Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (32 page)

There were easily two hundred people in folding chairs before the dais, plus maybe another fifty standing, plus some spillover from the Blender’s crowd.

Who the hell, thought Mark, chooses to drive out to the local book barn on a beautiful Saturday to hear people like himself and the weatherman opine on self-betterment?

But when Mark saw who came in next, the crowd was a little more explicable. That was Diane What’s-Her-Face, the single mother who had calmly lifted a small car off her son’s leg (sincerely unaware, it seems, of the steady-handed neighbor lady with the flip camera getting the whole thing). After that thirty seconds of footage had been viewed ten zillion times, Diane Carlifter wrote what Mark had to admit was a very good little book about the experience.

I Didn’t Do It Alone: Why a Connected World Is a Better World
was one hundred and fifty pages and clear as a bell: “I discovered that I have so much more strength in me than I believed I had. And even as I felt Jimmy slip out from beneath the bumper of the car, I knew that I must never forget that it is my
belief
in my limitations that hobbles me more than my limitations ever will.” Also, it didn’t hurt that she was hot.

The moderator was the MegaBooks! founder and CEO. His own memoir—
How to Build Something from Nothing
—he had written five years ago without professional assistance and had published himself. It was such a deeply and essentially bad book and so roundly mocked by everyone who read it (
Holy Shit, Look at All This Money I Have!
was an alternative title suggested by one reviewer) that the CEO had attempted to buy back and pulp every extant copy, and had nearly succeeded. That, in turn, had made the book a
very
rare volume and given it a weird cachet among a tiny cult of book collectors.

They were on that dais for an hour, and for Mark it was a very long hour. The crowd really just wanted to hear from Diane Carlifter, and Mr. MegaBooks! did a crappy job of moderating. The Distressed Properties guy, having sat there unconsulted for forty-five minutes, actually got up to use the bathroom.

Mark mainly just sat there, an engaged and I-see look playing on his face. When the attention finally fell on him, he used one of his go-tos. A musing, Buddhist-ish parable he called Mistakes You Should Try to Avoid Making.

It was his ability to appear to be searching his soul that made Mark remarkable; that was probably what Blinc saw in him, way back when. It was easy for him. But now he felt like the guy who’d written one good jingle or whatever.

“Assuming that you’re smarter than the other guy,” he told the crowd, “that’s the mistake you should avoid making.” He said he used to make that mistake all the time, until he’d met a homeless man named Cecil.

“This was years ago. Every day, on my way to work, there was Cecil, sometimes asking for change, sometimes too plagued by his own demons even for that. I started spending so much energy trying
not
to give him any of my attention, because of the guilt he caused in me just by being there, you know? He was not easy to look at—he’d lost one foot to diabetes and the other was looking dodgy. He had this wet-wool-and-rough-sleeping-human funk around him like weather. After months of seeing him every day and trying not to, I just…well, I don’t know what I just, exactly, but it was bitterly cold that day, I remember, and I bought Cecil a cup of coffee. Pretty soon we were sharing a cup of coffee every morning. I’d pay a buck for the coffee and a quarter for the extra paper cup. And we’d take our coffee together there, outside the subway station.” Mark looked just as you would look if you were casting your mind back to the memory of a lost friend. “Cecil taught me so much,” he said meaningfully. “He taught me about eye contact. How to use it to protect yourself
and
to assert yourself. He had to do both, Cecil. He lived by his wits on the streets.” Pause. “Though in the end he also died by his wits, I guess.”

At the book-signing after the event, Mark regained some ground. He was an expert at the signing. Though the protect
/
assert stuff was bullshit, eye contact
was
important somehow, and Mark was naturally good at it. He might give a brotherly nod or a kind elbow touch in the handshake. Three times in the last year, a woman presenting his book to him had been broadcasting on a certain frequency, and he’d signed her book and then, with eye contact established, Sharpied his cell number onto the reverse of the dust-jacket flap. That method was two for three.

Which is why he got a special thrill when he saw that Diane Carlifter had written
her
cell phone number in
his
copy of her book. This depressing junket might have a consolation prize.

He met her that evening in a passable and nearly empty Italian place in the lobby of her hotel, which was nicer than his. He thought he was showing up for a date or an assignation, if that word meant what he thought it did. But a few minutes in, it started to feel like something else.

When they sat down, Diane Carlifter just drained a vodka tonic, which back-footed Mark a bit. He was going to try to keep to two drinks tonight. If the assignation thing happened, he wanted to be able to perform. He’d not actually gone there—like, with a real person—in months, and he had some concerns.

“You’re going to have to stop using the Cecil story,” she said after they had ordered.

“Is this professional advice? Because I’m open to that. I’ve been having a hard time coming up with new stuff lately. I loved
I Didn’t Do It Alone,
by the way.”

Oh, you little idiot,
she pretty much said with her eyes. “I suppose it is advice, yes. Coffee hasn’t cost a dollar since 1989, and people named Cecil do not end up homeless. You should’ve called him Joe or something.” Damn. Mark had actually considered Joe. “But you don’t have to come up with new stuff, Deveraux. They provide the content; we’re just the platform. They certainly don’t want any more of that homeless-sage thing. Unless you can throw Synapsiquell in there somehow.”

“They?” asked Mark, signaling the waiter for another drink.

“Well, in our case,
they
is Straw, I guess, or the Conch Group. That’s who you’ll be under, I assume.”

“You know about…” About what? What should he ask her if she knew about? His deadline? Serve-whales?

“I know all I need to know, Mark, about you and this situation right here. You’re stalling; you’ve had four days to signal your intentions clearly, four days to pick up the phone and say yes, please, and, thank you, yes.” She made four days sound like an eternity. “Let me assure you that without Straw behind you, you would have been given zero time to mull things over. You don’t want people thinking that you think you’re too good for them.”

A teenage waiter arrived with their mains. When he’d retreated, Mark said to Diane, “Okay, Pope sent you, didn’t he?”

“Pope? If Pope wanted to convey his concern about you, he would do it more directly.” Then she softened a bit. “Tessa sent me.”

He just looked at her. How many masks?

“She said you should give up the menthols?”

Okay. Diane was from Tessa. Tessa was a friend, he was certain.

“Tessa said to tell you you’re on thin ice. You may have hurt Straw’s feelings.” Then Diane leaned in and loud-whispered the next part: “Take the fucking job, Deveraux. What’s the holdup?”

What’s the holdup?
Now he leaned in and whispered loudly, “The holdup? You serious? How about the massive undersea vaults of stolen information? That beast just gorging itself with every minute detail of our lives so that one day the
computer
can tell the
person
what kind of day he had? We’re just supposed to look the other way on that?”

Diane sat back. “You’re supposed to change your perspective. Isn’t that one of your saws?”

Actually, it was Tell Yourself a Better Story, but he got her point. “That’s in the abstract,” he said. “Like, you apply that shit case by case.” It felt good to be the one at the table pointing out what was wrong with this model.

Maybe Diane saw him puff a bit, up on his (only slightly elevated) moral ground, because she sounded tough again when she said, “You must know by now that there are carrots
and
sticks in this game, right? Those computers have been gorging on every minute detail of
your
life. Don’t you want to keep that safe?” Only the tiniest lilt of sarcasm on
safe
.

He had no answer to that.

“They moved up your next presentation. The Nike thing you were going to do next month? You’re doing that next weekend instead.”

He’d done something at Nike a year ago; he’d knocked it out of the park, actually. Digging Deep and Finding Killer App.

“I’m not prepared for Nike,” he said.

“I told you—you’ll be supplied the content. But Mark?”

“Yeah?”

“You better bring your A-game. They’ll want to see that you can dance.”

“The Nike people?”

“No, you moron. Our people. You need to commit. You get a few of those Nike pooh-bahs behind SineLife and you will have earned your first paycheck. You phone it in, like you’ve been doing, you may just run out of rope.”

And as if she were on Diane’s team, a waitress who had snuck up behind Mark said, “Would you like me to wrap that up for you?” Mark hadn’t touched his food.

“Yeah, Mark,” said Diane, “you could bring yours to your nice homeless friend.” The waitress cleared their plates and retreated. Diane wrote a phone number on a piece of paper. “This is Tessa’s direct line. About nine people have it. She said you should call her if you need any more help making this decision.” She gave him the piece of paper. “But Mark?”

“Yeah?”

“You do
not
need any more help making this decision.” And then she was gathering her purse and getting up.

That was it? He was supposed to walk back across eight lanes of traffic to his shittier hotel? There was only one chance at relief here. So as she stood up, and without giving himself time to consider it, he said to her, “Invite me up.” He looked at her hard, but with his mouth a little open, his eyes saying
Please
but also
Come on, you know you want it.
“You can tell me more about the thin ice.”

She smiled. Some encouragement in the smile.

But she was digging in her purse. “Wow,” she said, “I’ve only ever heard about people like you.” She put three twenties neatly on the tablecloth and walked away.

And so he was sitting alone in Fontana di Trevi in Creekville or Rockville or Rocky Creek, Illinois. He looked around to see if anyone was witness. Only a busboy, bringing him his boxed Alfredo on a tray the size of a shield.

His hotel room did turn out to have a minibar and Mark made maxi use of it. There was a
Law & Order
marathon on. If he stayed in the middle of his bed, sucking from the little bottles and clicking up and down during the commercials, he was able to avoid thinking about the situation.

Then, in the opening segment of the next
Law & Order,
a fruit vendor was found dead in his store, prone over produce, and, Lenny, the older detective, delivered his zinger:
If this is the carrot, I’d hate to see the stick
.

You must know by now that there are carrots
and
sticks in this game,
Diane had said. Mark was filled with dread and panic again. He clicked around.
Shane
was playing on a high-up channel. His dad loved this movie. He switched from dark liquor to clear. He opened a seven-dollar box of Junior Mints.

Later, when the alcohol had smoothed the turbid seas and blurred his vision, he had an idea. It came to him in the bright light of the plastic bathroom.
You know who would love this shit?
he thought to himself, focusing hard on a far tile.
Leo Crane would love this shit.
Leo was always the first to see the patterns beneath the surface. He was always talking about
sifting data
. That summer they pretty much lived together on Mass. Ave. They shared that motorbike. There was a beautiful girl who worked at the deli. Leo came over every day after his shift at Widener. Widener still had that little rabbit-hole door to the stacks. Leo would come in and he’d say,
Data sets, Deveraux! Great data sets today.

Yeah, Leo would love this shit. Leo was in Portland. Nike was in Portland. Of course!

This was such an excellent idea that Mark had to begin executing it at once. He stood, but forgot (1) that his underpants were still around his ankles, and (2) that he was holding a box of Junior Mints. Falling, he scattered the minty rounds about the bathroom in a wide arc. His humerus made hard contact with a corner of the plastic bathtub. The pain was so sharp he could only yell,
Gah!

Then, recovering on the cool tile, he remembered that he had insulted Leo Crane in his stupid book and then totally dumped him and then
stolen
material from
his
weird blog, which had gotten weirder, until, when last Mark looked at it, it seemed like Leo was headed toward the Crane curse. In that big kitchen on the garden level of the Riverside Drive place, Leo’s mom used to tell tales about her husband’s “eccentric” brothers. Barking mad, they sounded.

But you never know. Whose genotype is without booby traps? And maybe Leo would let him borrow some material, for old times’ sake.

He erected himself and left the bathroom, stepping on the scattered Junior Mints and mashing them into minty brown squidges. He found his computer. Using one hand to cover one eye, and one finger to carefully depress keys, he navigated his SineMail and composed the following:

S
o what’s the deal with your being two days late?” Dylan asked her as he took her bag out of the car. It was midnight. Dylan had been waiting for her on the street, smoking by the garage, when she pulled up.

He embraced her before he said anything. The sweet stink of his cigarette was overpowering, but she was so glad to see him that she found it delicious.

“And whose car is this?” he asked, checking out the vehicle.

“It’s kind of a rental, I guess.”

He gave her a
bullshit
look. “From where? Planned Parenthood?” Leila saw what he meant: the faded and peeling pro-choice stickers on its rear bumper.

“Yeah, well, I guess I kind of borrowed it from some friends, then,” said Leila.

“Intriguing,” said Dylan.

“Oh, yeah, brother. Most intriguing. But maybe pointless, after all. So I don’t want to get into it tonight.” She saw that Dylan was even looking a tiny bit old, like the ledge of his shoulders was less straight than it had been a year ago. She saw it then for the first time: he looked like their father.

“Is Dad up?”

“Probably not. He’s pretty checked-out at night, actually. I don’t see why he has to be on that much stuff. But Roxana says it’s okay.”

“Is she pretending she’s a doctor?”

Dylan smiled. “No, the actual doctors put a stop to that pretty quickly. But she’s liaising with that half of the situation.”

“And you’re legal?”

Dylan gave the faintest nod. “That’s the idea.”

“But then what do I get to do?”

“Just do some of your magic.”

“Right. My magic.”

“Well, you can help me with the legal stuff. Or you can take it over, actually. It’s not going great on that front. The FBI is just canvassing everybody who ever came through that school to find any dirt on Dad. And, you know, even Dad has enemies. Someone’s gonna make something up soon. Yesterday, one of the lawyers said maybe we should see what kind of deal they’re offering. I didn’t even tell that to Dad. If this sticks to him…” Dylan was at a loss for words. “We can’t let that happen.” He dropped her bag by the front door and hugged her again, but the other kind of hug, the kind where the hugger lets go of his own strength for an instant and sort of hangs off the huggee.

“How about Mom?” said Leila, partly to bring the hug to a conclusion.

“Yeah, that’s what you can do, actually.”

“Is she totally wigging out?”

“Well. No. I mean, she’s wigging out. But not about the right things. She tore into a checker at Safeway the other day, for double-bagging or not double-bagging or something. But she’s pretty much ignoring the actual situation. She hardly noticed when I got back from the airport two days ago and you weren’t with me. I told her you were hung up in London, and Roxana told her you had to stop in New York. She never investigated either claim.”

Shit,
thought Leila. “Is she up now?”

“She’s not home. She’s out with Peggy.”

“Peggy Pillbottle? Hasn’t that old wagon tripped over a golf tee yet?”

“You know that Peggy quit drinking ten years ago, right?”

“Yeah, I know.” Peggy Pilkerson was one of the few non-Persians in the small crew of friends Leila’s mom had run with since she arrived in America. But Leila was forgetting that Peggy Pilkerson was also Bobby Pilkerson’s mother, and Bobby Pilkerson had been Dylan’s best friend growing up and then had died, presumably accidentally, by autoerotic asphyxiation at seventeen, which tragedy had a few extra layers of pain on it and had been six months’ worth of local gossip and had led to Peggy’s divorce and then to her spectacular collapse. “Maybe Peggy’s a great one to handle Mom, under the circumstances,” said Leila.

“Yeah, maybe,” said Dylan, in a way that meant “probably not.” “I think they’re playing blackjack right now.”

“What’s blackjack?” said Leila.

“The card game,” said Dylan. “Like, they’re at a casino. That’s where they end up when they go out. Last week they drove to Vegas.”

“Mom can’t play cards.” This was a known fact. She was always calling jacks jokers and folding when it turned out she had a killer hand.

“Well, then let’s assume she’s losing,” said Dylan.

“Or maybe she’s been hustling us all these years.”

“That would be a very long con, sister.”

Leila slept in the little room off the kitchen, beneath the stairs. It had once been Dylan’s room. But now their mom used it to stack cases of President’s Choice diet cola and to hide all the real-life things that housewives need to hide in order to make their houses look spotless. But there was still a narrow bed in there. Dressing in the tiny space, Leila was put in mind of Cinderella or Anne Frank. But then she remembered that one of those was a fairy tale and the other a girl murdered by Nazis.

In the morning, sitting on the toilet, she looked between her knees and was comforted when her eye landed on the little hexagonal floor tile that had cracked to look like an old woman talking to a butterfly. Dylan had once said to her,
No, not an old woman talking to a butterfly. That’s a fish about to eat a piece of fish food.

But, lifting her gaze from the cracked tile, Leila noticed that the bathroom wasn’t as clean as it should have been. This was strange. Mariam Majnoun considered herself the personal enemy of any scuzz, dust, film, fliff, grime, or splodge that tried to breach her walls.

After a long shower, she dressed and then knocked lightly at the door of the den. Then a little less lightly.

“Come,” said her father.

Leila had prepared herself—she thought—for the sight of her dad as a cardiac patient. But no, she hadn’t, it turned out. When she was home a year ago, he was just a guy nearing retirement—a bit stooped, and squinting at labels—but you could be that way for twenty good years. Whereas the Cyrus Majnoun in the hospital bed in the den looked to be near the lip of the canyon. The skin around his eyes. Leila must have displayed her shock, because her dad winced before he smiled. But his smile was a true thing and he said her name in a still-strong voice and as she ran toward him, he zizzed up his adjustable bed with dispatch.

She hugged him as best as you could hug someone who was sitting up in bed.

“So was it London or New York you were stuck in?” he asked her.

“New York,” she decided. “I had to debrief with Helping Hand.”

“Ah, yes, the employer with the dumb name. Are they going to straighten out your problems with the unreasonable Burmese?”

“It’s unclear.”

“Well, anyway, I get to see you, which brings me joy.”

There was a ten-second stretch of not saying anything, and then Leila thought she would cry, so instead she said, “This bed fits in the den just fine.”

“Yes, it does,” said her father, nodding and surveying the room, as if Leila had flown home from Burma to evaluate the feasibility of putting a hospital bed in the den. Another ten seconds or two weeks ticked by and then her father said, “Leila, I have not yet said to you that this thing they say I did…these charges. I want you to know—”

“Dad, I know.” Leila cut him off. “I know that. And not just because it’s you, but also…” She stopped. What would be gained by telling her dad about Dear Diary? Would it help in any way to say that she
knew
that he had been set up? Not by the maladjusted math teacher he’d fired two years ago (as Dylan reported he suspected) but by a cloaked and tentacular super-mafia? And that this had been done to him because of
her
nosiness and
her
whole pursuit-of-truth thing? And that she knew this because the nameless agency’s antagonist network had semi-abducted and mind-melded her?

“I just know it, Dad. Don’t ever have a sliver of doubt that I know that, okay?”

“Not a sliver,” he said, and then
he
looked like he might start to cry, but then he saw, through the large den window, that his wife had arrived home.

Mariam Majnoun was getting out of Peggy Pilkerson’s (actually, her ex-husband Pete Pilkerson’s) sparkly brown Corvette, which was of an era when Corvettes had ludicrously long and potent hoods. Wafting from the Corvette, across the tiny garden and through the window, came the tinkle of her mom’s pretty laugh, unrestrained, and a guffaw from Peggy, deep in the penile car. Mariam swung the big car door closed—she was almost unbalanced by the force she had to summon for the task—and crossed the lawn to the front door, with the extra-intentional gait of the still slightly drunk.

It wasn’t until her mother had come inside and
click-click-click
ed straight upstairs and Leila had turned to watch Peggy’s Corvette growl away that she noticed that her Dear Diary loaner car was gone.

“So, you left with the impression that these Dear Diary people could, like, unframe Dad?” said Dylan. He was skateboarding beside her as she ran. It was the second morning since she’d returned. She wanted to do at least five miles, but after two she was hurting and was considering a tighter loop; if she cut over behind the place that used to be the Noodle House but was now Cell Phone Depot, she could pick up Valley Drive and go back home that way. That might also be a way to lose Dylan, whose pointed questions over the first two miles had caused her to realize that she didn’t know enough about Dear Diary’s aims and methods.

“Yeah. That’s what they said.” Leila was not a talk-while-you-run type, so she did not expand on the answer.

“But you didn’t get from the rehab guy what they wanted you to get from him, right?”

“I did not.” They were on a slight downhill incline here, so Dylan was cutting the pretty, slacker-y arcs of the expert skateboarder. Leila liked that part of skateboarding, but the noise of the wheels she found grating. “I’m just saying,” he said over the noise, “you got a big song and dance from these people who claim they can ignore borders and hack the state and rescue Dad”—he carved a lacy arc—“but that also just makes them hackers and human traffickers, and I haven’t seen any letup in the pressure on Dad. You say they whisked you around Dublin and lavished all this hot spy attention on you”—another lacy arc—“but they could have been guerrilla theater, for all you know. All you got out of it was a broken Nokia.” He terminated another lacy arc in front of his sister. She was retying her laces and shifting the Dear Diary phone, which was an annoying lump beneath her sweaty waistband.

The phone hadn’t pipped since Portland, since it told her to leave Leo behind. She had tried to send messages to Sarah asking for updates, instructions. But
No secure path available
was all that displayed on its little visage.

“Though I guess the fake-documents thing takes them out of the class of theater,” Dylan allowed. He did that scrape-kick-catch move that skateboarders do to come to an unbothered and indolent stop.

And the eye test,
thought Leila. But she hadn’t told Dylan about the eye test. “You should take better care of your board,” she said.

Dylan looked at her like she was thick. “No, I shouldn’t. It’s a skateboard. You NGO people are such dorks.”

This would be a good time to ask him. She’d have the rest of the run to think on his answer.

“Hey, D, did you go with Kramer and his forensics guy when they examined Dad’s computer?” Kramer was one of the lawyers. Dylan said he seemed to be the one most behind them.

“Oh hell, yeah. We had to report to a creepy, bunkerized office building in Long Beach. The Regional Interagency Technical Services Facility. But those guys are so juiced on power, they insist on calling it the RITSerF. And I thought our forensics guy was going to be able to examine Dad’s computer. But he didn’t actually get to touch or even see the computer or the hard drive. They gave him access to what they call a
mirror image
of the hard drive. I know, right? In America. It’s like the state says to the defendant, No, you can’t see the evidence we have against you, but here, we’ll draw you a nice picture of it.”

“That sounds like bullshit.”

“Well, that’s how it is now. And yes, we sat there and looked at all this nasty porn that was allegedly on the so-called mirror image of Dad’s hard drive.”

“Was it that nasty?”

“You want to know this?”

Leila nodded.

Dylan shrugged. “I’ve seen worse. It was mainly pictures, static images. Nothing violent. But the girls were totally girls. I mean, they were
young
.” Dylan dropped his eyes to the ground. “And then there were also these PowerPoint presentations. Shitty porn, no alleged minors evident, but with heads cropped from pictures of students from the school. It was revolting, especially because whoever did it didn’t scale the heads right.”

Leila exhaled. “Students from the school?”

“Yeah. See, that’s why it’s so bad, Leila. If they have any chance to get this before a jury, you just know they could select the kind of jury that would take one look at Dad and see a principal cutting and pasting their daughters’ faces into porn collages.”

Fuck. He was right, she thought. “But couldn’t they have shown you anything? Come on. I mean, the mirror image of the hard drive?”

“I agree with you, sister, but read your Patriot Act. I told you that you shoulda voted for Nader.”

“He was a spoiler.”

“Well. We’re supposed to accept this mirror-image business because all the metadata on all the images is consistent with their having been downloaded to that computer, that ISP, on dates between eighteen months ago and four weeks ago. You know what metadata is?”

“I think so. Time stamps and stuff.”

“Yeah. And then there’s this elaborately attested to chain-of-custody protocol—a big sheaf of papers tied in a folder, with affidavits and thumbprints that swear,
Here are the technicians who handled the evidence; here is the date at which it was moved from the middle school to the RITSerF.
You even get to see a little photograph of the computer itself, sitting on a shelf in a room in the building you are in. But you cannot go to that room.”

“Motherfuckers,” said Leila.

“Indeedium, sisbag.”