Now and Again

by Charlotte Rogan

  After giving Martin the information he wanted, Le Roy told him a little about how the website had started and how the captain felt responsible for Pig Eye and the others even though it wasn’t his fault.

  “Whose fault was it?” asked Martin.

  “That’s something I think about too,” said Le Roy. “What if the world is just a giant computer simulation? What if the grand master isn’t God, but a computer geek at his keyboard who just wanted to find out what would happen if we took out Saddam? Maybe he also wants to see what happens if we bomb Iran or North Korea or let the polluters run amok. Or what if he makes half the people warlike or hyper-religious or a combination of the two and the other half, you know, all goody-goody and passive. Or if he gives all of the money to a handful of people and everybody else has shit.”

  “Hunh,” said Martin. “Cool.”

  Just then E’Laine and the single mother came in with bags of groceries. Le Roy had forgotten E’Laine had come to visit for a few days. He was glad to see her, but the gladness was more like satisfaction, the kind a person felt when problems were solved and blanks filled in. Like if he had been wondering where E’Laine was, now he’d know. “There’s E’Laine!” he said, marking the instant a tiny gap closed up inside him.

  “We’re cooking for the guys tonight,” said E’Laine after shaking hands with Martin. “You’re welcome to stay for dinner if you like.”

  “Thanks. I’d like to meet everyone involved with this project. I’m hoping they can help me with my article, and in return, I can help them publicize the site. The more publicity, the more traffic, and the more traffic, the more donations—that sort of thing.”

  “Sure,” said E’Laine. “I’ll set another place.”

  Le Roy swiveled his chair to see E’Laine. He thought about how his chair could be turning on its axle, or it could be that with a mere push of his foot, he’d sent the entire universe spinning around his chair. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yeah.”

  Martin said he had an errand to run, so Le Roy got back to work. He put on his headphones. He turned up the volume to the point where the room went away and it was just him and the screen and the liquid slip of the keys under his fingers. He liked to tap in time to the music, which made it seem like he was the one playing the keyboard, and if the train just happened to come through as it did now, all the better for the bass. He entered another line of code and felt like a master of the universe, even if his universe was still small. Once he got tired of the website, he’d try something bigger. He wasn’t joking about simulations, which were a combination of games and real life and were starting to get some press.

  He kept his eyes on the computer screen, but the sides of his face could feel E’Laine walking toward the door with Martin. Probably she was only seeing him out, but maybe she was going with him. E’Laine had a mind of her own. He knew he could tap and tap and he couldn’t keep her from going with the reporter if that’s what she wanted to do. The tiny gap threatened to open up again. Then she was waving—he couldn’t tell if it was to catch his attention or to say good-bye to the reporter. He felt a slight unraveling in his chest as if he wanted to tell her something, but then he typed another line of code and E’Laine was gone. Martin Fitch was gone. Everything was gone but the screen in front of him until Danny came back with some books under his arm and a few minutes after that the captain and Kelly returned with the supplies. Danny made sure everything was in order—the tape on the tape shelf and the coffee on the coffee shelf—while Kelly answered the phone when it rang, and the thing that had clicked out of place when E’Laine went out the door with Martin clicked back in until Kelly started shouting at the captain about something and Le Roy tuned him out.

  In his simulation, Le Roy would make a world where everything was in its place, at least at the beginning—at least at what he thought of as ground zero or the big bang. He could set the parameters so that if Kelly or Danny went out the door, they were guaranteed to come back in again. That way, the people in the simulation who depended on Kelly and Danny would feel secure the way he felt now that his friends were back and the supplies were put away. But then he thought, What would that prove? The point of a simulation wasn’t to keep things static. The point was to shake things up. He’d like to see what happened if an alien race attacked those people who were feeling all safe—ha! Or if the icebergs melted all at once or if computerized robots started to make decisions for themselves. Like if the rich people somehow got the poor people to vote against their own interests and if the poor people ever figured it out. Or what if they were in a simulation now and just didn’t know it—a simulation within a simulation, he thought. Now that would be a project worth working on. Now that would be fucking cool.

  10.2 Penn Sinclair

  After Fitch’s article was published in the New York Times, leaked documents started to pour in to the site’s secure drop box from anonymous sources.

  “Shee-it,” said Kelly. “Who’s sending us all this stuff?”

  “Martin says we don’t want to know their names,” Penn told him. “It’s better for everybody that way.”

  Le Roy increased site security and developed a network of volunteers to help with encryption and document authentication. Some of the documents needed to be redacted, so they developed another network for that.

  “We all know Dolly’s name,” said Danny. “Does that put her in some kind of danger?”

  “She’s not the insider who stole the document,” said Penn. “Outsiders are safe.”

  “What about us?” asked Danny.

  “We’re journalists,” said Kelly. “Journalists are protected by the First Amendment.”

  “But probably not leakers,” said Penn. “Fitch says that the prevailing view is that they aren’t protected, even though some scholars disagree. Everything in this arena is changing pretty fast, and the law is far from settled. But the bottom line is that the less we know about the people sending us this stuff the better.”

  The site’s email box was even busier than the drop box. One soldier wrote anonymously of participating in the Haditha massacre, where twenty-four unarmed Iraqis were shot at close range. Others wrote about being advised to carry drop weapons in case they killed the wrong person. Soldiers wrote about indiscriminately rounding up all able-bodied men and sending them to Abu Ghraib for processing, and interrogators at Abu Ghraib wrote about being overwhelmed and undertrained. There was footage of an Apache helicopter firing on men armed with what turned out to be cameras and more footage where a wedding party was the target of attack. In the forum section of the site, the soldiers asked each other how you could tell the right person from the wrong one, and the answer was you couldn’t.

  They wrote about bellying up mountains through storms of artillery fire and about taking out snipers and disarming bombs and providing clean water and helping the local businesses that sprang up in areas that had been rife with sectarian violence, and then they wrote about how the sectarian violence crept back in as soon as the soldiers left.

  Political operatives wrote about burying information in the run-up to the war and about inserting sentences into official speeches. A Vietnam vet sent a documentary of the Winter Soldier Investigation, which was intended to show that war crimes in Vietnam were a direct result of official policy, and another one told about how he’d been present at the Gulf of Tonkin—no torpedoes had been fired at U.S. warships that day, which meant a deadly and divisive conflict was started on a lie.

  There were stories about how one third of veterans from the First Gulf War suffered from Gulf War Syndrome and how they were still fighting for treatment seventeen years later and how much of the debate centered on what to call the mysterious constellation of symptoms that was now starting to affect a new generation of returning soldiers and how what you called it had implications for how seriously it was taken. There were stories about how exposure to Vietnam-era Agent Orange was only getting official attention now that it was too late to help the men and women who had
suffered from multiple myeloma or soft-tissue sarcoma or cancers of the lungs or larynx or trachea and finally died. There were stories of benefits delayed or denied, of soldiers who fought for their country overseas and then had to fight the bureaucracy at home.

  There were statistics too: 148 combat casualties in the First Gulf War; 145 noncombat deaths. And explanations of the statistics: official figures for soldier deaths only counted those who died on the ground, not the ones who died on the C-130 taking them to the hospital or the ones who died after they landed in Germany or the ones who died at Walter Reed Medical Center or the ones who died a few years later from wounds or illnesses contracted during the war or the ones who waited eight or ten or fifteen years to die of worsening symptoms that were variously attributed to vaccinations, oil well fires, pesticide use, bacteria in the soil, anti–nerve agent pills, solvents, metal-laden dust, depleted uranium weapons, and infectious disease. Of 694,000 soldiers who served in Desert Storm, 115,000 would soon be dead. Of a group of eight friends, only two remained.

  A soldier wrote to say, “Why are you doing this? People don’t want to know all the risks because then no one would do anything.”

  But Kelly kept passing the stories on to Le Roy and Le Roy kept blasting them up on the site and Martin Fitch kept advising them on which documents to release to the public and E’Laine came more and more often to do odd jobs and the single mother was there almost every evening with a hot, home-cooked meal. Now and then one of the men would say, “Man, this thing is really taking off,” but mostly they concentrated on the daily tasks, with Penn feeling good that the other men needed him less and less, because wasn’t the whole point to set them up on their own? When he couldn’t sleep, he tramped through the neighborhood on patrol. Once, he scared off someone who was trying to jimmy a lock on a building down the street. Another time, he chased two men from the shadows, gaining on them as they cut through an empty lot and circled back toward the river. He was running easily, his shadow catching up with him when he passed a streetlight before disappearing in the dark. The closer he got, the more infuriated their heavy, labored breathing made him. “You shouldn’t go on a mission you’re not ready for,” he shouted.

  When the slower of the two men tripped, Penn made the decision to keep after the faster one, sensing weakness there too, and panic. With panic, he knew from experience, came mistakes. The man took to the street where the running was easier, which gave Penn a further advantage because the path was predictable and because he could save a few feet on the curve. When his quarry ducked left, headed across a parking lot and toward a forested hillside that dropped toward the river, Penn knew he had won—because of a chain-link fence that was hidden in the tangle, which meant the man would have to retrace his steps back up between the parked cars to the road, and because he was faltering while Penn stayed strong. Penn hung back. It was better to tackle a spent man than one with some kick left in him. As predicted, the man cut up the embankment toward the highway. Penn turned on one last burst of speed, and in another minute he had the target on the ground.

  “Okay, mister, okay.”

  When he saw it was only a teenaged kid, the anger drained out of him and he said with more violence in his voice than he felt, “This is my neighborhood. You mess with it, you mess with me.”

  “Okay,” the kid said again.

  His hat had fallen off. Penn picked it up and held it out in a gesture of conciliation. “Where do you live?” he asked.

  The boy waved vaguely at the surrounding streets of ramshackle houses.

  “Give me the exact address,” said Penn.

  The boy gave it to him.

  “I’ll tell you what. You bring your friend here tomorrow night at eleven and I won’t tell the police about you. I need recruits for my patrol.”

  “What patrol?” asked the kid.

  “You’ll find out tomorrow. You’ll start off as grunts, but you can work your way up.”

  In February, Colonel Falwell contacted Penn to say he was using his time stateside to check on his wounded troops. “The families said some of them are with you.”

  “Yes sir,” said Penn. “Some of them are.”

  “I’d like to touch base with them. Do they want to come down here to Washington?”

  “We were there in the fall,” said Penn. “It didn’t go so well, but I’ll ask them.”

  “And if that’s not possible, you might make the trip yourself. You live in Connecticut if I remember correctly.”

  Instinct told Penn to let the misinformation stand, so he said, “Yes sir, I do.”

  On the day of the meeting, Penn set off when it was still dark. It was peaceful in the car. He hadn’t been alone for weeks, and he liked listening to the whoosh of tires on the damp road and watching the light come up and the scenery change. He liked seeing the small businesses pop up as he approached a town and the neat suburban lawns unspool into farmland as he left it. He liked pulling into a service station and smelling the mix of gasoline and coffee and saying, “Morning” to the station attendants in their neat gray uniforms with their first names stitched in red script on white canvas patches and knowing just that about them, nothing else. He wondered what Falwell would say to him, if he knew about the protest or the website. But something about the closed capsule of the car protected him from the birds of worry, so he fiddled with the radio as he drove and mostly he thought of nothing, just let impressions flow over him: a hill with fruit trees, an abandoned baseball field, a middle-aged woman on a bicycle, a man in a cap and faded jeans who had been pulled over by the police.

  But now and then one of the worries would peck through and he would think about Louise and all of the people he had let down and about how, if things kept going the way they had been, they were likely to cover their expenses with donations alone, without tapping into any more of the seed money from Penn’s trust fund. And just that week, Kelly had said he had thought of a way for the site to turn a profit.

  “I’ve applied for nonprofit status,” Penn had told him.

  “Yeah, sure,” said Kelly. “But what if I could find some advertisers in addition to the donors?”

  Penn had been noncommittal, but now the word “profit” rattled around in his head like unexploded rounds. He should be happy the men were pulling in different directions because that meant he had accomplished what he had set out to do, so why was he so bothered by it? He supposed that alongside his desire to help them was an equally strong desire to prove himself as a leader, and what kind of a leader was he if his men weren’t following enthusiastically along behind?

  Just after the turnoff to Annapolis and Fort Meade, the highway cut through a thick stand of trees. He tried to imagine that he was lost in a primeval forest, that all anybody needed to live was a simple cabin with a rough pine floor and a plot of land with a river running through it and a few tools and some farm animals and of course a rugged inner core, but with cars and semis whizzing by, it was hard to hold on to the vision.

  Anyway, he thought as he pulled off at a rest stop for another cup of coffee and a piss, there was no denying the fact that Kelly was developing a knack for business and that Le Roy was a whiz with computers and that Danny could go for an entire day without hitting the deck when the train went through. In that regard, the website was a complete success. It was Penn himself who lacked a real direction, and in the back of his mind he was hoping his meeting with Falwell would help him with that.

  10.3 Gordon Falwell

  Falwell shuffled through the stack of reports on his desk—the one that said ten of eighteen benchmarks had been met in Iraq and the one that said eleven of the benchmarks hadn’t been met and that only three had been completed. He found the report he was working on, and then he picked up a pen and changed “modest” to “significant.” He changed “trained” to “empowered,” and in front of “leadership” he wrote “committed and determined.” Fuck the benchmarks. Was there a benchmark for understanding the enemy? Was there one for unit rea
diness and self-sacrifice and morale? Was there one for showing that Americans wouldn’t put up with crazy fucking shit? “Unmistakable signs of progress,” he wrote. “High levels of local cooperation and trust.” The counterinsurgency was working. They were definitely winning hearts and minds.

  Falwell was in Washington to provide input for an operational assessment and, if all went well, to be recommended for a promotion and to see someone about a persistent pain in his gut and a worrisome rattling in his chest. To top it off, now one of his after action reports was being called into question on the Internet. Miller, his old NCO, had brought it to his attention, and if certain other people saw it, it could torpedo his career. He could only surmise he had Captain Sinclair to thank for drawing attention to the inconsistencies. Sinclair was the one who had first written up the IED incident, and he was the one with the guilty conscience. Any report depended on the person writing it, as well as on the freshness of the memories and on biases and agendas the writer might not even know he held. A reasonable man could argue that Sinclair’s version of events was less accurate than the more measured official version, but the colonel didn’t want to have to make that case. Things were muddied enough without going down some he-said-she-said rabbit hole. Falwell wasn’t angry so much as irritated. Mightily irritated. And, to be honest, his feelings were a little hurt. When he’d altered the report, he’d been looking out for Sinclair’s interests as much as for his own.

  Once, back when he himself had been a captain, he’d led a tank company in the wrong direction. Visibility had been next to impossible due to hundreds of burning oil fields. He’d had to make a split-second decision, and he had called it wrong. The lessons learned were many: to listen to his subordinates, to take a moment even when all hell was breaking loose, to realize that mistakes came with the territory in any pressured situation. Most important of all, he had learned that the reaction of a superior could foster learning and renew confidence, which is exactly what his commanding officer had done when he had called Falwell into his office and said, “You’ll get ’em next time.” That was what had been done for him and what he had tried to do in saving Sinclair from the consequences of his overly emotional report.