What could I have done about it? Hacking my computer is like machine-gun warfare. Masami gets to disembowel me without looking me in the face. And that’s just the way life is.
“Same old,” said Nabi when I called to check on her at noon. Her voice was pallid. Her words were code for Martin, who must’ve come to take her out to eat.
“Don’t bother coming in,” she said. “It’s slow.” Translation: stay away.
“You’re okay, though?”
“Sure! It’s a lovely day.”
Not sure what that one meant.
“Erik been bugging you?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
“All right, I get it. Check you later. Love you, nikkou.”
“Yeah, go on with your bad self,” a.k.a. I love you too.
I imagine myself standing before one of Aetna’s pages. AS6 blown up to my height: a magic mirror. Reaching up to touch her words. From the opposite side, her dark hand and then her face swimming toward me from the bottom of the sea. Her hand touches the surface, which for me is the page where I have lain my palm. We touch with the abyss of death and shifting words between us. I try to lure her courage into my heart.
If it’s in my book, it can get out of my head. So just this quick thing, then I’ll get back to my invoices, so when those lot come back from lunch I’ll look like a Managing Partner who’s got it together. What I want is a vacation from bumper cars & I mean both of them, Lord have mercy. One’s all sulky this morning, I mean still sulky. Sigh! Noon rolls around & he shows up at my office. I thought he wanted to “clear up” what he said last night in public & in very poor taste, but he looked sulky instead of sheepish, & just as he started saying let’s go have lunch, the other one was calling me on my phone & who knows what he might’ve got himself into! I don’t mean like what Iesha’s worried about, I know that’s nothing, but insurance & BRMS, etc, sigh! He just wanted to check on me (I mean K), but the other one was miffed that I even took the call when he’s there trying to take me out to lunch (I mean M). Not that he (M) even knew it was the other one calling (K). & to make stuff more uncomfortable, he (M) wanted to go to that place on Dundonald calling itself TEN. I couldn’t groan, I don’t think M even noticed the story about that woman & the suicide notes when it came in the paper, gotta leave it to the other one to notice stuff like that.
So we sit down, I ask how his day is going, I wait for my husband to say he didn’t mean nothing by it last night, & the man comes out with this:
“I just can’t understand it. I’m serious, Nabilah. What is going on? What is it with the 2 of you?”
He meant the other one. SIGH! 2 whole days since the 2 of them talked to each other for about 2 mins, & Martin still won’t let it go.
“1st you & the computer. Now him & Gavin.”
“Honey, I told you that’s nothing.”
“Well, let me tell you what I see. (Like he hadn’t already. In the car last night of all places.) I see the 2 of you trying to weasel information out of BRMS behind my back. Now, what am I supposed to think?”
“You’re supposed to listen to your wife & stop worrying.”
“It’s him, isn’t it. Trying to get you involved in something.”
“Well, hello there! How are you?”
I’ve never been so glad to see my ex-boss from the bank. She came into TEN & of course we had to chitchat. Thank You for our Blessed little Island, Lord. Interruptions like that can totally bust a mood, which was exactly what I needed. M quit sulking in a snap. He knows lots of people at the bank. Higher up than my ex-boss of course.
But she left & Martin said, “Was there somebody at that function you didn’t want to see?”
“What?”
“Last night. Clearly you didn’t want to be there. Was it cuz you didn’t want to risk running into someone?”
“Who?”
“Well, I don’t know. You sulked the whole night thru.”
“I did not sulk, thank you very much. You were the one that got uptight, making jokes in poor taste.”
& that (sigh!) put us right back where we started this morning. No, last night! That stupid invitation! But not just that one, I mean all those glittering evenings sucking up to so-&-sos, Martin don’t need that. He’s great at what he does, everybody knows it, & sometimes after work I’d rather have my feet up. Yeah I get to wear my dresses & laugh at people’s gossip, & this is where Honey needs me most cuz people warm up to me quick. But did he ever stop to think maybe we weren’t invited, maybe that’s why we didn’t get no invitation? “It got mixed up in my wife’s papers. You know what my wife does with papers.” Yup. & in front of an exec from XL Catlin. Lord, the way that man gets loud when he’s nervous drives me fullish. I reminded him, in front of XLC’s exec, of the time we were at XLC’s formal thing & we met some bigwig from Sydney. He asked me my profession & before I could say anything, Martin goes, “She gets 6 figures for chopping up paper.”
Aceboy loves this joke. He thinks it’s the biggest crackup since Charlie Chaplin slipped on a banana peel. But that time? (Forgive me, Lord.) I turned to my loving husband & said sweetly, “6 figures to protect people from poky snoberses like you.” I kissed him on the cheek, & while I wiped the lipstick off him with a tissue, brethren from Sydney laughed & so did I & Martin sulked. Excuse me, where would you be if you made some kind of note about a confidential case & neglected to dispose of it properly when the case was over & somebody found it?! Well, aceboy didn’t like being reminded of all that in public at a “function” we maybe weren’t invited to. He sulked & then he fished for reasons to get mad at me when we were going home. He brought out his “chilly headmaster” cuz of the other one & Gavin. Again.
Guess he just got off the plane. & there I go making excuses for him again. Sick of worrying about him, I mean Martin. & Martin’s radar, Lord forgive us. Sick of worrying about K. & how much I’m been praying for these lot? You Up There paying attention?? Sick of them sniffing where they shouldn’t & having to be afraid they’ll stick their noses in the wrong shredder. & while we’re on the subject, what You got against creating freedom? What’s so wrong about what I did? If You in’t got no answer, why don’t You keep M & K out of it & keep them out of each other’s hair like I keep asking? Is it cuz of Moses? I can’t love who I want to cuz of what You told Moses, a magician with 2 wives?! You gonna teach my boys some self-
sufficiency in that case? You know both of them think I’m got nothing better to do than buzz around after them, struggling to keep up with my little bitty wings. If they had any idea what I could be doing with my time…
Firewall Hacking Secrets. Email Hacking For IT Security Professionals. I’m done everything those books know how to teach & then some. Has either of dem byes been to computerforensicsworld.com? Do they know how to solve every problem & beat every counter-attack that site comes up with? Are they up to date on vulnerability research? Have they exhausted hackthissite.org & elite-hackers.com & completed every hack on hackaday.com for how many months running? No. I made a girl who follows sharks in caves in the Great Barrier Reef. In my mind I ask her why those 2 selfish men get to make me feel like a sinner & a traitor just for loving.
Let me ask You something. Does Seabird exist for You? Will she ever? Or would You say she’s digitally real but doesn’t exist? Or she exists as electricity & data but isn’t real? She’s got a license, birth certificate, passport, bank account. She’s got history. Check her on Instagram. Check Facebook. People “like” & “friend” her all the time without knowing it. On her Pinterest You’ll see all this beautiful furniture I’ve been wanting for my house. I could almost afford to buy some if M wasn’t obsessed with the wood & leather “clubhouse” look or K would get a bigger place & wasn’t obsessed with books. She’s got that Ted Baker dress I want, the Louis Infini luggage set, that cutie yellow Porsche.
She’s posted a
bout crawling thru the tombs under the Egyptian pyramids, spelunking in Borneo & Iceland & Thailand, cave diving & freediving & muck diving, shopping in Paris & Hong Kong & Dubai & London. No boys, no job, no awkward debt to her big sister, no parties unless she wants them, no bouncing back & forth between angry brothers like a tennis ball. History don’t mean a thing to her unless she wants it to. & Lord does acegirl have Rock Fever! That’s why she’s “Seabird.”
She never posts a picture of herself. Like a longtail bird never sits still for a picture. But if she did post a picture of herself, would she exist? If her picture was my picture, could I kiss who I want where I want without worrying Who’s looking? There’s pictures of Greece on Seabird’s Pinterest. Plaka, Syntagma, Attica.
I hacked KEMH planning to give her an old moped accident from years ago, where she got lucky with road rash. But thinking about mopeds got me remembering how K let me use his bike while he was @USA cuz I couldn’t afford a bike. But when he came home & our love grew up & started squeezing us real hard, Baby asked me not to ride on mopeds anymore, now he’d seen the craziness young people do on mopeds. I thought of how I’d asked my husband the same thing: no more mopeds, Honey, I’d rather go without the car so he could use it, & so Kenji let me use his car. Next thing I know, the hospital drama’s gotten totally carried away, it starts with this scuba adventure where Seabird’s exploring caves in Bermy’s underwater mountains. She follows a grouper down into a hole, hoping she’ll find a giant squid, she sees tentacle marks or something on the walls, so she follows them but dives too deep, the hole gets too narrow & she gets stuck & has to leave one of her scuba tanks down there, she comes up fast & ends up in the decompression chamber @KEMH…
That’s Seabird for you. Doing stuff I’m scared to do. I made her to live & live & live. I did that.
Nikea saw me that time cuz I hesitated. Why? Cuz I’m used to underestimating myself, & that is what the bumper cars do for me. Next time that man makes a joke on how I make a living, I’m gonna say: What you don’t know is I make living better than living. Or something. I’m sure the other one would come up with something wittier & snarkier & philosophical like that. I’m sure I won’t actually say anything.
Nobody’s just one thing. It makes what people call identity pretty difficult to pinpoint without being at least a little arbitrary about it. In fact, maybe there’s no such thing except insofar as people create it in their minds and on official computers. Knowledge of this is a kind of power and helplessness: all identities are false. It’s why the idea of an impostor is so terrifying.
Not the pharmacist who pretends to be a scholar or corporate errand boy. That’s just changing clothes. Think about that English lady who rented someone’s house, legally changed her name to match the landlady’s, got a passport under her new name, and sold the house that wasn’t hers even though her name was on the deed. Now think of Aetna Simmons becoming Macy Moran. Only on paper but a very important paper. Aetna understood it all, the power and the helplessness, and that’s how she made an art of what she did.
UnDoreen only thought she understood it. She considered what temporary Doreenness could get for her, that is, for her as UnDoreen. But in a true becoming, both RealDoreen and UnDoreen would be stamped out. The impostor would forsake everything she owned, every last vestige of the self she was born with, submitting to absolute assimilation, perfect Doreenification without remainder. RealDoreen in turn would cease to exist except as her own impostor, the very person she was not. Which would mean, in practical terms, no one alive could identify her as the very person she was. And this would apply to the impostor as well as RealDoreen.
The successful hostile takeover would’ve made sure of all of this. Aetna made sure of it. Aetna Simmons, whoever she was, sacrificed herself to it. But with a colonizer’s arrogance, UnDoreen thought only of gains, not vulnerabilities. And so by sheer dumb luck, an accident of history and the fundamental, arbitrary impurity of all the races split a seam in what she mistook for changing clothes.
And this was all I had to go on. It was less than a hair’s breadth from nothing. It implied there was very little UnDoreen wouldn’t do even if she hadn’t thought it through. And that’s the most dangerous sort of person that exists.
But why be dangerous like this, why become an impostor? What kind of person does this to themselves and not just themselves but other people, strangers who’ve done nothing to them? Of course you’d ask me that. Or, I guess, maybe you would if you were who I thought you were. I’m sure you have your reasons.
Not that any matter of “identity” needs reasons. Nor have people ever needed reasons to destroy strangers. The English tenant, the house thief. What reason did she have to steal her landlady’s identity other than money? What reason do people have to criminalize other people’s identities? And when I say reason, I mean something that won’t disintegrate when you think it all the way through; something that doesn’t turn out to be just power-tripping, which itself boils down to fear that your own identity is as vulnerable as everybody else’s. Which it is.
I sure hope you have your reasons.
I made coffee before I dialed again. This one needed all my wits. Then I got back in the car. As though I hadn’t already flogged myself with questions until I was raw and all the questions were in dislocated tatters, I went through it all again.
Her every murmur heavy with darkness, it seemed her every sound pressed in on me. It was a physical phenomenon; all timbres are. But it was also, I think, fundamental bitterness weighing down her voice.
Then again, her idea of an icebreaker was proclaiming her bitterness over racist and misogynist injustices while being caught red-handed trying to rob a dead black mother. So maybe fundamental wasn’t quite it.
Why would a postmodern graverobber hold Empyreal hostage? Revenge? For what? I didn’t know the bitch. And yet, I thought with a quickening of dread, UnDoreen knew me. We cohabited some perverse wavelength by some sick accident. Why would she bother with Empyreal if she didn’t know even more than she pretended? And where did that leave Myrtle? Even if this wasn’t about robbery, even if it was just breaking in and looking and what by now amounted to vandalism, why Myrtle’s house? Why would an UnDoreen want to get back at Myrtle?
Discounting for the moment the perfectly realistic possibility that UnDoreen was another pawn in Masami’s conspiracy to destroy me, I asked myself what Myrtle and I had in common. Bermuda, I thought. So what, I thought. But if you set aside the possibility that UnDoreen wasn’t serious about anything (which, I think I warned you, I heard in her voice sometimes and it gave me the willies), there must’ve been something about Myrtle, about me, that aggravated or encapsulated whatever enraged UnDoreen deep in her heart of hearts.
The fact that something enraged UnDoreen most of the time was one of my few certainties. After she flattened me and pinioned my wrists, there were moments when I felt like I was being eaten. Almost unmetaphorically. She was indiscriminate: she and I were disgusted by each other and went at it anyway with extravagant abandon. Not in desperation. UnDoreen was the opposite of desperate. Every look and word made it clear she was above any need for me or anyone. Why devour something you don’t need when it won’t do you one bit of good? Because you’re in the grip of rage that isn’t going away.
None of that woman’s paradoxes escaped me. Nor did this sickening irony: What were we doing, UnDoreen and I, except limbo at its fiercest and most ludicrous?
Incidentally, there’s one more thing Myrtle and I had in common. But you knew that.
I reached St. George’s in a tizzy. Her voice, that sound straight out of that hazardous body: the heat of all that rage I’d felt so sure I’d denuded was nowhere to be heard or seen. Not that she’d chemically doused it like a normal person. Clear-eyed self-control, that’s all it took. It looked effortless. Maybe it was.
“Coming in or what?” She put her hands on my hi
ps.
“Come outside,” I said, against every urge in my body.
Her eyebrow went up, but she came out. We sat on the stoop. Surinam cherry bushes darkened the sunlight to maroon and murky green. Nothing moved, not even a lizard.
She was a liar. It was all I had on her, and it had to be enough. My plan was to make it sound like more.
“The thing is,” I said, “you’re not Doreen Trimm.”
She was less astonished than I’d hoped. Make that a lot less. Make it totally unperturbed. “What else?”
“Give me the pearl, gorgeous.”
“That thing’s worth way more than one of your tall tales, babydoll.”
“And who was it who asked me to help them find a sister they knew they never had?”
This amused her. Should’ve amused me too, a con conning a con, fondling my thigh while she was at it.
“Where is she, Kenji?”
Her breath in my ear. Her tongue. She wanted me to kiss her. I stood up and started pacing.
“Bottom of the sea.” My voice was a discreditable croak.
I looked at Aetna’s cottage, having no idea that it was for the last time. I see it now as in a painting. The hedges cluster round the small pink domicile in a closer, thicker formation than they ever managed in reality. The shadows are permanent, the light forever partial, the front door closed. There’s a sort of craquelure over the entire scene, making it ancient.
“Tangled in mangrove roots. Inside barracudas and a million little fish,” I said.
“Come on.”
“What difference does it make?” If you can shout at a whisper’s volume, I did so, but the predator got up in my face, snuffing out a flash of anger just as it appeared.
“That bluff’s been called, teddy bear. She might’ve left the country, I’ll give you that. So you can have a little time. Let’s say Monday.”
Drafts of a Suicide Note Page 21
