Parts Per Million

by Julia Stoops

  There’s the folder with Dee’s cell-phone pictures. Heh. Me and Nelse eating breakfast. Mr. Nguyen wiping a table. Blackberry vines in the back yard. She was so excited to see them on the screen, and soooo disappointed when she saw the prints. “They’re blurry,” she said.

  “Well it’s 72 dpi,” I told her. “What do you expect?”

  She’d looked up at me. “I have no idea what you’re bleedin’ talking about.”

  “Think of it as the ideal resolution for electronic storage and delivery.”

  She looked at the prints, looked back at me. Frowned. “Pardon?”

  Told her she could donate the phone to me, but she didn’t like that idea.

  I open the Maryville firebombing clip on the site. For some reason I keep watching it. A good job, if I may say so myself. Split widescreen, simultaneous views from my camera and Nelson’s. The horses are fucking amazing, even at this size. People must think so ’cause it’s getting hits on the site.

  I close the laptop and it makes a fat click.

  Under the stack of Infiltration is the stencil.

  And it’s warm out. And everyone’s asleep.

  Backpack. Two cans: red and white. Roll them slowly to keep the ball bearings quiet. Folded aluminum foil. Black T-shirt. Wallet out and on the desk. Keys front pocket. Hair up, cap on, black bike helmet, time to go.

  I ride around Laurelhurst park and shake the cans, then head back down to Hawthorne. Thank you Jesus, Deirdre and Nelson were asleep as I snuck past them in the basement. The clock on the corner of Thirty-Ninth says 2:38. A single car at the intersection, then the light turns green and it moves on. Clock says 67 degrees. No breeze. No cops. No one in sight. The lights on in Fred Meyer but nobody’s home. Still straddling the bike, out comes the virgin stencil, out comes the white can. Shake one two quick and spray. The hiss of it loud in the night, the smell of enamel catching in the back of my throat. Stupid nozzle dribbles white on my finger, but there it is shining bright and true on the TriMet bus stop plexi.

  t h e y

  p e p p e r

  s p r a y e d

  b a b i e s

  Damn, that feels good.

  The foil crackles orange in the streetlight as I wrap the stencil. No cops to the east, none to the west. North and south are clear; let’s go reclaim some more of the commons.

  Empty streets make it easy, flying with the summer night on my face.

  This time it’s in red, on the sidewalk at Hawthorne and Thirty-Fourth. Reality hacking. Making a place in the system for my response, fuckers. Belmont and Thirty-Fourth. Take this unit of cultural information and fucking let it into your brains, damn it. Belmont and Forty-Fourth outside Movie Madness, good foot traffic here. Spread it around, folks. Back to Hawthorne at Twentieth, then Division at Twenty-First. Subvert the message. Change the message. Division at Eighth, another bus stop. Let the message loose.

  That was maybe a knock.

  Another knock.

  “What, dammit? I’m trying to sleep.”

  Through the door Fetzer says, “It’s after nine. Even Romeo’s up.”

  “So?” Got to change these sheets today.

  “We’re interviewing the woman from Save the Cascades at ten.”

  “Oh. Yeah. Crap.” My ass is reluctant to haul. White and red enamel all over my hands.

  Damn, it’s on my pants, too. The doorknob starts to turn. “Hold on!” My room stinks of spray paint. I open the window, pick another T-shirt off my floordrobe, and squeeze out through the smallest possible opening in the door.

  Fetzer tries to peek in. “You got a, uh, friend in there?” he says, soft and surprised.

  Hands in pockets. “Nah. Just cataloging my stash of enviro-porn. I gotta powder my nose—I’ll see you down there.”

  He sniffs the air, then one side of his face creases with a half-frown. “Right.”

  27: FETZER

  We’d picked up the mail from the P.O. box, then stopped for coffees on the way home. No hate mail that day, but we did get our first issue of the Harry Lane Gazette. Being banned from campus had spurred Nelson to sign up for the monthly alumni newsletter. And as Jen skimmed the rag she noticed a call for artists for Harry Lane's photography gallery.

  “This could be our way back in,” she said.

  It took me a moment to get her point.

  “She means Deirdre,” said Nelson. “And it’s ideal. No one there knows her.”

  “Hah, that is true,” I said. “What do they want, a resume?”

  “Portfolio,” said Jen. “Call for an appointment.”

  “You think she’ll mind?” I asked.

  “I’m sure she’d be happy to,” said Nelson. Smug.

  I got out the phone and made the call.

  But when we got home Sylvia’s Audi TT was parked outside the house. She had one of the gray ones. I secretly coveted it.

  We could hear them cackling from downstairs. They were sitting on the velvet kitchen sofa, a bottle of wine between them, Sylvia with her legs crossed and her arm along the sofa back.

  I sternly greeted Dee with, “I told you never to open the door when you’re alone.” Dee and Sylvia gaped at each other, then they held up their matching cell phones and took pictures of us standing there like idiots. Despite the camera phone being a disappointment, Deirdre couldn’t stop using it.

  “Don’t tell me we had a meeting,” said Jen.

  Sylvia shook her head. “Just dropping by.”

  I told Deirdre we got her a show in a gallery, and she lowered her phone. “You what?”

  “Harry Lane University has this gallery devoted to photography!” said Nelson. “Well, we didn’t exactly get you a show, more like an appointment to talk to the curator.”

  Alarm jangled in Dee’s eyes. “When?”

  Jen looked at her watch. “Three.”

  Deirdre jumped up. “You’re bleedin’ joking. You think I’m going in for an interview like that with no flippin’ preparation? You’re out of your tiny minds! I don’t even have a portfolio together. How am I supposed to pull a portfolio together so fast?”

  Nelson gestured meekly in the direction of the basement. “We thought you could just take that binder you have.”

  “Then you didn’t think too clearly, did you?” She paced. “It takes time to get ready for something like this. I can’t just waltz in there with a stack of photos under me arm. I have to do research. Find out what they’re looking for. Edit me pictures down to fit.” She whirled around. “Jaysus Christ, you think it’s easy, don’t you, just pick up a few snaps you have lying around and have a wee chat about them and you’re flyin’ it. Well it’s not like that.”

  “Holy cow,” said Jen. “Girl’s got lungs.”

  Nelson said, “Deirdre, please, could you keep still a minute?”

  Hands on hips, she stopped in front of me. “You could’ve asked.”

  “Look,” I said, “Don’t sweat it. The main thing is to get you on campus. Doesn’t matter what your portfolio looks like.”

  Nelson winced.

  Deirdre crossed her arms. “It doesn’t matter what me portfolio looks like?”

  I apologized. Nelson persuaded her back to the sofa, sat her down. Calmed her down. Suggested she exhibit her work more. That she treat this like a trial run, and that he’d help her find other venues.

  Out from under her cot came the heavy binder. She turned pages and muttered, “I’ll have to choose them in the car. Shit. Shit. They’re all mixed up. There’s Stuart from last year. Sal in New York, and Sal again with Rico and Janey. And there’s that famous fountain.”

  “Deirdre,” I said, “you can do better than a show at a college. Nelson’s right, this is just practice. You should get these out. In a magazine or something.”

  “It’s amazing any of them’s survived,” she murmured.

  I said, “They were made by a survivor.”

  The smile she gave me was watery and grateful.

  I reached down and touched a pic
ture of an old woman in what looked like a city park. Shadows from some object out of the frame covered her in unplaceable, confusing shapes.

  “Something about them,” I said, “kinda grabs at you.”

  28: JEN

  “Here she comes,” says Fetz to the rearview.

  “Finally,” I say. “Thought she’d been swallowed by the Ministry of Truth.”

  Deirdre waves at us through the window as if waiting forty-five minutes for her in this stinking underground garage hasn’t been a giant waste of our time. Nelson flips the seat forward and she climbs in the back. “Nancy’s gorgeous!” she says. Then she goes on about meeting the curator, seeing the gallery space, and that Reynolds is apparently “cheesed off” that there’s posters up all over campus protesting the Pentagon contract.

  “You get photos of them?” I ask.

  “A few.” She giggles. “I felt like such a spy. And Nancy loves your hair, by the way.”

  “Huh?”

  “She said, ‘I’ve never seen such fine hair on a white girl.’ And I got a show! In December! But the thing is, the curator doesn’t want the work I have, she wants new work. Images that ‘speak to the local or regional culture.’”

  “You must be present to win,” I say.

  They fall into a discussion about how she’ll need a real camera, and a darkroom, and Dee whines, “I have no idea how I’m going to pull it off.”

  I say, “What would you take photos of?” I’m thinking the bridges, trilliums in Forest Park, roses, the usual stereotypical Portland images.

  She leans forward, and I can smell the mint on her breath. Girl eats a lot of mints. “You.”

  “Me?”

  “The lot of you.”

  “Aie,” says Fetzer, “I don’t like that idea.”

  “Can’t,” I say. “Security.”

  “I don’t mean while you’re hacking or setting fires, I mean just around the house. You know, dinner, watching TV and so on.”

  Nelson huffs. “For the record, we do not set fires.”

  I flip around and say, “For fuck’s sake, Deirdre. We just wanted some help getting inside this stupid campus. Don’t tell me this is going to turn into some long-term art project.”

  But she’s smiling in a conspiratorial way that makes me pause. “Ah. But Dr. Reynolds would be a collector of fine-art photography, wouldn’t he. And he attends the openings.”

  Fetzer strokes his chin. Nelson slowly smiles, and I have to admit, the idea of that prick seeing our mugs all over his swanky gallery walls is pretty funny.

  29: FETZER

  Things unfolded predictably for a while. Dee fretted about her exhibition. Jen and I worked. Nelson occupied himself with Dee.

  Thanks to Kate Simms at the Oregon Herald, our Harry Lane/Pentagon story got more traction. Her angle was somewhat questioning, but one of her editor’s conditions (unstated, she told us later, but implied) was to balance that with a “local liberal institution does its part for national security” slant. Nevertheless, from there the story migrated to the noon news, evening news, made it onto the AP wire the next day. Our inbox filled up, and the phone rang a few times—mostly independent sites, but a couple of mainstream dailies, too. No doubt Reynolds’s phone rang itself off his desk, what with the daily anti-Pentagon protests at the university, and the Students for Peace invasion of the Department of Science and Engineering that made the local news. Dozens of folks danced like crazy, while others locked themselves to furniture, big U-locks around their necks. Four fire trucks and twenty po-po cars on the scene. Took them two hours to get the kids out. No tear gas because the press was there, shaky footage on the evening news of Students for Peace making one hell of a joyful noise unto the planet.

  Free Speech Radio News requested a follow-up story, and Nelson narrated it in one take, with a shine in his eyes and his voice so clear and smooth that Jen had almost no editing to do. Within a week of that we got offers from three more stations to pick up the national syndication, which took us to fourteen.

  We saved the letters to the editor at the Herald for a while. About half were critical of surveillance culture and the Pentagon, and the other half wondered what the crazy lefties were thinking, letting terrorists wander around under our video cameras unnoticed. And that anyone who thought differently was unpatriotic, including Kate Simms, and the Herald for not firing her. Kate Simms said she wasn’t worried. I wasn’t worried.

  Well, I was worried, but not about the stupid Herald.

  On the domestic front, Jen and I decided Dee had to go. It was intolerable giving those two their privacy in what was essentially our office, and the only route in and out of the house. And Jen and I didn’t want Dee moving upstairs. So one day I waited until Dee was at work and I grabbed a big orange extension cord and went looking for Nelson. Found him in the basement bathroom taking a leak with the door open and the lights off. Perpetual twilight through the grimy window. I let him zip up, then I said, “We need to talk about you and Dee.”

  He turned into the shadows to flush. “Yeah?”

  Two-day-old head stubble under my hand. “She needs to get her own place.”

  When his face came back around it was the betrayed boy.

  “Hey,” I said. “It’s not the end of the world. She can move in to the other side of the house.”

  “But it’s not hooked up. You’re suggesting she go without electricity?”

  “Nope. She can use ours.” I held up the extension cord. “Couple of these and we drill holes in the wall and run them through to power strips.”

  I told Nelson I’d snuck over there earlier and checked out the top floor, which had probably once been a dance studio. The interior walls had been removed, making it one big space, and there was broken mirror all over the floor. I also told him Dee was welcome all hours, all days, and that to be honest I was hoping she’d keep up with the cooking.

  Once Nelson saw the place he was into the idea. It had a separate entrance via a metal staircase on the outside of the building. The staircase led to a small foyer with a window that looked out over Novi. We spent fifteen sweaty minutes getting that window unstuck.

  Later that afternoon Nelson stood on the balcony at the top of the stairs that was more like a fire escape grating than a balcony. When he saw Deirdre walking down Novi he called out, “Got something to show you.”

  Her feet clanged up the metal stairs. “I didn’t know this was yours,” she said.

  “It’s not,” he said. “But come in anyway.”

  She flapped a hand in front of her face. “Whew, it’s stifling.” Nelson looked nervous, because if she didn’t like it, she was going to end up somewhere farther away.

  “Yeah, it faces west,” said Nelson. “Nice sunsets.”

  “Sunsets?” She looked around the empty foyer. “What did you want to show me?”

  “Through here,” I said, and led her into the main room. We’d cleaned out the broken mirror and swept the floor. The long wall where the mirror had been was blotchy from the glue. Dust motes hung in the air, and the light coming through the tall sash windows on the west side just about scalded your eyeballs.

  Deirdre looked around. “This is huge.”

  Nelson said, “We were wondering if you’d like to move in.”

  “Here? Jaysus, really?” She threw her arms out and spun in a circle. Then she hugged us both.

  It was always a shock when she got close like that. She was small and big and dark and bright at the same time, like she could morph right there in your arms, and you’d be left holding onto something else.

  “Glad you like it,” I said, and extricated myself.

  We showed her the bathroom at the other end. Just a tub, and not even a clawfoot we could’ve sold for cash. A rusty cabinet over a sink as cracked as ours, and a stained toilet. Through the window you could see the big silver maple in the back yard.

  “Hot water,” said Nelson, and he opened the closet like it was a game-show prize. “Once Fetzer gets it
hooked up.”

  “We’ll rig up a shower head, too,” I said.

  “We can help you get whatever you need,” said Nelson.

  “Yeah,” I said. “We know the best dumpsters.”

  We had a good time, fixing up her place. Even Jen helped. Business as usual was set aside as we pulled that big room into something habitable. Franky’s muscles bulged like yams getting the furniture up the narrow stairs. Deirdre still didn’t have a camera or an enlarger, but it meant a lot to her that she was getting a space that could accommodate her photography. Personally, I didn’t like the idea of my mug up on some gallery walls, but I went along with the plan because it meant a lot to me, too, to see her so happy.

  I never told anyone, not even afterward, that I went through her stuff sometimes. The first time I didn’t find a thing, so I left it alone for a few months. But toward the end I snooped a couple more times. I wasn’t proud about running my own Department of Homeland Security, but I just had to do it. I never read her diaries—the musings of a thirty-year-old drifter weren’t interesting to me—but I’d go through her clothes and shake out her books. Checked the nooks and crannies of the bathroom. Never came up with what I was looking for. And because I thought I knew what I was looking for, when I found glasses smelling of booze and tacky on the inside, it didn’t mean much. By then we were drinking wine with dinner every night, and I figured it was just leftovers.

  It was a contractor who found her stash, when we converted her place into the archive a couple of years ago. Her clothes hamper must have sat over that laundry chute trapdoor, barely visible in the grimy bathroom floor. A shelf in there, and lots of dusty bottles. Gin and wine. One from Mrs. Krepelter’s case of ’97 Pinot Noir. Putting two and two together, I figured Dee must have stolen the ’97s early on and replaced them with the ’99s when she realized we’d notice.

  The contractor thought the stash was funny, but I made him promise to keep his mouth shut.

  30: NELSON