Generation of Liars (2 page)

We walked back to the spot where
Motley had first approached me. We would catch our train there, he told me. I
stepped onboard and clobbered my backpack onto a seat. Motley tugged the scruff
of my collar and shoved the bag containing the hair dye into my hands. “Go into
the bathroom.” It was clearly an order.

I scuttled towards the back of the
train car. My nervous eyes avoided everyone I passed. The seats were packed
with businessmen in dull suits on cell phones and vacationers with chins tucked
down for a nap. I opened the narrow bathroom door, submitting my senses to
lingering noxiousness that had been pent up inside. I shut myself in. The interior
of the bathroom was lined in outdated wood paneling and the toilet and sink
were flaked with rust.

I dumped the contents of my pockets
into the drain: a freshman student ID from Wesleyan University, my Social
Security card, and a strip of photo booth shots taken of me and my boyfriend
the week prior. There are three separate photos on the strip, and in the first
photo I am smiling and there are wisps of my clumsy bangs falling into my eyes.
In the middle photo, we are both smiling and looking forward, poised and
serious. My lips are shaped like tulip petals, and my green eyes appear bright
enough to be sparking off photosynthesis. I am trying to pose like Marilyn
Monroe. You can’t tell from the photo, but I know it. I had just written an art
history essay on Andy Warhol and in every photo I was trying to pose like his
rendition of Marilyn Monroe with pastel eyelids. It’s funny how teenage girls
try to take on other people’s identities so wistfully. My older, wiser self
realizes that playing masquerade is fun only until it becomes necessary to
survive. After a while, fantasy becomes the ropes around your neck. 

I can’t stop staring at the strip.
The photo paper is soaked with acid tears now. In the bottom photo, my eyes are
blinking downward, waiting for the timer to go off. My boyfriend is sneaking a
kiss onto my cheek. I realize that in the photo booth snapshots I am wearing
the same sweatshirt that I have on at that moment inside the rancid bathroom,
which is a pink zip-up hoodie with fuzzy trim that is ratty from wear.

I roll up my sleeves. There is
important work to do here in the bathroom. Everything that was in my pockets is
now in the sink. I turn on the faucet and watch as the flux of water destroys
it all. I ball up the soggy remnants into my hand and toss them into the toilet
to watch them get sucked down into the abyss of the train’s bowels.
There
went my old skin
.

Next, I wiggle my foot from my
sneaker without undoing the laces and fish out a note I had hidden inside.
After I had done the terrible thing that I did that November night, the one I
can never mention, I wrote it down. I wrote a confession. The confession was
scribbled on a standard sheet of lined college ruled paper, ripped from a
spiral bound notebook, the kind you would etch with homework assignments or for
passing love notes in class. It haunted me, this paper talisman. For a moment,
I considered dropping it into the toilet and flushing it away too, but I
couldn’t. Some secrets are impossible to let go of.

I used my teeth to tear the lid on
the box of hair color. I read the instructions carefully since I had never dyed
my hair before. My pale hands trembled while performing the alchemy of
transforming my hair, which was naturally flaxen blond, to an alert shade of
red. I tried to wash the bathroom as best I could. The red dye had gotten into
the creases in the sink and it looked like blood.

I left the bathroom and took the
empty seat next to Motley and I noticed that he had a deck of playing cards on
the armrest. Fool’s Luck. The brand I had watched him almost buy.

“Where were you headed before I
found you?” He began shuffling the cards.

“I wasn’t sure where I was going,”
I told him. “I did something very bad. I just need to run away.” I was never
going to say what I did out loud. He seemed satisfied with my pert reply. So
far he hadn’t even asked me my name.

“It must be fate that I found you.
Fate that we should both live at this moment in history.” It was then that I noticed
a sinister thunderbolt scar riding from his upper lip to his right nostril.
“Just like it was fate when I found
him
.”

“Found who?”

Motley pointed to a seat three rows
ahead of us in the train car, where a kid my age was sitting. The kid was
plugged into headphones and a laptop. He looked like a techno wunderkind.
“Him,” said Motley. The kid looked up just as Motley mentioned him, a
phenomenon of rung ears.

“Is he the person you bought that
third ticket for?” I asked.

Motley reached down and braceleted
my wrist with his fist. “Wave hello to your new partner.”

“What’s his name?”

“We call him Rabbit.”

“That’s an unusual name.”

“It’s not his name. It’s what we
call him.”

“Do I have to change my name too?
Before I start working for you, I mean?”

“I suppose we should call you
Alice, since you will be following him down the rabbit hole into a very dark
world.”

I hugged the backpack in my lap. “A
dark world?”  I looked ahead the three rows at the kid to get a better
look, but his eyes were hidden by a Yale Bulldogs cap. I looked up at Motley,
my lashes fluttering over my racing eyes. “What do you mean by a dark world?”

“When you work for me, you’re on a
mission. Your mission is to retrieve and destroy an item that is causing me a
headache. This item was never meant to exist in the first place, and securing
its ruin won’t be easy. It is directly related to the cyber attack.”

“What kind of item is it?” I asked.

Motley pivoted towards me; his lips
blew hot against my ear. “You said you were running because you needed
someplace faraway to hide, right?” His eyes were blue like crystal waters and
they seemed to penetrate my mind. I wondered if the almost-palpable scent of my
fear wasn’t some kind of perfume to him. Was I twenty minutes and a punched
train ticket into the worst mistake of my life?

“Yes,” I answered, “I really need a
safe place to hide out for a little while.” I looked away from his intimidating
stare, down at my hands, and saw that the spaces under my cuticles were stained
red from the cheap hair dye.  

“I am also running from something.
I haven’t been a free man in a long time, but the attack made it possible for
me to run.” His eyebrows pushed together, and he added the word, “
Except
-.”

“Except for what?”

“Except,” he continued, “our
secrets aren’t entirely safe. Not just yet.”

“What do you mean?” I was still too
shy to look directly into his eyes. “The cyber hit saw to it that our true
identities are gone for good, and as long as we resist the order to re-register
on paper we are anonymous forever. The lady on the television said so.”

“There is a disk out there in the
world that contains a hard copy of all our Social Security numbers.”

A sharp chill erupted on my neck
and surged through my body. It was like I could almost feel the confession
note, forceful as a lodestone, inside my shoe and burning a hole through my
skin. “How do you know that?” I asked him.

He pressed his finger to my lips,
an aggressive reminder to speak softly inside a crowded train car. “Alice, I
hope you won’t think negative of me if I tell you that before the attack I was
in prison.”

“Prison?” My eyes slowly crept up
to look at his eyes, but I could only go as far as the curvy lip scar.

“Two weeks ago a new inmate arrived
in my quadrant at Rikers Island. His name was Enoch Sprites. He was a doctor
who was freshly busted for malpractice. Dull fellow, personality wise, but he
told me something that got my attention. He bragged about being able to
download the Social Security number of every single American citizen onto a
disk without being detected. He had special access since he worked for a
veteran’s hospital. He had been planning some sort of financial scheme before
his incarceration. He was very bitter about something, though.”

“What was he bitter about?”

“Enoch lost the disk.”

“Does that mean the disk is out
there somewhere in the world?”

“You’re a quick study, Alice. So
you can probably see how important that makes finding this disk. It is the last
remaining record of the Social Security numbers. It’s actually funny when you
think about it. Some amateur, a second-tier criminal, sick of his spot on the
workplace hamster wheel, manages to accomplish what even the most powerful
government in the world cannot. The government kept records backed up on fancy
servers, which were corrupted by the hackers. Even the data stored up in the
clouds was ripped to holy shreds. But the simple disk was safe. Somebody is
walking around with possibly the only true remaining record of our Social
Security numbers in the world inside their pocket.”

“But you don’t know who has it?”

“No. Enoch is still searching for
the disk.”

“But how can Enoch get the disk if
he’s in jail?”

“Enoch isn’t in jail. He escaped
with me.”

“You just escaped?” I asked, my
eyelashes beating like moth wings.

Motley cuffed his hand over my
mouth. “Quieter.”

“Sorry.” I hushed the apology and
steadied my nervous eyes down onto my sneaker where my note was hidden. I was
just going to do whatever this guy wanted. I didn’t know what else to
do.  

“Immediately after the attack
occurred, I was able to use the distraction to escape. I am, shall we say,
happy to leave my old life behind. But as you can imagine, my knowledge of a
disk that contains the only remaining source of my true identity, well, it’s
hampering the enjoyment of my new freedom.”

“Where is Enoch now? Can’t he help
you find it?”

“As soon as we got into the city,
Enoch disappeared. I should have known better than to trust him.”

“You want me to find Enoch?” I
asked. A woman shoved through the aisle carrying heavy luggage and a wailing
toddler at her hip, and I waited until she passed to say more. “Is this the job
you said you had for me?”

“No, Alice. Enoch isn’t what I’m
looking for. You and Rabbit are going to find the disk with the Social Security
numbers.”

I snuck another glance at Rabbit.
He had pale skin and bronze freckles. His neck was bent in concentration and
his fingers, which seemed too big and gawky for his underdeveloped body,
lurched like spiders over MacBook keys. I looked back into Motley’s eyes,
burning blue luminescence at me. “Why me?”

“Because you’re keeping a secret. I
could tell just by the look in your eyes, the unsure posture of your shoulders,
even before you told me. That’s why I stopped you at the station. I don’t let
just anyone come play in my dark web, it’s very exclusive, like the old
speakeasies, your knock has to hit the right chord to get you inside.”

“What chord is that?’

“Desperation. You’re running from
something, which means you aren’t planning on ever re-registering with the
Social Security Administration. Am I right?”

“Yes.”

“There’s your explanation. I need
someone anonymous.”

Anonymous and desperate. Both of
which I was at the moment.

“How will we find this disk?” I
asked.

“We will search tirelessly, to the
corners of the Earth if we need to. And don’t worry, I have ways of funding our
little, shall we call them, adventures.”

A smile pinned onto my lips.
“That’s good. The corners of the Earth are good. Far away from here is very
good.”

“There is one matter that might
make things complicated.”

“What is it?”

“It turns out the United States
Government already knows that the disk exists,” he paused to wet his lips, “and
they are desperately seeking it.”

“If they find it before we do, they
can restore our identities and then it’s all over, right?”

“Exactly. Which is why we must
ensure that we find it first. Before the government, before Enoch Sprites, and
before anyone else in the world. We will need to be meticulous. Our ducks need
to be in a row at all times. But that shouldn’t be a problem. I can tell how
badly you want to hide from your secret, Alice.”

I shot my eyes back to the kid in
the Yale cap. “Why did Rabbit agree to help you?”

“Rabbit got into a little trouble
at school and he would like to keep the past in the past. Lucky for us, he’s
somewhat of a boy wonder when it comes to computers. His technical wizardry
will prove priceless.”

“How long will it take us to find
the disk?”

“Good question. There isn’t a
timeline for this kind of work. It’s messy. However long it takes, you will
work for me, and then I will let you go, and you can become any identity you
wish. I have a way of arranging that. But now that you know about the existence
of the disk, you can never walk away until it has been destroyed. The only two
options are success or death.”

“According to who?” I asked.

“According to me.” He shuffled the
cards in his lap.

I took a hard swallow as the train
grunted and pulled away from the station. Once it climbed above ground on the
tracks, daylight breathed onto the windows, showing my reflection, and I didn’t
recognize myself beneath the twisted crown of red hair. I had an instinct to
run away from Motley right then and there, before I got too deep down the
rabbit hole, into that dark place he warned me about. It’s an instinct that has
never gone away, even after three years of working for him. If it hadn’t been
for the terrible secret inside my sneaker, I would have run that first day.

Motley nested into his seat and pulled
a pack of Dunhill cigarettes and silver Zippo lighter from his breast pocket.
He sifted a cigarette from the pack and held it out to me. I grabbed it, not
sure which end was up, and popped it into my mouth like candy. Motley held the
lighter under my lips, hesitating before igniting it to ask me a question. “Do
you know what a thumb drive looks like, Alice?”