-high crest of the cumulonimbi with the distinct impression of having missed an important rendezvous. Oh well, she still had plenty of stratagems in store to shake up Éric’s sorry carcass. The main thing was to keep their parents out of the loop.

  —

  Looking skeptical, Éric bends over the cardboard box. So these smelly old cameras are supposed to be the solution to their money problems? Lisa nods emphatically.

  “We’ll sell them on eBay.”

  Éric instantly sees the cameras in a new light. He examines them one at a time, presses the shutter releases, gingerly opens the bodies. One of the Instamatics still contains a film cartridge, which he does not disturb. Added value.

  Over the past few months, Éric and Lisa have tried
so many money-making schemes they’ve lost count. Lisa collected and returned empties and mowed lawns. She won’t receive her wages for the work on the Baskine house until the end of the summer vacation. As for Éric, he debugged a few computers in the neighbourhood and did some freelance website design. He keeps searching the Web for little-known machinations, but the legal system constitutes a perpetual obstacle on the road to wealth.

  So, selling old cameras on eBay? No worse than lots of other silly ideas.

  “How much are we short?”

  “About two hundred and fifty dollars.”

  “We won’t sell them overnight. It may take weeks. Or months.”

  “Maybe I should have gone strawberry picking.”

  “Waste of time.”

  He brings up eBay on his screen and keys a few model numbers into the search engine. The antique camera market appears to be flourishing. He adds up the prices. The plan looks workable.

  While Lisa puts away the cameras, Éric points with his toe at the Cyrillic writing scribbled on the back of the box.

  “Is that Russian?”

  “Looks like Russian.”

  “We should do some research on who lived in the house.”

  “Someone rich, anyway. I spent the afternoon shovelling minks and martini glasses. We could have made a fortune on eBay if everything hadn’t been coated in two inches of bat shit.”

  Abruptly erasing the box from his mind, Éric holds one of his earbuds out to Lisa and dives back into his work. Lisa takes the earbud and finds herself inside a cloud of Polish industrial punk. She glances at the lines of source code on the screen.

  “You’re making good progress?”

  “Sort of. I’m trying to fix a bug with CHDK. I’ve got a ‘lens error.’ I think I’ve corrupted the ROM. My mother is going to kill me.”

  Lisa makes a face. “Hey, it’s all for science.”

  As she says this, it occurs to her that this excuse really does allow you, really and truly, to do anything.

  One of the budgies has just alighted on the top edge of the monitor and is eyeing the code, as if to scrutinize the naming conventions. It coos in disdain. There’s nothing more annoying than a psittacine who knows code.