by James Smythe
Amit watches the scene being drawn in in 3D. It’s an approximation rather than true 3D, but the system does what it can: Laurence and his family; the crying, louder than he’s heard it before, over this far-too expensive sound system. He’s seen this too many times, he thinks; he knows the beats of it, the count of the sobs, the exact way that their faces look. It’s too familiar.
‘Well, now,’ Hershel says, leaning forward, and then standing up to get close to the projection, ‘this really is quite fucked up.’ Everybody in the room is watching it; nobody’s smiling any more.
Hershel slaps his own face, then brings up Laurence’s results on his screen and stares at them. He mumbles under his breath; he fights off the effect of whatever the pill was, waves his half-whole hand at the screen to control it, scrolling through the results. He makes notes in another app and murmurs. Amit sits behind him, drinking flat Coke from a whisky tumbler – the only clean glass he could find; for all the money here, everything is dirty and in need of attention. He watches Hershel work.
‘Have you got the original questions?’
‘Laurence does.’
‘Get me those. I can’t see why the results did what they did. The algorithm shouldn’t have done this.’
‘You see the problem?’
‘I mean, it’s too tight a margin, but there’s nothing here that’ll totally cut him out. This isn’t how the algorithm behaves.’
‘Maybe the algorithm doesn’t work?’
Hershel doesn’t even hesitate. ‘The algorithm’s as close to perfect as these things get. The data miner adapts, but that’s all automated, and then that feeds into the algorithm. Hasn’t been touched by a human being in nearly two years now, and it hasn’t needed to be.’
‘So you are still in contact?’
Hershel hesitates. ‘If they need me,’ he says. ‘But they haven’t. Like I say, ClearVista is basically self-sufficient. Runs itself, man.’ He turns around. ‘But sure, I’ll look at this. It’s a challenge, right? No guarantees. You give me all the data, and I’ll see what I can find out.’
‘That’s all I wanted.’
Hershel flicks through the file again, but his eyes have gone glassy, and his head lolls. ‘This is good,’ he says.
‘Not good.’
‘Maybe not. But, you know. Interesting.’ He smiles at Amit, and that smile falls into a laugh. ‘It’s so great to see you, man!’
‘Yeah, you too,’ Amit says. Hershel’s done for the night, he knows. ‘Great to see you,’ he repeats; but as he walks past the reflective surfaces of the mansion on the way to the front door, and back out into the rain, he wonders if he’s telling the truth.
Deanna doesn’t sleep. She lies next to Laurence and listens to his breathing and she feels the ebb of his chest as he does. His face is a scowl, his hands tightly clenched, the duvet balled up into tight fists. He woke up in the night to an email. She caught a glimpse of the sense – some email address @ClearVista – and realized that they must be sending the report through again. He didn’t tell her, though: he only opened it, read it and then put it away. He went back to sleep, or shut his eyes and pretended to. Now, she watches him sleep, and then gets up, the same way she always does when she doesn’t want to wake him. She makes it downstairs without waking the house. She sits at the table and she swipes at the tablet that’s on the surface in front of her. There’s an email from her agent, about her novel, sent to her in the middle of the night. She opens it and reads it.
He’s just finished reading Into the Silent Water, he writes. She looks at the time the email was sent: nearly half past two in the morning. He says that he couldn’t stop; that’s the sort of a book it is. He loves it. He says it’s odd, but powerful, and emotional, and resonant. His words are carefully chosen, trying to avoid saying exactly what he means; trying to not upset her with anything. He’s focused on the work, as if she wasn’t even a part of it, and as if her life hasn’t fed into what she was writing. He asks her to call him in the morning to chat about it, because he thinks it’s important. He writes, There’s a story here, and he means the book, but he means her personal story as well. Something that they both know will help to sell this to publishers and readers. If that’s something she wants, he says that he can sell it. She wonders if it was meant for that, really; or if sending it to him was just catharsis. She thinks about other people reading it – sitting down as she is now, only they’re going into her world, a world that she created, for better or for worse – and she isn’t sure that she can cope with that.
She goes back upstairs, thinking that she might get dressed, maybe go for a run. Laurence is stepping out of the shower as she opens the bedroom door and he picks up the remote control for the air-conditioning unit and flicks it.
‘It’s freezing in here,’ he says. He stretches and dries himself, and Deanna watches him. She wonders if he knows how thin he actually is, or if he thinks it’s just a blip; if he notices at all. He stretches his arms upwards as he sprays his antiperspirant and it billows clouds around his body, making him appear even whiter, even paler. As he bends to dry his legs and feet she sees the top of his head, the hair thinning at the back; and she sees his shoulder blades, jutting so much further back than they ever used to. They almost remind her of shark fins. ‘I think we should all spend the day together,’ he says. ‘Get out and do something as a family.’ He pulls on jeans and a T-shirt, and Deanna struggles to remember when she last saw him looking so casual. His clothes are far too big for him. He hasn’t replenished the day-to-day parts of his wardrobe since well before Sean died. The T-shirt he’s wearing is the same as he’s wearing in the family picture they keep on the refrigerator; only it’s faded by time and hangs on him like a sack now. He tucks it in at the back, pushing it down below the belt in order to make it taut at the front. ‘We should go to the mall or something. Treat the girls.’
Deanna sits on the edge of the bed and watches him as he looks in the mirror, as he teases his hair with his fingers. ‘What was the video of, Laurence?’ she asks.
‘I don’t want to talk about it,’ he says.
‘You’re not being fair to me,’ she replies.
‘Yes,’ he tells her. ‘I am. I am being so fair, you have no idea.’ He pauses, seemingly to catch his breath. ‘So do you want to come?’
‘Today?’
‘I just want normality back,’ he says. ‘I just want my life back. Do you want to come?’
‘You go with the girls,’ Deanna says. ‘I have to work on the book.’ She hasn’t told him that she has finished a draft; or that it’s readable, finally; or that her agent has read it. He talks about this as being his life; she’s keeping secrets. She wonders when this happened to them, exactly, if this is new, or if this is the way that they’ve always been.
‘All right.’ He goes downstairs without her. She hears him speaking to the girls from the hallway, telling them that they’re all going out. She’s not even surprised when Lane says that she’ll go with her father and little sister, knowing that she’ll return with bags of clothes that she couldn’t afford without Laurence’s credit card and him feeling guilty enough to buy her things.
Deanna takes her time getting dressed, only going to the kitchen as they’re all ready to head out. She kisses them and tells Alyx to stay safe, tells Laurence to take care of them. As they’re leaving, she grabs Lane’s arm and pulls her back.
‘Anything happens, you watch your sister,’ she says.
‘What?’ Lane asks.
‘Just make sure your sister is safe. Don’t leave her side. Okay? Call me.’ She kisses Lane on the cheek and holds her for a second before letting her go out to the car. She looks around at the other cars parked on their street as they drive off, trying to see if there’s anybody sitting in them and watching the house. It’s to be expected, that they’ll be watched. People will be back for their trash and they’ll keep trying. She searches for the glint of a camera lens. She wonders when it became like this: when it wasn’t j
ust movie stars that weren’t safe from having their privacy invaded. At the moment, technically, Laurence is a nobody. Before Sean died he had been a clean politician as well, one of the few who could truly say that. (And she prayed that this was true every time a fresh scandal appeared in the newspapers: that there were no secrets between them that would tear her life apart more than it already had been.) But still, they hounded him. She wonders what it must have been like in the last century: when there were still secrets and lies in the business and politicians could get away with them. Wiretaps were once a rarity, but over the past few years the press has been full of stories about the ways conversations have been manipulated and hacked and recorded. Lying now feels routine. When Amit became involved he instructed them all to delete text messages and answering machine messages as soon as they had read them. He told them to simply make it a part of their lives. Don’t keep anything – another of his rules. He gave them worst-case scenarios and they scared Deanna enough to listen to him. Now, she doesn’t keep records of anything.
She looks inside the recycling bins and sees paper, thrown away like it’s nothing. The remains of envelopes, of circular letters from their bank. She takes out all the paper and carries it inside and then pulls the shredder from the cupboard and plugs it in. She feeds everything in – there are no bills, because they’ve moved totally digital with those, but anything that suggests even the slightest glimpse into the way that they conduct their lives. She wants to make this harder for anybody who might be desperate enough to rifle through this stuff. She mixes up the paper, stuffing it into different bags, making sure that this takes whoever steals their trash as long as possible to realize that they’re looking at old charity donation statements and circulars from Alyx’s school rather than anything actually important.
When she’s finished she sits at the table and looks at her book on the screen and the email from her agent. She reads the start of her novel again and she thinks that it’s okay. She doesn’t hate it. It’s what she needed to write. She looks at the email once more. This is not what I was expecting, her agent wrote. She picks up the phone and finds his number. She dials it, and it rings. His voice: they haven’t spoken in months. She cancels the call and reads the start of the book again and again. They say that the first chapter is the most important and so she reads it aloud, speaking every word to see if any of them are wrong. But they’re not. They work.
Laurence asked her once, the first day that they went to the lake house, if she minded him beginning this journey. They had only owned the house a few days, and they went out there to spend the night, the whole family, sleeping in sleeping bags on filthy floors. Laurence was gearing up to announce, and his future career, their future lives, felt – suddenly – very real.
‘Just tell me,’ he said, ‘and I won’t do this. I’ll do something else with my life; consulting, or I’ll stay a senator, or I’ll go back into law.’ She told him that she wanted him to be happy. She said that he could make life better for many, many people. That’s what he wanted. In his eyes, she could see how happy he was. And she loves his eyes most, because he shared them with his children: all three of them taking that part of him, as if they were his strongest, most defined thing that he passed along. Sean had those eyes, and now they’re all she sees in all three of them, that reminder.
Laurence and the girls eat cinnamon rolls as soon as they get into the mall, sitting on a bench with their backs to the fountain. When they’re finished, his daughters want to drag him in different directions. Lane drops her pretenses for a second, her hood pulled up over her head, hiding her lack of hair. Laurence thinks that she looks younger again. Remove the piercings and the tattoo that peeks out of the top of her manufacturer-distressed vest and she could almost be a kid again, he thinks. Laurence decides that they’re going to Lane’s shops first, taking Alyx’s hand and joke-dragging her along behind him. Lane picks a clothes shop that he’s never been into. The walls are covered in wire mesh, as if they’re security fences, and a sweet perfume smell comes from hidden vents. T-shirts hang from the mesh, along every single wall. She pulls down a couple – emblazoned with the names of bands that Laurence knows from the posters on her bedroom walls, WMBLDN and Lost Boise OH and Semi-Coma – and she asks Laurence to hold them for her. He obliges. She pulls out trousers, thin, glossy black jeans that look more like leather than denim, and she hands these off to her father as well. He watches while Alyx potters around the shop, picking up small items from tables. His phone buzzes in his pocket. He picks it out and he sees another email from ClearVista.
We are sorry for the confusion, the email reads. Please find your video link attached. Laurence feels his heart in his body, in every part of himself. He thinks, This could be my redemption. This is when it’s all fixed – if not the result of an election, then at least as a vision of my future. He is lying to himself in his desperation and he knows that, but he stands there in the darkness of the shop and presses play on the video regardless.
This one begins in the same way: the vague figures being drawn in through the darkness. No set around them: just the four of them in a space. He watches the figures become themselves. He watches their faces twitch and change, and alter. He watches them contort into their terrified facial expressions. There’s a difference, this time, in their poses. This time, his wife and daughters are huddled together, clutching at each other, a cluster. He is fixated on them. There’s something wrong about the angles, as if he isn’t meant to see them this way. They look towards the Laurence in the video, even more terrified than before. It’s distressing to see them like this, he thinks. And in their eyes there’s a reflection of something; a slight glimmer of light. This is how exact the technology is; how perfect they have managed to make it. But these eyes are theirs, taken from photographs or videos, he reminds himself. They only look real. He looks at the version of him that’s there, and he sees the biggest difference in the scene. In his hand is the dark metal of a handgun. Laurence recognizes the make and model. In the video, the digital version of Laurence flexes his finger around the trigger. He doesn’t turn to look his family in their faces; he looks straight at the camera instead. He is still free of all expressions, as if the algorithm couldn’t find the right look to fit to his face. What does a broken man look like when threatening his family? When they are terrified of him? What sort of expression would that man wear? The video cuts to black and there is a noise: static, like water, almost; followed by a harsh snap over the speakers like a distortion.
Laurence drops his phone. He feels his stomach churn, his head pound. He rushes to a counter, goes behind it, grabbing the small trashcan there. He tastes the vomit behind his teeth and then spits. He holds himself together, but only barely. Alyx and Lane rush over, concerned for him. Alyx reaches for his phone, on the floor, and he realizes that there’s every chance the video will be repeating itself, and that she will see it. She glances down and he lurches for it, snatching it away.
‘No,’ he says. ‘That’s mine.’ He puts it into his pocket. He sees the shop staff looking at him. Other customers have their phones out, and he imagines more videos appearing on the Internet, and what the bloggers will write. Sick, Sick, Sick: Amit’s dreaded S word, invoked over and over. ‘We have to go,’ he says. He ushers his daughters out of the shop, despite their protests, and towards the elevators. He wipes his mouth. He can’t control his own breathing and they get into the elevator and Lane asks if he’s all right, but he doesn’t answer. They ride to their floor and get out and walk to the car, and he leans on the hood and tries to get himself under control, but he can’t. ‘Get in the front,’ he tells Lane. ‘Are you okay to drive?’
‘Sure,’ she says. He opens the doors and lets the girls get inside, and he stands next to it for a second while they both watch him through the windscreen. He breathes. He puts his hand into his pocket to feel his phone handset there, and it vibrates again. He doesn’t want to see whom it is – Deanna, Amit, ClearVista again – so he pulls it
out and throws it hard against the floor. It clatters and skids off, down one of the ramps, shattered into pieces. He can’t leave it, he knows: the hard drive can still be accessed. He picks up the fragments, a few pieces of plastic and glass, the guts hanging out. He snaps the chip and then throws the shell away. As he walks back up the ramp he sees a man in the distance, standing and watching him; and there, the glint of a camera lens. He tries to make out who it is, but his head is swimming and his vision is fuzzy; there’s a smear of blue to his clothes. He can’t quite see, so he starts walking closer. The blue is a jacket; and while he can’t see the man’s face, he knows that he’s seen him before.
‘Stop,’ Laurence shouts. He walks up the ramp and then runs across the parking lot. His feet smack the concrete of the floor and they echo. His head begins to clear. He sees more of what is happening. He sees the blue-jacketed man turn and run away from him, and he hears his daughters shout his name, but he doesn’t stop. The man has gone up the ramp, to the next level, and Laurence follows. He steps out to see row after row of cars in the darkness, a parking-lot scene from a movie. He listens, but there’s only the rumble of his car on the level below and his own breathing. Suddenly a car flicks on its headlights, a small black vehicle that’s almost nondescript, and it tears out of a space and towards him. He can’t be sure, but it looks as though it’s aiming for him, so he hurls himself to one side, to the floor, and the car goes past. He can’t see inside, can’t see if it’s the man, but he knows. He knows.
Laurence picks himself up and rushes down the ramp, back to his daughters. He can hear himself breathing; he can hear the sound of his own blood inside his body.
‘Let’s go,’ he says as he gets to the car. Alyx is scared silent, but Lane asks what happened, why he ran off. ‘We just have to fucking go!’ he shouts, and he pounds the dash with one open palm. ‘Please,’ he begs. Lane puts the car in drive and pulls out, and he watches the outside because he wants to see if the car is anywhere. Maybe it’s waiting for him.
