After James (19 page)

I gave her back Durant's letter.

“What did you think of his R Code theory?” She started right in. I could feel, or imagined I could feel, the heat from her legs.

“I think he hopes to find his daughter. The hope has made him inventive unto a little nuts. People in distress see as they need to.”

“But now the new poem. He told me he took his daughter to Marseilles when she was young and she befriended a street dog. For years the dog showed up in her dreams. Now there's the dog in Marseilles in a dream in a poem. You can see why he finds it significant.”

“It's just a fragment, something familiar. I could watch the nightly news and see ten fragments of my own life if I looked for them.”

“And you don't sense anything else in the poems?”

“Well, reading them the way I've been asked to did toss me into a spiral yesterday. For a while I thought someone was following me.”

An expression of specific concern came over her, as if she'd been worried I might be followed. I told her about Voth, and the warning I'd decided I imagined, the threat I'd
read into a line in a guest register. She looked more anguished than surprised.

“James. You need to trust me. You have to stop reading the site. Don't visit it again. Ever.” She held her hands to her face, then threw them down and said, softly, “Ouf.”

“What aren't you saying?”

“You'll think I'm as inventive unto nuts as he is.” Her hair, loose, no longer pulled back by sunglasses, so the widow's peak was gone, accented her face differently. It was as if I'd brushed grass from a stone and found an ancient goddess looking back at me. No, what an inane image. She seemed older, more deeply beautiful, less striking than she had earlier, less successfully serious, a little weary from need and intent. “Do you read science fiction?”

“No.” I'd had some luck with speculative novels but more often whenever I'd tried to read the so-called classics of the genre, I'd been unable to draw my eyes across the page. The silly made-up names, the plastic dialogue, the alternate histories and magical technologies
that seem to describe where things are actually going!

“Do you know Stanisław Lem? His novel
Solaris
?”

“I've seen the movie. American, not Russian.”

With a look of self-amazement, she said that Three Sheets was something like the planet in
Solaris
. Anyone who tried to penetrate it began to see their own lives communicated back with terrifying veracity.

“It isn't that readers project personal meanings onto the poems,” she said, “or not just that. It's that the site really does seem to know them.”

I wanted to stop her from saying anything more, to protect us, but I couldn't respond.

“It will happen to you, too.”

“I've been reading Three Sheets for months and haven't caught a glimpse of my life.”

“Well, I've seen mine.” She looked out the window at the sky getting darker. “I see Marcus.”

If she pressed the point any further I would have a hard time, in trying to avoid saying she was delusional, not telling her that because of her brother's death she was simply in a state of high vulnerability, like Durant, and so prone to misperceptions. It was understandable, I'd say, though of course it wasn't, not really.

“This stranger following you, that was inevitable. Have you read the Three Sheets chat rooms lately? The talk is getting really concerning. Someone worked up a profile of the Poet, more or less like yours, that he's middle-aged male, likely white North American, maybe living in Rome, and people began hunting through the postings. Now August has been named and there's a theory that he's the Poet. Your follower is probably just the first one to track him to Rome. Before long we'll end up meeting some pretty desperate people unless we cut loose from him.”

Maybe it was her way of putting things, saying “we” instead of “you,” promoting a note of shared romance, that kept me from feeling her degree of concern. What if we were just a couple of suggestible dopes, Amanda and I, knocking around in a crazy world?

“So you're visiting the chat rooms,” I said.

“No one comes right out and admits it, but that's why everyone needs to talk online about Three Sheets. Each of them believes in this secret communication, but they're afraid to say so. Instead they debate about the poems and build up profiles of the Poet.”

It was the theory I'd presented to Dominic. She drew her feet up under her, which had the effect of tilting her slightly in my direction. Her posture was exactly that of the Londoner in our pre- and postcoital talks on the rented Spanish couch. We weren't bed loungers. We made use of our few rooms, reading at the kitchen table, having sex in the shower, watching TV shows on the couch, talking at the kitchen table, watching sex between people in a shower or in bed or on a couch on her laptop on the couch. The memory belonged to some other life.

“I can't get free,” she said. “I've seen details in the poems, things about Marcus, and now I can't stop looking for more.” She said he was killed in Guatemala City when a pallet of construction bricks fell on him from the roof of a restaurant where he had lunch every day. “Same patio, same chair. The official version is, a kid working construction, twenty. The pallet was on scaffolding. The kid claimed to be trying to secure the platform but it tilted and the pallet fell perfectly off the side. From just two storeys up. Most of the bricks weren't even broken.” Marcus had just written her that he had evidence and the names of Guatemalan government and military figures who were using the U.S.-funded surveillance apparatus to identify and detain human rights activists, some of whom had died in custody or been found dead in the streets. “Marcus died before the list could be published. It wasn't in his effects.”

Suddenly I was cold, sorrowful, still. She looked at my chest, as though it might offer what she needed, then up again. Out of nowhere, the way of things could come crashing down on us. We all knew this fact and worked hard to forget it. You could make millions from people's need to forget the way of things.

“I need to stop talking for a while,” she said.

She disappeared into some isolated
penetralium
(great word, Keats, in a complaint about Coleridge) of her thoughts. There we sat, sometimes looking at each other. A minute passed. I didn't move or speak or check my phone. Then I felt it coming on, a dread truth I hadn't been willing to admit, but just in time she reached across and cupped a hand behind my neck.

The word that came to mind—nothing to be done—was
penetration.

The first time I woke it was still dark. I knew instantly where I was and felt wonderful. When next I woke the sun lit everything and I lay in pristine confusion. I rolled over and there she was, head on pillow, looking at me. She smiled. Her face seemed a little fuller, her eyes somehow a different shape. She unfolded herself from the sheets and walked out of the room in the underwear she'd slept in. More even than the sex, which we hadn't actually had, just a kind of making out, gropings and glimpsings, what felt like teenage prewar sex, then falling asleep together half-clothed, this was so far our most intimate moment. She returned with a sheet of paper and we sat on top of the covers, shoulder to shoulder. She
looked down at the page—there was a poem on it—and said that it was why she couldn't let go of Three Sheets.

The poem was “Seconding.” I remembered it from the site. To read a poem is one thing; to be directed to it, another; to be directed by a new, half-nude semi-lover, a thing of a whole different order.

A former general back home in the jungle

capital from DC where specialists made

the first breaches in the wall around

his forever silent teenage daughter

inquired about transforming the vacant

third floor of the old municipal building

into a school for children in need, not

knowing that the floor processed

cocaine. The lords kidnapped

his wordless girl, left her in a stream,

though death was not by water. And now

the general is talking. In the beginning

we killed one, he says, though which

one is debated. By the third day

and thereafter we killed without

distinction. In the end we killed our natives,

Americans, Dutch, the British,

Canadians. We killed wives and daughters,

uncles and mothers. Workers, piano teachers,

men on the road.

The Turks we killed and their enemies.

The Spartans, Persians and Prussians

and Mongols. We killed ancient mud

warriors carrying spears. Their final words

covered the earth in languages. The elephants

they rode. Their caged birds.

You have to understand we killed

them all many times over, as I will now be killed.

Words recorded by a visitor

to this country of punctuated endings,

in his blue notebook stolen from the bag

at the scene not secured by police who

didn't ask questions.

“Marcus.”

She nodded. I reached to touch her but she shook her head. A dull longing to put my feet on the ground, a longing made all the duller by my clichéd condition to have been born into a safe class in a safe country, a good family, born lucky. By degrees, many Westerners feel the same. We are our own country, the young, dumb-lucky educated Westerners.

“Which details?”

“The jungle capital is Guatemala City. The killers. The blue notebook, which would have contained the names.”

“Not the general and his daughter?”

“He never mentioned them. But don't tell me there's still room for coincidence. I've been reading around, trying to figure it out. That's what I'm doing with my days here, searching
online, emailing contacts in Holland and Central America, trying to find the identity of the general. He might know who killed Marcus, or at least maybe I can get the same story he did.”

“With the same result.”

“Not if I don't travel there.”

“Did you ever see this notebook?”

“He always had one with him. A blue one was in a picture he sent me the week before he was killed. But it wasn't in his belongings they sent. I asked about it. The police claimed there was no notebook at the scene or in his room.”

“Is this the only poem about your brother?”

“Before ‘Seconding,' every now and then there was a phrase or line that seemed sort of loaded, but they showed up in the more obscure poems and I wasn't really sure what I was seeing. I was actually afraid to see more. It was like any day there'd be a poem called ‘When Marcus Was Killed Under a Ton of Bricks.' And then this.”

She got up and stood by the window and lit a cigarette. She said something about the sky and I tried to make a note to myself that there's this in life, too, there's murder, killing upon killing, but there's also seeing this person in this moment. If only I could see her against a window once a season, life would be easier. She stubbed out the smoke and returned to bed. Before reading the poem I'd been planning to keep some light in the hour, some hope she'd find a way for me to stay in Rome without money. Now the breathing fact of her was overwhelming. I turned and held her and when she started to cry she pushed me away and let the tears come, then go, closed on herself. At some point she raised her
knees and hugged them and dropped her head to her legs in a kind of cannonball-tuck position.

I was looking at the part of her I could see, more or less at her thighs. I tried to take them in as part of my sense of her. Those thighs are Amanda. Those feet. That forearm. Amanda. So clearly all three syllables. She could never have been Mandy. Three syllables, the same vowel in each, an assonant echo inside the whole—

“Penetration,” I said.

She turned her head to me, made a sort of cautioning expression.

“Penetration. It's hacker language. You didn't tell anyone about the notebook, but you must have written about it. In emails to the police, you just told me. You've been hacked.”

We looked at each other, a distance of about eighteen inches.

She paused, then slowly nodded.

I had it, I had it.

“I have it.”

She said nothing. I kept my eyes on her, thinking it through, as she must have been. Her round belly, its single roll of skin, heaved a little.

The theory had weight. People of political interest are flagged. Their online habits fit them into a profile. False sites are seeded, sites for, whatever, eco-activists, currency traders, poetry readers, a site exactly like Three Sheets. But why? Could people be reliably manipulated through a website? Of course they could, if it was one they visited daily and it presented with some authority or inviolable mystery.

Not quite believing myself, I laid it all out for her. Her thoughts were divided, I could tell.

“Me with my Solaris effect, you with your conspiracy theory.”

“I know, I know,” I said, the theory still building in me, cumulonimbus, airy and full of violent consequence. “But still.”

She got off the bed and left the room and I realized I could never truly know what it meant to her to have solved the mechanism, if not the whole mystery itself, if that was what I'd done. The solution connected to her brother's murder, to emotions I couldn't know. I tried to isolate what I did feel about the possibility my own computer had been hacked. I should have felt violated, but didn't especially. Maybe I didn't believe my theory, or did believe it in the abstract—big data trawlers could see all—but not the actual. I had no deep secrets or pictures of inflamed privates on my laptop, but the thought of some stranger looking around in my emails new and old, between me and Dominic, me and the Londoner, seemed too unreal to anger me. To make it real, when Amanda returned I imagined a third person with us, hiding somewhere in the room. Did I want to brain them with a bottle of Peroni, or ask them to leave, or just let them listen and watch? Neither. Nor. All. I couldn't decide. The real world contrives to be unbelievable.