“Frankly, Gladstone,” he said, “I don’t know what you know or don’t know. I just said that to shut up Senator Bitchface, but, yes, the powers that be have taken an interest in you, and you need to tell me something quick.”
“Why?”
“Because I don’t like it here.”
“Sorry to hear that Rowsdower. Have you tried harassing some prisoners down the hall?”
“I don’t mean here, with you. I mean L.A. They called me up because I met you already in New York. They brought me here … because of you.”
“Oh.…”
“I don’t like being asked if I prefer egg whites when I order breakfast. Do you understand? I miss the subway. I don’t like the traffic, the smiles. I don’t like the sun, Gladstone. You might be okay shitting away your life in a room, but I am not okay watching you do it in Los Angeles. So, y’know, if you’re gonna be useless and quiet, wanna do it in New York so I can go the fuck home?”
There was something I did want to tell Rowsdower. Something that had plagued me since Bellevue.
“I have a confession Special Agent Rowsdower,” I said.
He waited.
“Back in New York I told you my wife was dead. She’s not dead. I’m sorry. I know that now. I was just … off.”
“I know, Gladstone.”
“You know?”
“Yeah, I know. I know everything. I knew it then. And even if I hadn’t read your journal and done, y’know, my job, I’d still know.”
I didn’t respond and he continued.
“Maybe because it’s in your file. Maybe because I’m the hand of the most powerful government in the world, authorized with tremendous power to get results. Or maybe it’s because she’s waiting to see you right now.”
* * *
It had been weeks since I last saw Romaya or even spoke to anyone in depth. I was starting to hope Rowsdower would just beat the information out of me so that I’d spill everything and this could all be over. But maybe he knew what he was doing. Maybe he realized I was only good at sitting alone in a room when there was available liquor and functioning WiFi. Now I was antsy and eager.
Despite the million chirping voices pecking at my skull for freedom, I tried to stay cool. I wanted Romaya to see me self-possessed. I wasn’t sure if I should change into street clothes, but ultimately decided to throw on my sports jacket and fedora over my blue prison attire. It created a look not too dissimilar to the jacket/scrubs ensemble I sported when I first hit L.A.
Unlike my cell, the visitors’ room looked very much like my prison expectations. There were several segregated stations with opposing seats, glass, and telephone receiver. Romaya waited for me behind glass, unsure of where she was or what she’d see. And for reasons I don’t understand, that insecurity inspired me to act as if I were right at home. I sat across from her, greeting her like a guest, and nonchalantly grabbed the phone as if I’d done it countless times. As if anyone else had come to see me.
“How did dance class go?” I asked.
“What?”
“I haven’t seen you since your class. Everything turn out all right?”
She ignored the question.
“I came to see you at Tobey’s,” she said.
“Why?”
“I wanted to thank you.”
“What for?”
“For driving me to Google,” she said. “I really appreciate it. I even got you a present, but I guess I can’t give it to you now.”
She pointed to the little tiny slot in the glass. A plastic tray like the kind you could pay a nervous New York City taxi driver through. The guard in her corner of the room took notice and moved a half step closer.
“Too big?” I asked.
“Yeah,” she said. “I don’t even know why I brought it. Stupid.”
She reached down to her side before reappearing “Here.”
Romaya presented me with a three-quarter-liter bottle of Jameson.
“Jameson,” I said.
“Yeah.”
I thought about Alana at The Hash Tag, and how Rowsdower had arrived before I got to drink the Macallan she bought me. I thought about the thick sweetness of Jameson rolling over my tongue.
“What?” Romaya asked. “I thought this is what you like now.”
“Yes. You’re right,” I said. “Thank you. That’s great.”
“I’ll give it to you when you get out.” She paused and stared at my clothes. “When are you getting out?”
“I don’t know, Romaya,” I said. “I’m a person of interest under the NET Recovery Act. They have questions. They can keep me indefinitely if they want to. Do what they like.”
“Do you have a lawyer?” she asked, and I laughed.
“Something funny?”
Nothing was funny. She wasn’t visiting her husband. I was just a man she knew, seemingly not even as well as strange women in bars did.
“I’m not entitled to a lawyer under the NET Recovery Act,” I said.
“Oh.… I read your book.”
I stopped being hurt and petulant for a moment and looked at her again, wondering if she’d seen behind the journal’s booze and sex. Seen how much I still loved her.
“And?” I asked.
She paused. She considered the tiny slot in the glass between us.
“Well … I guess I didn’t realize things had gotten so bad for you.”
I laughed again, still without meaning to. “Yeah. Pretty bad.… So. Anything else? I know you’re busy.”
“Yeah,” she said. “You got some mail. I don’t know how they found me, but it’s for you. Just sent to me. In care of me. It’s from workers’ compensation,” she said, and turned to the guard. “Can I push this through?”
He came over and opened my mail in front of me without hesitation.
“Now you’ve gone too far,” I said. “Jail people indefinitely without counsel for no articulated crime, sure. But opening someone else’s mail is a federal offense, buddy.”
Romaya looked at me. He didn’t. Neither of them laughed. He also didn’t care enough to read the letter. He just made sure it contained no contraband and gave it back to Romaya. She thanked him and folded it in half before passing it through the slot. I took it from the slot and pressed my love letter flat against the glass in front of her face.
“Trade?” I asked, and she put her head down. “Guess not.” I put the love letter back in my pocket and took the workers’ compensation letter.
“What does it say?” she asked.
“It doesn’t matter. They’re gonna cut off my disability payments.”
“What?”
Back before my hospitalization, all I had to do was show up once a month and talk to some shrink who checked a box and kept my half salary coming, but Kreigsman had insisted on seeing me every week in light of the whole jumping-off-the-ferry thing. He was clear about it. Insistent. But I came to California anyway. And that was months ago.
“I haven’t seen a psychiatrist for a while,” I said. “I have to get back to New York by next week or they’re canceling my benefits.”
“Maybe you can work it out so you can see one here,” she said.
“Maybe. But hey, at least food and shelter’s currently being provided by the state.”
“I don’t think you should ignore that.”
“Okay.”
“I’m serious.”
“Okay, I won’t.”
I waited for her to say we had fun on our date and that we should do it again when I got out. And after waiting in silence, I swallowed the last bit of pride an unloved prisoner can have and said, “I had a good time at Hollywood Forever.”
“Me too.”
“Did you forget we could?”
“No. I remembered.”
“Good luck with Google, Romaya. Thanks for the mail.”
I turned to my guard and signaled for the door without looking back. I didn’t need to. I knew the precise image I wouldn’t see.
* * *
“You enjoy your peep show, Rowsdower?” I asked, referring to my exchange with Romaya, all of which was no doubt recorded.
“Not so much,” he said. “No offense, but I like to see more of a performance from women behind glass.”
I laughed and wondered if I was coming down with Stockholm syndrome.
“We’re sending you home, Gladstone,” he said.
“What? Just like that?”
“Just like that. It’s been three weeks. You gonna miss me, Tiger?”
“I’m happy to leave, but I don’t understand.”
“To tell you the truth, Mr. Gladstone, neither do I, but there’s this thing in the world you’ve forgotten about. It’s called a boss. I have one, and boss says it’s time for you to go.”
“Your boss is incredibly wise and sexy.”
Rowsdower threw open my door and repeated himself. “Time to go,” he said.
“Should I give back the clothes?” I asked.
“I wouldn’t dream of ruining that ensemble. Take the clothes, compliments of the government.”
I paused in the doorway. “I’m glad you get to go back home, Special Agent Rowsdower,” I said.
“Thanks, Gladstone. But can I ask you to do something for me?”
“Yeah?”
“When you do get out there. Try to do something worth getting arrested for.”
8.
I hadn’t seen Tobey in three weeks, but once again, when needed, he was somehow reachable again, even if I did have to borrow a phone. Apparently, even under the NET Recovery Act I was entitled to a phone call, and the phone I was offered belonged to an incredibly bored middle-aged woman sitting behind a semicircle of Formica in the middle of what could only be called an office-building lobby. She rested the unit up on the ledge and turned it to me. This was not a prison.
I walked outside freely for the first time in three weeks, and headed to the corner of Sepulveda and Wilshire, as Tobey had suggested. A guard saw me out and pointed the way. I had apparently been held at the L.A. Veterans Affairs building, which with its tall white walls looked far more foreboding than the name would imply. I reached the corner, and in only thirty minutes, Tobey was there.
“Gladstone, lose that fucking hat!” he said, lowering his window.
“Very funny.” I walked to the car.
“No, I’m serious.” He held up a pair of cheap sunglasses. “And put these on. We need to keep you out of sight.”
“Uh, Tobes, not for nothing, but they just released me. I think I’m safe.”
I buckled up, noticing something was different, and it wasn’t just the newfound cleanliness of Tobey’s car. My words weren’t bouncing off Tobey the same way. He was alert. Motivated. Normally, I would have spent more time figuring out what catalyzed the change, but I had too many things on my mind and I didn’t want anything to get in the way of the colossal fuck you I was about to deliver. I even took off my hat and put on the shades so he’d have no distractions.
“Thanks for coming to see me in prison, asshole,” I said. “I mean, I thought maybe I was in a secret location or not allowed visitors or something, but Romaya showed up today. You couldn’t manage?”
Tobey smiled his different smile. “I’m sorry, G-Balls. But I couldn’t come to see you. A lot’s changed in three weeks. For starters,” he said, reaching for the backseat, “check out your book.”
Tobey pulled a fresh photocopy from my old backpack and handed it to me. I was relieved to see he’d had the presence of mind to grab the pack after my arrest, especially considering it had the Internet phone book in it.
“Pretty great, right?” Tobey asked.
The book looked fantastic. Now it was velo-bound, blue, and most impressive, it had cover art. Right in the middle was a drawing of a WiFi signal wearing a fedora. But not just any fedora. The curves leading up to the pinch were thicker, more emphasized, and clearly in the shape of an “M”:
“You drew this?” I asked.
“Yeah.” Tobey was prouder than I’d ever seen him.
“Is that supposed to be an ‘M’ in the hat?”
“Yep!”
“Does that stand for me?” I asked.
“Close. The ‘M’ is for ‘Messiah.’”
“That’s what I meant, fuckwad,” I said, and Tobey laughed.
“It’s awesome.”
“Yeah, well that’s just the start,” he said.
We headed east on Wilshire toward the Farmers Market, where Tobey insisted I’d see something that would make everything clearer. He also explained that the movement really took hold after my arrest. There was now a more immediate cause than getting the Internet back: “Free the Messiah.” That was the goal and the next Hash Tag meeting was flooded with people dying to join the cause. And not just addicted-Net zombies jonesing for their fix, but people with skills. Apparently people claiming to be affiliated with Anonymous were stopping by, but there were also all the MMORPG guys missing the adrenaline rush of their online gaming, willing to perform a host of tasks to satisfy their crushing need for high-risk kicks. But even more important was a whole contingent of employees from high-profile Web-based companies who no longer felt secure in the continued existence of their jobs during this Apocalypse. It made them bold. It made them do things. According to Tobey, a group of Facebook employees showed up at The Hash Tag two weeks ago, delivering some intelligence.
“What do you mean ‘intelligence’?” I asked.
“Grab my laptop,” he said. “It’s in your backpack.”
I pulled Tobey’s computer out of my bag, relieved to see the Internet phone book still safe inside. Then I opened it up.
“Facebook has stuff on everyone,” he said. “Stuff on you and on me. Well, at least they did. Look.” Tobey felt around his neck where he was wearing two thumb drives like necklaces. He took one off and handed it to me.
“A gift from our new recruits.”
“When did we stop calling them disciples?”
Tobey didn’t reply, and I inserted the flash drive into his computer, waiting to see Facebook’s data on me as the video player fired up. I was not prepared for what I saw.
“Jesus Christ! What the fuck, Tobes?!” I asked. “That’s where I sleep now!”
Tobey laughed and then he stopped laughing. “Wait, what?” He turned the laptop so he could see the screen and was greeted by video of himself sitting pantsless on his couch, jerking off to his webcam.
“Oh fuck,” he said yanking out the flash drive. “Wrong one.”
He took the other drive from his neck and handed it to me. “This one’s you,” he said.
“This data really comes from Facebook?” I asked.
“Yes. They save everything. And not just the text. Any time you’ve used their webcam function, they’ve got a record of it. And anything you’ve done on that cam. And maybe even data when you didn’t know you were being recorded…”
I put the flash drive in my pocket for later and closed the computer.
“But even if that’s true, what does that have to do with bringing back the Internet?”
“Well,” Tobey said. “Maybe we should consider what we’re bringing back.”
“So you sent your new recruits to find out?”
“No, they came with that. I think they wanted to show what they can do for us.”
“And what can they do?” I asked.
“Well for one, they could destroy all of Facebook’s ill-gotten data before we bring the whole thing back online.”
“That’s not our mission,” I said. “We should be looking for suspects.” I pulled out the Internet phone book and flipped the pages in Tobey’s face. “Have you looked at any more of these names since I was locked up?”
Tobey kept dri
ving.
“Wait, is that why you didn’t visit me?” I asked. “So I wouldn’t get in the way of your new missions?”
“Not at all,” Tobey said. “When you got locked up, things really started happening for us. You became an icon. A symbol.”
“So?”
“So I wanted to keep that going. Y’know, you’re locked up, no one has seen you, no one has heard from you. I wanted you to be some big fictitious symbol like Guy Fawkes or Che Guevara.”
“Those were real people!”
“Even better,” Tobey said. “Anyway, the martyr angle is working because people already know you from the book. They know Gladstone is really good at suffering. It’s like your superpower.”
We pulled up to an outdoor mall that Tobey called The Grove and parked in a main lot.
“What I have to show you is in the Farmers Market,” he said.
We passed food stands with meats on sticks and falafels and organic produce. One dude was selling rubber bouncy balls that lit up on contact, and I had to drop five bucks to get one because three weeks in fake jail makes you crazy for whimsy.
Tobey led me in the direction of a white clock tower and I followed, bouncing my ball, and hoping each flash of light would illuminate what was wrong, because my spidey-sense was tingling.
“Look at this side,” Tobey said and pointed up at the clock tower. There, right under the clock and a sign reading FARMERS MARKET was Tobey’s Messiah symbol, thirty feet wide: WiFi wearing an M-shaped fedora. And underneath it, the words “Free the Messiah.”
“Holy shit.”
“That’s right,” he said. “These have started popping up all around town in the last few days, but this one’s the biggest. We had some Halo-loving douchebags do it in the middle of the night. Called it a covert painting op to give them a kick.”
I stared at the graffiti, impressed but uneasy.
“Yeah, but why fuck up this market?” I said. “I like it. Look at this neat ball I got here.”
“Because it has to exist beyond a book jacket, Gladstone. It’s the symbol of our movement. And people have to see it. I can’t share it on the Internet. That’s the point.”
I stared at the symbol some more and Tobey let me stare, waiting. “But I’m not imprisoned. I’m free,” I said, finally.
Agents of the Internet Apocalypse Page 13