Parts Per Million

by Julia Stoops

  Franky wraps a thick gray scarf around his neck. Thank god he could come. Jen lifts the home phone and waggles it. “I’ll call you the minute.”

  The TV’s off. It’s now dark outside and there’s a wind up. The loosened window rattles with each gust. Nobody’s made dinner, but the thought of food makes Nelson nauseated, anyway. He shelters his hands in his coat pockets.

  As soon as he’d walked in on her and Sylvia, he’d known. From the bed, their two pairs of eyes, frozen, staring. He couldn’t keep her. She was already on her way.

  “Ready?” says Fetzer, and Nelson nods.

  They go up and down Division. Into Ladd’s Addition a ways, since she likes going there for walks. Then they do the bars. In every one of them it’s hard to see in the smoky light, and impossible to call out over the music and the chatter. They lean in close to bartenders and ask, “About five-two. Straight black hair. Irish accent.” Fetzer keeps adding, “String-beany, long face.” Nelson wants to qualify that with, Beautiful skin, and topaz eyes, and the most delicate mouth that bends into a V when she smiles, but by then the bartenders are already shaking their heads.

  “Haven’t seen her tonight,” said one of them, and Nelson had to swallow against the sore place in his chest. It’s his fault. If he didn’t work so damn hard he’d spend more time with her.

  “Where are you now?” says Fetzer into the phone. Rain sparkles on his bald head. Nelson’s hair is wet and the wind bites at his ears. Fetzer tells Franky, “Keep going farther. If she kept walking she could be miles out by now.” Traffic streams by in a river of red and white lights.

  “If she got on a bus,” says Nelson, “she could be approaching Olympia by now.”

  Fetzer closes the phone. “Let’s not think like that, okay?”

  They’re stepping out of a pool hall on MLK when Jen calls. After a second, a grin bursts out on Fetzer’s face, and Nelson is rinsed with sweat and relief. Then Fetzer’s grin fades. “Well,” he says, “at least she’s back.”

  Nausea churns with the relief. “Is she all right?”

  Fetzer drops the phone in his pocket. “She’ll be fine. A taxi took her home. She apparently had a business card on her—when the hell did she get business cards, anyway?”

  “Jen made her some, remember, for her housewarming. Is she okay?”

  “Huh. She should’ve handed them out at her opening. Well, thanks to the card, the driver knew where to drop her off.”

  “Is she okay? God, Fetz, did Jen say if she looked okay?”

  “Sounds like she’s fine, except perhaps”—Fetzer pinches his mouth—“her liver.”

  48: FETZER

  The poor guy nursed her through the night. She was passed out, but her pupils and her pulse left me pretty sure it was alcohol and not anything else. Besides, she stank of it. Keeping her upright and shuffling around was a challenge, but it got even more challenging when she came to enough to barf all over the kitchen floor. Me and Jen went to bed. Saint John tended the sick, and Saint Francis tended the desperate of spirit and cleaned up after the sick.

  Next morning we came downstairs to Nelson and Dee spooning on the brown velvet sofa. The smell of booze and vomit hung around till we opened the liberated window and stuck an extractor fan in it. It was sleeting outside. We wore extra sweaters, and the conversation around the table was all contrition and vows. Deirdre was the color of putty except for around her raccoon-eyes. She couldn’t remember most of her evening.

  She said, “Some fellas bought me a drink in a place with a neon sign, round with something in it like a crab or a spider—”

  “That crab house?” said Jen. “They have a bar in there?”

  “—then we went to this other place, but I wasn’t paying attention to how we got there.”

  I let out a “Jesus fucking Christ.”

  Nelson covered his face with his hands. “Don’t tell me you got in their car.”

  “Bloody stupid, I know.”

  Nelson groaned and stretched back in his chair. “God, you could have been raped, killed.”

  There were more admonitions from us, apologies from her. I mentally thanked the guys she hung out with for not being animals. Then Jen changed the subject.

  “So, ah, Students for Peace sent this email for you.” She handed Deirdre a printout. “They’re really bummed your show closed. And I shoulda asked you about the protest. I’m sorry.”

  An apology. This was significant.

  Deirdre read the note, but her expression didn’t change.

  “Tell you what,” said Jen. “I’ll put your whole exhibition on the web. I’ll set up a domain name and everything.”

  “Good idea,” I said, pleased to see Jen making amends.

  Dee handed back the printout. “Don’t bother.”

  But Franky was into it, and Jen said people were emailing trying to find out what had happened to the show. Nelson, who had barely spoken to Jen since the reception, said, “It’s a good idea, Dee.”

  She rolled her eyes. “Fine. Anything for a quiet life.” And that was the signal we could go back to work. Jen and I nearly knocked heads reaching for the papers on the floor. And since we’d all been too preoccupied to check the independent sites for a day, that morning’s news was a surprise. Hundreds of Middle Eastern men and boys had been arrested around the country. Not exactly rounded up—they’d gone in voluntarily for Ashcroft’s new fingerprinting and registration scheme, but they never made it home.

  Jen brought a laptop to the table, and her searches found stories from distraught wives and mothers who had no idea when they’d see their men again. And blogs were talking of evidence of abandoned Japanese wartime detention camps being refurbished.

  Nelson said, “It puts our own small lives into perspective.”

  Franky said, “Yeah. We’ve got it good.”

  “I dunno,” said Jen. She gestured at the laptop. “We’re in no less danger than these dudes. Feds just haven’t figured out how to round up white dissenters yet. They can’t use the brown paper bag test, but you know they’re working on something.”

  “I just meant we gotta be grateful,” said Franky. “Look what we have, guys. It’s way more than lots of folks.”

  Just then the phone buzzed in my pocket. I pulled it out. It was a text. I kept trying to make sense of the text but it just said Intrusion Detected.

  Jen frowned at the interruption. “What?” she demanded. “Who is it?”

  I held out the phone for her to see, and she was out of her chair and scrambling down the stairs before I could blink. “Intrusion!” she yelled.

  We followed Jen down. She was typing faster than I’d ever seen. “That firewall was just fucking updated.” She threw up her hands. “I don’t know what they’re using.” She was up and over at the server rack and a second later the computer went dark. The lights went off on the servers. The fans stopped. The basement was quiet in that way where you realize you’d gotten used to a noise.

  Jen sat down in the nearest chair and pushed her hair off her forehead. Breathed in. Breathed out. “Hopefully the mirror site is fine. Should be.”

  “What happened?” said Franky.

  Jen swung the chair to face us. “We’ve been hacked.”

  “Who by?” said Nelson.

  “Maybe I can tell when I check the logs. But shit, no prizes for guessing, right?”

  Nelson dropped his butt on the vinyl sofa and frowned, incredulous. “You think Reynolds would do this?”

  “Probably not personally,” said Jen. “But he’ll have contacts.”

  “Did they do any damage?” I asked.

  “Fucking hope not,” said Jen. “It was what, fifteen, twenty, seconds?” She rested a hand on the nearest tower like she was calming a frightened pet. “The intrusion detection picked up as soon as they got past the firewall, so unless they lobbed a bomb into the system, I doubt they got very far.”

  “A bomb?” I said.

  Jen closed her eyes. “Fuck. I’m going to hav
e to go through and clean out.” Then she pointed at Franky. “See? Don’t give me that Hallmark positive-thinking BS, okay?”

  Franky said, “Huh?”

  Jen jabbed her finger. “This is war, man. Just ’cause we’re not in matching outfits with little ribbons and medals doesn’t mean it’s not happening. Class war. Resources war.” Her hands scythed the air. “War against the whole fucking planet and everyone who lives on it who isn’t in the elite.”

  She was pink in the face. Franky, like he was speaking to a simpleton, said, “I know about that. I’m just saying, like for instance they didn’t get very far, right? So that’s cool, see? On the day to day, gratitude is the best attitude.”

  “You don’t get it, do you?” Jen picked up a nearby laptop. “We’re on the front lines, Frank. And it would really help morale if you quit talking like a fortune cookie and started getting even semi-realistic about shit.”

  49: JEN

  I’m not depressed enough. Must be time for a news fix.

  WAR IS UP TO SADDAM. Well fancy that. “President Bush flatly rejected arguments from antiwar protesters, saying the choice for war is Saddam Hussein’s. ‘They’ve got all the right in the world to express their opinions. If they tried to do that in Iraq, they’d have their tongues cut out,’ Bush said.”

  Tongues cut out. Tongues cut out.

  As Franky would say, look on the bright side: nobody’s actually torturing us. Yet.

  But fuck, what if it came to that? Do we even really know what’s happening to all those Muslim guys they rounded up?

  And here am I, sitting in our quiet kitchen. The newspapers on the floor like every other day. The Crusher taking up space in the living room, temporarily up here for its recovery. And Dee’s collecting bottles by the stove.

  “Yo, Deirdre,” I say. “Recycling?”

  She pauses with two full paper bags in her arms. “Yeah,” she says. No smile.

  “Cool,” I say. She’s been cleaning a lot the last couple of weeks. And she and Nelse have cooled down—not so much activity through the wall, thank you, Jesus. He’s working hard, she’s pulling her weight. Finally. And she’s not as ditzy. In fact, she sort of plods around. Doesn’t laugh as much. Weird thing is, I sort of miss the old ditzy Dee. Why can’t she combine Righteous Dee with Ditzy Dee for something more balanced?

  She glances up from the bags. “These are getting heavy.”

  “Right. Listen, it’s pouring outside. Put those down and come have a look at this.” I pull out a chair and she sits. Then I turn the laptop so it’s facing her. “Ta-da!”

  Her eyes latch onto the screen, and her fingers touch her collarbone. “Me website?”

  “For all the world to see.”

  She stares. The first photo is the one of the vigil outside the Science building at Harry Lane.

  I say, “I figured it shouldn’t start with a picture of one of us, you know? ’cause that would be, like, privileging whoever it was.”

  Her name is across the top in simple white caps. My hand leaps for the touchpad, but I pull back and say, “Click the arrow? Yeah. The photos look cool against the dark gray, huh? And the captions come up when you roll over—yeah. And the arrows take you to the next one or back. And click there to get home.”

  Her other hand is over her mouth. “You did this for all of them?”

  “Sure. Piece of cake.”

  “Oh,” she says, and there’s a tiny break in her voice that shoots right into me.

  She clicks. It’s the one of me and Fetz pouring fuel. “You’ve kept the contrast,” she murmurs. “And the detail.”

  “Yup. I didn’t have to manipulate them at all.”

  Another click, and it’s the one of Frank and Nelse walking to the car. A symmetry in their arms and feet. Something I noticed as I was scanning them. They’re actually pretty interesting pictures if you look at them for a while.

  She clicks. There’s me at the Crusher, my hands like starfish on the keyboard.

  “I set up an email address, too, so you can answer questions.”

  “An email address?” she says. “That’s scary.”

  I’d Googled her, didn’t find a thing that matched. There’s a Deirdre O’Carroll in Florida who’s a swim instructor, and another one in Ireland, but she’s studying to be a nurse.

  “What’s so scary about an email address?”

  She clicks again. Broken floral carving along the top of the porch. And again. Nelson looking out a window, evening light texturing the cloth of his shirt.

  “I am no longer a passenger,” she says to the screen. “I have come ashore.”

  “Huh?”

  Her head lifts and her pale eyes are on me. “I love it.”

  I want to hug her and I hope she wants to hug me, but her elbows pull in a tiny bit closer to her sides.

  I say, “Click on the envelope icon to access your email.”

  “Jaysus,” she whispers. The cursor hovers over the envelope. “What if there’s a message?”

  I shrug, smile. “Check and see.”

  She clicks. Webmail comes up. Two messages: One, ‘test-ignore’ from me. The other’s subject is, ‘your photos’.

  She sits there.

  “Click on the subject,” I say. “Haven’t you ever used email before?”

  She clicks. It’s a message from Beatrice. Cool. Saying how glad she is to see the photos again. With yet another apology for the closed show. And yet another reassurance they thought she knew. Yeah, yeah, everybody’s got to rub it in.

  “I wish I didn’t have an email address,” says Dee.

  “O-kaaay,” I say.

  She turns and her eyes are full or warning or fear, I can’t tell. “Because every day now I’m going to check it.”

  “That’s the general idea.”

  Her eyes skitter back and forth on mine. “In hopes that Sylvia will write.”

  “Ah.” I stand up. “Look, there’s diagnostics I need to check on, so—”

  She grips my sleeve. “Don’t you ever—?”

  “Can I have my arm back?”

  She lets go. Barely audible over the hum of the fridge, she says, “You’re so bloody self-contained.”

  I shrug again. Pull a face. “Sorry. I guess.” My new strategy: when in doubt, apologize.

  “No. I envy you.”

  Her eyes have stopped skittering. Now I can’t look away.

  “You know that part in Peter Pan,” she says, “where Peter is marooned on a rock, and the tide is rising and he knows he’s going to drown?”

  My hands up, a barrier. “Okay. This is getting weird.”

  But she grabs one of my hands, holds it in her small hot paws. “He’s sitting there and his heart is pounding and the water is lapping at his toes. And it suddenly occurs to him, ‘To die would be an awfully big adventure.’”

  Her lips move and twist. Her hands feel feverish.

  Don’t know what to say.

  She leans forward and I jerk back, step away, hands in pockets, hands out of pockets, wake the Crusher up. Progress bar’s only halfway though. The laugh out of me is shaky, grating. “What the fuck was that about?”

  “Thanks for making the website,” she says in a voice gone flat. “I’ll be saying a prayer of thanks to the blessed Virgin, too.”

  The progress bar seems to have stopped. “That was a joke, right?”

  So close I catch the mint on her breath, she says, “Will you check me emails?” She probably eats the damn things to cover up the alcohol.

  “Uh. Okay.”

  Then she’s walking away. Heading for the basement. Not looking back.

  Now what the fuck was that all about?

  50: NELSON

  Nelson reaches across Deirdre for the clock. 4:17 a.m. He flops back against his pillow and sighs.

  She’s lying facedown, and her breath scrapes in, then falls out. There’s the data about depleted uranium he has to look at before the end of the week, and that Wetlands Defenders interview to t
ranscribe. But it’s too early to get up.

  Even the highway is quiet. The lamp on the floor at the far end of the room makes a cave of the space and casts shadows across the ceiling. More rain coming this week. A lot more rain. Biblical rain. When Greenland melts, that’ll be biblical. The Atlantic will fill the Amazon basin. The Willamette will flood this house. No wait, it’s supposed to be fire. “God said fire not a flood next time.” Pete Seeger. No, Peter, Paul and Mary.

  They thought they had problems, but from here the sixties looks like a hopeful, breakthrough time. Turmoil mixed with a big fat promise of a better world. Now there’s just the turmoil and something unimaginable coming up ahead. No world as anyone knows it.

  Nelson pulls the cover off Deirdre and rests his palm on her hot back. She’s damp. She got so drunk again. It was Sylvia’s letter that did it. Handwritten on heavy paper, it was addressed to them both, and it sounded so unlike Sylvia that he thought it was a hoax. Deirdre assured him it was Sylvia’s handwriting.

  The letter was full of regrets about the hurt she’d caused. And her desire to change. “I want to be less selfish,” she’d written. “I want to do more for the world. And even if I never see you again, John, I’ll always remember your inspiring spirit.”

  “Are you sure this is from her?” he’d repeated.

  But after a while the letter had a calming effect, and an argument he’d been carrying in the back of his mind went quiet. He was able to finish his piece about a raid against an English GM research facility before heading for bed. But he found Dee sitting on her bathroom floor, empty gin bottle beside her, moaning, “I have strayed, I have strayed, far from the path.”

  The Catholic stuff again. Her arms fell loose around him as he pulled her up. Her mouth left a wet smudge on his shirt. He sat her on the couch, wiped her face with a washcloth, made her drink a glass of water. He wished there was more he could do.

  “I am a sinner,” she moaned.

  “You seeing Sylvia again?” he’d snapped, but she just murmured “No” and clung to his neck.