by David Shafer
Daisy was keeping a very close eye on him, and she was bossy. But she was not unreasonable. Leo liked having her around, and he was allowed to give her a hard time in his way. “On the walks, I don’t have to carry those stupid little pink weights you carry, do I?”
And she to him. “No, you’ll probably get a workout cleaning this Richie Rich house of yours.”
Zinger. It wasn’t a Richie Rich house, though. She meant it was too big for one person. He had bought when the neighborhood was still rough.
Daisy drove him to his first session with Alice Waters, who turned out to be a totally uncreepy blue-spectacled Buddhist social worker. The next day Daisy drove him to his first session with Larry Davis, a bearded and besweatered old hippie who explained to Leo without condescension the pharmacology of and current theory on a drug called lamotrigine. He gave Leo his home and mobile numbers to use in the event of an adverse reaction.
Daisy didn’t have to drive him to his first AA meeting, because there was one a few blocks from his house, in a dingy building in a still-ungentrified patch of his neighborhood. The building announced itself as Promises—the word painted brightly across the pocked masonry of its facade. Leo had always assumed it was some sort of evangelical outlet, or maybe a bar for black people or for the kind of white people who felt able to walk into black bars. So he was embarrassed to discover, when he consulted his little meeting guide, that Promises was the opposite of a bar—it was a sober club—and that the addictions and afflictions that brought people in there were highly democratic. This was no Quivering Pines. This was folding tables with that sticker of wood grain—that, but peeling—and tubes of powdered creamer made from hooves, and all types of people. It skewed a bit rough, but it was as mixed a room as Leo had ever seen in Portland.
After his first meeting, he drank thin coffee with Len, a grizzled electrician who had appointed himself Leo’s sponsor. Len said Leo was clearly white-knuckling it and that he should Let Go and Let God.
Such meaningless advice. Not even noise, really. Leo wanted a new sponsor. Maybe he could break James out of Quivering Pines. Len said that Leo should try sharing in the meeting or talking to some people afterward; that he should try to tell the others what he was going through.
“You have to trust that there is some knowledge in the room,” said Len, pulling from a Pall Mall. “Knowledge that could benefit you. Like, you ain’t the first one been through this shit.”
Leo tried to take that on board. But as beautiful and strange as the stories here were, as real as the suffering was, these people’s predicaments were deeply unlike his own. This objection is said to be a form of denial called terminal uniqueness. The phrase was supposed to mean it was a false position. But a secret global network had sent a beautiful girl to involve him in a worldwide counterconspiracy. And then she’d asked him to blackmail an old friend, and when he’d said no, she’d left in the night and broke his heart. You tell that to the room.
He thought it could work—the meetings and the sit-ups and the attempts at prayer. The checklists and the granola and the lamotrigine.
But oh, how he wanted her back. The way she had made him feel; the way she had asked him straight, and told him straight; the way she had walked up the stairs.
He should forget about her, her wild claims of a secret world, her half nakedness, her having asked for his help. Yeah, right, he should forget about her, her wild claims of a secret world, her half nakedness, her having asked for his help.
Leo liked his sister’s regimen. Her lots-of-leafy-greens diet; her bed-before-eleven, rise-at-seven policy. And he had to agree that the morning walk was a good idea. It gave his brain a baseline for the day. Or maybe that was the lamotrigine. So the day after Daisy left, he called his friend Louis, the guy whose wife was a public defender, early in the morning and asked would he like to take a walk in the woods.
Louis picked him up in his ratty Mazda truck, his old dog Cola on the bench seat beside him. Leo squashed in beside the musty brown dog and the trio drove to Forest Park, across the river, up over the arched back of the Fremont Bridge.
“Hey, do me a favor,” said Leo, as they debouched at the trailhead. There were only a few other cars parked on the verge. “Leave your phone here, will you?”
“This more of your Gene Hackman conspiracy thing?” Louis asked him.
“Sure. We can call it that.”
Louis was a city government reporter at the best alt-weekly in Portland. Leo knew that his job required being discreet and dogged at the same time. He thought Louis might be a good resource for how a non-schizophrenic person would go about confirming the existence of a secret cyberplot and the online underground opposing it.
Louis let the dog off leash and she shed five years, dashed away into the green brush beside the trail. The two men walked behind her.
While Leo talked, Louis kept his hands in his pockets and his eyes on the trail ahead. He asked only a few questions. He was pushing the pace. Leo was breathing hard as he spoke. Cola coursed around them, a house dog returned to her element.
After a mile, Louis said, “I thought you decided all that stuff was delusional.”
Leo stopped there, where the trail offered a particularly nice view of distant industry. A heavily used bank of the Willamette was far below them, far enough below to look like it was from a storybook: train cars and brightly colored tanks and stacks, their grimy, carbon-economy purpose obscured by the distance, the view softened and Fenimore-Coopered by the trailside conifers in the foreground.
“Some of it was, some of it wasn’t,” said Leo.
“That’s convenient.”
“No, Louis, it’s very inconvenient, actually.”
Louis regarded the view, and then his friend. “Well, I can look into what you said about SineCo, I guess. I know a guy who does that kind of reporting.”
Yes. Someone to help him with this.
“You lost a dog?” called a man from the bank ten yards above them.
Louis turned quickly. “She’s not lost,” he said. “I’m right here.” He whistled for his dog. Cola sprang to go to him, but the man had her tight by the scruff of her neck and he yanked her back in midair. Cola yelped in pain and surprise.
“She’s got no collar,” said the man evenly. “Could be a stray.”
Louis moved toward his dog, and the man clamped down harder on her neck, pushing her into the ground. Louis stopped moving forward. He held up one hand to display leash and collar. “Easy now,” he said.
“That’s okay,” said the man brightly. “They got microchips, now, in these dogs.” He took what looked like a Node from the pocket of his too-heavy coat and held it scanner-style against Cola’s shaking shoulder blades.
“Yeah. Here it is. You Louis Hanson? Live on Northeast Twenty-Fifth Street? Two little girls in day care at Sunflower’s, on Killingsworth?”
Louis said nothing. Leo said nothing. The man gripped the dog.
Then Louis said carefully, “Yeah, that’s me.” The man let go of Cola. She raced to Louis, who slipped her collar on her and began walking quickly downhill. Leo stood rooted to the trail, looking at the man.
“Let’s go,” Leo heard Louis say, his voice weird with fear and urgency.
The man on the hill nodded at him, knowing, dismissive. “Yeah. Best be on your way, Crane.”
Louis was ashen and shaking on the drive back across town. Cola licked Leo wetly on the ear. Getting out of the little Mazda at his house, Leo said to Louis, “You forget about what I said, okay?”
“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m going to do, Leo,” said Louis, looking out the windshield. Then turning to look at his friend, he said, “You can understand that, right, Leo? My girls.”
“Perfectly.”
After that, Leo was more careful. He acted exactly like a man who was not trying to get to the bottom of something. Walk. Breakfast. Meds. Meeting. Look for work. Clean too-big house. Walk. Dinner. Sleep.
The watchers seemed to be e
verywhere. Or were those just random men, thick-coated and alone, nearby? They could be dads on the way home from work, guys heading back from the gym, a legitimate telephone repairman in a cherry picker across the intersection from Leo’s house.
The man buying one loaf of bread and a quart of milk behind him in line at the New Seasons could have been just that. But why wasn’t he using the express lane in the busy store? Maybe because this checker was hot. So after she rang him up, Leo said loudly, “Damn. Forgot something. Be right back.” He left one heavy bag of purchased groceries at the end of the station to attest to his return. He grabbed the other bag and walked back into the store’s aisles. Then he ducked quickly through Bulk and into Produce. He slipped on a squished grape, lost his balance, and felt the twenty lemons in his bag rumble weightless and almost spill. He caught himself and ducked through a portal made of hanging plastic strips, into the store’s offstage. Busy employees took little notice of him. He found an exit by the loading dock.
If that bread-and-milk buyer had been following him, he wasn’t anymore, Leo was certain. So he went to his local library and found a public computer in a carrel at the back. He spent an hour online.
That night Leo squeezed twenty lemons and soaked sheets of raggy paper in their juice.
He’d tried this once, at Brand-New Day. Well, not this, exactly. He’d let the children paint with lemon juice on a big roll of white butcher paper; they’d used fat ink brushes. The lemon juice dried to nothing, and he rolled up the work again. Then he brought the paper outside and unrolled it in a bright sunny corner of the OPZ. In minutes, the sunlight exposed the lemon-juice figures on the long roll: hand turkeys and love hearts and dinosaurs in proud, confident strokes; misspelled names a foot tall. The children cheered wildly.
This was a more delicate operation. But after a few hours of experimenting with types of paper, length of soak, and drying time, Leo had produced the result he needed. Then he had to figure out how to increase the impression force on the little electric Smith Corona that he’d picked up at a yard sale. He found the knob that adjusted that. Then he slipped one of his lemon papers into the typewriter’s platen, sandwiched it between two plain white sheets, and wrote a letter to Lola Montes.
Chapter 22
Los Angeles
Leila was driving downtown to have dinner with Roxana at her office. She was late, because the 405 was crawling. A huge white box van—Stan’s Sewerscopes: We Look Down There—had been behind her since at least Balboa. Was it the van that was making her nervous? Or was she nervous because she had decided to ask for Roxana’s help?
Roxana was still frosty about Leila’s unexplained delay in getting home. Big sisters like to be kept in the loop. Leila hadn’t wanted to get into the whole thing with Roxana, because where Dylan was skeptical, Roxana would be scathing. Plus, Leila hadn’t gotten her alone yet. Roxana lived in a spare and highly modified Echo Park bungalow. She mostly went between home and whatever office, driven by her mobility assistant and body man, a now-old Pole named Eddie who had been at her side for seventeen years.
Roxana was born a phocomelus. That is, she was born with phocomelia syndrome. That is, Roxana had no arms. Her first years, in Iran, she was a travesty. Take the arms off a baby and what’s left looks so much like a fish that Mariam’s friends started avoiding her—most were saddened and secretly disgusted by the daughter. The market is the grown woman’s school yard, and Mariam found herself alone buying dates, buying butter, sipping tea.
When the Majnouns escaped to America, it got better. There were programs for Roxana; there was help. Iranian refugees were cool for a while there, in academia. Cyrus earned a master’s degree in education, and the Majnouns met people eager to show support for the exiled family. Grants and loans paid for home modifications; other costs were defrayed or subsidized in kind, mysterious ways.
And when Roxana’s staggering linguistic and computational skills began to emerge, the people who had helped felt vindicated, and they helped more. The circle of benefactors grew. Now Roxana was a prodigy, not a travesty. There were all sorts of scholarships for an armless girl who at eleven had learned to speak fluent Ojibwa from a documentary on PBS. Magazines and TV news shows even called, and Mariam and Cyrus said, Yes, of course, run a profile, but we’re sorry, no photos, which made most of the magazines and all of the TV news shows go away.
Leila hadn’t even noticed her sister’s missing arms until around age seven. Then one day at the corner store, Roxana balanced on one leg like a shorebird and used her toes to count her change at the candy rack. Gross, Dad, look! said a boy. And his dad yanked his hand, and in a flash Leila understood that Roxana’s armlessness was a problem. It was grotesque. Leila had four stuffed unicorns, but all her dolls had arms. Her sister was the only one. Leila glared daggers at the boy, then went home and cut the arms off her dolls.
Roxana did a steely job of ignoring the gapes and gasps, and she also ignored the limitations it was assumed she had. At eighteen, a junior at Cal, she announced that it was her intention to become a doctor. No one had the balls to say to her, But you have no arms, so she pursued that for a few years. As it turned out, Roxana’s lack of interpersonal skills posed more of a problem than her lack of arms. When an MD career was ruled out (“Well, you can’t really lay hands on people, now, can you?” said Dylan one Thanksgiving), Roxana moved to research genetics, and then to research oncology. In these labs and faculties, she was generally ten years younger than her closest-in-age colleague. From oncology, Roxana moved into some sort of mathematical-linguistic crossover research that Leila had never been able to grasp. The last time Leila had visited Roxana at work, she’d been at some laid-back cubicle-based research facility in Pasadena—Leila remembered a golden retriever wandering the halls and a lunch bag in the break-room fridge that said I am Jim’s sandwich. If you are not Jim, don’t eat me.
Roxana had a new job now, and Leila assumed from the company’s name that it was in some kind of astronomy facility. As it turned out, though, it was in a huge, windowless building that Leila could see minutes before she found a way to reach it. It looked like it was right there, but then the exit to it was suddenly four lanes over, and you’d have to be a test pilot to cross them in time. Leila pulled all the way around in a tedious loop and made another pass, this time making the exit. The maneuver also allowed her to shake Stan’s Sewerscopes, which was a relief.
She parked beside a freeway pier, in the thick shadow of its rumbling deck, and spent ten minutes looking for a front door to the mammoth building. She walked by it twice before she noticed a small sign beside an otherwise unmarked door that read LA County Large Array Facility Visitors Must Wear ID at All Times.
Leila waited at the front desk for Roxana to collect her. There was only one wooden bench in the lobby. Nothing else. Not a magazine or a potted palm or a wastebasket. Leila sat on the bench, the pleasing heft of a white deli bag on her lap: chicken salad sandwiches and pickles, Roxana’s favorite. It was quiet in the desolate lobby, so quiet that Leila could hear the small hydraulic hiss of the receptionist adjusting her desk chair.
Her sister arrived wearing what looked like a desk lamp with a huge whisk on the end of it, secured to her trunk with straps. It was one of the beta-version prosthetics she sometimes wore, test-driving them for a prosthetics-inventing friend. She did it as a favor: no robotic arm would ever give Roxana anything close to the grace and functionality she achieved with her dexterous legs and feet.
“These came for you, Dr. Majnoun,” said the receptionist, and she held up a worn manila interoffice envelope as well as a USPS Express envelope. She handed these to Roxana’s robotic-whisk-clamper thing without clumsiness or embarrassment.
“What’s with the no-signage and why’d they take my phone?” Leila asked Roxana as they walked to a bank of elevators.
“There’s a fifty-tesla magnet on the third floor of this building,” said Roxana. “For the Plasma Working Group. And I think they get a lot of Pentagon
money, so the whole building has to be secured.”
“Wow, a fifty-tesla magnet, huh?” said Leila. She was imagining a gigantic horseshoe-shaped magnet in a vaulted laboratory, little lightning bolts zapping from its feet, attracting distant paper clips.
Leila hadn’t understood Roxana’s work in twenty years and knew only that Roxana now worked in a field called control and dynamical systems and that she’d spent the past five years “modeling language” and that two years ago she’d won a lucrative prize that nonscientists have never even heard of and that three Czech mathematicians in their sixties were totally supposed to win that year. Since then, Roxana had been operating in extremely-smart-people world, a world in which her severe physical handicap was no professional impediment. Her colleagues were in far-flung learning capitals, screens away, married to desks and number clusters like she was. Her job required neither arms nor tact.
And so the girl whom the neighbors told the parents to throw out when she was born now worked in the upper atmosphere of the world’s best research institutions.
They ate their sandwiches in Roxana’s little office, which was all screens and tablets and specialized furniture. Also a lot of cacti. No photographs. Roxana didn’t eat in front of anyone but her family and a few lifelong friends. Even the well-meaning and well-trained couldn’t help but stare, and once or twice people in restaurants had asked loudly to be sat well away from her.
But in fact Roxana was so graceful that Leila, in her sister’s presence, felt her own arms were excess appendages, that Roxana was a swan and she was a spider.
“I wanted to say thank you, Leila,” said Roxana a few bites into her sandwich.
What was this? Roxana didn’t exactly rain thank-yous. Leila couldn’t remember the last one.
“For what?”
“Dylan said you know the people who got us the proof that Dad’s computer had been tampered with. So thank you for that. If that’s why you were delayed coming home, I’m sorry I was a jerk about it.”
