In this way, father caring for son, son receiving his father’s ministrations, they grew further and further apart, and the great quest upon which Quichotte had embarked seemed to recede into the distance. Then, in the middle of the night, while the sex shrieks of his neighbors kept him awake, Quichotte arrived at a moment of complete clarity. Enough of these orgasmic motels! His first and only duty was to provide a better life for his child. He would approach his sister, heal that rift, and together they could provide Sancho with the stable family environment he needed. This was how everything was connected. This was the only way the harmony and peace of the fifth valley could be achieved. And yes, perhaps, once this had been done, the path to the Beloved would be seen. He could not be worthy of the Beloved—how could he be? How could he not have seen that it was ridiculous to think he might be?—until he had proved his ability to do right by his own flesh and blood.
He called her. He didn’t even know if she still had the same number, but he called the one he had, and she replied. A lump rose in his throat and for a moment he couldn’t speak.
“Who is this?” said his sister’s voice.
He didn’t speak.
“I’m hanging up,” said his sister’s voice.
“H.T.?” he said, his own voice trembling.
Now she was silent. Then, “Smile-Smile,” she said. “Is it really you?”
“Yes,” he said. “What’s left of me.”
“Where are you?” she said. “Are you here in the city?”
“I’m in a flophouse near the Lincoln Tunnel. With my son.”
“Your son. Oh my God. So much time.”
“I’m sorry,” he said. “For everything. I’m just sorry.”
“Come here at once. Can you come now? And bring your, your. Your son.”
When he hung up Sancho said, “That’s it? That’s all it took? You both missed out on most of your lives and it would have been so easy not to? Really? That’s all you had to say?”
“That seems to be so,” he said.
“Wow,” Sancho said. “That’s fucked up.”
Brother, the Author, had lost touch with his only son several years ago. The young man, tall, skinny, nerdy, bespectacled, had never seemed like a potential runaway, but after he dropped out of college, which he described as “worse than useless,” adding “nobody will ever need me to write an essay in the whole rest of my life,” he began to act strangely, to lock the door of his room and spend all day and all night lost somewhere inside his laptop, listening to music videos, playing online chess, watching pornography, who knew what. Son was living with his American mother, Ex-Wife (she was another story Brother didn’t care to revisit, another story whose new chapters he knew nothing about) up in the high nosebleed latitudes of the Upper East Side. She was happily remarried, that was a fact, and another fact was that he was the one who had introduced her to her Chinese-American husband, who had originally been Brother’s friend but was his friend no longer, and that was quite a fact, and the new Chinese-American husband was rich and successful and kind of a big man in the city, and that also was quite something. Son developed a bad case of divided loyalties. To see his real father doing, it had to be admitted, not so well, while his new stepfather went in for expensive automobiles and owned a horse farm upstate, this made the boy feel ashamed, and from shame to anger was a short step. So Son was angry with both Brother and Ex-Wife and retreated from them both into his secret world.
Brother didn’t know who Son’s friends were or where he went when he left his mother’s house, and neither apparently did she, so when he disappeared (along with his laptop, tablet, and phone) and the police were alerted, neither parent had any leads to give the searchers. In the weeks that followed he saw a good deal of Ex-Wife as they sat together in sad cafés and waited for the call that said, we found the body. But that call did not come. Instead there was a visit they didn’t expect. The officer in charge of the search asked to see them together, so Brother went up to Ex-Wife’s lavish apartment in the nosebleeds. Stepfather had the grace to absent himself but all his possessions were there, his expensive bad-taste art, a lot of it contemporary Chinese for obvious reasons, he had identity issues, Brother thought, and believed he could solve them by paying through the nose for this crap from Beijing and hanging his framed identity on the walls. That was an ungenerous thought. He took it back. No, he didn’t. Anyway, it was irrelevant. Here was the officer in charge of the search, and he was not saying what they had feared he would say.
They had found Son. He was alive. He was well. He was not drunk, or a drug addict, or kidnapped, or a member of a cult. In short, he was not in danger. He was still in the country, not abroad. And he didn’t want to come home or see his parents or be in touch with them. He had disposed of his old cellphone and would prefer them not to have the new number. This was a choice he had made after giving the matter considerable thought. He was an adult now, he had a place to live, he had work, he had some money in the bank (not the bank with which they were familiar). He wanted them to know these things, and asked them to understand, though he knew it would be hard for them to do so. It might be that at some point in the future he might contact one or both of them and wish to reconnect, but at the present time he was doing what was right for him to do.
There followed the usual parental cacophony, demands for more information, weeping, etc., but even as he heard the conventional noises issuing from his own mouth as well as Ex-Wife’s, Brother was realizing that he was not surprised. People left him. That was what they did. If Son was now choosing to resign from the family, he was only the latest, perhaps the last, in a long series of resignations: friends, lovers, and Wife (now Ex-Wife). After what he judged to be the minimum necessary period of hysteria, he stood up, thanked the officer for the kindness with which he had relayed this tough information, excused himself, and left. At the new subway station, giant mosaic portraits of artists and musicians—Kara Walker, Philip Glass, Cecily Brown, Lou Reed, Chuck Close—stared at him, judging him and finding him wanting. He would never be canonic. He was no longer even admissible into the canon of good fathers. Bad writer, bad father. Two strikes. He went down below the earth and took the Q downtown.
And so, now, Sancho. Brother hadn’t expected an imaginary child to show up on the page, but Sancho had brought himself into being, and insisted on remaining. Brother’s own Son had dematerialized and ceased to exist by an act of will, for his parents, at least. Quichotte, contrariwise, had made a son appear through the force of his desire and by the kindness of the stars. If I could make Son reappear by praying to meteor showers, Brother thought, I’d be at every meteor shower in America. But that would require Ex-Wife to be there, too, as she had been way back when.
He understood some of what he was doing, what material his unconscious was throwing up, transmuted, and splattering all over his pages. “The Human Trampoline”? Really? If Sister ever read what he was writing, she probably wouldn’t like that. She would probably be disturbed, too, by the fact that Quichotte’s financial complaints against the Trampoline were an echo of his own accusations against her. And then this sweet-easy reconciliation between Quichotte and H.T. on the phone, that’s all it took?, as Sancho asked Quichotte disbelievingly. Well, if only, Brother thought. I’m on the same side as Sancho here. Real life isn’t as easy as that. But he saw why it came out that way on the page. Like Sancho himself, H.T.’s welcome was born out of need, her own need as well as Quichotte’s.
Salma was all fiction. These days the only women in his life were ones he made up in his head. Or, yes, admit it, as with Quichotte, sometimes women he saw on a screen—in his own case, more often at the movies than on television or one of the streaming services. Fantasy women. The real thing seemed now well beyond his reach. And Dr. Smile? Well, Brother was a writer who believed in doing his research. Sadly, there were many real-life candidates who could fill the crooked doctor’s b
oots. And, yes, his prescriptions too.
If you wanted to say that the bizarre story he was telling, unlike any story he had ever told, had deep roots in personal necessity and pain, then yes, he would concede the point. But the old fool? He resisted the idea that Quichotte was just his Author with a pasteboard helmet on his head and his great-grandfather’s rusted sword in his hand. Quichotte was somebody he had made up with a nod (okay, more than a nod) to the great Spaniard who had made him up first. Granted: his creation and he were approximately the same age, they had near-identical old roots, uprooted roots, not only in the same city but in the same neighborhood of that city, and their parents’ lives paralleled each other, so much so that he, Brother, on some days had difficulty remembering which history was his own and which Quichotte’s. Their families often blurred together in his mind. And yet he insisted: no, he is not I, he is a thing I have made in order to tell the tale I want to tell. Brother—to be clear about this—watched relatively little TV. He was a member of the last cinema generation. On TV, he watched the news (as little as possible, it being presently close to unbearable), and in the baseball season he watched the Yankees’ games, and sometimes, when he was able to stay up that late, he watched the late-night comedy shows. That was more or less it. TV had ruined America’s thinking processes as it had ruined Quichotte’s. He had no intention of allowing it to ruin his mind as well.
So, no, he insisted, not I. However: if he was so certain of the divide between character and Author, why had he so often been afraid that his spy novels had attracted the interest of real spies who were now spying on him? Why had he seen shadows in the shadows, lurking, shadowing him? It was an irrational fear (but then, fear is irrational). He neither knew nor had he leaked any official secrets, he reminded himself. He was not a player in the game. To believe otherwise was vanity. His paranoia was a form of narcissism. He needed to let it go, especially while he was absorbed by this, the most peculiar of all his stories, which for some reason was making him smile happily at his computer screen, allowing him to forsake all thoughts of giving up his chosen profession. Sometimes the story being told was wiser than the teller. He was learning, for example, that just as a real son could become unreal, so also an imaginary child could become an actual one, while, moving in the opposite direction, a whole, real country could turn into a “reality”-like unreality.
He was also getting up his courage and planning a trip to London. Maybe peacemaking would work out for him as it seemed to be working out for Quichotte. The olive branch would readily be accepted and they would have each other once again. Yes, replied the more cynical voice in his head, and maybe pigs would fly. But he found himself feeling optimistic. Very well, he thought, London. It was a long time since he had crossed the ocean. He would have to buy a new carry-on bag. He would need some advice about which airline to use.
Such were Brother’s more or less cheerful thoughts when he returned to his apartment in Kips Bay from an evening stroll along Second Avenue, holding a paper bag containing a six-pack of Corona Light, and dreaming, as he often did, about moving to Tribeca, perhaps into a loft conversion in the Gould Industries building, one hundred years old and formerly a printing house and steel wool manufactory, which stood at the corner of Greenwich and Beach with the arrogance of its double affluence, the history of past industrial successes within its walls yoked to the two-thousand-dollars-per-square-foot eminence of its desirable present, and which was his fairy-tale residence of choice. When in Tribeca he always tried to walk past it even though it made him feel down at heel.
He shook off the fantasy and turned his key in his door, to be greeted in his darkened apartment by the bright light from the illuminated iMac screen, which he had left in Flurry screensaver mode, and which was password-protected, but which had somehow been opened. By the light of his hacked desktop he then perceived, seated in the Aeron office chair at the computer station, a large Japanese-American gentleman, who was probably six foot three, six foot four inches in his socks, Brother estimated, and his weight might be what? Two hundred and sixty, two hundred and seventy pounds. The Japanese-American gentleman was wearing an expensive dark blue silk suit with a pale blue silk pocket square, a white shirt with a high thread count, a red Hermès tie in which a small golden cat was chasing a smaller golden wind-up mouse, and a small button badge on his left lapel bearing a miniature image of the Great Seal of the United States. There was writing on the button badge which was too small to read. On his lap, just lying there, was a high-powered handgun, which looked to Brother (who had to be up on such matters because of the genre of fiction in which he had until recently specialized) like a Gen4 Glock 22. Apart from the presence of this gentleman the apartment looked undisturbed. There was no sign that either entry—into the apartment or into Brother’s computer—had been forced in any way.
“I apologize for alarming you, sir,” the Japanese-American gentleman said. “Let me reassure you that I mean you no harm.”
It was indeed alarming when one’s worst paranoid fantasies became reality. Brother’s interior life went through a series of stomach-churning somersaults in the course of a few seconds. He was about to be beaten up slash murdered slash burgled as well as beaten up and then murdered. The Glock was a bad sign. His eyes focused on the button badge and clung onto that. He was drowning and that was his only hope of a life buoy.
“You’re from which agency?” he finally managed to say, in an approximation of his normal speaking voice.
“If you wish, sir, I can show you ID,” the other replied. “But I really don’t think I have to spell out to you, of all Authors, which agency it is.”
“The weapon,” Brother said. “Why the weapon?”
“You know how it is, sir,” the visitor said respectfully. “A man enters his own home, sees the shape of a stranger seated in his chair, and in self-defense draws his personal weapon and opens fire. This is a plausible scenario. This is America, sir. I wished only to guard against unnecessary loss of life, including my own life, sir, yes.”
Brother set down the bag containing the six-pack. “I would feel a lot happier if you put the weapon away,” he said. He was trying not to faint, and his bowels were being troublesome.
The intruder did as he was asked, then stood and extended a hand. “Lance Makioka,” the Japanese-American gentleman introduced himself. “We met briefly on a previous occasion, which I’m certain you will not remember.”
“I’m pretty sure we have never met,” Brother said.
“Yes, sir, you were signing books at a store right on Sunset in Los Angeles,” Lance Makioka said. “At that time I was with President Reagan, post the conclusion of his term of office, and I asked you if you might agree to kindly autograph a book for the president. I believe you were skeptical, and said, ‘I thought President Reagan suffers from Alzheimer’s and is not reading many four-hundred-page spy novels these days.’ I remember your exact words, sir. And I replied, ‘Sir, Mrs. Reagan would also be glad of the signature,’ and then you very kindly signed the book.”
Brother did remember. He even remembered that that was where he had seen the blue suit before, or one like it. “I’m presuming you’re not here tonight to get a book signed,” he said, relaxing just a little.
“Ha ha, sir, no, sir,” Lance Makioka said. “At that period of my life I was on the protection side of things. Since then I have moved on.”
“To the house-break-in side of things,” Brother said. Heavy levity was his way of disguising his still-high level of foreboding, even of fear.
Lance Makioka did not laugh. “Nowadays I protect America in a different way, sir. That is why I am here tonight. Sir, there’s a story I’d like to tell you. May I tell you that story?”
“Auditioning for my job, then,” Brother said. The terrified comedian again.
“By way of a prologue,” unsmiling Lance Makioka replied, “may I ask if the name of Blind Joe Engress
ia means anything to you? A.k.a. Joybubble? Now deceased?”
Brother shook his head.
“In 1957,” said Lance Makioka, “a blind seven-year-old American boy accidentally discovered that whistling certain precise notes into his phone, at certain precise frequencies, could manipulate the system. The first note to work in this way was, I believe, the fourth E above middle C, having a frequency of 2637.02 hertz. This was the beginning of the practice known as phone phreaking, closely linked to the development of what afterwards became known as computer hacking, and at a certain point the phreaker community included such later luminaries as the computer entrepreneur Mr. Steve Jobs. The boy Engressia, as he grew, became a legend in this community. However, sir, in the end he got busted, he was maybe nineteen then, and he gave up phreaking. His subsequent life was not distinguished by great success. At one point he legally changed his name to Joybubble and announced that he was five years old and intended to remain five years old for the rest of his life. He passed away in 2007, aged either fifty-eight or five, as you prefer. The point of telling you this, sir, is that we, that is to say the appropriate agencies, wished to enlist Blind Joe in our battle against hacking, using the ‘set a thief to catch a thief’ principle. Like Cary Grant in the old Hitchcock movie. Some say he did work for us for a time but then ceased to do so. If he had done so, he would have had a secure income, health care, pension all the way to the end. But there it is. People make their choices.”
“But this is not the story you came to tell me,” Brother said.
“No, sir. It is a type of preliminary fable. You will see the point of its moral as I proceed.”
“I am not any kind of hacker,” Brother said. “Phone or computer. Just for the record. You, however, plainly are,” he added, gesturing to his iMac.
“Are you familiar,” Lance Makioka asked, ignoring Brother’s remark, “with the covert hacktivist organization using the name of Legion?”
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