by David Shafer
They rode most of the rest of the way home in silence, though not the frosty kind that had stretched between them at breakfast or the taut kind that had snapped in the Costco. It was kinder; a détente. Nearing home, they passed Peggy Pilkerson’s place, with its plaster lions rampant before six feet of driveway. Leila tried to bring up again the subject of the nights out till all hours with Peggy. What she wanted to say but couldn’t quite was: Why are you choosing right now to quit being the Good Wife? Don’t you know he’s innocent?
“I think you could stand to go out, Leila,” said her mother as they neared the house. “You’re helping neither yourself nor your father by just sitting in that little room and looking at that Tubeface.”
Unfair. Leila had been reading her dad the newspapers, trying to help with the house when and where her mother left an opening. She wasn’t online more than a few hours a day, and then certainly not on Facebook. She worked in the little room under the stairs because she was sleuthing; she needed to concentrate, and she didn’t want to explain every page, or the black electrical tape over her webcam.
There was nothing on the Internet about Dear Diary. Finding nothing on the Internet about something is suspicious. Like, yeah, too quiet. There was a scrapbooking website called Dear Diary and some wry hunter’s blog called Deer Diary. But there was no whiff of Dear Diary the secret resistance and people-smuggling network with postnationalist aims and a neurotransformative eye test, nor of its pitched battle with a fascist consortium of data miners. Was there another Internet besides the one she knew about? Were there secret domains? She scoured her computer for the little owl icon that had let her contact Dear Diary in the first place, but it was gone. She went over and over the Heathrow meeting and the day in Dublin, but she could think of no way back in.
“I’m helping Dylan with the legal stuff, Mom.”
“How? Dylan’s taking all those meetings. He updates you. And what’s with that other phone you carry around and look at but never use?” Her mom was like this—oblivious, oblivious, oblivious, and then—bam—a noticer.
Then Mariam’s phone rang. She dug it from her purse. “Hello, Dylan,” she said. Her voice always brightened for him. As long as we’re talking about who’s nicer to whom, thought Leila, Dylan had better be getting this hard sell on grandchildren also.
Then Mariam sat up straight in the passenger seat. “What?” Her voice was hard with disbelief. Leila stepped on the accelerator. “But I don’t understand,” she said. Leila slowed a little; if the news were bad and medical, she wouldn’t have said that.
“What is it?” she asked her mom. “Can you put him on speaker?”
Mariam waved her away, annoyed. “How can you be sure?” Nod. Squint. Hmmm-mmm. “Okay.” She hung up, and even then she didn’t start sharing. She was savoring knowing something Leila didn’t. And when Mariam did speak, it was strange, because instead of sounding ecstatic and relieved, she sounded puzzled.
“That was Dylan,” she said needlessly. “They’re going to drop the charges against your father.”
“He didn’t tell you his name? He didn’t have some funny name? Did he mention me or Dear Diary?” Leila asked Dylan. They were outside the house, Leila breathing hard. She had run the last half a mile at three-quarters intensity. Before going out to run, she had left a note on her brother, who was asleep on the couch. Can you meet me outside 8:30? it said. When she pulled up at 8:35, he was outside, smoking a cigarette, drinking slurpily from a Winchell’s cup. He was definitely looking unyoung these days, but that was probably the hours he was keeping. He worked full-time at Whole Foods, went to law school at night, a school much less fancy than the one he’d dropped out of.
“No. I told you. I was just eating a hot dog, on a bench, like a schmuck—”
“This was yesterday?” she interrupted.
“Yes.” And he punished her for the interruption by taking an especially languid drag from his cigarette. It was going to be hard for Dylan to quit smoking; he smoked so expertly, his eyes bright behind the noxious veil. “And this guy walks right up to me. Too fast, you know? Like I kinda thought I was about to get knifed. But he just hands me this folded manila envelope, like I should know what it’s about. So I said, Excuse me, but what the fuck?”
“Is that what you actually said?”
Dylan thought. “Yeah.”
“And what did he say?”
“Wow, you’re really helping me tell this story, sis.”
“Sorry.”
“He said, Show that to your solicitor. And then he walked away.”
Leila made her eyes wide to indicate That’s all?
Dylan made his wider to indicate Yeah, that’s all.
“Dylan. What was in the envelope?”
“A thumb drive. I was about to poke it into my own computer right there on the bench. But then I got spooked and thought it should go straight to Kramer. Which was prudent on my part, because it turned out to have this thing where it could make only one copy of itself before it died. And at Kramer’s office they brought it straight to their forensic electronics guy—who marks like four hundred and fifty dollars an hour, by the way, and sits in a room called a SCIF—a sensitive compartmented information facility. He took the one file that the drive had on it, and he immediately copied that file about a hundred times to their special offline servers. When I saw what the file was—like, on the screen—I didn’t understand it at all. It was code, computer code. It could have been anything.”
“Did the forensics guy have any idea what it was?”
“Well, first he says, ‘Oh, this is useless, it’s just a bunch of corrupt scraps.’ He said it was like someone had emptied the shredder bins at IBM and then glued everything together to look like a document. But twenty minutes later, he actually stood up from his chair and sort of started hopping around. I have never seen a tech guy so excited. He’s saying, ‘It’s written on the back, it’s written on the back.’” Dylan took another drag of his cigarette, squinted through an exhale. “And it turns out that if you turn the code over, there are legible files on the other side. See, Mystery Dude gave us both the encrypted file and the decrypted file. The tech guy said that the code he thought was junk is actually the first nontheoretical use of quantum encryption he’s ever seen. He said it was like someone had just FedExed us the Rosetta stone.”
Leila stretched her calves against the little concrete wall that enclosed the tiny garden. Her dad had another olive tree failing to thrive in a terra-cotta pot. She felt the taut line up the back of her.
“It’s a work order, Leila. Or an invoice. It’s an internal document, anyway. From a company called TMI Data Solutions, in Roanoke, Virginia. It details the work this outfit did on Dad’s hard drive. The file is called C. Majnoun Minor Porn. The work is broken down, itemized: Flick-Burst Transmission, and Evidence Custody Chain Repair—they did twelve units of that—and then there’s one line item that just says Collage Fabrication. And there are these things that I guess are chat windows within the working document. Like, where people scribble notes, you know, on a document that has to go through an office. And beside Collage Fabrication, some professional framer has written to another professional framer, like at shift change or something, Pull images of the blonde with the bangs in the folder JV Volleyball ’06. That’s the one I’d want to fuck if I was this guy.”
The run had gotten her mind ticking right. Leila sucked down the news. What Dear Diary said about the Committee’s reach was true.
“And it’s enough?” she asked Dylan. “It’s enough to make the prosecutor back down?”
“Well, so, by last night, our forensic guy had spoken with their forensic guy. And when we show up to the RITSerF, you could tell that the prosecutor was pretty shaken, actually. Kramer thinks that the man had no idea. They built that facility a year ago and it cost a billion dollars and it’s supposed to be the safest place in the world, and we’ve just given him proof that the evidence in a high-profile case is being written like a
storybook by some black-helicopter-contractor outfit in Virginia with apparently free access to his shop. Dude went white.”
“And he said he’s going to drop the charges?”
Dylan made a little grimace. “All but one. He wants us to plead to one count possession of unauthorized material. It wouldn’t be a felony conviction. The sentence would be that Dad would have to sign a legal instrument saying he would never speak or write about the events.”
“Dad’s not going to do that. And if the prosecutor concedes that the evidence is fabricated, where’s the unauthorized material?”
“When the FBI interrogated him, Dad admitted to having installed on his personal laptop a copy of, I think it was, Adobe Creative Suite. That was software licensed for use by the school only.”
“You’re fucking joking with me, right? They can do that? They can ream a guy like they reamed Dad and then turn around and compel his silence?”
Dylan, who took care when speaking and who saw no reason to add to the scope of the trouble they were facing, said, “Let’s not worry about the them here, Leila. Or not at this moment, anyway. Let’s just worry about Dad, and what’s happening right now. Shouldn’t we take this offer? Plead to the bullshit count, and Dad walks away?”
A car went by. Jim Brenton and his severely autistic son from three houses down. Leila waved, and Jim gave her two honks, like you do when you’re supporting picketers. Dylan had told her that some neighbors were already keeping their distance and that an unknown man had yelled vile things at the house soon after the arrest. So the two honks made Leila want to weep with gratitude. Behind Jim Brenton’s car came one of those cute USPS mail jeeps with the right-hand drive. The mailman inside was better-looking than your average mailman. Leila waited until both vehicles were well past.
“You think he should take it, I know,” she said. “But, Dylan, he can’t walk back into that school without it being perfectly clear to everyone that he was completely exonerated, cleared of all charges. The gag-order part of this would kill him.”
“Maybe, Leila.” They were standing close to each other now, like conspirators, like siblings. “But the risk of the other course is we fight this and lose. Or it could be months or years, and then we have to take the same deal, or a worse one. So maybe Dad won’t be able to walk back into that school. I just want him walking.”
Leila began to object.
“I know. I know. I know. It’s a travesty of a mockery of a sham,” said Dylan. “But imagine. The case would be us saying, No, it’s not that a pedophile principal was making sicko collages out of the volleyball-trip pictures; it’s that a shadow-government frame shop is persecuting innocent Americans. It would be a tough sell, sis. The drive that Mystery Dude gave us is enough to beat this. I say let’s thank our stars and go home, because I don’t know that it’s enough to convince twelve content civilians that they’re living under a tyranny. Maybe that’s for another day, you know? Who knows, maybe that prosecutor will do the right thing and ferret this out.”
“You’re saying we should eat this? Let them get away with it?” She was checking his math, though, and saw that he was right, just in risk-to-Dad terms.
Dylan shrugged his shoulders, exhaled a thin stream of smoke. “Unless…” And he did this cool little rapping of the air, with his smoking knuckle.
“Unless what?” she said.
“Unless you can get your Dear Diary friends to hook us up with some more of the good shit.”
Chapter 21
Portland, Oregon
Leo slept soundly, and ludicrously late, happy to be in his own bed again, certain in his dreaming head that the world had sent him word. A girl in a Toyota. So when he finally roused himself—ten fifteen!—and raced downstairs and found Lola’s note and her absence, his world spun again. What utter bullshit. Leo was a light sleeper. The universe sends you a Lola Montes, and you let her creep out of your house while you snooze like a fool?
He sat very still in his kitchen, wondering what to do. For an hour. Then he made some coffee and thought about getting stoned. He pushed that thought away and thought some more about Lola, about why she had come, why she had left. And when a car he did not recognize pulled up to his house, Leo didn’t know whether to run toward it or away from it. But the footfall on his porch was no threat, nor was the knock at his door. It was Daisy.
“You wanna tell me what the fuck?” she said to him.
The next morning. Daisy woke him very early, barging into his room and saying, “Let’s go to that diner I saw by the freeway. We can write your contract there.” She shook him hard. His sisters had always been physical and executive with Leo. He didn’t mind. Big brothers hold your head underwater and drive their knees into your solar plexus and throw your turtle out the window; big sisters just dress you up and order you around a lot.
They walked to the Overlook Diner and sat at a vinyl-and-Formica four-top by the window. The freeway. That’s what it overlooks, Leo thought. He had wondered for years about the eponymous claim.
Daisy waited until they had coffees before them, and then she turned over her paper placemat and slid it across to him. She pushed over a pen and said, “Here. I’ll dictate it to you.”
Leo gave her a seriously? look. But his sister stone-faced him, so he took up the pen.
“‘I, Leo Crane,’” she said, “‘will not drink alcohol or smoke weed, starting now until forever, or at least until all my sisters are dead.’”
“Oh, come on, Daisy,” said Leo, lifting pen from placemat. Daisy only made a don’t interrupt gesture.
“‘I will attend an AA or an NA meeting every day. I will meet with Alice Waters twice a week—’”
“The chef?”
“No, not the chef, you asshole. She’s a therapist and an LCSW and she’s good people and she’s smart. Keep writing. ‘And I will see Larry Davis, prescribing psychiatrist, once a week. My sister Daisy is old friends with Alice and Larry both, from PA school, and she will totally check up on me, and with them, whether or not that’s ethical or whatever. I will speak by phone or Skype to at least one of my sisters every day, and I will accept every single call I receive from them.’”
“What if I’m in the shower or something?”
“‘Unless I am in the shower or something, in which case I will return the call promptly. I will not sit in my house by myself. I can journal but I cannot blog. I will keep away from conspiracists.’ That one’s important, Leo. Also this one: ‘I will find a job—’”
“Can you give me a few weeks on that?”
“‘—within three weeks, maybe with that nice friend of mine the carpenter who fired me six months ago.’”
“Gabriel? I don’t know. He was pretty pissed.”
“I talked to him. He said he’s willing to do it.”
Leo nodded okay. “What’s in this contract for me?” he asked.
“‘In return, my sisters will not make me go back to Quivering Pines or any other inpatient rehab facility—’”
“Or nuthouse of any kind.”
“‘—or nuthouse of any kind. Though, of course, if I go crazy again or can’t stay off the weed or the booze, my sister Daisy will be unable to plead my case anymore, and without Daisy advocating for me, I will be screwed.’ Because Rosemary totally thinks we should have brought you straight to a serious psych facility back east.”
“Wait. Is this part of the contract?” he asked.
“You don’t have to write that bit down,” she said. “But you get my point, right, Leo? This is the last bit of slack you get.”
He did get her point. From where his sister stood, he probably appeared to be loitering at that fork in the road between eccentric wanderer and mentally ill loser. Daisy was just trying to call to him from down the road she had chosen.
That being the case, Leo knew at once that he must concede at least some of the claims he had made earlier were delusional—like that Marilyn and Brand-New Day and the people hanging warning signs by the light
-rail tracks had been acting in concert and against him, because of his greatness. He knew that that was all nonsense, all bullshit; that was just bad genetic code; that was uncles.
But he also knew not to tell her the and yet part. And yet it turns out that he had been right about a lot of it; that there was a terrible plan afoot to collect and commoditize all our information; that SineCo was bad and was in cahoots with other bad guys, including his old friend Mark Deveraux; that not all facilities and institutions were what they seemed; that many were not, in fact, what they seemed.
He wanted his sister to see that he knew that he was lucky to be relieved of the self-spangled connectivity, the elation, the certainty. He didn’t even want them back. Truly. The plain old world was strange enough, turns out. What he wanted back was that girl. But when he imagined trying to convince Daisy of Lola’s role here, he saw that she’d probably end up saying something like I believe that you believe it, Leo.
No, the kinder thing here was not to make his sister worry any more than she was already legitimately worrying about his sanity and grip. She had enough on her plate. Everybody did. Groaning plates, all around.
He knew that Lola was real. He remembered putting his hand on her breastbone, remembered how little space she had occupied in the driver’s seat and on the mattress. And when the blanket had fallen: chin and neck and swale of clavicle and rise of breast and fall of rib. Anyway, he had kept her note. And she left a hair elastic on the white cliffs of his sink. He was wearing it on his wrist.
So he signed the contract. Daisy booked a flight home for three days later. She said she wanted to stick around to see that Leo still had what she called a basic set of life skills.
She woke him for seven a.m. walks and light breakfasts. She made checklists for him and taped them to his fridge beside his placemat contract. Walk. Breakfast. Meds. Meeting. Look for work. Clean big stupid house. Walk. Dinner. Sleep.
