Quotients Page 5

  Jeremy stood again. “Who would believe whoever it is a person claims to be?”

  “I’m original but not creative, Allsworth; I won’t lie to you.”

  “You already did. The boy isn’t speaking yet. The specialists say he’s nonverbal autistic.”

  Gunner shrugged. “I figured you for pitiless, but I thought you might be charmed.”

  In that moment a prickle began, perhaps not yet the knowledge that nothing good could come of Northern Ireland but some consciousness of how little he knew. He would not until then have known the inertia of divisions. Nor would he have known that one day he would go around his home turning lights off, Alexandra already dunked under sleep, that looking at her, he would want to blot out the information of his life until she’d arrived in it.

  Chapter 8

  He did not know what to say, so he said that there was nothing to tell. He did not say that he’d forgotten facts were less dense than all the thick fictions, that facts pushed against the surface, bobbing. It was the night before she was to leave for New York, and now she was circling on what he could not say.

  “It’s just you never said you were in the army,” she said.

  “I haven’t known you all that long,” he said. “Whereas I am very old. The math of it is skewed.”

  “So catch me up, old man,” she said, bright and campy with something.

  She’d ceased eating. He reached across the table for a crumple of lettuce and tried to think up a quip about how she was allowing her salad to get cold. They had gotten to the moment because she liked war movies, not cowboy movies. They had gotten to the moment because he’d burned the roast. They had gotten to the moment because he’d wanted them to have a very nice dinner before she left, and they had been having a very nice dinner. He saw her glance at his hand holding an oily green. “I was in the army at the end of the eighties, in Germany, and I went home.”

  Alexandra made her voice dramatic, ironic. “Did you kill anyone?”

  Jeremy cut into his steak carefully. He finished chewing, said, “I drank like a young man for a while, and it made an old man of me. I used to have a hairline in the proper place, you know.” Jeremy searched for more true things to say. This meant stick to Germany.

  In Teufelsberg—translation: Devil’s Mountain—the air then was Dylan and Klassenfeind radio, Bitlovka jackets and the class enemy who comes in the night. By the time he had arrived, old ladies across the wall were watching Dallas. He had been eighteen and buoyant with army money, a fortune compared to the sums available in the gray mines at home. The Siggies had three days of the week off, and so when he was not listening on the radio for words that meant war games, he’d read E. T. A. Hoffmann or left Field Station Berlin to buy champagne for young Germans who sang songs about the state where hop and malt did not lose. The final days of the Cold War arranged themselves like a holiday, and whether it was Schabowski’s mistake or his stratagem, what everyone accepted was a few words and the war was over.

  “That’s what you did in the army?” Alexandra dangled her fork over her plate. “You read stories and sang songs?”

  He raised an eyebrow. “Why do you think I’ve got dirty little secrets?”

  “I don’t entirely, but I want it all,” she said. “Don’t you?”

  He thought of how he loved that she couldn’t sleep without music playing on the stereo, how because of that sometimes he’d wake in the middle of the night to Bach. She had never known her father, but she said because he’d owned a grocery, she thought of him when she saw a misty globe of lettuce. She was quietest in mornings. She left vitamins on Jeremy’s toast plates. And, simply, he thrilled to look at her clavicle, her cheek.

  “No,” he said. “I don’t. I like you just the way you are.”

  Alexandra’s mouth drew into a wry little bow. “And what if there is more?”

  “Is there?” he said.

  He set his knife down. His fork. He lay both hands flat on the surface of the table. Steady. Symmetrical. One side of him, the other. Heart, skin.

  “I used to have secrets. I was a fifteen-year-old with a forty-year-old boyfriend.”

  “You nearly still do,” he said.

  Her hands were brisk on a cloth napkin, folding it, setting it on the table. Done. Alexandra wobbled a glass of wine, circling it on its base. He could see she was a little drunk. “Did you ever think of one thing,” she said, “did you ever think if you could only fix that one thing, you would fix it all?”

  “Once,” he said, “for a few years.”

  “And then?” she said.

  “And then I grew up.”

  “My friend Lyle Michaels,” she said.

  “The journalist.”

  “The journalist,” she said. “Lyle says when you learn someone’s secret, that’s when you really know them.”

  Jeremy swallowed. Jeremy raised a finger. “It is my turn for a question,” he said. “Tiramisu or flan?”

  Chapter 9

  When she’d bought the plane ticket to New York, she had not imagined receiving his words on a screen, but perhaps it was better than all the years of no Shel whatsoever. Alexandra had walked through the fish smells, wafts of fried dumplings and garbage, windows of golden, hanging poultry. The New York storefront had a cardboard sign on its glass door: lucky seven web coffee. Inside, she’d bought a spongy cake with a frosting mouse and given the woman behind the counter a ten for internet minutes, receiving in return a piece of paper with handwritten numbers, a log-in code.

  A square of light appeared on the screen, words blinked and disappeared. Hello, it said, and then it didn’t. Announce yourself, it said, and then it didn’t. Hit the keys-ies if you pleasies.

  Alexandra, she typed.

  You alone?

  I’m alone.

  All the way, one hundred percent, to the bottom alone?

  No one but the lady with the code. She kept her hands on the keyboard. She wanted her minutes, seconds.

  Xiaoliang is all right.

  Where are you?

  I can’t tell you that. I’ve survived this long on being only what I told.

  You told me if I came here, you’d name a place.

  New plan. If you want to obviate classes of problems in coding, you need to be able to anticipate hypothetical miscalculations.

  The cake’s glassy, unblinking eyes focused on her chest. Alexandra hadn’t taken a bite. A girlish laugh came from behind the counter. Xiaoliang was watching a soap on a small screen leaned up against a jar of change and holding a piece of spongy bread in between a folded paper napkin. The woman’s face was screwed into a knot, and she turned it into her elbow, sneezed.

  How did you know I’d log on now?

  I could explain. At the same time, learning the difference between dog and cat when there are wolves can just equate to all the better to be eaten, my dear. Tell me. Did you get out of that job?

  Alexandra did not know why it, her life, did not transmit to her brother, why the good feel of it didn’t seep through. She blamed it a little on the thin developments of telecom that tendered silent shouts landing afar. But it was also the way his virtuosic fear rattled the settled substrate of her life, upturned the glossy surface she had mastered, so that what was left was the halting thinness of a teenage self.

  Not yet, she typed.

  Yet is a human arrogance. It implies you can predict. Today there’s a seventy percent chance of precipitation in Reno, Nevada, and that you’ll wake up tomorrow. Laughable.

  She suggested in smaller increments. Not a dinner but lunch. Not lunch but ice cream. A cup of coffee. There was a place nearby. They could sit in a place where the only thing between them was a jar of flowers. Instead he was saying hedge fund managers would become subscription computer programs. The AP wire would be written by robots. Half of what she saw on Cathexis was generated by s
hadow governments weaponizing complacency and impulses.

  The symbols on the screen began to seem strange to Alexandra, ancient. The sounds stopped coming into her mind from them. They were just twenty-six motifs shifting in light. Her stomach was curling in on itself, and she didn’t know what he was saying, but there was a feeling to it like the moment before a dropped object hits the floor.

  Chapter 10

  Without Alexandra home, Jeremy needed to think through a problem with his hands, so he went after the broken watch. Online, websites said this is the gathering pallet, the stop-lever spring. This is the warning wheel. There are pieces to the mechanisms. Fix one, fix them all. But that was a lie. It was one piece off, nothing works.

  I want it all. Don’t you?

  Month of fools ’92.

  He could not make out what Wright was getting at.

  Wright who had been too enthused when he told Jeremy the Five Techniques were not torture but that it was known they worked because the Chinese had broken their own that way.

  Wright who had told Jeremy the ways to step that would kill you involved ammonium nitrate and fuel.

  Wright who had advised the less you speak, the less you lose.

  I want it all. Don’t you?

  She did not.

  Now, Jeremy turned the screw, the appliance reconstituting in his hands, but the numbers didn’t come. The lights didn’t. He arranged the nest of watch circuitry in a drawer.

  He checked his phone. It was nearly time.

  Chapter 11

  Alexandra appeared at a bar in the East Village to meet Lyle Michaels two hours after leaving the internet café. She was sick with cheap noodles and sick with her own stories, but to see a friend from NYU mitigated the lie, approximating a reunion of sorts, she thought. She told herself that.

  Lyle’s foot was propped on a brass pole lining the floor beneath the bar in an Irish pub, and for a while they sat together on cracked stools, looking at pictures of the baby. They exclaimed. They spoke of how it used to be that he’d have taken out his wallet.

  “What are you doing here anyway?” Lyle said.

  Alexandra returned the phone, watched Lyle raise himself from the chair a little to fit it in his pocket. She set her face. “Seeing an old friend,” Alexandra said, “who I think is in trouble.”

  “When you say trouble.”

  She chose her words. “Maybe needs in-patient.”

  “Because.”

  “Because I can’t tell you.”

  It had become clear that her brother was losing his mind—odd sentences, odd paragraphs—and she didn’t know where to retrieve it. What she knew was that he had been a boy who smoked Pall Malls. A twelve-year-old with a pack-a-day habit. Not menthols. She knew he had been pushed out of home too young.

  Lyle pulled noisily at the bottom of a drink that was over already. “You’re having a friend committed.”

  “He’s not a danger.”

  “So he needs to surrender himself to treatment,” Lyle said.

  A squeeze of lemon into her drink. A stir. Jangling ice. “That’s the problem.” She did not understand his eyebrows, their puckering now. She turned up the corners of a napkin so it clung to her sweating glass. “He needs to think it’s his own idea.”

  “And you’ll feed it to him.” Lyle leaned toward her.

  “I’ll help him.”

  “Well, if I’m ever in trouble, don’t help me,” Lyle said.

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “He really that far gone?” Lyle said, tapping a straw against his head. “Because to do that to someone.”

  “To do help.”

  “You really believe that?” he said.

  Alexandra rubbed her cell phone with a thumb. Overhead, a woman on television was deciding between three choices to prevent her elimination. She trusted the knowledge of those she knew. She made the call.

  “I believe everything he says doesn’t match everything I know.”

  “Maybe he knows something you don’t,” Lyle said.

  Chapter 12

  Alexandra had been told his name had once been Allsworth. She had not, of course, been told Bill was Wright’s alias for Jeremy when they met these days, a riff on Wilhelm, the real third name of E. T. A. Hoffmann. Jeremy called Wright Ray. And it was from Ray, or rather Wright’s former name Wilmington, that Jeremy had learned in Lisburn how secrets could thicken a man, accrete rings so that one was not diminished by the work, worn by it. In invisibility, he had expanded like hot air, but in recent years, his hands shook except when he spoke of Northern Ireland. “The voices of bureaucrats dismantle years of our life,” he said. “It is all cartoon legitimacy, redeemed outlaws. Terrorists don’t get better. They must think we’re stupid.”

  Jeremy looked at his feet. “It’s other fish now.”

  “The other fish they know to be sharks. PIRA painted pretty pictures of Basques. They would cry about rubber bullets and human rights. Meanwhile,” Wright said.

  “Fertilizer and Barrett Lights.”

  “Thinking shock to be astonishing. Thinking martyrs to be saints.”

  Jeremy spoke slowly. He stared into the white pane of a cocktail napkin, skated it on the edge of the table. “But that isn’t why you asked me here. That’s old news now.”

  Wright flicked his hand in and out of his pocket, pushing a folded piece of newsprint toward Jeremy. It was a short piece in the financial section. An AP bite. According to the story, Cathexis had moved its headquarters to Dublin. Then an Irish subsidiary of the company moved to Bermuda, a tax haven. Jeremy read it twice to see if he’d missed something.

  Wright agitated his hands, vibrated. “If you’re seeing what I’m seeing,” he said, pointing to a line in the clipping, “you’re seeing this goodly American running the show is the same goodly American who made the call on a number of crises. You’re remembering that these crises, they were addressed with coups.”

  “And,” Jeremy said.

  “And you see the connections or you are naïve. I smell fish, Billy. Mackerel, salmon. Our American friends are demanding from private enterprise weaknesses in the software they can exploit for surveillance, digital weapons R&D, misinformation campaigns, or all of the above.”

  Jeremy’s knee began to pop like a sewing machine needle. “It isn’t the worst idea.”

  “They can’t control this kind of warfare, Bill, because they don’t understand it. They don’t understand the science of hitting buttons in a room.”

  “Maybe they are not card-carrying Luddites, Ray.”

  The surface of Wright’s face peeled back, gleaming, gray teeth peeking out from thin, tense lips. He arched his neck back. “If you’re talking about that adorable little idea out of the Weapons Intel Unit.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  “Tried to bug PIRA weapons to snatch the dirty talk. All the techies thought electronics were going to win a deathless war, but what happens? Republicans get wise to the jarking, sussed out all the funny gunnies. It was as though the WIU had given the Provos a list of touts. A load of executions caused by the fastest-fingered secretaries in the army.”

  “That was then.”

  “Private companies though, Bill. How do we know they are secure? Or, how do we know they don’t sell the same technological weapons to terrorist groups or hostile governments? Security. Mercenaries. Go ahead and say it’s not a woodchuck. It’s a groundhog. No, it’s a whistle-pig. But it’s all the same squirrel. Every agent thinks he is offering the best of all possible worlds. Find out the mistress is everyone’s mistress, but you cannot trace the beds because these are black ops. Because there are no checks on men like us.”

  Jeremy couldn’t quite keep up, follow the progression of conversation. What he saw looking at Wright was a hunger for action that made the air vibrate, t
hat hunger that would find any opening. It made Jeremy’s ears ring or maybe it was the music they ducked into to cordon off their words to everyone but each other. He took a long drink so that the heat spread in long fingers through his chest.

  “This is not even to speak of whether actors within governments can be trusted. Think of all the Sinn Féin TDs in the Dáil or Seanad, the NIA, lapsed PIRA with their ballot box legitimacy and their old friends. People don’t change, Bill.”

  “You don’t change, Ray,” Jeremy said.

  “In Lisburn, Lawrence wanted to believe entering information in intel databases was multiplying knowledge, that it would skim away inefficiencies in interagency sharing. Trust MI5, RUC. Please. We might as well shout secrets through microphones. So where does that leave us?”

  “In new lives, Ray.” Jeremy meant it gently. “You’re paranoid.”

  Wright reached over the table, flicked a speck of something from Jeremy’s collar. He peeled back slow and uniform as the second hand of a clock moving from ten to twelve. “What if I were to tell you that a Sinn Féin councilor had met with someone on the payroll of that pinguid little security firm Tyle headed by Lawrence?”

  “Are you?”

  “And happens to be Tyle’ve gone very deep into cyber.”

  Jeremy inspected the collar Wright had undirtied. “How would you know who meets with Lawrence’s men?”

  “You don’t think that’s interesting.”

  “I think there are a lot of reasons for contact,” Jeremy said.

  “You’re not listening, Bill. Lawrence. Irish. Public-private. Cash flows. What’s the sum?”

  Jeremy worked over logic, refutations, but these were useless devices here. He knew the prolonged pinnacle of danger was the last bastion of reality to Wright.

  “Lawrence is playing both sides of the pitch, Bill.”

  “There’s no way to know that,” Jeremy said.

  “You know what Wittgenstein said about the human soul?” Wright said.