Crime Plus Music

by Jim Fusilli

  Neither, as it turned out. As Katy led him through the thick front door, nothing but silence greeted them.

  The place resembled a professor’s home, or what he imagined one might look like from movies and TV. Katy introduced him brief ly to a couple other residents shelving dishes in the kitchen—both twenty-something, strangely scrubbed and ruddy for recovering addicts, no piercings, no tats, no scarification—then led him up two flights of stairs to an office at the back of the house.

  A black-haired man in a cardigan and slacks sat at a desk with his back to the door. Through the giant windows along the north wall, Lonnie spotted, beyond the tops of the eucalyptus trees in the near distance, the Golden Gate, the Marin Headlands.

  Katy knocked gently. The man did not move.

  She didn’t speak or knock again, just patiently waited. Finally the man removed his glasses and set down the book he’d been reading, rose from his chair, turned, and approached the door. He was Asian, trim with an athletic gait, handsome if a bit sharp-featured, the angles of his face accentuated by the impeccably combed-back hair. Scholarly eyes, a careful smile. Two red discs on the bridge of his nose marked where his glasses had rested.

  “Welcome to Metta House.” Hint of an accent. He extended his hand. “I am Doctor Wu.”

  The ensuing handshake was clumsily formal and gratefully brief.

  As though sensing the awkwardness, Katy interjected, “‘Metta’ means ‘loving kindness.’ It comes from the Pali word mitta, which usually translates as ‘friend.’”

  Doctor Wu nodded. “More accurately,” he said, “‘the true friend in need.’”

  Lonnie shrank a little, feeling their eyes on him.

  As though reading his mind, Doctor Wu said, “Your friend, the one who died, I believe he called himself Mousy Tongue?”

  Lonnie swallowed what felt like a burr. The floor seemed to buckle. It wasn’t meant as an insult, he thought, to Mao or you or anyone else. The kind of thing white people always say.

  Finally, he managed to whisper, “Yeah.”

  Doctor Wu clasped his hands behind his back and stared a hole through Lonnie’s skull. Then, ever so gradually: a mischievous smile.

  “That’s rather clever.”

  THE FOLLOWING DAY LONNIE COMMENCED his daily routine, which involved the usual recovery diktat—making a fearless inventory of people he had injured, preparing to make amends—though without the self-flogging he’d expected.

  Instead, the practice focused on cultivating bodhicitta, the arousal of the compassionate heart, and each day ended not with groveling prayers of contrition but a vow of empowerment—to live as a bodhisattva, dedicating this life and all subsequent lives to help alleviate the suffering of others.

  Every morning Doctor Wu led the residents in an hour of sitting meditation, followed by a session of tai chi chuan, another of qigong, moving meditations that gave Lonnie a sense of his physical presence he’d never before known. He’d previously thought of his body as nothing more than a machine of meat, an animated coffin waiting for its corpse. Now he came to recognize the flesh and the spirit as mirror images, deepening his resolve to stay clean.

  His energy normalized, without the crazed swings between mania and lethargy. The monkey in his head began to settle quietly in the branches of his mind.

  Where he’d once flaunted his tattoos, they came to embarrass him as hopelessly crass, but that too evolved into humble acceptance: they were him. In fact, as his skin and muscle tone improved, the ink seemed to flare more vividly, like the plumage of a wild parrot.

  Afternoons were spent in more meditation, some with chanting of mantras focused on healing or transformation, then study and discussion of Buddhist texts and concepts. He came to learn that Doctor Wu had once been a prominent biochemist, whose work—to the extent Lonnie understood it—concerned revealing how both classical Newtonian mechanics and quantum physics were necessary to explain the workings of a living cell. But then some kind of scarring inside his retina began to cloud his vision, making it all but impossible to read the small print in most scientific journals, and two operations only made it worse. So he elected for disability retirement and, needing to redirect his life, chose to dedicate himself to teaching Americans the benefits of Eastern traditions.

  Not just any Americans. He found he had a special calling, a particular aptitude for helping those whose talent had only created chaos. The gifted but broken, the brilliant but lost.

  That explained, Lonnie realized, the peculiar breed of cat inhabiting Metta House. Unlike the losers, skeeves, and derelicts he’d only recently considered his tribe—and whom he’d reasonably imagined would reappear in rehab—everyone here had been successful, some insanely so.

  Victor Mazur had been a hired gun in Silicon Valley specializing in network penetration, exploitation, and defense. Eleanor Tosh had been the assistant director of research for the Pacific Stock Exchange. Jonathan Adler had taught both political philosophy and economics at Stanford. Even Katy had a hotshot resumé—she’d been the youngest faculty member ever at the San Francisco Academy of Ballet.

  Sure, they’d all had their problems, cocaine mostly, pharmaceutical uppers, nothing so white-trash as crank. To ease the inevitable crash or just mellow their buzz they’d used Nembutal, Seconal, good old reliable booze. A few had toyed with pharmaceutical opiates, Oxy and Percocet mostly, the occasional flirty snort of heroin. None had mainlined like Lonnie, or sniffed paint from a paper bag or raided a neighbor’s medicine cabinet and swallowed literally everything he’d found. None of them had gone on a week-long meth binge only to wake up in a truck-stop toilet in Cheyenne, swatting at invisible bats, no idea how he’d gotten there. Their addictions hadn’t been a lifestyle choice so much as self-medication, stress management, the dark underbelly of American mojo.

  Leaving Lonnie with the nagging question: What in the name of God-and-weasels am I doing here?

  That became clearer as he got better acquainted, not just in class but performing the daily chores. And the answer, again, surprised.

  Household duties were performed communally, shoulder-to-shoulder, care of the house and garden, preparation of meals. Only illness excused you. And as he joined in with everyone else to rake leaves and weed flowerbeds and trim back trees, empty the trash and wash the dishes and sweep the floors, change beds and, yes, scrub out shower stalls and toilets, he learned that he wasn’t alone in feeling a profound disaffection with the Land of the Free.

  The others may have avoided the bitter grind of growing up working class—coming from presentable families, enjoying an actual shot at prestige and money—but they’d come to see the trap in that. Each of them shared Lonnie’s utter contempt for the capitalist shell game, the perpetual hustle of working people, the naked rape of the poor. And they’d earned that disaffection not from the outside like him, but from deep within the system. They could genuinely claim the mantle of traitor, to their kind if not their country. Lonnie admired that.

  ONE NIGHT, AS THEY SAT around shooting the breeze over white tea and sesame brittle, he got a deeper sense of what bodhicitta and the vow of empowerment meant among these people.

  In contrast to the usual silence that characterized the house, a CD of classic chants crooned softly in the background, performed by Shi Changsheng, the former pop star turned Buddhist nun.

  “This may not be your kind of thing,” Katy had said with a shrug when she’d slipped in the disc, “but I find it kind of soothing.” Lonnie took note of the title, Mantras for the Masses, wondering why dancers so often had such sentimental taste in music, then tried to ignore the syrupy, over-sincere production, focusing instead on the weightless melodies.

  Meanwhile the conversation ambled from this to that, until Victor, the former cyber-warrior, casually kicked it into a different gear.

  “You hear all this stuff about Chinese hackers.” He was burly, stern, wild-haired, clean-shaven. “How on a daily basis they’re raiding not just military and intelligence datab
ases but corporate ones, even hitting small businesses. They’re probing utility networks to fine-tune a potential crash of the power grid, stealing patent applications, pirating software.”

  “Planting rootkits and Trojans in stock market computers,” Eleanor, the finance maven, added. A comfortably plump woman, disheveled in earth tones, sensible shoes.

  “Don’t forget the Sony hack.” Jonathan, the philosopher, finger-tapped his mug of tea like an ocarina—cowboy handsome but eerily tall, slouching in his armchair, stretched out like a ladder. “Seventy percent of the company’s hard drives trashed, handiwork of the scurrilously named Dark Seoul.”

  Eleanor shook her head. “All for a Seth Rogan movie. Bad? Meet worse.”

  “What they never tell you?” Victor again, leaning into his message. “We’re doing the same damn thing, only ten times worse.”

  “God forbid,” Jonathan said, “the rest of the world defend itself.”

  “We’re the good guys.” Eleanor bit off a morsel of sesame brittle. “You know, because we’re us.”

  “Beware the inscrutable Asian.” Jonathan glanced inside his mug as though distressed by its emptiness. “Yellow Peril 2.0.”

  Finally Katy spoke, directing her words to Victor, nodding toward Lonnie. “Tell him about Site M.”

  “Site M?” Eleanor chuckled acidly. “Christ, tell him about MonsterMind, Treasure Map.”

  Victor smiled and edged a little closer to the others, like Uncle Buddy preparing to tell the kids their favorite story, but he focused his gaze on Lonnie. In the background, Shi Changsheng sang in prayerful monotony: “Om mani padme hum . . . Om mani padme hum . . .”

  “There’s a wastewater pump station that just got built deep in the woods along the Little Patuxent River outside Fort Meade, Maryland. County officials told reporters that the National Security Agency made anyone working on the project sign a piece of paper agreeing that if they ever talked about the job to anyone, in any way, they’d go to prison for life.”

  “Amerika über alles,” Jonathan said.

  Lonnie glanced back and forth between them. “I don’t get it. Wastewater—like what, a sewage treatment plant?”

  “The pump station,” Victor continued, “will provide around two million gallons of water a day to this huge, top-secret lair code-named Site M. Located right next to NSA headquarters. Guess why.”

  “Here’s a hint.” Eleanor waggled her fingers. “It’s not for flushing toilets.”

  “Site M,” Victor said, “is the $900 million center that houses the US Cyber Command.”

  “More specifically,” Jonathan said, “High Performance Computing Center-2, which all would agree sounds far less ominous.”

  “Think of it as a missile silo,” Victor said, “only there’s a computer inside, not an ICBM.”

  “Not just any computer,” Jonathan said. “A gargantuan cyber-brain that consumes 600,000 square feet.”

  “That’s about ten football fields,” Eleanor said, “assuming you share the average American’s fondness for sports analogies.”

  “A computer that large,” Victor said, “needs perpetual cooling, which means it has an insatiable thirst for water. That’s why the NSA spent $40 million on a nearby pump station that no one who helped build it can talk about.”

  “Unless they want to disappear,” Eleanor said.

  Jonathan added, “Which segues nicely to Treasure Map, no?”

  Victor tented his fingers thoughtfully. “The purpose of this massive computer is essentially to track every single person on the planet connected to the web—mainframes, laptops, tablets, phones—an almost real-time map of every Internet user in the world.”

  “Not just to know where they are,” Eleanor said. “You know, send a friendly email, cute little emoji—Hey, just checking in, hope everything’s lovely.”

  “We’ll be able not just to access, but to attack. An operation code-named Turbine will allow us to infiltrate any device in the world with malware.”

  Katy made a face. “I’m not entirely comfortable with the word ‘we.’”

  “It’s our tax money,” Eleanor said. “Over which we have zip control.”

  “Ah yes,” Victor said. “Lack of control. Which brings us at last to MonsterMind.”

  He turned once again solely toward Lonnie, the focus of his gaze even more severe. Shi Changsheng and her mantras for the masses seemed to fade further into the background.

  “This cyber center will not only be tracking incoming attacks, singling out suspicious algorithms as they f lash through communications links. There’s going to be an automated strike-back capacity, where the computer, with no human input can, in a microsecond, launch a counterstrike at the source of the intrusion.”

  “Too bad if the source computer’s a proxy,” Eleanor said. “Or a zombie.”

  Jonathan: “Some kid in Slovenia hijacking an Iranian computer.”

  “And Obama has refused to rule out nuclear retaliation for a massive cyber attack,” Victor said. “We’re talking the reincarnation of Mutually Assured Destruction. With robotic computers in charge of the nukes.”

  “The infamous Doomsday Machine.” Eleanor tilted her head toward Lonnie and smiled: “I’m assuming you’ve heard of Dr. Strangelove?”

  Jonathan raised a cautionary hand. “But we all agree the problem isn’t technological. It goes a great deal deeper than that. It goes to the self-destructive nature of what the West considers freedom.”

  “The freedom to be miserable,” Eleanor said. “The freedom to ruin your life.”

  “To be greedy and cruel and self-idolizing,” Katy said.

  An addict, Lonnie thought.

  “When most Americans think of freedom,” Jonathan said, “what they mean is power.”

  “I don’t entirely agree,” Victor said. “Yes, I get what you mean. But some just want to be left alone.”

  “In a trailer somewhere in Idaho.” Eleanor struggled forward in her chair to set her empty cup down on the coffee table. “Head off with the guns and dogs, get away from the niggers and spics and chinks.”

  Lonnie thought: my parents.

  “Money is power,” Jonathan said. “Money is liberty. This is America.”

  “I am free to ride the dragons of want,” Katy said, paraphrasing one of the sutras. “Free to chase my illusions.”

  From which Lonnie inferred the dharma is freedom, feeling too timid to say it out loud.

  Jonathan rose to stretch his spidery limbs, his fingers almost reaching the ceiling. “The world isn’t a mess because we’re denied opportunities to discover the truth. We already know the truth. It lies in virtually every spiritual and philosophical system in the world. Abandon the ego. Still the mind, calm the passions, look within. Do unto others as you’d like to get done.”

  “Simple to state, hard to live by,” Eleanor said. “Much easier to be free, which is to say lazy and frightened and restless.”

  “Speaking of rest,” Katy said, “perhaps it’s time to turn in.”

  After turning off the music and joining hands for the vow of empowerment, dedicating themselves to the end of suffering for all living things, they headed up to their separate rooms.

  Katy, touching Lonnie’s arm, suggested they linger downstairs for a moment.

  “Doctor Wu wanted me to let you know he’d like to speak with you tomorrow after morning practice.” A puckish smile. She took his hand. “Don’t worry. It’s a good thing.”

  ALMOST INSTANTLY UPON RISING AT 5 a.m., Lonnie became plagued by a state of doubt so fierce it swelled to the level of panic as he pulled on his square-necked tunic, tied the drawstring on his loose-fitting pants, stepped into his rubber-soled slippers.

  Throughout the hour of sitting meditation his mind hissed with negativity and self-doubt. During tai chi his attempts to perform even the simplest movements of the kata—Cloud Hands, Parting the Wild Horse’s Mane, Grasping the Sparrow’s Tail—created such uncontrollable trembling he all but lost his balance,
and he actually fell attempting Snake Creeps Down. As for qigong, the Five Animals never frolicked more miserably.

  He wasn’t surprised when Doctor Wu, at the conclusion of the morning’s final session, all but fled the garden patio without so much as a glance back. The ensuing sense of foolishness tinged with devastation only broke when a hand settled gently on his arm.

  “You look like you could use something cold to drink,” Katy said.

  Until that moment, he’d barely noticed the sheen of sweat covering his skin, soaking his armpits and the back of his tunic.

  In the kitchen she withdrew a pitcher of water from the fridge, filled a tumbler, and passed it to him. Parched by a thirst that felt greedy and small, he downed the entire glass in one go, only realizing at the end what she’d so clearly intended. Words from the Tao:

  True goodness

  is like water . . .

  It goes right

  to the low, loathsome places

  and so finds the way.

  Taking the glass from his hand, she said, “Doctor Wu is waiting in his office.”

  LONNIE CLIMBED THE STEPS TO the third floor with the deliberation of someone unsure whether he was ascending an altar or the gallows. Wondering as well: did it matter?

  The office door stood open. Doctor Wu, smiling, gestured him inside. “Have a seat,” he said in a voice both calm and pleasant, then closed the door for privacy. Lonnie doubted he had ever felt more scared.

  He chose a rocker near the bookshelf, thinking movement might ease his jitters, while Doctor Wu wheeled his desk chair over, like a physician preparing for a consultation—eyes with their usual imperturbable focus, now graced with something not unlike warmth.

  “I must admit,” he began, “I did not know much about your world until Katy recommended you join us.”

  “My world,” Lonnie said. He was gripping the rocker’s arms like the railing on a boat about to capsize.

  “The music business,” Doctor Wu explained. “Specifically, the form I believe you refer to as ‘punk.’”

  The word had never sounded so cheesy, so petulant.

  “I believe there is a recording company,” he continued, “that takes a particularly spiritual perspective on the form.”