Now and Again

by Charlotte Rogan

  The dog was back, eyeing him warily from across the street. Then it tucked its tail between brindle haunches and slunk into the bamboo that ran along the railroad tracks. “Hey, dog,” called Kelly, but by then, the dog was gone.

  “Any luck?” he asked when the teenagers got into their car and drove off.

  “They’ll come,” said the captain. “If they don’t, I’ll track their asses down.”

  The magnolias were in bloom, and up the street, the single mother was digging in her garden. Kelly thought about the convertible he was going to buy. He told himself he hadn’t made the world the way it was and he wasn’t responsible for human nature, not even his own. If they sold the site, he could do anything he wanted, but what did he want to do? He seemed to have a head for business—he could make something of that. He could find a nice girl and get married. He’d figure it out once he had the money, but they should definitely sell the site. He’d call Hernandez and get him to come to New Jersey to help with whatever they did next, or maybe he’d go to Texas and Hernandez could give him advice about settling down. He dialed the number, but Hernandez’s voice was guarded. “What?” he asked. “What do you want?”

  Kelly tried to explain it, but the spoken words didn’t sound the way they had in his head. It sounded like he wanted something from Hernandez, when what he wanted was only to reestablish their old connection. “Remember how you got the Humvee out of the ditch?” he asked. “Remember how Harraday smoked those guys down by the canal just before the helo got there?”

  “Hey, man. I’m trying to forget.”

  “I was thinking you could come out and help us with the site,” said Kelly. “If we don’t sell it, that is, or if we start a new one. Either way, we could work something out. I can send you a ticket, just so you can see the place. And I might buy a convertible—I haven’t decided yet. If I do, you can help me pick it out.”

  “I’ll think about it,” said Hernandez. “But I’ve got a kid, you know? He’s already three years old. And I’ve got Maya, and a little house—maybe you should get a woman too. It’s not perfect, you know what I mean? But it’s sure as hell not bad.”

  “Yeah, that’s something I’ve thought about. I’ve thought about that a lot.”

  But Kelly needed a woman who could stand up to him, which basically meant he needed a man.

  “There are men in the army,” said Hernandez.

  “Ha!” said Kelly. “No way I’m going back there. Besides, I’m pretty good at what I’m doing now.”

  “Me too,” said Hernandez. “Not great or anything, but definitely pretty good.”

  10.9 Le Roy Jones

  An inspector from the building department knocked on the door one evening when Le Roy and the other men were eating fried chicken out of a paper bucket. “I heard you guys were living here,” he said. “This area is zoned commercial. No COs for permanent occupation.”

  “Hey, man, nothing’s permanent,” said Danny, and Kelly said, “Hell, we’ve lived in bigger shitholes ’n this.”

  “We just work long hours,” said the captain.

  “I heard you’re here day and night.”

  “This is a start-up, so we kind of are.”

  “I’m afraid you’re gonna have to find another place to live. I’ll give you a week or so, but I can’t let it slide much longer than that.”

  “Fuck that shit,” said Le Roy.

  “Christ,” said Danny when the housing official was gone. “It’s like they don’t want us to succeed.”

  “We’ve already succeeded,” said Kelly. “We should definitely sell.”

  “I’m telling you. They’ll buy it and they’ll shut it down,” said the captain.

  “Why would they spend a million dollars on a website just to shut it down?” asked Kelly. And then everyone was quiet except the captain, who said they all knew why. Everyone but Le Roy knew why. “Why?” he asked, which started up another argument, with the captain going on about “visions and goals” and Kelly banging his fist on the desk and Danny pacing up and down saying, “Let’s all calm down here. I’m sure we can work this thing out.”

  Le Roy couldn’t fully comprehend the source of the disagreement, but he suspected it was located in the place E’Laine kept harping on when she talked about the things they used to do together or about how Le Roy’s body had been taken over by someone else’s soul. So when Kelly said, “What do you think, Le Roy? Weigh in here,” Le Roy could only try to guess what Kelly wanted him to say. It was like hacking a password, but with no end run where you used machine language to reset the basic user information. “What if I make a memorial to the guys in the company?” he asked. “Or what if we make a second site?”

  “We can’t do that ’til after we sell,” said Kelly. “We don’t want to divert traffic and scare the buyers off.” Kelly did the thing where he slammed the refrigerator door and chugged a beer and threw the can so hard it hit the wall behind the trash can.

  Le Roy thought it might be time to bring out his new idea. “I’m thinking about a simulation,” he said. Just the thought of it was calming. Just the thought of all that new-idea blankness turning into lines of code. He started to describe how in the simulation, the parameters could be set so that most of the people would be totally screwed, and then they would band together to take their country back. Wasn’t that what the captain meant when he said “visions and goals”? It had occurred to him that they were in a simulation now. The odds of it were good. It was generally accepted that intelligent beings would eventually create realistic computer simulations, which meant that someday the simulated worlds would far outnumber the real worlds, which meant a person would have a better chance of being in a virtual world than in a real one. Maybe someday had already come. “In the simulation—” he started to say, but Kelly interrupted him.

  “We’re not talking about any simulation here, Le Roy. We’re talking about real life.”

  “But what if we’re already in a simulation? What if we only think it’s real? In that case…”

  “Besides, there’s plenty for you to work on finding people to help authenticate that new batch of documents. Whether we sell or not, we’ve got to keep going full strength for now.”

  Then the conversation died down, and after a while, everyone went back to work.

  “Hey,” said Kelly later in the day. “I got a funny call from Martin.”

  Le Roy had forgotten about Martin Fitch, but now he said, “What’s up with Martin?”

  “He’s getting some heat about the sources for his new Guardian series, and he wants to make sure our security is up to snuff.”

  “Blast it on over here,” said Le Roy. “Let me take a look.”

  “What do you think he means when he says ‘heat’?” asked Kelly.

  “I guess we can’t expect to post some of this stuff without ruffling some feathers,” said the captain.

  “But Dolly’s okay?” asked Danny.

  “Yeah,” said Penn. “Dolly’s just fine.”

  “All the more reason to sell,” said Kelly. “Get out from under while we can.”

  Here it came, Kelly yelling and throwing another beer can at the wall and the captain telling everyone to calm down and Danny taking his notebook out onto the porch and staring off up the tracks to where they disappeared behind a patch of urban bamboo and Le Roy snapping his noise-canceling headphones into place and trying to induce the sensation he got when someone was passing through his peripheral vision, when he could feel them sliding along toward being forgotten.

  The issue of the sale didn’t go away, and a week later Danny suggested they vote on it. “A yes vote means we sell,” he said.

  Kelly voted yes, Danny voted no, and the captain abstained. “The website belongs to you,” he said. “Besides, I redeploy in another couple weeks.”

  “That leaves it up to you, Le Roy,” said Danny. “You get to decide this thing yourself.”

  “That makes zero sense,” said Kelly. “That makes less than z
ero sense.”

  Le Roy looked from Kelly to the captain and tried to figure out which of them had the more compelling expectation, but just then a glitch on the screen caught his eye and he was narrowing the cone of his vision and feeling the music of the ether coming up through the pads of his fingers and letting his mind resonate with the vastness of the universe, of all the worlds within the universe, of all the worlds within the worlds.

  11.0 HOME

  The judge denied the warrant for the telephone records—partly because of incompetence and partly because of that brouhaha in Congress over domestic spying.

  —Deputy Ben Kincaid

  Our break came when some highly sensitive documents showed up on a website and two local business leaders lodged a formal complaint. Now we were getting somewhere. Now we only had to connect the dots.

  —Sheriff Hank Conway

  Alpha particles are not harmful until they are aerosolized and inhaled or ingested, but what about the gamma rays, x-rays, and neutron particles emitted by unexploded ordnance? All three have much longer penetration ranges than alpha radiation. Neutrons are especially harmful to living tissues, but you can’t measure them. When they decay, they leave no trace.

  —Professor Stanley Wilkes, Oklahoma State University

  Hell, the guys at the plant were sitting right on top of that stuff, and so were the military drivers and pilots in Iraq.

  —Munitions Worker, name withheld

  My nurse is the one who convinced me to get involved. Soldiers are risking their lives every day. They have a right to know where the danger is coming from.

  —Levi Thomas, M.D.

  Everyone assumed Lyle and I were having an affair. That’s how it is in Red Bud. People get wrapped up in the minor scandals and they miss the bigger ones.

  —Lily De Luca

  11.1 Will

  In the days between joining the army and shipping out, Will was treated like a hero by everyone he knew. It reminded him of the brief period when he had wanted to be a doctor. Whenever he went into the Main Street Diner, Lucas Enright called out, “Coffee’s on the house!” The mayor sent him a bottle of champagne despite the fact that Will was underage. He and Tula drank it while watching The Bourne Identity, after which they went for a walk and talked about what the movie meant.

  “My favorite part was the beginning, when Matt Damon said, I can tell you the license plate numbers of all six cars outside. I can tell you that our waitress is left-handed and the guy sitting up at the counter weighs two hundred fifteen pounds and knows how to handle himself.… Now why would I know that? How can I know that and not know who I am?”

  “How sad,” said Tula.

  “Sad? I think it’s incredibly cool. He’s kind of like Spider-Man. And anyway, who really knows who they are?”

  “I do,” said Tula. “At least I used to know.”

  “Everybody has sides to him, sides that are brought out by particular circumstances. So there’s no telling who you might be under different conditions.”

  “I think that underneath, everybody has a solid, unchanging core.”

  Sometimes Will took Tula with him to the diner, but more and more often he went alone. The diner had always seemed special to Will. “Let’s go out to eat!” his father would announce every now and then, and his mother would flutter back and forth between delight and consternation. “Oh dear, give me a minute to fix my hair,” she would twitter. “Is this the right shade of lipstick for my dress?”

  While they were waiting for her to get ready, Lyle would say to Will, “You can see why I married your mother—she was the town beauty, and she still is.”

  In the truck, Maggie would shrink up against Lyle in the front seat and put her hand on his shoulder as if she needed protecting, even though everyone knew she could handle most things just fine. Then they would park at the Super Saver and walk up Main Street to make the evening last longer. When they reached the diner, they would sink into the red leatherette seats of a booth and Lyle and Will would open their menus and Lyle would ask, “What do you say, Will? What looks good today?” All of it made Will feel older than he was, as if the occasion was both a festive celebration and a solemn lesson in how to be a man.

  Some Saturdays, Lyle took Will to the diner for pancakes while they let Maggie sleep in. Saturday mornings were different from the evenings in that except for the waitresses, it was all men, which gave the narrow room a clubby feel. The men dragged out their breakfasts, tapping pipe tobacco onto their plates and talking about politics and the state of the world as they chewed, as if this were the spot where grave decisions about economics and foreign policy were made. Inevitably, one of the men would say, “Damn it!” or “Damn it all to hell!” which only made the subject seem more urgent, affecting not only the future of the planet, but the mysterious fate that lay in store for Will. He never spoke much at those breakfasts, but his protruding ears took in everything that was said, and his mind sifted through the various tidbits of conversation for clues about what that fate might be.

  The worst thing about quitting school was that now he only saw Tula when she wasn’t busy with other things. Ten days before his departure, she called to say she had a surprise for him—she would pick him up at his house at seven o’clock on Saturday evening. “Be there or be square,” she said. All week long, Tula acted mysterious, and if Will pestered her with questions, she said her lips were sealed.

  When Saturday came, Will put on the navy shirt with the pearl buttons and sat at the kitchen counter while Lyle ate some miniature sausages straight from the tin and washed them down with a can of beer. “Are you sure you don’t want any?” he asked.

  “Thanks anyway,” said Will. He suspected Tula was planning a special dinner, and he didn’t want to spoil his appetite. At 7:15, Will walked down the driveway to peer up the empty road, and at 7:25, he walked all the way to where the hill dipped and flattened out. When he got back, Lyle was sprawled on the couch, listening to a journalist explain that there were five Iraqs, not one, to a host who kept interrupting. The empty sausage tin was sitting on the countertop along with dishes from that morning and also from the night before.

  At 7:45 he called Tula’s house, but no one answered. By the time she finally arrived it was almost eight and both of them were flustered, dissolving the air of mystery that had built up over the previous week. “Where were you?” Will asked, but they both knew it wasn’t a question so much as a complaint.

  “My mother had to work late at the Winslows’ house and I couldn’t get the car,” said Tula. “But it will be worth the wait. I promise.”

  “I hope we’re going to eat,” said Will. “I could eat a horse.”

  “Oh,” said Tula. “I forgot about that.”

  “Who forgets about eating?” Even though Will had stopped getting taller, he was still filling out, and food was never very far from his mind.

  “Men!” said Tula the way she often said it, but neither one of them was in the mood to laugh. Then she repeated, “It will be worth it. You’ll see.”

  They drove for a little in silence. Sleet had fallen earlier in the day, and the moon was throwing its cold light over the frozen fields, washing them in silver. Instead of heading into town, Tula steered toward the highway and turned into the parking lot of the town’s only motel, which catered mostly to long-distance truckers. Will wasn’t sure what to say until Tula took a room key from her pocket and dangled it before his eyes. “I helped my mother today so she could get to the Winslows’ early so she could get back with the car—not that that worked out exactly the way I planned it. Anyway, while I was at it, I took a key to one of the empty rooms.”

  Her tone had become teasing, and as soon as Will took in what she was saying, his hunger vanished, replaced with a burning sensation deep down in his belly. He drank in Tula’s perfume, and the sight of her standing on the frozen pavement under the star-strewn sky filled him with wonder.

  Tula’s fingers fumbled with the key, but she wouldn’t l
et him take it from her. “I can get it,” she said. By the time the door sprang open to reveal the disarray of an unmade bed and the greasy remains of a half-eaten take-out dinner, the burning inside Will caused him to interpret Tula’s gasp of dismay as a cry of passion. He scooped her up and tossed her onto the bed, choking a little on his own suppressed cry.

  But Tula jumped right up again and said, “Why isn’t the room made up? The rooms are always made up as soon as the guest leaves.”

  “He could have left too late.”

  “What if he hasn’t left yet? He could be back at any minute!” Her eyes darted from the tangled coverlet to the door. “I wanted it to be so romantic, but look at it. It’s a mess.”

  Will was willing to take the risk that a stranger would walk in on them, but Tula wasn’t, so he spent a few minutes trying to convince her that the room had been abandoned. “If someone was staying here, he would have left his personal belongings lying around, and there aren’t any. You said you and your mother left the motel early. If the guest left late, you wouldn’t have been there to clean the room.”

  Tula’s expression said he was missing something obvious, but he didn’t know what it might be. She rushed around the room opening and closing dresser drawers and poking her head into the closet before scooping the dirty linen off the bed and into a pile on the floor. After replacing the coverlet, she took a towel and wiped at the surfaces in the bathroom before getting on her knees to swab behind the toilet. “Leave it, Tula. It doesn’t matter to me what the bathroom looks like. It doesn’t matter to me at all.”