by Jamie Mason
My mother loved comic books. She memorized operas and devoured rich literature. She read novels, pored over poetry, and studied the newspapers. But none of that is love, and nothing lit her up like a stack of new comics. Simon caught the fever, but I never did. I was happy enough to avoid it because the medicine was expensive. I saved for a new bicycle while Simon’s allowance evaporated weekly at the hobby store.
Now, in the food court, at my usual table, a male-shaped blur tugged in the margin of my right eye. Brian Menary took up a seat at a high table off to one side and midway to the exit from where I sat.
It could be that he lived nearby. People lived places. People, in fact, lived here. I lived here. My mother had lived here. Certainly, he had to live somewhere. So why not in this town? And if he lived here, he’d go out sometimes. Why wouldn’t he eat here at this food court and take late lunches as I tended to do and . . . oh, hell. What if it wasn’t even him?
And just like that, I derailed my first reaction, the crucial instinctive reflex, and accordingly, I also murdered its firstborn plan, which was to walk right over to his table, sit down, and look him in the eye with a fire that pinned him to his seat. We’d have a chat about the weather and the football scores and what he’d been up to for the past nineteen years—and just what exactly the hell did he mean by being aggressively in the same place as I was, at the same time that I was there, and on more than one occasion to boot.
Oh, boy. Not crazy-sounding at all.
Now gripped in doubt, I furiously pretended to read my phone, keeping my head cocked so that perhaps-Menary shifted, backlit and indistinct, at the farthest reach of my eye. I wouldn’t let even his shoulder drift out of the frame. I couldn’t bear the thought of his leaving the room, which would also have his leaving me with this ridiculous uncertainty to tote back home later.
My cheeks stung with the heat of my imagined audience’s curiosity. Surely everyone was looking at me. I’d certainly be looking at me. They must have been able to feel the thrumming of my pulse and the pressure change it boomed into the room. Somehow it didn’t help at all that not a single head had swiveled in my direction.
I bought a buffer of privacy in plain sight by mock-startling at the phone that had not rung or moved in my hand. I pretended to swipe the screen with a flourish, tucked the phone in under the curtain of my hair, and took a call that no one had made. Safe in the sanctuary of oh-she’s-on-the-phone, I examined and discarded several options of how I could leave this food court knowing more than I had coming into it. It had to happen.
And why, exactly, should I be the only one in the room feeling branded and spotlighted? At least I knew I belonged here. Let him see me looking. Let’s see what he does with that.
I raised my head, phone still at my ear, and let probably–Brian Menary see me find him in the crowd. A flicker of surprise zipped between our locked stares, and my bravery lasted only one tick of the second hand. I dropped my eyes to my knees and, for a heart-knocking moment, desperately wanted the previous minute back. A do-over. No such thing, Plucky. You’re in the soup now, little girl. The memory of my mother’s voice rang clear and smirking.
For the benefit of anyone who might be looking, I said my good-byes to the nobody on my silent phone and stood, snatching up my purse and jacket. On my feet, I found that I’d resolved myself to the only option that would guarantee any progress. I’d have to go ahead and walk over th—
Shit. He was gone.
In no more than a blink and a glance down to find the strap of my bag, Menary had slipped from his chair and faded into the thin crowd.
“Son of a bitch,” I whispered, sorely disappointed and uncomfortably brimming with unexploded courage.
But God bless my mother and her games, I caught sight of him again, out of the direct line as was his trained habit. He was watching for me. There was still a chance to leave here wiser.
I walked past the shop window where he’d slouched low to browse some gadgety thing on the shelf in one of those electronic-wizardry gift shops. I stopped in the trickle of midday shoppers, made a small show of looking around, and turned on a purposed heel and headed back the way we’d both come.
I had to trust that he’d noticed the feint and would try to keep up with me. I would not risk looking around, even discreetly, to see if he was still there. If he wasn’t, I’d feel foolish only to myself. And if he was there, I’d blow it. I slowed, knowing that he’d have to rein it in, too, then I took off at fresh pace, less than a dash but more than a stride.
The food court restrooms were set into the right side of the corridor: men’s room first, then the ladies’. With more of a flail than a plan, I hit the ladies’ room door hard enough so that it swung to the full range of its hinge and banged an echo down the short hallway. I blocked out the objections of my saner mind and doubled back instead and, quietly, slipped into the men’s room.
Thankfully, the man at the urinal was done and just zipping up. I leaned my ear to the door, held up one finger against the startled outburst that might have launched from him, and mouthed, I’m sorry!
The din of the ladies’ room door would have carried into the food court. If Menary hadn’t seen me duck into the hallway, he would surely at least have noted the noise. I heard footsteps pass the men’s room. The footfalls stopped in front of the ladies’ room, but the door didn’t open. I had him, or someone at least, in my trap, such as it was, with me between him and the exit.
Sorry, I mouthed again to the slack-jawed, red-faced man who stood holding his hands away from his sides, too stunned to make a break for the sinks. I pulled open the door and stepped into the buzz of the faltering fluorescents. Brian Menary turned easily, then with full flinch, to face me.
“Well, that was easy,” I said.
17
Pardon me?” he said. It was one of those passive-aggressive, trifly word-gnats that irked me in some indefinable way.
“Hang on.” I raised a finger to put the scene on hold, in much the same way I had in the men’s room. The door beside me opened. My lavatory hostage had at least rinsed his fingers, but whether he’d had time to properly soap up was in question. Maybe he was just really fast. He burst from the men’s room shaking the water from his hands and scowling. Catching sight of me did nothing for the blood in his cheeks, and he bloomed even brighter and hustled away, muttering.
I let the man clear the entrance back into the food court, buying some time to pull in what I hoped weren’t obvious deep breaths, before I turned back to Menary.
Nothing ventured, nothing nothing, much less gained. I led with bravado I felt only in my feet. Everything above the ankles was quaking. “So. Brian Menary. Long time, no see. But not quite as long as you’d intended, yeah?”
I watched him try not to react to the use of his name.
“Pardon me?” he said again.
“Please don’t do that. It’s annoying. I mean, unless you really are hard of hearing, and in that case I apologize. I’m ready to talk a whole lot louder if you’d like.”
He relaxed just the slightest. Maybe we’d passed the part where I was supposed to pull a gun or something. “Have we met? I don’t remember ever giving you my name.”
“I read it on a name tag once.”
He laughed. I didn’t. “Come on,” he said.
“Yeah. What was it? Nineteen years ago. We never did get formally introduced that night, but I never forget a face.” It was only a little white lie of omission. I forgot faces all the time, but I never forgot a face that I had inadvertently studied upside down. It worked just as she had said it would. Three points for me.
“What are you doing here?” I said. “Please tell me you live right down the street.”
“I was just checking in on you, of course.”
“Of course.” The trembling started all over again, with more rattle in it this time. I clamped down, at some expense to my ability to breathe, so that it wouldn’t show.
He continued, “But I would have bet
my next ten paychecks that there wasn’t anything for me to actually find with you. Joke’s on me, huh? Were you going for the Tag Site just now?”
“Tag Site?”
“You weren’t going for the Tag Site?”
“I give up. What’s a Tag Site?”
“Seriously?”
“I don’t know what a Tag Site is. So what? And I don’t know why you’re here or what you want after nineteen goddamned years, but you can start filling in the blanks anytime you’d like.” The daring zoomed through me. “Or I could just scream and see how badly I can mess up your day with security guards and any stray hero-types who happen to be sitting out there at the tables. I’m sure Paul Rowland would be thrilled to come pick you up and iron out all the shit that goes down when someone like you gets filmed from ten different angles by the security cameras. Or did you Silly String all of them on your way in?” My quaking had calmed to a heady buzz. I was beginning to enjoy this. “Not that Paul couldn’t talk his and your way out of it, I’m sure. But still, there’d be anyone who took a video on their phone of the scene I’m about to cause. . . .”
Brian offered a palms-out surrender. “Okay, okay, hang on. Who do you work for?”
“Traynor and Associates.”
“Well, I know that, but—really? That’s it?”
“What is going on? I am just about out of patience and it’s going to get very loud in here very fast.”
“Okay, first off, that’s a Tag Site.” He pointed at the plain beige door across from the restrooms. A card swipe was next to the doorknob, but otherwise it was unmarked and, therefore, completely unremarkable.
“Yeah, that doesn’t help as much as it could.”
“A Tag Site is kind of like, I dunno, a covert-ops broom closet.” He shrugged. “A few agencies use them. They’re all over—in airports and hospitals. Sometimes shopping malls. You can get in by swiping your ID tag—hence Tag Site—or they can be unlocked for you remotely with a phone call. That’s assuming you know who to call and how to ask.”
“What are they for?”
“I guess it’s not for anything if you weren’t going in there in the first place.”
“Yeah, that’s not going to cut it. What’s inside?”
“Secure communications. Supplies. Stuff.”
“What stuff ? Prove it,” I said. “Show me.”
“I can’t do that!”
“No? Well, why are you telling me all about it then?”
Brian laughed, a warm, amazed chuckle. “Agh! Because you asked.” He raked exasperated fingers through his hair.
“Other people don’t ask?”
“What other people?”
“Nobody ever asks you to explain yourself when you’re skulking around?”
“Other people don’t ask me things because it doesn’t occur to other people to corner me by the restrooms. I happen to be good at my job. Other people don’t even know I’m there in the first place.” The gap in the back-and-forth fell uncomfortable in seconds. “Speaking of, can we—” Brian’s sentence was interrupted by a mother and a potty-dancing little boy hop-pulling past us to the ladies’ room.
He waited until the heavy door had shut them out of our conversation. “Can we take this discussion out there?” He nodded to the bustle and blur of the open food court. “Maybe we could sit down and straighten out this misunderstanding?”
“You’ll just ditch me.”
“I’m not Houdini.”
“Okay, so that’s who you’re not. How about who you are?”
I said it easily, with a confidence that felt tapped, and not necessarily by me. Brian Menary had a version of the same contagious boldness that my mother had owned. Confrontation in his hands, as it had been with her, wasn’t the powder keg it could have been. They almost encouraged it, made it feel safer than it was, which made a certain type of sense. Information was their business. No gold stars were handed out for their shutting down the person across from them.
What scuttled through my head was of no use to him if it didn’t tumble out of my mouth. Intimidation probably wasn’t as useful as the spy movies made it look. Like hot-pepper flakes or eye shadow, it was best applied sparingly.
“Let’s go sit down,” he suggested again, mildly.
And so we did.
The situation was just as tricky out in the open, but at least sitting down felt less fidgety than standing up. That the air was fresher was a bonus, too. A big, bright window stripped our standoff of most of its clandestine mood, but the light made it more real, too. Brian Menary wasn’t a figment of my paranoia, and that was both a triumph and a terror.
He was also better looking than I’d appreciated at thirteen years old or just now in the gloomy corridor. He would have seemed old to me that night if I’d even bothered to notice, but on closer and better-lit inspection now, he wasn’t even two handfuls of years older than me.
In surprising candor, he explained to me that I was—and had been—under routine “follow-through” surveillance ever since my mother died. My Internet searches, not the money at all, had rung the bell.
“You’re spying on my Internet?”
“No, not really. It’s not even your computer, specifically. It’s just an open alert, everywhere, an algorithm scanning the search engines and Web pages and whatnot. If enough key words get tripped in a certain way, in a certain span of time, then an analyst takes a look at a scramble of data. Sometimes they make a recommendation that we put eyeballs on the situation. Anything more than that and we’d need a warrant and an army of lawyers.”
“Mmmmmm. I see. You guys are just playing by regular-people rules,” I said. “Sure you are.”
“We do. As much as we can. Seriously. We pick our headaches very carefully, I promise you. For things like this, we just put a very casual watch on the person’s day-to-day for a short while to see if they’re acting tuned up.”
“And the yoga studio?”
Brian smiled quizzically.
“You owe me six bucks.”
“Huh?”
“Yeah, right.” I rolled my eyes.
“Look, almost every single time, it’s nothing. It takes a lot to send us scrambling around for the invisible ink and self-destructing messages. It must feel very weird for you to hear this, I know, but, honestly, there’s no one out there watching your every typo and Google search.”
“Except the algorithm.”
“Well, yeah. Look, your mother worked on some very sensitive cases in her time. They’re all old news by now, but still, there are occasional developments in the field that call back to the work she did, even way back then. We’d just like to know before anyone else if her friends and family have any knowledge or even curiosities that could draw, you know, unwanted attention.”
“So you’re not recruiting me or Patrick?” I remembered Patrick’s feeble covering for his conversation with the blue-sedan man. He’d make a terrible field operative. In the interest of national security, I hoped Paul Rowland had noticed that.
Brian looked genuinely surprised. “I’m not. And I don’t think it’s all that likely that anyone else is either. Nobody’s looking at my reports for that sort of grooming intelligence. It’s not that kind of thing. It’s not what I do. I mean, I wouldn’t definitely know for sure, but you’re not—how do I say this without it sounding insulting? You’re not high-desirability material.”
Whatever telegraphed across my face set him backpedaling.
He took the bait and served up an apology, laughing. “Hang on. That’s just jargon for ‘not what we’re looking for.’ If you guys were seeking us out, or working in a field that bumped up against what we do, or, not to put too fine a point on it, if you were younger, then maybe. I mean, I know Rowland’s big on pedigree and all that. . . .”
“So, like you said, you don’t really know for sure. Paul’s asked me before.”
“Well, this is pretty much my job now. In all likelihood, I’d know. What I used to do had me a little more
directly involved in operations. Now I mostly follow up on what, these days, crosses those same paths I walked way back when. It’s semiretirement. Now I only travel two hundred days a year instead of four hundred and fifty.” He smiled and brackets of fine lines in the hollows of his cheeks made him look comfortable. Harmless even.
I wasn’t that easy. “And you can just tell me all of this why?”
“Tell you what?” He smiled at me as if we were friends. Or as if we should be. A bright bubble of curiosity about what that would be like tickled up through my middle. “What have I told you?” he asked.
“That my Internet is being spied on, for one thing.”
“It’s really not, but again, what have I told you? Who would you tell? And they’d be able to do what with it? All’s well, Mrs. Aldrich. I don’t have to kill you just because I told you that stuff.”
“Ugh. Let’s just be Brian and Dee, if you don’t mind. I mean, since we’re such good friends and all.”
“Yes, let’s. This has been a very weird day. You scared the hell out of me back there by the bathrooms.” Brian started laughing.
“I did?” The giggles got me then, too.
“Holy shit. Like I said, all of my errands these days—they’re nothing. It’s always nothing, and nothing is the only thing that ever happens. I get paid for a whole lot of nothing, and that’s just fine by me. When I thought you were the one-in-a-million something, I didn’t know what to do. It’s been so long since I had to do anything.”
“You keep saying that, but you’re a lot younger than I thought you were. You guys retire awfully early.”
“It’s a high-mileage job.”
Another lull didn’t make the scene less ridiculous. Some sort of chivalry monster made Brian ask me if I wanted something to drink. I declined.
“So that’s it, then?” I said. “I just put up with it—and with you—and that’s that?”
