The Amateurs

by Liz Harmer

  “What?”

  “Why are you sticking by him so dogmatically?”

  “But this isn’t dogma.”

  “You are just reciting platitudes, Brandon. Are you going to go pack a bag now?”

  “Of course.”

  She gave him another hard look. She got up to leave, and Brandon moved toward the window, out of her way. A volleyball game had broken out in the quad; a white ball popped gently up, then fell.

  “Let’s just see,” she said, eyeing the camera. “Let’s see what your good friend Doors does if he thinks he’s got a skeptic in his twelve. Maybe I’ll disappear under mysterious circumstances.”

  “This is paranoia,” Brandon said.

  “I hope I survive it.”

  “You don’t know when to stop.”

  “I guess that’s the difference between us.” She had said something like this while in his bed, lanky brown limbs drawn deliciously against his white sheets. That’s the difference between us. But Brandon couldn’t remember what that difference had been.

  “What does that mean? I do know when to stop? I’m not dogged enough? I give up too easily?”

  It was Zahra who left the boardroom first, door closing behind her with the programmed force of an airlock. That wall had its share of windows, too, facing the cleanly white hallway, which was empty now that Zahra had walked briskly away. Outside rose the volleyballs, the beach balls, the kites. Blue skies clear.

  There would be no mysterious circumstances, Brandon thought. Up in the corner, the green light blinked off.

  * * *

  —

  Air travel was no longer possible, but you could jump through a void to any time or place that you imagined. All the wealth this had brought PINA was worth nothing now; these were the contradictions of their time.

  You couldn’t see people disappearing, inking out, one light at a time, so everything darkened imperceptibly, turning from a city to a countryside in little over a year. He had watched it happen from the roof of his old condo, and from his once-office-now-apartment at PINA, on screens, in the data. He and Zahra had fallen in love on PINA’s roof, quietly fearful and a little bit thrilled as the world ended in a million whimpers. Even at PINA, the number of employees was way down, down by nearly 90 percent from the peak, so that the main atrium was too large and cavernous and mostly abandoned, and it was possible to walk down this long hallway and run into no one.

  The feeling of being alone again in a room with Zahra was like a layer of sweat on Brandon’s skin, a glaze he couldn’t shake as he walked toward the archive. Zahra used to like to pretend she was flailing from one affect to another, speaking to him with anger and contempt and then faux-crying and then giving him that knowing smile, as though she could hide herself beneath these thick coats of expression. And in fact, she did hide.

  Maybe even she didn’t know what her feelings were. Brandon knew what that was like. After all, Zahra’s parents and her brothers were gone forever, and she would never find her way back to them. Just before her family had disappeared, she called her parents and spoke to them urgently in Urdu. They were wealthy, they would be okay, they would be protected from the violence hitting the streets in Pakistan, the demands made by those who thought ports were apocalypse machines, more efficient than nuclear weapons, the hostage-taking that Zahra’s mother kept comparing to the French Revolution. “She keeps saying it’s a guillotine,” Zahra told Brandon. “I told her, of course, it’s not a guillotine. She says people are being forced into it against their will. I told her it was no tragedy to go into one. She says, ‘Why haven’t you gone into one, then?’ She says people she knows bought one and were stabbed in their sleep.”

  This all sounded improbably dramatic to Brandon, who had trouble fitting these hysterics into his idea of Zahra’s aristocratic-seeming life. Brandon reassured her that PINA had reached peak port and the bubble would soon burst. But they were out of their depth; none of them had foreseen what port would do to the world, although their colleague Benji had believed that it would follow the same surging trajectory as had personal computer use, social media, the PINAphone, and that pretty soon everyone would adopt it. The rest of them had been skeptical even about this. The stakes seemed too high, not to mention the expense; the cost of a port installation was a few months’ pay for most middle-class people.

  But money kept coming into PINA; and people had disappeared so fast, there was no time to plan. While they were figuring out what to do with their wealth, airlines had died, competitors fell away, and people providing amenities, like their own personal catering company and personal barbers, stopped showing up at PINA. The morning talk shows, the evening news shows, had hammered PINA with questions about what would happen to the economy if people were leaving. It’s not American! People don’t just take off to some other space-time instead of coming into work.

  “This is bigger than America,” Doors had scoffed. “Is your job your life?” He had been trying to convince people that port was countercultural, anticapitalist, even antifascist, an expression of freedom. “Are you really not going to find out for yourself?”

  “You perfect a thing, and then it dies.” Doors had said this to his employees, and then to CNN, to the Times, to “The Daily Show”; Brandon had tweeted and retweeted this mantra, had managed the feeds as he always did, until nobody bothered to watch TV or write updates anymore.

  “Leave San Francisco to the hippies and deadbeats again,” Doors had said finally, at the meeting where they’d agreed to live on the PINA campus until it blew over. “Fuck Stanford. Fuck Berkeley. Sanctimonious elites.” This was during what they began to call the third wave of disappearances. Brandon had watched the city falling apart in those final days. You perfect a thing until it dies was graffiti-scrawled on the refurbished factory-turned-condo across from Brandon’s window. “Even the hippies won’t last long without electricity or plumbing,” Doors had said.

  The reporters who remained demanded to know: why weren’t people coming back? Everyone knew at least one or two people who had gone into the ports proclaiming that if they didn’t return within a week something should be presumed to be very wrong. But still, people could not resist going. Lawsuits were filed, and Doors easily settled them, his kingly riches making him untouchable. Then subpoenas arrived, with court-dates unwisely set for many months in the future, by which time there was no court.

  “Why aren’t people coming back?” Brandon asked then.

  “Would you come back?” Doors answered.

  Zahra had said, “Oh, no,” when Brandon had told her all the planes were grounded. It was his only clue to her grief. But he knew: grief was desperation, was chaos, and there was a Zahra with real feelings locked away.

  He reached the door to the archive but kept walking. There were six bends in total, all around the half-mile mark, so that the building from above was a perfect hexagon. Suzanne, last night, had said he had a reputation for pacing. Pacing was a gesture of genius; a genius brooded and paced. But Brandon wasn’t pacing out worries or mathematical problems. He was walking because he could not run. Six months ago, jogging, aerobics, Zumba, kickboxing, CrossFit and anything else that produced more than a normal amount of sweat had become taboo. He had persisted for a brief while, but when he went to get his ration of water, he was met with head-shakes and frowns. Nothing would be forbidden outright, but the feeling that he had let his comrades down was stronger than any law. He didn’t want that look from the waterers.

  “It’s okay. I don’t need any extra,” he told the girl pouring out his share into bottles.

  “But look at you. You’ll get dehydrated.”

  “I’m acclimated.”

  “You are sweating like a pig.”

  These were the grandmotherly manoeuvres he was dealing with. Exertion that led to extra laundering, showering or thirst became impossible. Two decades of a near-daily running practice and all efforts at being as lean and strong as the former track-star version of himself were shot
. Now he walked, a little briskly, as his mother had done in the nineties with weights Velcroed around her wrists and ankles. Walking and gentle yoga: that was it.

  At bends three and six were wide windows overlooking the inner campus as well as the outer. He stood there and fantasized about a long, hard run out as far as the ocean, and then maybe a swim. He’d be happy to feel the scorch of cold water. What was freedom worth if you couldn’t at least run? Another contradiction: running had been his false outlet for freedom in a circumscribed age, and in the nearly absolute freedom of today, he wasn’t able to run.

  Over the quad, kites caught wind, whipped against their tethers and flew.

  The question of whether the group—the 996 souls who remained at PINA—would stay here permanently had been settled a year ago. A vote had been taken, though Doors pointed out that every democracy was a democracy in appearance only, controlled in ways more subtle and less transparent than any other kind of regime. Which was not to say that this democracy, here, in what Doors was now calling “Stable,” was a farce; it was, he pointed out, more transparent than any other system they’d ever known, and because they knew it well, they could see its contradictions rather than be secretly influenced. It was theirs.

  “There are no market forces here,” Doors told them, though at that time everyone, including Brandon, was still bewildered by the fact that creating the perfect product could somehow have collapsed the economy. Often, now, Doors spoke not into mics or through filmed projections but through the buzz of gossip. He would give information to the twelve, and each of them would go out into the crowds and pollinate. His words became their constitution: We are united in our desire for a good life. Life without want, without war, without suffering. Life enriched by good food and conversation and books and art.

  There were plenty of dorms and offices where people could sleep, so everyone had voted to stay. That day had been marked by celebratory kite-flying and drink-guzzling. In the vast atriums, auditoriums, and the bowling alley where people sometimes gathered to read poetry or sing songs, everything needed to sustain the 996 was stored. Bottled water, compostables of every shape and function, canned goods, birdseed (for the poultry garden), toilet paper, writing paper, soap, tampons, gauze, et cetera. An enormous cache of survivalist gear. People were slotted into roles that suited their skill sets and desires, although each job was temporary. You could rotate out of kitchen and garden work, as long as you took your turn, because such work dirtied the fingernails or parched the flesh. No one considered himself oppressed.

  Rain barrels were positioned to catch moisture, and solar panels were attached to batteries and wires. The giant swimming pool, filled with rainwater, they used to irrigate the gardens. But anxiety about drought never left them, and was the only reason anyone gave against staying there. Arguments over time spent bathing and laundering broke out occasionally, and people hated the outhouse situation. Water was their only problem, but as Doors pointed out, and Brandon agreed, a good problem was better than a flawless machine. “Problems keep us human, and they keep us innovating,” Doors said. “We need work to do.”

  PINA’s techies knew a lot, but not so much about infrastructure. They had dozens of porticians and zero mechanics, few plumbers, few civic engineers. Now, a year in, having consumed 59 percent of the bottled water supply, people gathered in bathing suits around old water features and sponged themselves with collected rainwater. Flush toilet use was forbidden. Beside the existing group of port-a-johns outside, holes were being dug.

  Thirst would not drive them mad, Doors claimed, sending out staggered search parties in a widening circle of supply destinations, to find bottled water in gas stations and convenience stores and private homes and spas and grocery stores. The searchers were instructed to be on the lookout for desalinators and plumbing supplies.

  “All we lack is information,” Doors had said, peering at the screens in Brandon’s archive with a wistfulness that mirrored Brandon’s own. “It is the only thing we lack.”

  The archive couldn’t tell them what they needed to know: Where were the other people in the world of here/now? And what was happening in the millions of pockets port had made? But it could tell them a little. After lapping the building once more, Brandon settled into the room buzzing with machines and piled with binders, notebooks and newspapers. He had come to crave this white noise.

  He sat down in the leather desk chair and went straight to the screens he’d left sleeping a few hours earlier, tapping “Nellie Young” into the search bar. The name of this writer had slipped into Brandon’s mind suddenly, just that day, and he could not say what had triggered it except for a vague but increasing doubt about Doors. Long ago, before port’s launch, he’d had a conversation with Doors about this writer, who had leaked some information about port that was potentially damning. “She’s going to make it sound dangerous,” Doors said. “Everybody’s looking for an angle.” But after that, Brandon had heard nothing more about it. Doors continued to insist that if people were leaving, it was because they wanted to, and if they weren’t coming back it was their choice, and that the result—this good life at Stable—was wonderful. Win-win.

  Results hammered in: screenshots from one of the VPs (gone), and a string of e-mails with the misleading subject line “RE: NY,” which at first glance seemed to mean “RE: New York,” and which Brandon normally would have ignored, assuming it had to do with their New York offices. Now he realized that NY, of course, stood for Nellie Young—this thirty-something Brooklyn novelist who’d been commissioned to write a New Yorker article about port. Brandon had met her once, at one of the parties Doors liked to throw for people he deemed influential. She’d been sent a pre-release port model and had written the first third of a long article, before her notes abruptly ended. PINA had acquired this work-in-progress, as well as several of Nellie Young’s personal e-mails and PINAphone pics of her notes.

  TIME MACHINE IN MY LIVING ROOM

  Not exactly a Maytag repairman, my port-installation technician looks fresh out of college. Acned, thin and glaring, he tells me his name is Kevin and waits while I move furniture in my tiny studio apartment to clear the sixteen-square-foot area he’ll need. I’ve dated men like this. Smarter than me, far less interested in the outdoors, and physically bowed by having done too much gaming. Doesn’t think to help me shove the couch out of the way.

  “Is portician your official title?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Who came up with it? Is the relationship to the word mortician intentional or accidental?” I’m on edge for some reason. He looks at me as though I’ve tried and failed to be amusing, and he won’t pretend to laugh.

  The port comes in a box so thin it resembles an envelope.

  [The text goes on like this for several paragraphs. Nellie and Kevin continue to have a stilted conversation, proof that her gifts are for fiction and not journalism. Where did he go to college? How did PINA recruit him? He installs the port using tools she’s never seen before, pulling up a fine gauze like a curtain. She compares him to a mime.]

  When I ask Kevin how—and whether—I can return to my apartment from wherever I go, he hands me a little remote that has since been discontinued. It has several unlabelled buttons. He says they are working on remote designs that users can wear like jewellery. Kevin does not appear to share my giddy amazement, and he continues to install this time machine.

  “What do the buttons do?”

  “Once you’re over, you’ll know how to use them. Once you’ve gone through.”

  “Have you gone through?”

  Kevin looks down at his phone, perhaps taking a measurement. I can see his furrowed reflection on the glittering surface of my terrifying new possession. “This part’s tricky,” he finally says, and he explains to me how the port works once I’m ready to use it.

  It sounds like magic, totally unreal, and it’s not until after he leaves that I realize he hasn’t answered my question.

  * * *
r />   —

  Brandon only vaguely remembered the remotes, which had been presented to PINA engineers right before the launch. They had been Dawn-the-designer’s idea, quickly snuffed out. Why had they been discontinued? How else would people be able to come back?

  He knew that, like most PINA employees, he only knew part of the story, and very little about how port worked. Doors had offered explanations in his hand-sweeping way—it is highly developed A.I., it has its own power source, the multiverse—but Brandon did not himself know who was trusted with the essential details. The engineers, maybe, some of whom were also porticians, and whom Brandon thought of as two-dimensional, the skinny nerds who mostly kept to themselves even now at Stable, eating at their own tables and looking at others with sociopathic contempt. Probably they at least knew more than he did.

  The search results that followed the article on his screen were Nellie’s piecemeal, jotted notes. From what Brandon could see, Nellie had begun to feel about the port the way a person feels about a beloved pet. She compared it to the volleyball from Castaway, and to a childhood stuffy, and made several other pop-cultural and personal references to illustrate her point. Her final note, dated three months after Kevin’s visit, read, I think I have fallen in love.

  Peering at the pictures of her paper-scattered desk and living room, Brandon realized that someone had broken into her apartment, but he couldn’t tell who, because he couldn’t find the original e-mail. Who had she fallen in love with?

  NY: mentally unstable? Find psychiatric history.

  Has anyone found any more notes?

  Last heard from NY end of March. Presumed gone.

  Finally Brandon found the e-mail from Doors that spelled everything out. Hidden at first because it began a new chain, with a transparent subject matter. A surge of familial pride warmed Brandon’s face. Hiding in plain sight was a classic Doors manoeuvre