“I got a little graduation gift for you,” Terry said as the waitress cleared the empty sake tokkuri and went off to get another. He took something that looked like a hardcover book in a pink plastic bag out of his knapsack and slid it across the bar. “Not much of a wrapping job, I’m afraid.”
Jordan picked it up. Not a book; the weight was wrong and the edges were too rigid. He reached into the bag and pulled out a little netbook, a cheap Toshiba with a blue brushed-metal case. He looked at Terry, puzzled.
“Outside world, mate. It’s the beginning.” Jordan flipped open the screen and hit the power button. A splash screen came up with the JET logo spinning slowly on its axis. “All the teachers get one when they start. We just waited awhile on yours, you know, until we thought you were ready. It’s had a little work done,” he added as he saw Jordan rub at some scratches on the case. “We had to tweak the network setup a little. It will only connect to the router in your apartment and all of your activity will be logged on the server at mine. No email, please, except JET business, and needless to say no contact of any sort with anyone or anything from your previous life. Fair enough, right?”
Jordan nodded mutely. His head was a little fuzzy and he couldn’t organize his emotions. It seemed like this must be a good thing but he didn’t really feel much about it one way or the other. The waitress returned with more sake and two bowls of steaming miso soup. Jordan shut the netbook and pushed it across the table.
“Shall I hang on to it for the night, mate?” Terry said, sliding it back into his shoulder bag.
“Yeah, thanks,” Jordan said, filling Terry’s cup, relieved to be back on the emotionally surer ground of food and drink. Twenty minutes later they were back on the street. Jordan no longer felt the chill as he followed Terry through a narrow alley and down a short flight of stairs.
There was a long line at the Lexington Queen but the Japanese doorman, a pumped-up bodybuilder in a gray suit with Oakley’s, acne scars and slicked-back hair nodded to Terry and opened the velvet rope to admit them.
Inside the music was booming. A repeating six-note phrase filtered up from murky rumble to angry hornet as a tight kick drum thudded relentlessly. They passed through a narrow hallway escorted by the doorman, past a throng of well-dressed club kids waiting to pay. The dance floor was a couple of steps down on the left and the bar ran along the wall to the right. The doorman led them right into the crush of dancers. The lights were spinning and pulsing in time with the music through a haze of smoke-machine fog that smelled vaguely chemical and felt cool on Jordan’s face. As he stooped to push his way through the crowd, the press of bodies made him feel claustrophobic and anxious, but he realized if he stood up straight, he could see across the tops of the dancers’ heads rolling and heaving around him.
The doorman led them to an elevated section in the middle of the club separated by another velvet rope that a shaved-headed bouncer opened as they approached. The VIP section was empty and surrounded on all sides by kids craning to ogle the new arrivals. A cocktail waitress in a short black skirt and stockings with pronounced seams up the back arrived just as they sat down on a low brown velvet sofa. She put two glasses down. “Whiskey,” she said as if it was a question, and then she was gone.
Jordan took a sip. It was indeed whiskey, albeit not a very good one and pretty watered-down. He raised his glass to Terry and drained half of it. Talking was out of the question over the music so he leaned back and watched the dancers. After what felt like a few minutes but could have been quite a bit longer, the doorman returned with three girls. They were in their early twenties and, even by Lexington Queen standards, provocatively dressed, Jordan thought. They arranged themselves on the only other sofa in the VIP area and carried on an animated conversation, laughing loudly and frequently glancing over at Terry and Jordan. The waitress brought them a bottle of Chivas along with glasses and a bucket of ice. Terry stood up and leaned into Jordan’s ear. “Come on, mate. Nampa time. Let’s meet the neighbors.” Jordan finished his drink and obediently followed.
The girls spoke almost no English and Jordan’s minimal Japanese had fallen victim to the music and alcohol. He sat in one of the two black leather chairs facing the sofa and watched Terry work. Jordan had seen nampa boys at the school. They always dressed flashily, sometimes rat-pack-gangster chic, sometimes garish Ed Hardy T-shirts and True Religion jeans. They usually hung out by the train station, coming on hard to every attractive girl that walked by. The whole nampa idea—they were players, pickup artists—ran completely counter to the stereotypical Asian reserve, and yet it had a certain respectability. Like drunken karaoke, it was socially accepted. Terry was a master, and a fluent gaijin to boot. He was aggressive without being threatening; he was funny, yet not without a hint of danger. Within twenty minutes he was kissing one girl while his hand worked its way up the thigh of another. The girls were laughing and the Chivas was nearly gone.
Jordan felt like the whole improbable scenario was unfolding at a remove, like a Bergman movie playing out on the back of a headrest somewhere over Omaha. He watched with a half smile playing on his face, scotch perched perilously on the edge of his armrest. Suddenly the third girl stood up and grabbed his glass. She sipped, watching him over the rim with a sly smile, then placed it on the table and held out a hand. “Miki.” Must be her name, he thought. “Dance?”
Jordan shook his finger no, but she took his wrist and pulled him to the dance floor. The bouncer opened the rope and shut it behind them, his expression never wavering. Without releasing her grip on his wrist, the girl led him away from the VIP dais into the thick of the crowd. He felt foolish and awkward, aware of his height and the stupid smile he couldn’t seem to turn off. The girl wore a gold dress of draping metallic fabric that left her back completely open. In the front the coverage was better, but in a way that suggested it could be brushed aside with the lightest of touches. When she stopped and turned around Jordan just stood in place, an improbable island in the tossing sea. She smiled and pressed herself against him, rocking gently in half time with her arm encircling his back. Jordan’s eyes fluttered closed. The smell of her hair and skin, expensive shampoo with traces of jasmine perfume and cigarettes, flooded over him. It was dark. The music was far away. Her hand tentatively pressed on his back; he put his arm around her. They both tensed at the unexpected skin on skin. She leaned into him, her head buried in his chest as his hand, flexed wide and with only the most tenuous of contact, explored. He felt her press hard into his thigh. She lifted her face and looked up at him with dancing eyes and smiled as she pulled his head gently to her own. Jordan marveled at the perfect undented oval that was her upper lip, and as he tentatively kissed her, his hand slid down the back of her dress to find that beneath it she was wearing nothing at all.
She pulled him toward the exit. Jordan turned back and saw Terry, head and shoulders above everyone in the club. Terry smiled and shooed him out with a conspiratorial thumbs-up. Moments later, in the back of a cab, ignoring the reproving glares of the cabbie in the rearview mirror, the girl slipped out of her shoes and straddled him, kissing him hard as her bare feet wriggled against him. The taxi stopped at a brown marble-faced building with no windows on the upper floors and a confusing redundancy of entrances. The girl hurriedly pulled him in one door. They stood in a small vestibule with a machine that looked like an ATM. She took a credit card out of her purse and swiped it, then touched the screen next to a picture of a small room dominated by a king-size bed with red satin sheets and a massive reproduction of an Edo-era woodcut of what appeared to be a woman having sex with an octopus.
A plastic card key came out of the machine and the far door hissed open to reveal an elevator. They went in and up; Jordan couldn’t tell how high as the elevator barely felt like it was moving. He had no sense of time. When the door opened he followed the girl into the room from the picture. She shrugged her shoulders and the dress spilled to the floor. Standing there
in white heels, the dress puddled at her feet, the girl seemed much younger. The lipstick had been kissed away and she looked like an adolescent caught trying on her mother’s things. She stepped toward him, reaching for his hands, but Jordan turned away and murmuring a slurred “Gomennasai” and stumbled out the door.
There was a taxi stand at the corner. As the cab sped through the empty city, the horizon started to glow a dull gray. He felt sick to his stomach. He smiled, a tight grim line. Street cleaners washed the sidewalks clear with orange buckets of water and straw brooms. When Jordan got out at his apartment, the sun was nearly up. The porch light seemed feeble and unnecessary. On the top step a huge beetle lay on its back, legs flailing in a lazy, almost pro forma way. Jordan kicked it off onto the little patch of grass with his toe and opened the door. Inside he pulled all the curtains and undressed. The pink plastic bag with the computer was neatly centered on his bed next to an unopened bottle of absinthe. He put them on the desk and, pulling the covers up over his eyes, curled up tight and rocked himself into a fitful sleep.
28
THE DARK WEB
Two nights later, the memory of the girl’s skin teased at the periphery of his awareness. The smell of her. The image of her lips when the lipstick had been rubbed away. Jordan sat at his little table and opened the bottle. He inhaled the familiar waft of licorice and herbs and the skin on the back of his neck prickled expectantly. He poured it over ice and watched the clouds billow like cigarette smoke through the pale green. While he still didn’t exactly like the taste it gave him a sense of anticipatory well-being with the first sip, a foreshadowing of how he knew he would feel as the green fairy worked her charms. He opened the Tor browser on the laptop. He had tried to download the more familiar Chrome but a system-level app had blocked the download. Sam didn’t trust him enough to let him loose on the internet with a traceable IP. Fair enough.
He paused with the cursor blinking in the address box, wrists on either side of the touchpad, fingers in the air like a pianist about to begin. He typed the address almost unconsciously. The internet was built on porn. Some staggering percentage of all the data flowing around the globe was dedicated to endless images, moving and still, of the same basic bits of human anatomy engaged in roughly the same small collection of familiar activities. He clicked on a thumbnail and poured a glass. Then another, and another, but even as the absinthe dulled his senses and spread through his body like a warm wave, the pornography left him cold. It didn’t awake anything but a vague sense of disgust.
He closed the window and opened a fresh one. He opened a Google News page and scrolled down. Usual shit. Korea, Israel, Iran, sports and celebrity scandal, neutrino discoveries at CERN. Then his eye snagged on a little story near the end of the business section: Pfizer Stock Price Battered by Ill-Advised Acquisitions, RoDacin and Genometry.
He clicked on the link. A new tab opened with a short story in a web letter called FiercePharma.
RoDacin and Genometry, two CASP front-runners picked up by Pfizer in December, have failed to deliver on early promise, dragging down the parent company’s share price.
That was it. There was a small picture. Jordan refilled his glass. The ice had long melted. He clicked on the picture and it opened in a separate window. A table in the foreground, men in suits and women in pricey frocks applauding. In the background, slightly out of focus, a woman was speaking at a lectern. He zoomed in. He couldn’t breathe, something in his chest was hammering to get out. He couldn’t feel his legs. He zoomed in more; the picture was low-res, just fuzzy pixels. As the cursor hung over his wife’s blurry face, her name came up. Tagged. Dr. Stephanie Parrish. He clicked on it and it jumped him to a string of search results.
Connect with Dr. Stephanie Parrish on LinkedIn.
Follow Dr. Stephanie Parrish on Twitter.
Do you know Dr. Stephanie Parrish?
Share pictures with Dr. Stephanie Parrish on Instagram.
He clicked.
This user account is private. Log in to access or request to follow.
Without thinking Jordan typed in his old Instagram credentials. She had only posted one picture. The sun was catching coppery highlights in her hair and her mouth was turned up in the merest hint of a smile. Her eyes danced, though she was trying to look very stern. Haden had his arms wrapped around her neck and was trying to pull her down while Sophie stood just off to the side with a shy smile, watching. Hawaii. The Nelsons’ place in Paia. He remembered.
Jordan gasped, realizing he had stopped breathing. His vision pointillized and his throat ached. He zoomed in and ran the arrow of the cursor delicately over her face, tracing the jawline and the arc of her neck. He hadn’t thought he’d pushed on the track pad, but suddenly a graphic of a heart swooshed through the frame and the “likes” incremented from zero to one.
* * *
The phone vibrated on Stephanie’s desk, jarring her out of her fugue state, staring out the window watching the powder-fine grains of snow flowing up and around in eddies created as the wind swept across the slate roofline. She glanced at it. Instagram notification. Nothing.
29
SAM I AM
What the fuck had he done? There was a loud buzzing in Jordan’s ears and his face felt like he’d been shot with Novocain. Adrenaline. Breathe. They’d see he’d been on the page. They’d see he’d “liked” the picture. He hadn’t meant to. Jesus, Jesus. Sam had said he’d kill them all. He couldn’t. Not for this; it had been a mistake. Stupid. Stupid. He looked around the room. Struggled to clear his head. The bottle was nearly empty. Idiot. He opened his eyes as wide as he could and swallowed hard to pop his ears. Think.
He could fix it. He had to. He looked in the Tor browser history. The three last entries were all Instagram. He ticked the boxes and deleted them. Cleared the cache, restarted the browser and checked again. Gone. But the backup on Terry’s computer, shit—Instagram.com/stephaniejparrish—no one was going to miss that. Stupid. So stupid. He checked the clock in the kitchen. Almost two in the morning. Terry was probably still out; he burned both ends pretty hard. Maybe it could still be fixed.
Jordan closed the front door with a firm click and ran lightly along the side of his building in the shadow of the roofline before cutting through the parking lot to Terry’s. From the outside it looked just like Jordan’s. There was a small window in the bathroom, over the walkway that ran along the side of the house. He wheeled a squat green trash bin underneath the window. Every sound seemed deafening; the scrape of the wheels on the gravel was going to rouse the neighborhood. Jordan carefully stepped up on the bin. The screen came out easily when he pulled but the window was locked. Fuck. There were four small panes on one side and a large pane with wires crisscrossing through it on the other. His ears strained in the darkness for the approaching sirens he knew must come. Repeating a string of whispered obscenities under his breath, Jordan wrapped his right fist in his bundled sleeve, then coughed loudly as he punched one of the small panes hard. The glass broke cleanly and he held his breath. The whole world seemed to buzz and hum but no one stirred in the houses. Gingerly he reached his hand in and found and released the window catch. It slid open easily and he was able to wriggle through.
He was headfirst, so his hands found the floor and felt around for space as he pulled his legs through. His foot caught a jar of something that crashed to the bathroom floor but didn’t break. He didn’t turn on the light. He thought he remembered the layout pretty well. The bathroom led into the kitchen and the living room was on the other side. Sure enough, as he felt along the wall, he saw the faint light from the living room under the door. His hand was on something smooth...glass. It wobbled as his hand brushed over it. Reflexively his hand jerked to right it. As he did, as if in a dream, he remembered the vast beer bottle collection in Terry’s kitchen, bottles from every corner of the globe, tiny American minis to huge Belgian bottles, the beer equivalents of Jero
boams and Nebuchadnezzars. Then a delicate tinkling sound seemed to come from everywhere at once, ahead of him and behind, as bottles started to fall. The first few didn’t break when they hit the floor but, like perfectly struck bowling pins, the subsequent bottles spread the collapse and a second later it sounded as if a bomb had gone off in a glass factory.
Bottles exploded on every side, each fresh wave louder than the one before. Jordan heard frightened Japanese voices from upstairs and next door and a dim light filled the kitchen as a neighbor’s lights came on. Broken glass was everywhere, and as the last two bottles rolled around, their tightening spirals sounded louder in his ears than all the violence that had preceded them.
Then it was suddenly completely still. Jordan walked quickly to the living room, broken glass crunching underfoot. He scanned the room for the server. He tore through it all—the closets, the rooms—nothing. There was only the cheap laptop on the desk. He tapped the track pad and the screen came to life with a swirling JET logo. The cursor blinked patiently in the password field. Shit. Think. He had to get out of here. The server had to be on the laptop.
He snapped it shut and tucked it under his arm. Any cameras? He doubted it, didn’t see any obvious ones. Fuck it. It could be a robbery, right? Totally random. He pulled out drawers as if he’d been a thief looking for cash, stuffed a chunky-looking watch into his pocket and ran.
He cut through the parking lot, pulse pounding in his neck. At his front door he struggled with the key, swearing under his breath, then the door just swung open; he hadn’t locked it. He slammed the door, threw the dead bolt and looked around the stale-smelling space. It was still. He held his breath; he heard his own chest thumping dully and some muffled voices from the direction of Terry’s but nothing here. He was alone. Well, not entirely. He looked up at the light over the stove. One of the cameras was in there. There was another one, he was pretty sure, in the microwave but he’d never studied it too closely. He wondered if anyone was watching; he hoped not. Dennis was gone and Terry was either out still or on his way home. He sank to a squat on the kitchen floor. He cradled his head in his hands and squeezed as hard as he could. Think, think. He desperately wished he were sober. They would know it had been him at Terry’s. He needed to figure this out. He needed time. He needed to get out of there.
Exit Strategy Page 10