No Harm Can Come to a Good Man

by James Smythe

  ‘Good afternoon. You’re joining myself and Patricia Buchanan for a very special edition of our show. We’re going to be speaking with Laurence Walker, who has been in the news a lot recently for his very high profile retreat from the world of politics. Mr Walker was, until a week or so ago, in contention for the race to be the next Democratic Party nominee. He has a solid political background, he was well liked, was respected on both sides of the divide. And then everything came crashing down when a video from the tech-gen company ClearVista appeared to show Mr Walker threatening his family with a weapon. Now, the video hadn’t as yet happened – the nature of the technology is that they show events that are, according to their promotional materials, only likely to occur – but this story has proven to be a fascinating one for America, and for what it means for the future of our political system. We’re joined by Mr Walker now, and we’re going to get his side of the story.’

  ‘Thanks for having me, Bury, Patricia.’

  ‘Our pleasure. Let’s kick things off with this video. So you took out a report from ClearVista, that’s right?’

  ‘Yes. Mostly a PR thing.’

  ‘And that also fed out a video, right?’

  ‘They make them. They have software. It’s all behind the scenes, done by a computer. Total guesswork.’

  ‘And what you saw took you by surprise?’

  ‘Utterly,’ Laurence says. He conducts himself as he always has; no media training, but you would never know it. So controlled, and so in control. ‘When I first watched it, I knew that it couldn’t be real. I knew that it couldn’t be an accurate representation of who I was, who I am; or of who I am going to be. I have focused upon the concepts of family in my work, and—’

  ‘Now, you say you knew it couldn’t be real.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘That’s a curious choice of words, there. Because it is real; the video, I mean. It’s as real as you or I.’ Bury smiles.

  ‘Right, but the video hasn’t happened. It isn’t a truth, perhaps. That’s a better word.’ Laurence looks around the studio. Only a brief glance, but he sees that there’s a crowd watching them. Not just the usual people, but all the reporters, all the tech staff. They want something from him; like rubberneckers passing by the scene of an accident.

  ‘Okay. So the software takes from everything that it can find on the Internet, correct?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And it also uses your answers to some questions for this report.’

  ‘A thousand questions.’

  ‘One thousand! That’s accuracy.’

  ‘Depends on what the questions are.’

  ‘ClearVista say, on their promotional materials, that this is the product of the sum of human knowledge. They say, The numbers don’t lie. I know, I know, it’s all promotional jargon, but that’s their thing. They claim to know you better than you know yourself.’

  ‘But they can’t. They can’t, it’s as simple as that.’

  ‘Maybe not. Let me ask you: do you own a gun, Mr Walker?’

  ‘A gun?’

  ‘A gun.’

  ‘Yes.’ Laurence nods.

  ‘What sort?’

  ‘It’s a Glock. I don’t know the model.’

  ‘So that’s why there’s a gun in the video, I’d guess. Because the Internet knows that you own a weapon, a handgun. So that’s where it got that from.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Is it the same gun?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘It is, I can tell you. We’ve looked it up. And it knew to only include the four of you, of course. You and your wife and your daughters.’

  ‘Yes.’ Amit sees Laurence sweating, the creep of a dark patch across his forehead and shirt. It’s the lights, and the questions. This is unfair, and going badly. ‘I lost my son,’ Laurence says. It feels desperate, then; it feels used.

  ‘And it knew that. So why doesn’t it know everything about you?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘In the report, it said that you were likely to have a mental breakdown, did it not?’ Laurence doesn’t answer. ‘How do you think a breakdown is likely to manifest, Mr Walker?’

  ‘I don’t know—’

  ‘Have you ever been tortured, Mr Walker? Kept in a room, threatened at gunpoint? Have you ever been physically terrified?’

  ‘Yes,’ Laurence says, panic in his voice, sweat on his face, ‘but I can’t—’

  ‘So, now, I think we should probably watch this video again,’ Bury says. He stands up and moves across, to the far side of the studio. ‘We’ve got some new technology to try out, just for this. We thought that this would be interesting.’ He flattens his clothes with the palm of one sweaty hand. Whatever he’s been hiding, Amit knows, is about to come out.

  ‘What’s happening?’ Amit asks. He’s shushed by the floor manager, so he retreats back to where Jessie is standing. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ she says. She looks at them all, suddenly switching something on. There’s a hum and a whine, and a puff of liquid, like an aerosol, into the air, and a smell of cleaning fluids. It’s a HoloGas projector.

  They watch the picture click into being in the round of the studio. Static on top of static, and then it’s in front of them, a 3D representation of the video, life-size and vividly clear. The colors are muted but the picture is exactly as it was online. It’s Laurence and his family – and he is there with his gun.

  ‘What the hell,’ Laurence says. He stands up, shaking, and walks towards himself; the same suit that he is wearing now, and the same face. He looks at the dead eyes of the figure holding the gun and he reaches out and through it. It dissipates. He – the real Laurence, the one who is moving in and around this scene – lurches forward, unsteady on his feet. Amit moves to run across and get him, to pull him off the floor and take him out of there, but the floor manager blocks him, and two men with the muscles of ex-army security guards hold him back. Jessie rushes back further, to see the feed. She wants to see how this looks on the air. Laurence steps through and looks at the amalgam Alyx’s face.

  ‘We should play this,’ Bury says. And it starts. Laurence staggers back, but the video plays; those few seconds of him holding the gun, and his family terrified and cowering. In the distance, the sound of something, water, a river, a crowd. A crackle. A gunshot, as the video ends, and the figures disappear into clouds of vapor on the air.

  Laurence, now, breathes; his chest rises and falls. He is in the suit, but nobody could have known that, and the tie. He looks the same. The visual of this is ruinous. They couldn’t have known that this would happen. A suit, that’s all it was. A suit. He falls to his knees and he retches. Bury stands back, making out that he’s shocked. This was never the intended reaction, his face suggests for the cameras. The men holding back Amit let go and he runs to Laurence and helps him to his feet.

  ‘You fucking liars!’ Laurence screams at Bury. ‘Why would you do this to me? What the fuck have I ever done to you?’ There is bile trailing his raspberry-pink mouth, his chin; his eyes are dark and soaking. The make-up runs down his face. It’s on camera, now.

  Here he is, the broken man.

  Amit grabs at him and pulls him towards the elevator, and the cameras track them across the studio floor. Amit presses to open the doors and they step inside, but there are no buttons to send them downstairs, only the panel for the key-cards. He looks at Jessie, and he pleads with her. She runs over and steps in and scans it. Laurence is crumpled against the wall, gasping for breath.

  ‘I didn’t know,’ Jessie says, ‘I swear I didn’t know.’

  ‘Okay,’ Amit tells her. He looks at Laurence.

  ‘Is he okay?’ Jessie asks.

  ‘No,’ Amit says, ‘he’s sick.’ She steps backwards. The doors close.

  Laurence slumps to his knees. Amit takes out his phone and calls Deanna.

  ‘Don’t let the kids see the television,’ he says to her.

  ‘What happened?’ she asks
.

  ‘I’ll tell you later. Don’t let them see it. Stay inside.’ He puts a hand on Laurence’s back. ‘Okay,’ he says, ‘we’ll get you home.’ The doors opens onto the lobby, and Laurence sits in the lift and sobs. Amit steps out and looks at him: suddenly so small, shrunken away. The doors begin to close, so he puts his hand out to stop them. ‘Come on,’ he says, ‘we have to leave.’ Laurence crawls forward. ‘Don’t be this,’ Amit says. ‘Come on, Laurence. You’re going to be all right.’ Laurence is sobbing, unable to catch his breath. He slides forward. He lies flat on the ground. ‘Laurence?’ Amit asks, and then he dials 911, and he asks for an ambulance as fast as possible. He thinks that it’s a heart attack, because Laurence is coughing, and there’s froth at his lips. He lies on the floor, and he chokes.

  ‘I have to protect them,’ Laurence says. ‘Don’t you get that?’ He spits the words out, and they sound wrong, as if his voice is not his own; and then he sobs, and gasps in air.

  The EMTs load Laurence onto the gurney. He is awake and conscious. He sees Amit, worrying and he sees Jessie, watching from the side, film crews capturing this for whatever part of the cycle they’ll use it. He knows how broken he must look.

  He watches the streets as they lift the bed, putting it onto the ambulance truck, and he sees something: a blue jacket, in the distance. The man from before, on a telephone, talking to somebody. Laurence shouts, because he knows. He knows. He shouts, and he tries to stand, and the EMTs hold him down. One of them injects him with something, and the world is lost to a haze.

  Amit paces. They won’t let him into the family waiting rooms, so he waits in the admissions area, and he paces. He goes outside for air, and he buys a cigarette from a woman smoking out there, giving her a dollar for it. He thinks about how good it tastes to him; how there’s always that part of him that feels incomplete since he quit. It’s a relief, and it starts to rain, and he waits.

  His phone rings. It’s Hershel.

  ‘I saw the news,’ he says. He sounds quiet and sad, a different tone to every other time. Amit wonders if he’s just projecting.

  ‘I’m at the hospital.’

  ‘How are you?’

  ‘Me? Fine.’

  ‘Okay. Look, I’ve got something for you. Don’t ask me how, but I’ve got a booted-out video.’ Amit’s heart leaps. A true video? Something that erases what’s been before? ‘It’s from running the software again.’ He drops his voice, as if he can be heard; or, as if he doesn’t want to run the risk of anybody else hearing. ‘It’s bad, Amit. Just warning you. You might not want to show Laurence.’

  ‘What—’

  ‘I have to go away on business for a while. Only a week or two, to the west coast; I’ll be in touch.’

  ‘I need your—’

  ‘I’m sorry I can’t help more,’ Hershel says. ‘I hope this all ends well for you, man.’ The line goes dead, and then Amit’s phone beeps. It’s an email, with a link to a video. Amit clicks it, walking away from the other smokers outside the hospital doors, to find a place that’s quiet; and he turns the volume up, in case.

  The video begins with the logo, and the static of numbers; and then Laurence drawn in first. It’s a complete Laurence, the one that was just on the television. As if the algorithm realized that suddenly the version it was looking for, that it was trying to create, actually finally existed in millions of new screen grabs and videos.

  13

  Deanna leaves the hotel. Amit’s told her that everything is all right; that her husband is going to be absolutely fine. He has been given fluids and he’s going to be checked out soon as anything; free to go. He tells her that there have been many, many doctors look at him; second, third, fourth opinions, and there’s no chance that they missed anything. They’ve run tests on his heart and apparently there’s an arrhythmia. It can happen. It can’t be explained. He can take tablets. They wanted to know if it was an existing heart condition, but Laurence said that it wasn’t. He asked what caused it, already knowing the answer.

  ‘So many things; stress, mostly, your general health level. You’ll be susceptible to it, should you fall into certain categories. Did you father have heart troubles?’

  ‘It’s what killed him,’ Laurence said.

  ‘Well, that’s one thing. And you’ve had a stress.’ He was a nice doctor, Amit told Deanna; didn’t seem to be judging or making assumptions. Maybe he didn’t watch the television, she thought.

  She walks to the roadside bar outside the motel’s forecourt and she orders a beer, asks them if they’d mind turning their set on. She’s the only customer paying attention: there’s a man clutching a bottle to himself, avoiding eye contact; a girl cleaning the floors; another girl sitting in a booth reading a book, something well-thumbed, with a cracked spine.

  ‘Any channel?’ the bartender asks.

  ‘Fox,’ she tells him. He shakes his head and puts it on. They’re playing the interview over and over, it seems. There is nothing else happening in the world; only a man having a very public breakdown. The cameras tail him to the elevator, and she watches as he slumps into it.

  ‘Sometimes, people have to answer for who they are,’ the host says. ‘Sometimes that’s just the way it goes.’ It’s almost a closed book: Laurence is like a war criminal to them, guilty with no chance of being proven innocent.

  ‘His poor wife,’ the female co-anchor says as they try to focus the cameras on Laurence’s face, on Amit as he urges the door to shut and let them escape the studio. ‘And those poor girls.’ They show it again, another reporter talking about it as if it had happened somewhere else; repeating the information in a seemingly endless loop. They have made their own news.

  They note that he’s in the same outfit as on the video. It’s the same yellow tie. Deanna remembers everything about why she bought that tie for him: that whole shopping trip being one of positivity, of wrangling the twins out of stores and actually connecting with Lane on some mother-daughter level that she felt was missing, and seeing one of her books in a Barnes & Noble and thinking that she wasn’t done, not yet.

  She calls her agent. She remembers his telephone number, because she’s had him since the days that she had to actually dial it on occasion, and those numbers remain locked tight in some box that she can’t erase from her memory.

  ‘This is Macleod,’ he says.

  ‘It’s Deanna,’ she says. ‘Walker.’

  ‘Deanna. Jesus! I didn’t expect …’ He fumbles something. She hears a rustle in the background. ‘I didn’t think I’d hear from you. We were just watching the news.’

  ‘Oh,’ she says. There’s no answer to that, she thinks; no reasonable response.

  ‘Are you all right?’

  ‘No,’ she says. ‘Laurence is in hospital.’

  ‘Jesus. Right. But I mean, are you all right?’ He asks it with the same complicit voice that everybody seems to be using around her. Your husband is a maniac, the voices say, so what aren’t you telling us? Are you in danger? Do we need to save you?

  ‘I’m fine. The video is a lie.’

  ‘I mean, of course it is. Of course it is.’

  ‘You know him.’

  ‘I do. I did.’ He pauses, his breath making the line momentarily dead as it waits for him to speak. ‘But, you know that if you need me, Deanna. If you need anything at all …’

  ‘You said that you can sell the book,’ she tells him.

  ‘Oh, good God yes. Certainly. I probably shouldn’t say that. I mean, it’s very different.’ She can read him. They’ve known each other too long. He means she won’t make much from it. ‘But it’s so very good, exceptional, even. A book for prizes.’

  ‘Not under my name – I don’t want a sideshow made of this.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ he asks. ‘I mean, of course, if that’s what you want. Understandable.’ She knows that he’s disappointed: her work would likely sell for triple what it will otherwise if it had her name attached. Or, more realistically, Laurence’s name. Deanna Wal
ker, wife of the disgraced. ‘Do you have a name you want to use?’

  ‘No,’ she tells him. ‘Jane Smith. Anything.’

  ‘Jane Smith.’

  ‘I don’t care. Pick something. Send it out. See what happens. Don’t say it’s from me. I just want it out there, I think. I want to know.’

  ‘I understand,’ he repeats. ‘I’ll start drafting a letter, make a few calls. I have some editors in mind.’

  ‘Let me know,’ she says.

  ‘I meant what I said, Deanna,’ he tells her. ‘As long as you’re safe.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I be safe?’ she asks. She hangs up the phone and looks at the screen, suspended over the bottles and the beer taps. Laurence is looking at himself, large on the screen; a 3D hologram of who he is, of the scene that scares him so much. He seems to swat at himself, almost, a feeble punch of self-disgust and terror. It’s almost slapstick; his terror, torn from a 1970s horror movie. A slow-zoom close-up of a face that’s too scared of what might be true to even begin to cope.

  She puts money on the counter and thanks the bartender, and she leaves the bar. The street is empty apart from the rush of cars. She follows them, back towards the motel.

  Amit sits at the end of Laurence’s bed while his boss sleeps. Funny to think of him using that term. There’s no financial commitment now, and no money coming in any time in the future. Although maybe Amit can sell his story when this is all over. The doctors gave Laurence something to sleep – Amit joked, asking if he could have some, and they didn’t laugh – and then left them both there. Amit reads the chart and see the medicine that they’ve prescribed to him; all sedatives, all to calm him down. He emails a few people, just testing the waters, reigniting contacts that have gone cold. He needs to sort out a job. He knows that they won’t pan out: he’s tainted now, and appearing on television with Laurence won’t have done him any favors, but he has to start somewhere.

  He looks at his inbox and selects everything that he hasn’t filed away as important, and deletes it all. So many of them are from the delegates. The tone is uniformly one of disgust. They had hoped that this could be sorted out, that a resolution could be found, but Laurence’s actions have changed the narrative. His actions have changed their plans.