Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

by David Shafer

  Truth holes: Five or ten times a day, a small zone in Leo’s field of vision (about the size of a pocket watch held at arm’s length) would flare and then become soaked in light and meaning. Leo would get drawn in, and within a moment, a bridge would emerge from the truth hole, a cable or cord connecting him to some other patch of knowledge or information. It actually didn’t feel all that weird—it felt like some sort of communication device that might be prosaic in the twenty-second century. The knowledge and information wasn’t abstruse, and it was never bossily delivered. It wasn’t even from the future or anything stupid like that, and in those moments Leo didn’t feel as though he was understanding Mayan or Martian or Kwakiutl. But he was definitely taking on information via a very broad band.

  “I think I know the kind of thing you’re talking about,” said James. He recalled a summer’s day two years earlier when the sun spangled into ribbons as his son’s little feet raced across the wet sand of the wide beach at Manzanita. “My heart filled to bursting. That was love. Love for Caleb. Pure. Best drug ever, actually. Maybe that’s the sort of privileged information you’re talking about. Everyone’s heart should fill to bursting sometimes. But ten times a day sounds clinical. Maybe you were smoking too much pot?”

  “Almost certainly. Or maybe I’m not smoking enough now.”

  “You still seeing them?” asked James. “The truth holes?”

  “Not in a while, no.”

  “Then, honestly, that doesn’t sound that crazy.”

  “Well, it went on from there.” At first it was great; those shining months he had come through, when sleep was just a bowl of fruit he took a plum from and everyone brought him news and it all seemed to link up somehow. He wrote without ceasing. Letters and manifestos. Sonatinas and villanelles. Household signage. Short stories. Shorter stories. Tiny little plays. Menus for banquets he would like to attend. Haikus about neighbors. Thank-you notes to people who would not expect them. Abstracts for operas. He wrote a backgammon column, a self-defense manual, and a monograph (On Outwitting Pretend Humans on the Telephone). He wrote letters to advice columns and to corporate headquarters and to his congresspersons and to newspapers. For his nieces in New York, The Memoirs of Señor Skrapits, the Squirrel in 7A. Back then, the sunlight off the hanging pots meant something; the way the worms writhed on the wet sidewalk after a rain meant something; even the newspaper news meant something. It all meant that there was a common direction, a flow, to human events. And he could see it. He put it all in his blog.

  Then he told James about how the paranoia began to creep up on the beauty, and then to eclipse it.

  He did at least try to keep away from the stupider wings of the Internet, where cranks peddle conspiracies. But he was constantly tempted. He would read too much about nanotechnology and then begin to see the tiny machines all around him. Or he would come across news of a huge private correctional corporation manufacturing a mobile, container-based prison system that could be delivered and installed in days and how one of the principals of that company was a higher-up at FEMA. Problem is, when you begin to talk about FEMA even possibly being nefarious, people edge away from you. So when he saw any garden-variety crackpottery in his copy, he’d scrub it out before he clicked Publish.

  And then how it devolved further; how it slid below the surface of cogency and into such solipsistic nonsense that it became clear to the blog’s fifty readers that Leo was in the grip of something, maybe drugs and alcohol, but probably something else as well. His output increased, and he stopped doing any sort of editing, really. There were rants about being slighted by the UPS guy; bossy warnings about leaving your computer unguarded, about the puffer machines at the airport, about nonstick pan coatings, and about the direction of the culture. There were bellicose and politically incorrect challenges to received notions and the status quo; exhortations to avoid respectability and to live by a code.

  And then he told James how he had become focused on the vast and terrible conspiracy that he alone had divined.

  “Okay, here we go. This is the stuff. Tell me about this,” said James.

  “See, I was online, right? Just poking around,” Leo said. “And, well, you know that blowhard Mark Deveraux?”

  “The self-help guy? Bring Your Insides Out, or whatever?”

  “Yeah, that guy. Well, I used to know him. Ten years ago. We were best friends in college. Anyway, I found this video of him on the web, where he was talking about how you can have whatever you want, you just have to learn to control your wish-making faculties.”

  “Sounds like bullshit to me.”

  “Well, it was the way he was saying it. But here’s the thing: He was lifting this stuff from my blog. Not word for word. But I was pretty sure it was mine.”

  “Motherfucker,” said James.

  “I know, right? He was probably making money off it. He got it wrong, is the thing. I never said you could have whatever you want. I just said you should notice that you do get most of what you wish for. You wish to enter the traffic stream without touching other cars; you wish to propel your sleepy body bipedally to the bathroom; you wish that the meaning of this or that moment would become more apparent to you—these are granted wishes.

  “I was furious. So I started to look into my old friend Mark Deveraux. Turns out, in every talk he gives, every idiotic ‘blessay’ he pens, he also shills for SineCo and for this new device of theirs, the Node—”

  “Oh, I saw one of those,” James interrupted, “they’re cool.”

  “No, they’re not, James,” said Leo, his voice gone granite. “They’re totally evil. They’re biometric sampling and surveillance devices that SineCo—or whoever’s behind that company—is distributing.”

  “Hold on. They’re selling them, right? Not distributing them?”

  “At a steep loss. The tech press can’t figure it out. They’re saying that either SineCo is building these in some secret incorporated part of Asia using, like, incarcerated children, or it’s the shaver-cartridge business model—you know, where they sell to us schmucks, at a loss, the thing that makes us have to buy their expensive thing forever.”

  “Yeah, it’s true. That shaver-cartridge racket is bullshit.”

  “But I say that it’s a much longer con. I say that they want to get this device into the hands of everyone in the whole world, where it can collect all of our movements, our vital signs, our images, our voices, our ambient audio, our DNA. All of it.”

  “They can collect that?”

  “Oh, they do already, as much as they can. They biomonitor your sewer pipe, and they use HIPAA siphoning, and facial recognition at ATMs, and AV collection grids at major intersections. And I won’t even go into airport security. But with the Node, you bring that motherfucker home. At your bedside, in your pocket, on your dashboard, to a date. You’re always showing it what you’re looking at.”

  “You ever figure out who the They is?”

  “Well, no. But check it out: The TSA has this program called Clear, where if you get pre-vetted, you can skip security.”

  “Yeah, I saw that. But I never see the line those people are supposed to use.”

  “I don’t think they’re even in the same part of the airport as you and I. And clear is also a state that Scientologists are trying to achieve. And Clear is the name SineCo gave its new operating system. And Baxter-Snider, that huge pharmaceutical—they make Synapsiquell—they’re giving out free contact lenses. For research, they say. The program’s called Contact Lens–Enabled Astigmatism Research: C-L-E-A-R.”

  Blue room; James thinking. “Okay. Put that way, it’s weird, I guess. But so you think SineCo and the Scientologists and the TSA and Baxter-Snider are in cahoots?”

  “And my old friend Mark.”

  James didn’t say anything.

  “I know; it sounds bonkers.”

  But at the time it really hadn’t. He’d wanted to alert the world. Once he’d decided that everything transmitted electronically was being vacuumed up i
nto an enormous shadow-government database, he asked his friend Jake if he could use his letterpress machine, then camped out in Jake’s studio for thirty hours, setting type until his hands were black.

  When the first broadside clacked off the machine, he took it outside to read it in the five a.m. light. He saw the text was smudgy and poorly kerned. But reading it, he knew what he had was electrifying. He knew it could change the world, stir the people, bring them to the ramparts. The thirty-six-point banner headline was THEY ARE COLLECTING EVeRYTHING (Leo could only find four thirty-six-point capital Es).

  “How many copies do you want to print?” Jake had asked, handing his friend a mug of coffee.

  “Five thousand? Ten thousand?”

  “Let’s start with fifty,” Jake said.

  But Leo omitted the goriest details from this account of his unraveling. He did not tell James about how he had bragged in the broadside of his illustrious pedigree. “Descended from the American intellectual elite,” he’d said he was. And he did not tell James that he had actually threatened Mark Deveraux in the broadside. Near the end of his breathless, alarmist, offset screed, he announced that he had “incriminating footage of SineCo fraudster and pitchman Mark Deveraux.” As he recalled now, that seemed appropriate, because he was exhorting everyone who wished to join the resistance to do everything in his or her power to oppose this evil plan. What was in his power to do was to trip up one of SineCo’s frontmen.

  But he saw now that that part was extra-weird—the public-threat-making part. Why had he failed to do any moral calculations about blackmail? At that point, it was by any means necessary. But nothing was by any means, was it? There was always context.

  “You know, it’s not even that far-fetched. That’s not what’s wrong with it,” said James.

  Leo did know. And he knew what James was going to say next.

  “It’s that…why would you be the only one to see it? It has that classic schizo thing, where you’re at the center of it all.”

  There are many centers, thought Leo. Not Jesus Christ but the Holy Ghost.

  “And, while I think the Scientologist part is tenuous,” said James, “the rest is not totally implausible, I suppose.”

  Leo appreciated James’s assessment.

  “I mean, that drummer who came and left last week? He was also a sound engineer, and he said he was pretty sure these rooms were bugged.”

  Sunday evening. After dinner. Most of the men were sitting in deep brown and blue couches in the sunken part of the lounge, watching When Harry Met Sally on VHS. Leo kept half an eye on the screen while he ate a succession of mini-yogurts from the fridge in the break room, which was just the raised part of the lounge.

  Actually, all the men were watching When Harry Met Sally, but about half were pretending not to. They were loudly shuffling their Step work assignments or conspicuously journaling. A steady rhythm of smokers nipped out into the cool summer night beyond the patio. A man wearing a football jersey was trying to make microwave popcorn, but he seemed unable to program the microwave for anything more than one second. It went whir hum ding and the man would harrumph and fuss with the buttons and then the microwave would go whir hum ding again.

  “Hell, Larry,” said one man from the lounge, “it’s not cold fucking fusion.”

  “There’s a popcorn button on the one I got at home,” complained Larry.

  Leo wanted another little yogurt, but he was embarrassed by the small fray of empties in front of him. He looked into the darkling of the sunken lounge to see if James was in there. The movie watchers had formed a horseshoe of couches and easy chairs about the TV. Stragglers—men who had started off in the pretending-not-to-watch camp but had succumbed—sat in an outer ring of springy conference chairs. A few men, the younger ones, were nested in throw pillows on the floor. It looked like a slumber party zapped by an aging gun.

  Leo couldn’t see James in the circle, so he walked to the patio door to see if he was at the smoking station. But the dim room only stared back at him in the glass of the patio door. A moving ember glowed like a distant buoy. The wide green world whispered to Leo. You will be okay, it said, come let me hold you in my arms.

  Leo stepped outside. Down beyond a slope of benighted lawn was scrub tangle of brush and beyond that a train track. Beyond the train track was the white-lit loading bay of a commercial warehouse. Leo could just hear the buzz of those distant lights. He walked to the slate edge of the patio. It was not James smoking out there. There was no hunch in that man; he had one hand in his pocket, trying to look cool.

  “You’re not watching the pitcher about Harry and Sally?”

  It was a voice from behind him, one he had not heard before. Leo turned and saw an old man in a plastic patio chair. It was the man who had come to Quivering Pines after Leo and who had been in the intake single all weekend. Leo had glimpsed him through the sometimes-open door of his room, sitting upright on the edge of the bed the way old men do preparatory to standing, his cane propped beside him, his hands settled on the mattress. Leo had also seen him waiting outside the nurse’s office. He moved like a construction site, with a walker and a cane—he hung the cane on the walker and used it for short trips away from the walker. He also wore a sort of brace that went from his hip to his chest. It looked like a plastic ceiling fan had flung itself out of orbit and embraced him.

  “I guess I was. It’s pretty silly.”

  “I’m Al,” said the man.

  “I’m Leo,” said Leo.

  “What you in for?” said Al.

  “Started going crazy; smoked and drank a lot to keep it at bay. But that may have made it worse. I can’t decide.”

  “I done that, sometimes. How old are you?”

  “Thirty-six.”

  Al exhaled whistily to express how ridiculous it was for someone to be that young.

  “How about you?” Leo asked. “How’d you get here?”

  “Interstate,” said Al. Then he chuckled once and said, “Goddang kids. Showed up outta nowhere.” Al was wearing his brace and holding his cane, lightly spinning it with hands that were nimbler than the rest of him. He was without his walker. “Had an interventionist with them.” He said the word slowly. “Name of Leanne.”

  The engine sound from a small plane came at them in the night. The smoker who was not James stubbed out his cigarette with purpose, hacked, and strode back to the patio and through the sliding doors, which made a sort of sucky spaceship sound when they were opened and closed.

  “It’s nice here though, anyway,” said Leo. He wanted to appear to Al to be broadminded. He sat down in a patio chair.

  “Yup. It’s nice. But I gotta put in my brussels sprouts; shed needs a coat a’ paint,” said Al. “And I need a drink, so I’ll be on my way here soon.”

  “You like drinking, huh?” said Leo.

  “No one likes drinking.”

  “Oh, I don’t know. I think I see people who do.”

  “They’re not doing it right,” said Al. He wore a checked shirt and a cardigan sweater, the straps and plastic of the ceiling-fan brace visible between the two layers. He had on a faded trucker’s cap, the kind with the plastic-mesh back. The brim threw Al’s face in the shadow of a shadow, but when the TV light from inside sparked brightly, Leo could see that Al’s face was not cloudy, like the faces of some of the older men here.

  “So how you gettin’ outta here?” Leo was unconsciously flattening his speech and slowing it, trying to sound more like Al, who spoke in Desert Prairie Interstate West.

  “It’s not a locked facility,” said Al. “Leo means ‘lion,’ right?”

  “Yeah.” Most people assumed Leo was short for Leonard. He liked saying, No, just Leo, like lion. His mother was a Leo—had been a Leo.

  “Well, look, Lion, I’m a mouse, okay? And I’m gonna chew you outta this net right here.”

  Remember this. Remember exactly this, thought Leo. But now he was doing that thing he did when a waitress recited the specials—he was t
rying too hard to pay attention, so he was paying attention to paying attention, not to what was going on.

  “You do exactly what they say, okay?”

  “I’m trying to reserve judgment, actually.”

  “What? Shush. Just do what they say. They’re right, but for the wrong reasons. There ain’t no promised land like they say there is here, but if you keep drinking like I did, there is a hell.”

  “So why’re you leaving?”

  “You know how old I am?”

  Never answer this question. “Nope.”

  “I’m sixty-six.”

  He looked twenty years older. “That’s not too old. You should stay.”

  “Naw, they ain’t got anything for me here. A Higher Power? They think I ain’t thought a’ that? Hell, I didn’t drink the whole time Ronald Reagan ran the place.”

  “Maybe you can make Ronald Reagan your Higher Power,” Leo suggested.

  Al laughed at that a little. “I just might,” he said. “I just might.”

  “It’s been nice, though,” said Leo, “these last few days, not being drunk once. I guess I tend to forget that I’ve been drinking for some time.” Why on earth did he care whether or not Al stayed at Quivering Pines?

  “Boy, I spilled more than you drunk,” said Al. “Just stop now. Forever. It never gets back to easy, it just keeps getting worse. Everything will get worse. Let me save you thirty mother-scrubbing years here. You use alcohol to clean wounds and get chewing gum out of woodwork. It is not for internal use. You drink it, you are inviting pain and dulling the only blade you brung to this fight. You will waste your days and sully your name, and your family will live in dread of you. You got that?”

  Leo nodded. He couldn’t help it. His eyes had actually gone wide.