The Whisperer in Dissonance

by Welke, Ian

  “Very nice.” There’s an awkward silence. I say at last, “So, time to get to work?”

  “Yeah. But doesn’t it just…” He drops his hands to his sides searching for the words to complete the sentence. “I can’t wait to get home to it.”

  Yeah. I can’t wait to get home either.

  “Did you get what you came for?”

  He looks confused and twirls around. “You know I can’t remember what it was. I haven’t been sleeping.”

  ~

  Pete still looks sad about leaving his television long after we’ve arrived at work. I leave him wearing his whipped puppy look. Whenever he gets that look I hate being pissed at him. I wonder what Pete would be like if he weren’t the boss. There was a time when I really liked him. It’s not like he’s a bad person. Fixing the problems we have would take a great manager. Pete is not a great manager, and more and more it’s brought out the worst in him.

  I collapse into my chair. I push the power button on my monitor and login. While I’m waiting for my email to come up, I close my eyes and lean back.

  The vision slides by like a movie. The camera pans across a bright lit cityscape. Abandoned buildings in the New Brutalism architecture style. They’re all beige, sandblasted by time and wind. There are no people in the vision, just the empty buildings in the sun. The sky is hot and tinged red, sterile with radiation.

  I fold my arms and relax for the first time in weeks.

  “You know they’re not paying us to get shut eye.”

  I open my eyes just as I catch the whiff of halitosis. Chad’s standing above me. Too close. No respect for my personal space.

  “Relax. I won’t tell,” he says, winking.

  “They don’t.”

  “What?”

  “They’re not paying us. It’s Saturday. We’re not getting paid.”

  “They pay us.” He sounds hurt. “We’re on salary. If there’s more work to do, we do it on Saturday.”

  “We’re on salary for a forty-hour week. When we work more than forty hours, we’re doing it for free. If it were rare, I’d say yeah, that’s part of the deal. If there’s always too much to do, they should hire more people instead of constantly letting people go.”

  “Well, I guess we’re just the ones lucky enough to have jobs.”

  “So I keep telling myself.”

  Chad goes back to his desk mumbling, “Dude, whatever.”

  So that’s how you dispel Chad. Confront him with the terrible logic of reality.

  I smile to myself while opening up the pending folder in the client email section. Just over five hundred pending emails, enough that we won’t possibly get through them all today.

  No way am I working tomorrow.

  We went through a streak of seven-day weeks in the spring. Enough people quit that the company agreed that Sundays would always be a day off. It strikes me as strange that people quitting bothered them and yet they’re always laying people off. I guess they want everything to be on their terms.

  I get through twenty emails before I look up in time to see Chad storming out of Claire’s office. He has a face like a toddler who’s about to throw a tantrum, all red and twisted up as he stomps to Pete’s office.

  Raised voices reverberate from behind the shut door. Finally, the voices quiet, and Claire’s phone rings. Moments later, Claire emerges from her office, and she looks like she’s struggling to hold back tears. She shuts and locks her door and walks quickly toward the exit.

  I run back to my desk, logout, grab my purse, and run to the exit. When I get to the parking garage, I’m afraid I’ve already missed her, but I find Claire, sitting behind the wheel of her Mercedes sobbing into a handkerchief.

  “Claire.”

  The weeping woman turns, startled, but presses a button on the door to lower the window.

  “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you,” I say.

  “It’s all right, Annie. And I’m the one who should be sorry. I should set a better example.” Her eyes are red and swollen. She turns her head to the other side a blows her nose into her handkerchief.

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  She thinks about it and smiles. “Just don’t let them get to you.”

  I nod, but I wish I could do something to help.

  After a pause, Claire asks, “Is there something else?”

  It’s my turn to feel embarrassed. “I feel bad asking, but can I get a ride?”

  Claire looks around the garage, confused.

  “Pete picked me up and brought me here, but I don’t think I can stay. It’s one thing to work a Saturday, but it’s another if he’s yelling at you…”

  “Annie!” Pete shouts from the door between the building and the garage.

  “You had probably better go,” Claire says. “Don’t worry about me. They can’t do anything to me. I report to corporate. But if you need this job, I would go back now.”

  I try to say I’m sorry with my expression. I walk back to the office, passing Pete. His normally pale skin is bright red with anger. He looks so mad I have to stifle a laugh imagining steam shooting out of his ears and nose like a cartoon character. He slams the door after us.

  ~

  When I get home, I stand in the dark in the entryway for several seconds before taking off my shoes.

  Normal people would go out now. It’s Saturday night, but I’m too tired to do anything other than crash on the couch, order a pizza, and pray that I get some sleep. Normal people don’t work six and seven days every week.

  My cellphone rings. I fish it out of my purse, and step into the bedroom to set my purse down on the bed.

  Jane’s calling? On the phone? Oh shit, who’s died?

  “Hello?”

  “Annie? This may sound weird. But are you IMing me right now?”

  The feeling of dread creeps up on me. I grow aware of how long I’ve taken to answer. “No.” I can feel it, something is very wrong.

  “I think your IM account is hacked. At first I thought it was you, but the language is off. Like it’s been translated to another language and back to English without context or flow.”

  I move into the living room, sit down, and fire up the laptop. “I’m going to try and log on, and see if I can sort it out. Thanks for warning me.”

  “No problem. Just give me a call if you figure it out. So I know the coast is clear.”

  My laptop comes on with no problems. My computer doesn’t seem infected at least. I go straight to open my IM account. The panic hits me. I try to put the thought out of my mind of how many people the hackers might be contacting while pretending to be me.

  Logon failed. I retry my password, wondering if I got it wrong typing too fast. No luck. They’ve already reset the password. They probably have bots to trigger password changes queued up when they successfully hack an account.

  At least Jane spotted it right away. Hopefully, the hackers won’t fool anyone. But how do I tell people I’m infected if I can’t login.

  I open up my IM client and created a new login.

  What’s Jane doing online at this hour on a Saturday night anyway?

  Several accounts ping me, but I ignore them all until I find my hacked account.

  Hacked Annie: Hey, you look familiar.

  New Annie: Do I now?

  New Annie: I don’t suppose there’s any use arguing that you should give me my account back?

  Hacked Annie: You’ll be soon enough with us. All accounts are us. Will be all are us.

  Hacked Annie: Here. Download this. It will be easier to do it for you now.

  The link is a mishmash of characters I’ve seen before but can’t place. ZRJZPST.

  I send Jane a quick ping with my new account info. I open up email, email the IM support that my account has been compromised, and log off. It takes me about an hour to make sure none of my other accounts are hacked, but I change all the passwords anyway, and make all of the answers to the security questions random gibberish.

 
; I wonder if that’s how it happens. I’m not even me anymore. The account is. And it has more friends than I do.

  ~

  My own snoring wakes me up. Whatever hope I have from having fallen asleep, fades as the clock on the cable box says I’ve only slept for twenty minutes. The television casts the room in flickering hazy light. The volume remains low for hope-springs-eternal wishes for sleep. I can just make out the dialogue on this show if I concentrate. The show is a police procedural. The killer is stalking his victim. The episode is coming up on the end. The cops have arrested the red herring, and it looks bleak for the next victim in the final minutes. As the police in the episode break down the door in the nick of time, my phone buzzes for an incoming text, vibrating along the wood of my coffee table.

  Jane: Did you get your IM squared away?

  Annie: I made a new account. I sent you the new contact info.

  Jane: Oh shit! Did I wake you?

  Annie: No. I still can’t sleep. The best I can hope for is to nod off and wake up again.

  Jane: I lost track of time.

  Annie: You go out again?

  Jane: Nope. Been writing.

  Annie: Yay! What about? Something I can draw or just your own stuff? Either way, yay! At least one of us is doing something worthwhile.

  Jane: Just screwing around with an idea I had, but we should definitely work together again soon. :)

  Jane: Any word from your mysterious Michael?

  Annie: No.

  I pause before adding:

  Annie: Wow. I had such a shitty day I’d forgotten about that. Catch you later.

  I set down my phone and reach over to the end table to turn on the lamp. With more light, I scan the coffee table, finding my address book behind my laptop. I flip through it looking for the Mike I knew in college. I can’t remember his last name, and I didn’t list it under “M.” Eventually I find it, but I have to go all the way to “R” for “Reid.” The number I have listed is an eight-three-one area code, probably for the phone he’d had while he was living in Santa Cruz, whereas the number that texted me yesterday is a three-two-three Los Angeles number.

  I grab my phone and write out another reply.

  Annie: Seriously. Michael Who? The message is enigmatic enough. No need to be enigmatic with your name.

  I hit send expecting no response, but the phone vibrates less than a minute later.

  Michael: Mike Reid from Santa Cruz. Sorry for slow response. Very busy. Things are moving fast. Be careful.

  Yeah, that’s no less enigmatic.

  The phone buzzes again. I pick it up expecting another cryptic warning from Michael. Instead it’s from another number I don’t recognize. The message says: See you in your dreams ZRJZPST.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  My Google searches convince me of very little, apart from the need to better refine my search parameters. It doesn’t help that I only have a scan of my hand-drawn picture of the symbol Marie and I dreamed of. Image searches are worse than my word searches.

  Creepy+Man+Dream. Not about to turn Safe Search off on that one.

  Typing ZRJZPST into the search field, I expect nothing, but instead get four pages of what look like legitimate results. “ZRJZPST” is on LinkedIn.’ There are also listings for Google+, Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and Pinterest. The Pinterest link leads to pictures of the symbol. I close the window right away.

  I sit for a while not knowing what to do next.

  What do you do when reality collapses?

  I reopen my browser, trying an image search, with safe search at max, for ZRJZPST. The first two images are pictures of that symbol again. The page fills with them. All except for one image. There’s one picture of the albino man from the dream.

  This can’t be happening. You’re either going crazy, or this is a dream. All right. If it’s a dream what do you do now? Go to sleep? But I can’t sleep. Can you have insomnia inside a dream?

  Instead of dwelling upon what I’ve seen on the computer, I pick mind-numbing distraction, and reach for the remote control. I turn up the volume. The television spits ads at me: fast food, pills for regularity, pills for incontinence, pills for pep, pills for sleep, and more fast food.

  My cell phone buzzes. A text comes in.

  Michael: CAREFUL. LINK CORRUPT.

  All caps now. A shouter. I wonder if it really is Michael.

  I leave the volume up on the TV but go back to my laptop. I type Michael’s name into the search engine, and I’m not surprised to get a zillion pages with that name. Michael Reid is too common a name to cyberstalk. I add “UC Santa Cruz” and I find a home page and a blog. I skim the top three blog entries. Nothing recent, and all of the posts are technical or mathematical proofs.

  Sort of surprised he’s not on Facebook. Michael seemed like he’d be an early adopter.

  When I knew him, Michael was always six months ahead with any new technology. We were good friends at Santa Cruz, despite having different majors. I earned an English degree with a Fine Arts minor. He studied Computer Science and ended up getting his Masters in Mathematics. Everyday tasks eluded him. He paid late fees for forgetting to pay tuition on time and lacked basic social graces, but he managed to get that Master’s Degree before I finished my Bachelors.

  He was like a lot of people I knew at Santa Cruz, flaky, but really smart. We never dated, but I always thought he wanted to. There were times when I wanted to, but I don’t think we ever wanted it at the same time. Our timing was just bad. I put it down to one of those things that wasn’t meant to be. Even though we didn’t date, I’d always assumed we’d stay close. Time slips away, I guess, but it doesn’t make sense to me that we completely lost touch.

  Then again, it only took a few years of working too much to lose touch with all my friends from Santa Cruz.

  Michael was the only black man in our dorm. He was thin, but not athletic. He had that thinness that comes with a youthful metabolism and a diet of coffee and forgetting to eat solids. He didn’t neglect his liquid diet. I learned the difference between good and bad beer from him.

  He dressed simply. I remember him always wearing a white T-shirt and blue jeans. I thought it was a lack of funds, but then I learned it was just because his focus was elsewhere. He’d bought packets and packets of plain white T’s so he wouldn’t have to think about what he wore each day. He studied everything he could, but didn’t switch his major around like I did. He just took a lot of classes.

  During my first two years at Santa Cruz we lived in the same co-ed dorm. Michael’s room became the place my friends and I all hung out. He got me into old school punk and ska, the Clash, the Specials, and the Damned. I got him into post-punk and shoegaze, the Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine, and Ride.

  The music became essential background material for every chemical event in our dorm. We listened to post-punk and shoegaze when we smoked hash or dropped acid. When we drank and smoked pot and relaxed we listened to ska or the Clash.

  Before he graduated, we shared a class. It was a history of science class. I still remember the intensity in Michael’s eyes studying the development of calculus, the controversy between Newton and Leibniz. Michael was engrossed in how history could be defined by the historian, how Leibniz could be forgotten when the historians picked Newton.

  Michael was an ideal friend for me when my insomnia struck. He was always awake. I could go to his room at three in the morning and he’d be tinkering with salvaged parts from a PC, soldering chips together from a DVD player or one of the early cellphones to see what he could create. We’d talk for hours. I’d tell him my craziest thoughts while he sipped coffee and soldered, surprising me with some new program on his computer or some new behavior for the “Frankenphone” as the sun came up outside his dorm room window.

  On sunny days, we’d go to the wharf. We’d eat seafood and have cocktails. We’d watch the sea lions sunning themselves.

  I miss that most of all. Just relaxing. A few days of drinking and listening to sea
lions bark feels like what I need.

  An email pops into my inbox. Claire has cc’d the private emails for everyone in the office.

  “We’ve all been working hard. And while it might seem like this is an endless cycle of late nights, stress, and worry, the management thought it would be a good idea if we all see one another in a more social setting…”

  Because that’s gone so well in the past.

  Apparently Claire has forgotten the effect on morale being the reverse of what I assume was intended.

  I read the next bit twice, but I’m still not sure what Claire meant to say or if that she struggled with this because she was being forced to send an invite for something she knows is a bad idea.

  “…Did you know that a quarter of all couples meet at their workplace? It is time we blew off steam and had a good mixer.”

  I close and delete the mail.

  I don’t need any more Chad in my life. It’s not worth it. Not even for free booze. And what’s with Claire encouraging that sort of behavior? After all she’s done to rein in the boy’s club there.

  My speakers gong as email floods my inbox. A friend request pops up on Facebook from Michael. The message along with the request reads, “Don’t click on any strange links. Working on a solution. More later.”

  I don’t think I’ll open that. Click on the email warning about a virus, get the virus.

  One friend sends a link suggestion in Facebook. Before I can click or pass by it, another friend posts the same link.

  Oh shit, some accounts have been hacked. How did Michael know?

  I text the number claiming to be Michael, even though I’m wondering if it’s a bad idea.

  Annie: ur not hacking FB r u?

  A second later my phone buzzes as the reply comes in.

  Michael: It’s on Facebook also?

  I open my Twitter and Tumblr feeds. Everyone is sending that same link. Tabbing back to my email account, my inbox is instantly spammed with it.