Reports on the Internet Apocalypse

by Wayne Gladstone

  Margo looked at me, but not with sympathy. Maybe she didn’t want me to think there was anything about my life to be sorry for, but there was also another possibility. Jeeves might have been putting our plan in motion before we ever explained it to him. And why not? Certainly a man as smart as Jeeves was capable of thinking any thought we could. Even more, if Margo were right, and Hamilton really wanted to be me, he might have even sought Jeeves out himself.

  “Y’know, back in L.A.,” Jeeves said. “Gladstone once told an audience he wasn’t the Internet Messiah. Instead, the Messiah was all of us. Because any one of us could wear that hat. And so with that in mind, I want to take care of something.”

  A young female staffer holding a fedora emerged from behind the curtain and handed it off to Jeeves.

  “Hamilton Burke,” Jeeves said, “I hereby dub you the Internet Messiah!” He placed the fedora on Burke’s head like a crown, and the cheers were deafening.

  It was too much. No one was looking for me, but I felt I was back in the middle of everything and if something went wrong there was now a frenzied army ready to tear me apart out of love or hate or both. I wanted to leave, but I stayed to make sure Jeeves was still my friend. I wanted to see something that would let me leave without all the fear I was carrying. And then it happened. Right as Burke was straightening his fedora and smiling, Jeeves grabbed his hand and held it over both their heads.

  “The Internet Messiah!” he shouted, and raised his other hand too before pumping their embrace in the air. The crowd grew somehow louder still and that old Carly Simon song came on. Hamilton turned to exit with his music, but Jeeves wouldn’t let go. “The Internet Messiah!” he kept screaming, and holding and holding and holding his hand.

  Report 9

  There was no one in the parked car outside my place, so either the agent was on break or already in my apartment. These guys didn’t fuck around. So as I walked back to my apartment from Northern Boulevard, I decided I could do a better job of feigning surprise from a NSA visit if I picked up a few sliders from White Castle along the way.

  I could smell Dunican’s brand of cigarette, Camel Lights, before I even turned on my lights, but I still did my best to look surprised when I saw him sitting in my dining room.

  “Patrick!” I said, dropping my mail to the floor and swallowing the remains of my slider with far too much effort.

  “Hello, Aaron,” he said. “Hope you don’t mind, but y’know, I don’t have a toilet in my car and I wasn’t sure when you’d be home. It was just easier this way. Plus your locks are bullshit.”

  “Not at all, Pat,” I said. “What’s a little breaking and entering between friends?”

  He put his cigarette out in my grandmother’s candy dish.

  “Besides, Pat. I don’t really have anything anyone would want to steal. Y’know, government salary and all.…”

  “Not even that,” he said, because Dunican was precisely that kind of asshole. At least he wasn’t wearing his aviators, at night, in a darkened room.

  I sat across from him at my round dining-room table. It was my father’s. Dark, heavy wood and legs that were slightly too long. It made anyone under six feet look a little silly and Dunican was about five-nine.

  “Yeah, tell me again why I was let go,” I said.

  “Well, you released a terrorist. Twice. Right?” he said.

  “You mean the terrorist who you announced, just last week, was not a terrorist and is no longer under investigation?”

  “Well, that was last week, not six months ago,” he said, and I think I may have sneered. Whatever my face did, it felt good. “Don’t be like that,” he continued. “Why do you think I’m here? We all know you fell on your sword. You did it for the agency like a good soldier. Everyone knows you’re one of the good ones.”

  “You didn’t say that when you fired me. You didn’t say much of anything.”

  “Well, that’s the gig, right? Discretion is key.” I didn’t say a word, and he continued on with his peace offering. “Your only sin, as far as I’m concerned was that you were in a position to be fired. Someone had to be blamed, and you just didn’t do a good enough job of making sure it wasn’t you.”

  “That’s sweet, Pat. So what brings you here besides pissing in my toilet and putting a cigarette out in my granny’s candy dish?”

  “I thought that was obvious,” he said. “We’d like you to come back.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Call it a six-month sabbatical,” he said. “You’ve earned it. The blowback has died down. No one gives a shit about Gladstone anymore, and we’d like you back.”

  “No one cares about Gladstone?”

  “Old news,” Patrick said.

  “Well, Pat, you must know I’ve been to Australia, right? You’re the NSA, you know where I’ve traveled.”

  “OK, correction, Aaron. No one cares about Gladstone except you. Did you find him, by the way?”

  That was the question I’d been waiting for. “No, I didn’t find him,” I said, “I went over there, but I ended up being a tourist.”

  “You don’t say?” he said.

  “Yep. Saw the Sydney Opera House and everything. Did you know it’s covered? There’s glass over those shells.”

  “Come home, Aaron. We need you.”

  “I’m not going back to L.A.,” I said.

  “We don’t want you to,” he replied. “You were in L.A. because of Gladstone. The NSA is done with you. Frankly, they may be done with me soon too, and I’ll be back to the bureau. The Apocalypse is ending. Slowly. Come back to the FBI like the old days.”

  I leaned back in my chair and put my hat on the table. Dunican offered his hand. “Whaddya say?”

  “Can I take a week to think about it?”

  “Sure, sure. I’m here because I respect you. No pressure. You’ve had six months. What’s one more week? Is there anything I can answer for you? Y’know, not as your boss, just man to man?”

  I took Pat tightly by the hand and sandwiched it with my other. “No,” I said, “I just have to think if I want to work with such a fucking asshole,” I said. Then I smiled, because I had to, and he laughed for the same reason.

  Day 425

  Margo had asked me what it felt like to be home and I couldn’t answer. Another day did little to help that. Everything was too quick, too big, too bright, and I was still just a spectator. Even worse, I’d be leaving New York as soon as I’d arrived.

  After Central Park, I needed to get away from Hamilton and his angry horde. Jeeves had either betrayed me or put our plan into action before we even delivered it, but both were too intense for me to accept in that moment. I pulled Margo onto a downtown local train still comforted by the thought that no one can get you when you don’t stay in one place. I put the time to good use, reading Rowsdower’s reports as we crept downtown, learning more about this new version of the man Margo had told me about. He seemed somehow both tougher and more fragile than I could have known, and I hoped his crush on Margo wouldn’t get in the way of us being actual friends one day.

  As we neared the end of the line, I wondered about procrastinating further by riding back uptown. But somewhere after Rector, she just put her head on my shoulder, and from the reflection in the window opposite us, I could tell she was smiling. Her eyes were closed and she wasn’t worrying about me or what came next. All she was doing was feeling my support. As we slowed toward South Ferry, I tucked a tiny bit of hair behind her ear and whispered, “It’s time to go, baby.”

  Outside, the big blue letters for the Staten Island Ferry stood above a terminal of glass and steel, and they still looked like a sign at the entrance of a carnival ride. I took Margo to the only bar on Stone Street not filled with financial douchebags, owing to its lack of both TVs and tube-topped bartenders. I wasn’t drinking, but I wanted her to try the fried pickles. Rowsdower was right. She was the kind of person who could have a five-minute conversation about a tomato, and this was the most interesting
culinary thing I had to offer. After all, the Growler did their fried pickles as wedges, not slices.

  I still wasn’t ready to talk about Jeeves. I was just so happy being on an honest-to-goodness date with Margo that everything else seemed like a distraction. We sat at a high-top table against the wall, and I flipped through Rowsdower’s reports while sneaking glances at an L.A. girl who made me feel more at home than any of the familiar landmarks.

  “I gotta ask you a question,” I said while she sipped a vodka soda with lime. “I get why you had my letters in your suitcase, but why did you have photocopies of your letters?”

  “That’s weird, huh?” she asked.

  “A bit, yeah.”

  “I dunno,” she said. “Maybe I wanted our letters to be together if we couldn’t be.”

  I didn’t say anything, and, instead, I just kept making my way to the end of Rowsdower’s reports.

  “You’re not buying that?” Margo asked.

  “Not really, no.”

  The pickles came and Margo was excited to note their wedge cut.

  “I told you, baby. Only the best.” I watched her try one, and then I said, “I think maybe you weren’t quite ready to let those letters go.”

  “Two things,” she replied. “One: I did let them go. I mailed them. And two: damn, these pickles are good.”

  “They are,” I said, stabbing one with a two-pronged wooden fork. “But I’m not sure keeping copies counts as ‘letting go.’”

  “Well, if we still had the Internet,” she said, “wouldn’t what I sent you still be there in my Sent box?”

  “It would, and I’m not sure that changes anything.” We were silent for a moment and that was OK. Each of us had too much respect for the other to argue too strenuously for anything less than fully formed ideas. “I think I’m ready to talk about Jeeves now,” I said finally. “That endorsement’s bullshit, right? He’s only doing exactly what we were going to ask him to?”

  “Well, you know him better, but he certainly seemed to be grabbing Hamilton tight.”

  “Yeah, except there was one thing he said that stuck out. Sounded weird.”

  “The stuff about you walking on water or looking for porn?” she asked, popping another pickle.

  “Yes! Wasn’t that just kind of off and mean?”

  A young woman sitting behind me, sporting oversized glasses and insanely manicured eyebrows stopped the waitress to ask what music was playing. The waitress looked for the bartender, but I’d heard this iPod playlist traveling through the bar’s sound system countless times. “It’s ‘These Eyes’ by the Guess Who,” I said, and she replied, “Thank you,” which was kind, considering she meant, “Holy fuck, how incredibly old are you?”

  “Are you going to keep playing it?” she asked the waitress, “because, I forgot my headphones today and it’s getting me a little crazy.” She had her Mac out alongside her salad and some red wine.

  “Well, it’s a playlist,” the waitress offered, “so maybe you’ll like the rest of the songs better?”

  “What’s next?” she asked.

  I was pretty sure it was Rodriguez from the Searching for Sugar Man soundtrack, but I didn’t have the heart to tell her.

  “Maybe Jeeves was sending a message to us,” Margo asked, doing a better job of ignoring the patron. “Referencing something from your journal?”

  “Well, there was certainly enough porn in it,” I said. “The Rule 34 Club? That’s down the street. We could check it out?”

  “Is it?”

  “Yeah, Beaver Street,” I said, and laughed. “Just realized that. How appropriate.”

  “But it wasn’t just the porn,” Margo said. “There was that walking-on-water reference too. Maybe something to do with Trinity Church, where Alexander Hamilton’s buried? That’s in the book and around here too, right?”

  “Yeah, but…”

  Suddenly, Rodriguez came on, and it wasn’t what our friend was hoping for.

  “No thank you,” she said, dropping cash on the table, and I turned around to see if I was missing something. “Remind me to never leave my apartment without headphones again.”

  “Poor thing,” Margo said.

  “Yeah, finish your pickles,” I said. “I think I know where we’re going.”

  “Off to the Rule 34 Club to request a tone-deaf, twentysomething with on-fleek eyebrows?” Margo offered.

  “Oh stop it,” I replied. “No. It’s the reference to walking on water and buying porn. In the book, remember, there’s that newspaper stand on Water and Wall?”

  “Man, Jeeves is smart.”

  “Annoyingly so,” I said. “Let’s go. And if you’re good, I’ll pick you up a copy of Inches.”

  * * *

  “You want me to go first?” Margo asked as we walked up Stone toward Water.

  “It’s fine,” I replied. “No one knows I’m here. If anything, they’ll be expecting Rowsdower.”

  We got to the intersection at Wall Street and the newsstand was still there. And just like a year earlier, it was flooded with hard-copy porn, as the Internet had yet to make a reliable return. I looked around for some further clue.

  “What are we looking for?” Margo asked.

  “That!” I said, and pointed to a bench at an office building across the street. Tobey was sitting outside, and reading one of several magazines he seemingly just purchased.

  We crossed Water, and Margo sat alone at the bench opposite Tobey, crossing her legs provocatively enough for him to put his smut down for a moment. Meanwhile, I snuck up behind him, covering his eyes and whispering in his ear, “Six Degrees of Stanley Tucci. Steel Magnolias. Go!”

  “Gladstone?” he asked, and I growled, “Answer or you’re dead.”

  Tobey started to panic. “Uh, OK, Steel Magnolias, uh Dolly Parton! She was in Rhinestone with Sylvester Stallone. Stallone was in Bananas with Woody Allen. Woody Allen was in Deconstructing Harry with Stanley Tucci!”

  “Fuck, you did it in three,” I said, and took my hands off his eyes.

  “Gladstone!” he shouted, and turned around to hug me over the bench.

  Then Margo came up behind him and put her hands over his eyes. “First of all, use your inside voice when saying ‘Gladstone,’” she ordered. “Also, don’t get too excited. You should have picked Julia Roberts from Steel Magnolias, and then gone to the Pelican Brief with she and Tucci. One step.”

  “I think I just came,” Tobey said, and that did a good job of getting Margo to take her hands off him.

  He turned around to see who had just bested him, and upon catching a full look of her he added, “And again.”

  “Margo,” I said, “this is my sexually immature friend, Brendan Tobey. I apologize on his behalf.”

  “No apologies necessary. I understand that syphilis often attacks the brain if left untreated,” she replied while wiping her hands on her skirt.

  “And Tobey, this is my friend Margo.”

  I hadn’t called Margo my girlfriend yet, which seemed ridiculous, considering I’d already told her I loved her. It wasn’t a lack of feeling. It was just not having lived together long enough in the world.

  “Nice to meet you,” he said like an actual grown-up, and I came around to the other side of the bench. “Likewise,” she replied, and the three of us sat, with Tobey in the middle and his three inches of porn on his lap.

  “What are you doing in New York?” I asked.

  “I’m crashing with Jeeves. Funny thing about FedEx/Kinkos—they don’t keep your job open if you’re detained indefinitely under the NET Recovery Act. I was down to my last forty bucks.”

  “And you just wasted it on eight porno mags?” I asked.

  “Fuck yeah,” he replied. “There’s still no Internet and you don’t even want to know what Jeeves has on his shelves.”

  I cut to the chase. “Jeeves isn’t really supporting Hamilton, right? It’s a con?”

  “Of course,” Tobey said. “Burke reached out to him. It was all h
is idea, but Jeeves just went along to get information because he already suspected something. He’s going on a tour with him. New York, Philly, Boston, Chicago, and L.A. Anointing him as the Internet Messiah all over America while getting his info.”

  “He’s the one, Tobes.”

  “What one?”

  “Hamilton took the Net. He’s behind the bombs. He killed Romaya.”

  “I heard about Romaya,” he said, and he reached out, holding onto the back of my neck, his thumb on the side of my face. “I’m sorry about that.”

  It was the first time since the murder that someone who actually knew Romaya had expressed sympathy to me, and even though I appreciated it, it felt wrong. Hamilton had killed Romaya to hurt me. To destroy me, but the rage I felt in the months that followed was no longer fueled by my loss. After all, I’d mourned Romaya for years before she’d even died, and thinking back to L.A. from the other side of the world, I could see my attempts to rekindle that love were impossible. But my anger grew and grew, not because of what Hamilton took from me but what he took from Romaya—the chance to build a new life without me. Everyone deserves a second chance, and she was having hers until he put an end to it. That was not a crime that could go unpunished like some white-collar fraud settled with a fine. He had to be destroyed.

  “I need Jeeves to get Hamilton’s collaborators,” I said. “Who drove the helicopter? Who pulled the trigger? We can get those names to Anonymous and build a case. Then Rowsdower drops the hammer on him.”

  “Where’s Rowsdower?” Tobey asked, his eyes drifting toward Margo’s cleavage. His solemnity was apparently short-lived. “He’s the one I was expecting. Jeeves said he got a call from him.”

  “The NSA was outside his apartment, so he sent us to tell Jeeves the plan instead.”

  “The one he was already doing?”

  “Yeah, apparently,” I said. “But again, tell him the kind of people we’re looking for so he can focus his energies. And tell him we’ll find him in L.A. We have to head back there anyway.”