by Reed Arvin
“I’m not in the mood for a PETA lecture, Michael.”
Nightmare shrugged and pointed to the screen. “Does that mean anything to you?”
I walked to the computer and looked. The words L’amore non prevale sempre flashed on the screen. I reeled. “You’ve got to be kidding.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a line from an opera. Doug used to say it.”
“It’s also the password to his computer.”
“You mean you’re in?”
“I’m in.” Nightmare spun around in his chair and pressed “enter.” I heard the hard drive start to run, and we entered the secret world of Doug Townsend.
I believe that loneliness may be the natural state of mankind. We walk from street corner to office building, locked in isolation. I don’t know how else to explain what lurked in the files of Doug’s computer, his inner chaos turned into binary numbers and infinitesimal voltages. But the unquiet side of his mind was cataloged there, various in its perversity, individual in its bizarre self-expression. In cyberspace, his obsession with Michele was not limited by time or physical dimension. Inside his computer, it flowered into full, demented bloom.
To describe the heart of Doug’s experience with Michele causes me pain, because it disturbs the quiet sense of false security that makes normal life possible. I admit that it’s false. I know that it is. But I also know that it’s essential. It’s like ignoring the risks of flying. There is the mathematical possibility that you will crash. There is also no benefit to thinking about it. It’s like that in life. If you consider what every apparently nice man or woman around you might be thinking, if only you could peel away their veneer of normalcy, you might never leave the house.
I had spent hours talking to Doug, and not one second was about Michele Sonnier. Many of those hours were enjoyable, the basis of a friendship. Certainly, while we were in college there was no hint of instability, just the lopsided social skills of a geek. Of course, I had to assume that every form of obsession has its beginning. But did this mean every moment between the two of us had been a lie? Even our talks, some as recent as two weeks ago, about his computer business? Had he been, with a titanic act of will, suppressing her name from his lips second by agonizing second? Had he, in the midst of a story about growing up in Kentucky, been longing to speak her name? Or was he split in two, each part of his brain independent, and what I saw was real but only a part of the whole?
There were no answers. Doug was gone. Lost in Michele’s persona, he had created bizarre works of art, amalgams of her picture taken to unreal dimensions. Should I remember him by the pages where he had superimposed her face on a photograph of his own body, creating a kind of half-man, half-woman monster? Or what can I make of a church building composed entirely of her eyes?
Having been ushered into his madness, I was forced to admit that my opinions about how Doug died were nothing more than blind theories. It was all a question of which side of his brain was doing the choosing. The Doug Townsend I knew would never have killed himself. The Doug Townsend hidden in that computer was capable of things I couldn’t imagine. But I was also convinced that the new, previously hidden, version was unlikely to vanish silently into the night. Surely, that energy would have found expression before its self-inflicted ending.
Nightmare shook his head, obviously shaken. “This stuff is whacked.”
I nodded. “I know. But ... I mean, there’s nothing illegal about it.”
“If you say so.”
“So this is what all that security was about?” I asked.
Nightmare looked up, surprised. “No, dude. This is what the security is about.” Nightmare hunched over the keyboard; after a few seconds, the logo of Grayton Technical Laboratories appeared, followed by a long list of some kind.
I stared for a long time. I had expected something about Michele’s daughter, not this. “Grayton Technical Laboratories?” I asked. “He was hacking them?”
“You could call it that.”
“Well, what would you call it?”
“I would call it a total obsession.”
“Why do you say that?’
Nightmare punched some keys. “Because there’s roughly a terabyte of stuff in here.”
“You mean he was collecting a lot of information.”
“I mean a fly couldn’t take a shit at that company without him knowing about it.” Nightmare pushed back from the desk. “Hacking is one thing, dude. It’s about getting in. You look around, mess with their heads a little bit. But this ... he mirrored the entire company. It’s just crazed.”
“Like an obsessive-compulsive thing?”
“Yeah, the world’s biggest obsessive-compulsive was also a great hacker. Not as good as me, though.” Nightmare pushed back and stared at the screen. “Dude, this is so beautiful. Considering he was a freak, I mean.”
“What?”
“Just admiring the workmanship.” He pointed to the screen. “Right here, Killah gets shell access, so he looks local. That’s key, because it means he blends into the background, so everybody puts down their guns. From that point on, it’s just a matter of escalation.”
“Talk English.”
Nightmare gave a reverent look. “Killah had the Holy Grail, dude. I’m talking about root access. When you own the root, you can do anything. You can even change other people’s passwords. You can set up a hidden entry for immediate access anytime you like. And my personal favorite, a keystroke logger. You hide out on any terminal in the system, and you can print out every stroke that person types. You rule the world.”
“And Doug had it.”
Nightmare nodded. “He owned this place. He could have devastated them. He could have melted them down, and locked their own administrators out, just to be mean. They would have had to watch, like the Titanic.” He laughed softly and said under his breath, “You freak.”
I was thrown; I had expected at a minimum to find out information about Michele’s daughter. Instead, I learned that Doug had conducted a massive hack of a company of which I had never heard. “Who’s Grayton Labs?”
“Got me.”
“Can we look around?” Nightmare shrugged an assent, then punched keys while we took a guided tour of the company. The public pages revealed the thrust of the business was medical research; there were a couple of pages devoted to various drug therapies the company was developing. Within minutes, however, we hit a long list of apparently meaningless letters and numbers. “How far in can we go?” I asked.
“We got the root, man. We can go anywhere, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to understand what we’re looking at. Whatever it is, Killah wanted in there bad. No stone left unturned.”
“We already know he could be obsessive. Maybe it was just an expression of that kind of compulsion.”
“It’s sure as hell some kind of compulsion.”
I stared at the screen. “Listen,” I said, “guys like you—”
“Hackers?”
“Yeah. I assume people . . . they try to hire you to do things for them? Things they wouldn’t want anybody else to know about?”
Nightmare gave me a thin smile. “You mean like what you’re doing?”
“I mean corporate types. Businesses.”
“It’s a boom industry, if you’re willing.”
“And Killah was good.”
“Very, very good.”
“Then it’s possible Doug was working for someone else. Something off the record.” I looked at Nightmare. “New economy, in other words.”
“Yeah, that’s a definite possibility. A job like that could be worth a lot of money.”
“Enough money to buy plane tickets all over the country to see Michele Sonnier.”
A look of comprehension spread over Nightmare’s face. “Dude, you’re on it. That totally clicks.”
I looked back at the screen. So this is just business. He was paying bills. Helping Michele came later. “Okay. So if Doug was working for somebody, the q
uestions are pretty clear. We need to find out who was paying him, and why they wanted to know so much about Grayton Laboratories.”
“Whoever they were, they weren’t kidding around. This is one serious hack.” Nightmare was sitting quietly, when suddenly I heard him exhale. I looked over at him; he was, if possible, even more pale than usual.
“Killah hacked these guys.”
“Right.”
“And now he’s dead.” We both sat in silence, watching the words Grayton Technical Laboratories flash on the screen. I tried to think of the right thing to say so I wouldn’t rattle Nightmare, but it was too late; the situation had unhinged him enough already. “Dude,” he said, “we gotta get off this site.”
“Don’t panic, Michael.”
“Panic? Killah is dead.”
“That’s right. And that’s why what we’re doing is so important.”
“Are you nuts? I’m cutting this connection right now.” Nightmare moved toward the keyboard; I put my hand on his slender wrist, stopping him.
“Look,” I said quietly, “I want to find out what this is about. And I need you to help me.”
“You don’t have enough money to get me to do that.”
Nightmare, my ass. “I don’t have any money, Michael. But I want you to help me anyway.” Nightmare’s breathing was shallow, his concave chest moving up and down under his T-shirt. He looked like he’d seen a ghost. “I’m going to piss you off now,” I said quietly, “but it’s in a good cause.”
“Start now, because the sooner you finish, the sooner I can get out of here.”
I turned his chair toward mine, facing him down. “You’re a talented kid, Michael. Intelligent, resourceful, and in your weird-ass way, ambitious. But I’m going to tell you the unvarnished truth. So far, you haven’t done a damn thing with it.” Nightmare started to rise; I pushed him back down. “Listen to me, Michael. Hacking a bunch of sites so you can brag to your buddies at some secret meeting where you don’t even use your real names—it doesn’t mean shit.”
“To you.”
“To use the vernacular, Michael, you and your hacker buddies spend all day jerking off. I’m offering you the chance to get laid.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means you can do something real instead of pretend. You’re good at this, Michael.”
“Not good. Great.”
“All right. You’re great. And your life story to date doesn’t add up to a thing. For God’s sake, I had to get you off a shoplifting charge.” Nightmare looked down; he was angry, but for the first time, his bravado couldn’t cover his embarrassment. “Do something valuable with it, Michael. Do something important.” I shook my head in frustration. “Or just piss it away. Why not? It’s what you’ve done with your life so far.”
Michael eyed me warily, but I could see he was still scared. “So helping you makes me a good guy, is that it?”
“Yes, Michael. And helping Doug. They both make you a good guy.”
“Killah’s past my help. That deal’s done.”
“Whatever happened to Doug, it has something to do with what’s on that screen right now. What did you think we were doing here? Just snooping around about Doug out of curiosity?”
“I didn’t care what you were doing, dude. I owed you, and now we’re even.”
“Come out of the cave, Michael. Do something that matters. Be my partner.” Silence, while Nightmare’s wheels turned. I could see him trying it on, comparing it against his fear. “Be a man, Michael. Be a man instead of a shadow.”
We sat silently for a while. At some point, something clicked in Nightmare. Maybe he was afraid that if he didn’t take this chance, he’d never come out into the sunlight. Maybe he saw himself, pale and forty, going slowly insane in front of a flickering computer screen. All I know is that minutes passed, and at last he quietly said, “Okay, we’ll be partners. Like in those movies. Like Jackie Chan and that black guy.”
I exhaled, relief flooding over me. “More like Abbott and Costello,” I said under my breath.
“Who’s that?”
I looked at him. “A couple of dead guys.”
CHAPTER TEN
THE MUNDANE IS WHAT separates life from the movies. Michael left around two, mostly because I had paperwork for Odom that couldn’t wait. If I didn’t fill it out, I didn’t get paid. This was followed by a meeting with a forty-seven-year old repeat-offending client who proved that drug abuse isn’t just for the young. The man had wobbled into my office looking every day of seventy, but apparently, his appetite for chemical destruction had yet to be sated. Taking his case was my contribution to the revolving door that is the American judicial system. It was after three before I could call Michele. She answered immediately. “It’s Jack,” I said. “Can you talk?”
“It’s fine,” she answered. She sounded better than when I had left her, nearly restored. “I’m in my car.”
“Okay. I wanted to ask you some things. We can talk now, or—”
“Did you find out something?” Her voice was full of anticipation.
“I got in Doug’s computer,” I said. “I didn’t find anything about ... what we discussed. Not yet.”
Her voice deflated. “What did you find?”
Images of Doug’s obsession flashed across my memory. Those I would keep to myself, if only to protect Doug’s privacy when he could no longer protect it himself. Grayton, on the other hand, was fair game. “A lot of things,” I said. “We need to talk.”
“I’m on my way to a rehearsal.” I could hear the sound of traffic in the background. “It’s very tight right now.”
“Maybe we can meet later.”
“No,” she said, firmly. “Meet me at the hall around five. I should be finished by then.”
“Is it private?”
“There’s no one there but my accompanist. You know the Emory campus?”
“Like the back of my hand.”
“Good. You remember the little chapel, the one by the Callaway Center?”
“Sure.”
“You’ll see a sign that says, ‘No Admittance.’ Ignore it.”
“That’s fine.”
It was too early to drive over to Emory, so I made the fifteen-minute drive home. I checked the news, which was the usual compilation of human misery, so I turned it off. I thought awhile about Michele, and found myself putting up my guard. There is a kind of woman who attracts drama, whether consciously or unconsciously, and the same magnetism can make a man stick to her, metal against metal. That, I reminded myself, I did not need. What I needed was information, and I was willing to help her in exchange for that service. If it reunited mother and daughter, all to the good; unlike her husband, I had spent enough time among the lost of the underclass to understand what had happened, and her determination to make amends now, when it might cost her so much, seemed admirable. But I wanted to keep my focus on Doug.
I rolled over to the rehearsal hall a little early, tired of pacing my apartment. I parked and walked to the front door. I pushed through the entry door, slipped into the darkness at the back, and confronted the power of a perfectly trained vocal instrument in full song. There were only about a hundred seats, and I was less than forty feet away from the edge of the stage. She was in street clothes, in black pants, a blood-red top, and little makeup. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail. Her voice filled the small hall, the air vibrating with her power. What she was doing was nothing less than astonishing. A middle-aged, balding man was hunched over a piano to accompany her, but he was irrelevant. With effortless, graceful ease, Michele was defying the laws of physics with her voice. There was no strain, no harshness. Just the flow and power of someone three times her size.
I slipped into a chair in the darkness to listen. There was something ravenous in her singing, something desperate and physical. I had seen it in her Romeo—the wrenching despair, the utter commitment to character. Her words came back to me: I sing to justify my life. I sing so that God does not c
ondemn me to hell. Those words, then so stark and mysterious, came to life before my eyes. There was no longer any question of the source of her artistry. Why was it impossible to look away when she sang? Because under every note was her indefinable, but utterly real, sadness. She was tortured, and she was turning her pain into something precious.
She sang for twenty minutes or so, starting and stopping a little, occasionally saying something to her accompanist. I could see her looking out into the darkness for me, so at a break I stood. She squinted, caught my face in the dim light, and smiled. That smile, set within the deeply etched sorrow of her performance, seemed as fragile as china.
I had expected her to finish up once she saw me, but instead she paused, turned, and whispered to her accompanist. He gave her a quizzical look, but rummaged through some music. She stepped quietly to the center of the stage and stood, an ebony statuette, eyes closed and motionless. After several seconds she minutely inclined her head. The pianist began to play.
What can a boy from Dothan say about such music? I grew up on my father’s recordings of Buck Owens and Waylon, and I kissed my first girl to a worn-out cassette of Guy Clark. That was music built to tear down whatever lies between a human being and his sorrow. I have no use for the stuff coming out of Nashville these days, because it has no heart. But listening to Michele sing that day, I learned that all heartaches are one, and the style is just window dressing. Rich and poor, white or black, none of it matters. Whether it’s sung in the celestial tones of an opera or ground out through the gravel voice of a bar singer, the heartache stays the same. It’s the common human experience, and when we hear it coming back to us in music, it stops us dead. I stood there listening, knowing that one of the greatest singers on earth was singing for me alone, and I will not pretend to have been immune. I have no doubt that in order to possess a power like the one Michele displayed in that moment, there are those who might even choose to endure her nightmares. If true art comes from pain, then her art ran in stained rivers through her soul.
