“What are you doing?”
He wears a smartphone in a harness on his belt. A white cord reaches across his chest and splits into his ears. He tugs on it and the earbuds pop out, and he wraps them around his knuckles and tucks them in his pocket. “What’s that?”
“I said what are you doing?”
Derek does not blink when he says, “Listening to some kickass music. Then I got interrupted. By you.” He clomps past Cheston and stations himself behind the counter. Here he keeps a stepping stool that he climbs onto, and now they are nearly the same height. “You got water all over the floor.”
“Bad storm.”
“Good storm. Good for me. Storms always do damage. And I’m going to be doing a lot of business tomorrow. A lot. I assume that has something to do with why you’re here?”
“Blew out a blade drive.”
An eyebrow arches. “Did you?”
“I did.”
Derek keeps the drivers locked up in a glass case behind the counter. He does not look at them but nods his head in their direction.
“I’d appreciate it if we could do this quickly.” Cheston rolls back his sleeve to reveal the pale flesh of his forearm, interrupted by a black patterned square, a QR code that contains his credit card information.
Derek looks at the tattoo and hoists his upper lip. “Really?”
“Do we have to go through this every time?”
“I just think it’s messed up. Commercializing your body like that. Soul selling even. Gross. Really gross.”
“It’s the way of the future. Ten years, we’ll all be inked up.”
“So predicts the great Nostradumbass.”
“How much?”
Derek slowly withdraws the scanning gun from its cradle, fires the red line of it across the counter, up the round swell of Cheston’s belly, pausing at his heart. “You know that’s an interesting question. Because you’re not a standard sort of customer, are you? You’ve got a lot at stake, don’t you? With your little business.” He turns the gun one way, then the other. “Hmm. How much should you pay?”
“There are plenty of stores. I don’t have to come to this one.”
“But I know things about you.” Derek’s lips tremble a little. “Isn’t that worth something?”
“You’re not the only one who knows things.”
“What do you know, Cheston?”
“You think I don’t know who my guests are? I know who I’m hosting. I know what you’re up to. I could rat on you just as well as you could rat on me.” There is a long silence between them. The wind gusts outside and Cheston says, “Have you ever heard of the Panopticon?”
“No, Cheston, I have not heard of the Panopticon.”
“It’s a building with a circular structure. It could be a school or a hospital or a prison. A philosopher named Jeremy Bentham designed it. There’s a watchman stationed in its center. From his inspection house, he can see into all the rooms, or cells, but no one can tell whether or not the watchman is actually watching. They must assume he is.” Cheston slides his sunglasses to the end of his nose and studies Derek over the top of them. “Assume he is. Assume I am watching.”
❖
A few minutes later, with a receipt crunched in his pocket and a plastic bag swinging from his hand, he pushes through the door, into the street, where the night hisses with rain. There is a hard division between the harsh white light of the store and the penetrating black of the street.
Sometimes, at the end of the day, after so many hours of staring at computers, his eyes will not focus. The world lags and warps and fuzzes over. So he cannot be sure whether it is a trick of the night or the fault of his vision, but he thinks he sees something. What, he cannot say. Maybe a pale dog or maybe a headlight flashing off a puddle. But he feels observed, hunted. It feels like there is an unseen presence haunting this night.
He blinks hard. Then runs and walks and runs again the next three blocks. With the air so full of water, breathing feels like drowning. He thinks he hears a clicking, like claws on concrete. Every few steps, he checks over his shoulder, making his vision whirl and his balance unsteady. The occasional car cuts the darkness, its engine coughing, its tires swishing. Otherwise, he is alone, the only people he sees safely ensconced in the bright orange squares of lamplight that pattern the buildings around him. They float above the danger and doubt he feels.
He passes an alley, a wedge of shadow. Every nerve in his body tells him to give it wide berth. He angles toward the curb, slips into the street. The water there is calf-deep. His shoe fills with it and threatens to tear away. He curses and lurches back onto the sidewalk just in time to see the man emerge from the alley. The man he saw earlier. The bag man. Lump.
Lump staggers, his face cloaked by the plastic torn around his face like a poncho. They move past each other, close enough to grab. The man’s face swings toward him at the last second, damp and warted, so that it appears tadpoles surge beneath his skin. “You don’t have to go to hell,” he says. “You can be saved. It’s not too late.” Only then does Cheston notice the crow on the man’s shoulder. It opens its beak and rasps at him.
Cheston sprints the rest of the way home, his legs trembling and his throat feeling burned out by the time he arrives. He pauses a moment at the entry to stare across the street. At her apartment. His sunflower. The window remains dark, though the rest of the building blazes with light. Maybe she left or maybe she’s in there. With that man. Cheston bares his teeth and keys the lobby door. He nods at the doorman at his desk. The elevator closes around him like a steel coffin that feels like it is being lowered instead of raised—and he does not feel safe until inside his apartment. The buzz of his computers, like angry wasps, calms him. He rips the blade drive from its packaging. Wires it in and powers it up. It blips and chugs to life.
He blows out a sigh, what feels like his first breath since leaving the apartment. He checks his phone—to see how long he has been gone, how long the driver has been down, hoping no more than thirty minutes. He checks his Blackphone and on the Skype app he sees five missed calls and just as many messages. They are all from Cloven. And all of them say the same thing: “What have you done, Cheston?”
His vision shifts again, as if traveling him away. He takes off his sunglasses, knuckles his eyes, puts them back on. He plops into his desk chair. His computers are asleep, and his eyes collide with his reflection in the dark screen and look away. He twitches. He cannot sit still—standing up, sitting down, swiveling in his chair one way, then the other—trying to take in the whole room at once, his body guarding against something. He shakes the mouse. The screens brighten and make his eyes feel full of ashes. He fits on his sunglasses again. He unzips and thrashes out of his jacket and tosses it on the floor.
His fingers spider above the keyboard and then stutter out a note. “So so so totally sorry,” he writes. “Huge-ass storm came through. One of the drivers fried. RAN to store to get another. Literally dying right now from lack of breath. LOL. Everything restored. Again, apologies.”
The response comes immediately. “We are nearly at Zero Day,” Cloven writes. “And we lost 20 percent of our capacity for forty minutes.”
He understands the subtext. He is supposed to quantify time and space, the incalculable amount of commerce and exchange that could not take place during a peak time. It wasn’t just citizen traffic; Undertown was engaged in something that had been interrupted. Cheston can only write back, “I’m sorry. I mean, my bad, but there was nothing I could do.”
He can’t tell whether it is sweat or rainwater oozing down his face. He hits refresh, refresh, refresh until the next message appears—a long minute later.
“We are willing to forgive you. So long as you are willing to do as we request. We mentioned before that your role within the company might change, that your responsibilities would greaten.”
There is a glass eye at the top of each of the monitors, a webcam, and he notices then their green lights throbbing to
life.
“Yes,” he writes. “Of course.”
“Open this, then.”
The email comes with an attachment. He clicks on it without hesitation and the computers all begin to chitter at once. A red code scrolls across the screens, filling his sunglasses with its script like blood-laced vessels.
Chapter 3
MIKE JUNIPER HAS KNOWN about the storm for days, and now it is finally here. He has three different apps on his phone—Weather Bug, Weather Underground, AccuWeather—and he thumbs through them a few times daily. In the morning, after he fetches the newspaper and pulls off the plastic bag and scans the headlines, he always licks a thumb and flips to the last page to study the five-day forecast. His eyes often cut to the window, where sunlight burns or where clouds cluster. It doesn’t make much sense, he knows, paying so much attention to something completely out of his control. But it makes him feel more connected to and protective of his clients, who suffer the elements in alleys and doorways.
That’s what he calls them, his clients, which they appreciate. “You work for us? That the idea?” they say, and he says, “Exactly.” He works for them. Feeding them meals. Offering them beds. Giving them soap and toothpaste and deodorant, underwear and socks, whatever castaway gloves and rain jackets and shoes get dropped off in cardboard boxes and plastic garbage sacks.
Juniper runs The Weary Traveler, one of several shelters in downtown Portland. He has forty beds, five showers, a kitchen, and a lounge where people can read the paper, watch TV, play cards or board games. The building, which huddles between two high-rises, is square and hatted by a sprung red roof, like some failed cousin of a Pizza Hut. Above the reception desk hangs a large cross that looks like a sword and gives off a pale blue light. The walls are blushed with mold and the linoleum is cracked and the ceiling is stained yellow from the cigarettes people used to be able to smoke here, but it’s a welcome refuge to many. Some sleep here for one night and others for thirty, after which time he’s obligated to review their case and extend or deny their stay. He has trouble saying no. Some of his clients have been with him for years.
Juniper himself has been here for twenty. Nobody asks him what he did previously, as people mind their business in a place like this. And nobody has recognized him and he doubts they ever will. The name he’s changed and the beard he’s grown and the muscle he’s gained from weightlifting make that nearly impossible. He’s only in his mid-forties, but his previous life feels like something that happened a century ago. His forehead juts, a thick shelf that throws a shadow over his eyes. His hair is curly black. His hands are enormous, his mouth small. He wears jeans and flannel, thermal long-sleeves.
He helps out the occasional teenager. There are many in Portland, but they try to keep away from the shelters because the admins are obligated to report underagers to social services. And he caters to the occasional family. Just yesterday, for instance. A hollow-eyed mother whose baby had worn the same diaper for three days straight. Whenever the boy needed a change, she’d simply scrape out the waste. She wasn’t on drugs, though some of them are, and she wasn’t mentally ill, though some of them are. She was out of work and on her own and didn’t want to ask for help until she had no choice. That’s what Juniper’s here for—to help, to make a difference, as a kind of compensation or atonement. These people have hit rock bottom and someone needs to hoist them out, and he’s happy to be the one to do it.
Most of Juniper’s clients are middle-aged men. One of his regulars sits in the lounge area now, a room crammed with mismatched couches and recliners and tables, a potted fern, a game cabinet, a coffee station.
Mitch Gunderson used to work as a horse vet until he took a hoof to the head that dented his skull and damaged his short-term memory. He still favors Wranglers and flannels. He’s presently stirring creamer into his fifth cup of coffee.
“What do you think, Mitch?” Juniper says. “Gonna be a bad one?”
Mitch stops his spoon, looks to the window, says, “Wouldn’t mind a big storm. I’ve always been a fan of enormous weather.” Then returns to his absent stirring.
Sure enough, the pressure shifts, the temperature drops. Juniper keeps a thermometer—round-faced with a faded picture of a crow on it—screwed next to one of the windows. He can see the hand on it slide back a good fifteen degrees, like a clock losing time. “Oh boy,” he says. “Here it comes.”
A gust sends a fistful of leaves skittering across the windows. The door breathes open slightly and the wind gasps inside. A streetlamp burns outside, and by its light they can see the maples bending with the wind. Lightning begins to zap and string the night, and they can see now the shape of the thing, one of those frontal thunderstorms shaped like a monstrous anvil. The gray, lightning-laced shelf of it moves toward them, eating up the sky. The moon has risen, a white rind that the clouds soon eclipse.
Today has been slow. A few of his regulars have checked in and are showering or resting upstairs, but he expects the storm to bring more his way. Mitch stands by the window and sips from his coffee and says, again, “I’ve always been a fan of enormous weather.” He’s tall and lean with big ears made more prominent by his baldness. He still carries the dent of the horse hoof at the temple, and his eyes have a faraway focus to them. He lets out a long appreciative whistle. “That’s a storm all right.” He glances at his wristwatch, which stopped ticking years ago. “I suppose I should head on home, but if I do, that means I have to spend time with my wife.” He takes a loud sip of coffee and runs a tongue across his lips for the taste. “So I’ll just stay here. I’ll just ride her out.”
Mitch’s wife abandoned him after the accident. They had never had children, and she didn’t want one now. That’s what Mitch had become, essentially, an absent-minded child. He hasn’t seen his wife in two years, but he talks about her as though she’s waiting, impatient for him to get home and fix a gutter, mow the lawn.
“That’s what we’ll do,” Juniper says. “Ride her out. Together.”
“Yep.”
“Let’s see what the box has to say about all this.” Juniper picks up the remote and powers up the TV hanging from the wall, flipping through the stations until he settles on KGW, the local NBC affiliate. A reporter—a woman in a blue-and-gray North Face jacket—stands in the rain next to a tree that snapped in half and crunched through a minivan. Glass and leaves litter the street. She signs off, reporting live from Tigard, and the camera cuts to Matt Zafino, in a charcoal suit, standing before a radar map. He uses his hands to pantomime the swirling force of the storm. He talks about changing pressure systems, dew points, supercells.
“We’re in for it,” Juniper says.
That’s when the rain arrives. It doesn’t begin gradually—it comes all at once—as if someone slashed the belly of the sky, lashing the windows, pounding the roof, filling the shelter with a roar they can feel. They can barely hear each other, but that doesn’t stop Mitch from muttering the occasional “Boy” and “Damn” and “Would you look at that.” A steady stream pours off the roof, like a silvery beaded curtain that obscures the view and distorts and refracts the headlights of the pickup that approaches the building.
“Who’s that?” Mitch says.
“That’s Sammy’s truck.”
“Sammy,” Mitch says. “Who’s that?”
Mitch knows him, even if he can’t remember. Sammy is a regular. Most nights he sleeps in his truck, a rusted-out Ford with no muffler and spent shocks. He siphons fuel out of luxury cars with a garden hose, so his breath often smells like gasoline. He collects scrap metal around the city and visits the shelter for meals and clothes and showers.
The truck careens toward them, approaching so quickly that Mitch flinches, as though the grille might crash through the window. Then the pickup comes to a rocking halt, parked diagonally across two spots, its nose right up against the entrance. The engine clanks and squeals and dies. The driver’s door kicks open, and Sammy jumps out and hunches down and splashes his way through a p
uddle.
“Christ, is this guy drunk?” Mitch says.
Sammy pushes his way inside and pauses on the bristle mat. His sweatshirt is soaked through, clinging to him. Water puddles the floor where he stands. His eyes are already big, but they appear now to bulge from their sockets.
“Are you drunk, buddy?” Mitch says.
“What’s the matter?” Juniper says. “Sammy?”
Sammy opens and closes his mouth several times before saying, “I . . . I hit something.”
“Hit something?” Juniper says.
“A horse?” Mitch says. “Did you hit a horse? I once treated a horse that got hit by a semi. Never thought she would make it, but by god, she pulled through.”
“What’d you hit, Sammy?”
Mitch finishes his coffee and sets it down with a hard clink. “Let me fetch my med kit and we’ll see about that horse.”
Sammy shakes his head hard enough for the water to spin off him. Then he wipes his face, dries his palm on his sweatshirt. He glances back at his pickup, and though it already looks like something salvaged from a junkyard, Juniper homes in on the dented bumper, the broken grille.
“Not a person?” Juniper says.
Sammy is still looking at his pickup. “No. Not a person. I’m not sure what I hit.” The thunder snarls. “But it’s in the back of my truck. I put it there, in the back of my truck.”
❖
Juniper and Mitch follow Sammy outside to the back end of the truck. The rain stings and the puddles soak their shoes and the wind shoves them off-balance. Sammy drops the tailgate. A smell hits them. A sulfuric urine. Juniper snaps on a key chain penlight to cut through the darkness.
“See.” Sammy motions at the thing. “Told you.”
For a moment no one speaks. Then Mitch says, “What in the hell is that?”
The Dark Net Page 4