Consequence

by Steve Masover

  We would like to make two things clear: one is our commitment to the Democratic National Convention; the other is our decision not to impose our point of view. We have also rejected any notion of chairing this Democratic National Convention. This convention represents a peaceful search for change; in no way should it be led by people who bear arms. We are grateful to you for giving us a place here, as one more among all of you, so that we may have our say.

  Subcomandante Marcos is the rebel’s nom de guerre. Romulus hadn’t paid his movement much attention, but he understood the draw when he read the passages Chagall cited:

  If you want me to summarize it, I will say that just as we became soldiers so that one day soldiers would no longer be necessary, we also remain poor so that one day poverty will be no more. This is why we use the weapon of resistance.

  Chagall aims to trump their detractors with modesty and deference. If they act radically but yield to a moderate center, he argues, their attack might catch a wave that has buoyed the Zapatistas for ten years in the face of massive repression. Marcos often repeats a widely quoted slogan: Para todos todo. Para nostros nada. Everything for everyone. Nothing for ourselves. Chagall intends their own rhetoric, too, to be antithesis and paradox, powered by a militant shock to the media.

  They fit the Chiapas insurgents’ mold imperfectly. He and Chagall have no community, no political apparatus, will have nothing to show beyond their single dramatic act. But like the Zapatistas, they will explicitly set aside vengeful impulse. They will simply exact destruction and justify it, seeking to catalyze a movement that can never be theirs.

  —

  Cocooned among his screens, Romulus scans reports forwarded by a Trojan. He is looking for signs that security admins set traps to detect his return to the Facilities and Construction Office at the University of Nebraska. The department sprawls the length of a city block in the heart of Lincoln: cinderblock, flat roofs, double-glazed sliders with aluminum frames, lots and lots of parking spaces. Romulus has no interest in this bureaucracy’s physical layout. He’s visiting a world of IP addresses and ports.

  A printer connected to Facilities and Construction’s network segment provided an ideal niche for a logger bot. Romulus planted his mechanized spy during an earlier intrusion, and later returned to map the department’s user names, IP addresses, and intercepted e-mail.

  He soon gained access to drawings of a six-story structure rising out of flat, tilled prairie west of the campus. He installed automated fetch scripts, set to pull data from breached file-­servers to compromised workstations, a trickle now, a dribble later. Over the course of a week, a complete set of engineering diagrams for the Randall P. Bailey Center for Agricultural Genomics has grown ripe for picking. Tonight’s ectoplasmic visit to the University of Nebraska will be a harvest festival.

  There is no sign that his intrusion was detected. Romulus marshals his bots.

  As dawn breaks over Nebraska’s state capitol, automated scripts will ready the digital spoils for beaming across the internet. Facilities and Construction may never realize they’ve been cracked. The path by which the diagrams are copied from Lincoln to obscure directories of a hobbyist’s site in New South Wales will be wiped from the digital record long before the purpose of this theft is realized.

  Romulus uses a phished password to log into a payroll administrator’s workstation. He writes rogue executables to memory, then deletes the record of his login. Romulus adds the file-moving script to a queue and withdraws from the machine.

  Twenty-six seconds.

  In an hour, maybe two, he’ll latch onto another network in a neighborhood miles distant, to confirm that all is unfolding according to plan.

  TWELVE

  Brendan woke late and groggy, as he had each morning since leaving Tlaxitlán. His insomnia fed on equal parts city noise and the absence of other men’s breathing, gorged itself on dreams that locked him back inside. He lay haunted in the wakeful dark, night after night. The guard El Dentista and his roundhouse punch to Brendan’s jaw, the whip-thin switchblade artist they called Culebra, the stench of scorched flesh in the House of Screams. Now Brendan groped for his jeans, squinting against sun pushing in around the edges of the window shade. He took a long, salty piss, and brushed smoke scum from teeth and tongue. Forgetting it was Sunday, that she wouldn’t be at work, Brendan started when he found Allison in the second-floor kitchen.

  “Hey,” he croaked.

  Allison looked up from the newspaper. “Kettle’s loaded,” she said. “Coffee’s set up for a press pot.”

  Tongue-tied, Brendan thanked her with a slight, silent bow.

  She returned to her article, head bending to the task. Allison led with an index finger, her concentration complete. Brendan might as well have been invisible. He lifted the kettle. Full, as advertised. Allison didn’t look up as he bumbled his way toward caffeination. Not even a glance. When he brought mugs and milk to the table she nodded distractedly. He reached for a section of the paper. They read silently, but Brendan couldn’t work up enthusiasm over a wife murderer who’d breached the tabloid-­broadsheet barrier. Reopening the Statue of Liberty to tourists didn’t hook him either. He tried to believe she wasn’t ignoring him, that she was just allowing him space to wake up.

  “Where’s Jonah?” he asked.

  Allison finger-marked her place in an account of Cambodian genocide. “Out with Zac,” she said. “One of their Bollywood field trips.”

  “Any more fallout from yesterday?”

  Allison shook her head. “Maybe tomorrow, he’ll see Buzz at school. Zac said Buzz was angry when they talked right after … all that.” She gave up her place in the article to gesture vaguely upstairs.

  “Zac told me. But no clue what about.”

  “We’ll just have to watch it unfold. I’m afraid it goes with the territory.”

  Brendan was sure that if he left a silence she’d return to her article. “I was thinking about Jonah’s … what, his standoffishness? Not hostility. But there was an edge.”

  “Keep in mind how old he is.”

  “I know, Zac said the same thing. I’m not taking it personally.” He set the paper aside. “But I was remembering the day I showed up. I disappointed him, I think.”

  She leaned forward. “How so?”

  “Can’t say exactly. He asked about prison, and I didn’t say much. I wonder if he thought I didn’t trust him, that I don’t think he’s old enough to know.”

  “Could be. That’s a sore spot these days.”

  “But then he shifted gears. I don’t remember how he put it, but he was struggling to see how people decide what to take a stand on, what political work to do. He didn’t like my ambiguity about why I went south.”

  Allison sat back and poured another measure from the press pot. “First they trust. Then they question. Now he’s getting to where he’s convinced adults make no sense at all.”

  “And it’s a rough ten or fifteen years ’til he figures out he won’t make any either. That sense isn’t a human trait.”

  “Do you really think that?” Allison asked.

  “Yes and no.” How had that happened? From making conversation to child-rearing to jostling for … for what? As if they were still juniors at Cal, still testing each other’s mettle. Brendan felt the caffeine taking hold. He could play that game. “Why Chiapas and not Tibet?” he asked her back. “Why genetic engineering and not nuclear waste? Focus on a single issue and your politics are neurotic. Abstract your ideals to generalities like justice or equality, and there’s too much, you’re overwhelmed. If you pick issues that are ripe for making progress, you’re reacting to somebody else’s agenda, pragmatism over principle. Where’s the sense in all that tangle?”

  Allison sipped from her mug. “Making sense means seeing connections across a range of activity. Pragmatic means moving the levers you can reach.” She held his gaze. “What’s tough about explaining that to a thirteen-year-old is it’s built on decades of experience.”
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  Were they talking about raising children or political strategy? Maybe Allison didn’t distinguish between the two. “Sense is muddied by complexity and disinformation,” he said. “Pragmatism is surfing whatever crisis is bearing down on us right now. That’s hard to explain to a teenager because it’s scary to acknowledge how little we know and how much less we can do about it.”

  Allison laughed, breaking the tension. “Okay, enough abstract philosophy. Explain why you, Brendan James, dove into solidarity work for a revolution hatched thousands of miles south, and now you’re pitching into a movement against mutant food grown in the States?”

  “Opportunity knocked?”

  “Seriously.”

  “When people build up wealth and power the result is usually widespread suffering. So a moral actor has to oppose greed, QED. Given multiple ways to do that, I want to choose the ones that are effective and that do the least damage.”

  “I think that makes sense.”

  “Of course you do. It follows from what you just laid out, connections and levers. ‘Opportunity knocked’ follows from what I said, the crisis right now. But guess what, Al? We’re both resolving to the same chord, and either tune is plausible.” Brendan leaned forward; his chair rapped sharply against the floor. “What do you say we take a walk? Maybe out along the water someplace?”

  She looked into his eyes for long enough to worry him, then nodded assent. “Okay,” she said. “The 22 gets us to the Marina in twenty minutes.”

  Brendan let a smile blossom for the first time in a week. “How ’bout let’s ride,” he said. “The Kawasaki’s turning into grease spots and rust in that cave you guys call a garage.”

  —

  Careening up Fillmore, he could tell Allison was trying not to hold on too tight, though it couldn’t be easy with her arms wrapped around his waist. She followed his calibrated leans at the turns and did her best to maintain an illusion of distance. Allison tensed as they rounded a sharp corner. He pretended to take her touch in stride.

  They parked in the Fort Mason lot and followed a path along the harbor’s edge. Halyards chimed against aluminum masts, seagulls complained in gliding arcs along the waterfront, somebody’s daysailer luffed around to the wind, jib riffling through the turn. After weeks in the city’s interior, Brendan soaked up the space. Angel Island and Tiburon beckoned from across miles of open bay. The Golden Gate Bridge draped cat’s cradle cables across a limitless Pacific. But once his gaze crossed Alcatraz, Brendan couldn’t pull away from it. The decaying walls of San Francisco’s retired penitentiary, a blur of weathered gray stone, sat like a grim cake topper set in steep sand and scrub. His focus narrowed until the prison island was the only thing visible in all that panoramic view.

  “What are you seeing?” Allison asked, soft over the ping of a signal buoy.

  “Nothing,” he said, ripping away from possession.

  They walked on. Alongside the docks he stopped to admire a teak-decked ketch jutting above the fiberglass crowd.

  Allison followed his gaze. “Own a boat like that,” she said, “you get really, really good at polishing brass.”

  Brendan nodded. “But think about it … that finely made thing and nothing else, out to every horizon. Just me at the helm. Is that right for a sailboat? At the helm?”

  Allison sighed. “However much things change.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  Allison stood upright and relaxed, eyes on the harbor, as if she could never be harmed. Her invincibility made his blood boil.

  “It means you can’t stay still. You’re already scouting for where you’re off to next.”

  He stood for a few seconds, wavering, then stomped away at a furious clip. Fifty yards on Brendan halted abruptly, and waited. She took her time catching up. “I’ve been living in a goddamned kennel,” he said, starting to walk again. “Is it such a goddamned surprise that I crave a little solitude?”

  “It’s no surprise. I can imagine wanting the same.”

  He tamped down his anger. “I’m sorry.” He knew he didn’t sound it. “Besides, I can’t sail. Would you crew?”

  “Don’t know that I’m qualified.”

  “I thought you used to go out on Long Island Sound every summer with your uncle.” He knew better, but couldn’t keep from baiting her. “That uncle on the Baptist, cross-burning side of your family, right? Or was it the strikebreaking Pinkertons’ side?”

  She delivered a playful jab to his shoulder but it landed hard, catching Brendan by surprise. He tripped over his own sneakers, stumbling toward the harbor’s edge.

  Allison followed instinctively, sinking her weight into the ground as she caught his wrist. Brendan twisted like a top, spinning on a sneakered toe, and tripped back the other way—saved by the skin of his teeth from a saltwater dousing.

  —

  “I guess that black belt shit never leaves you,” Brendan said, kneading his arm. They were sitting on the Marina Green, a safe distance from the water. He could have been grateful, could have been pissed off. He supposed he was both. His shoulder ached like she’d ripped the limb out of its socket.

  “Look—”

  “Forget it.” Brendan lay back into the cool, groomed grass and stared at the sky. At least he’d learned something. She was still ashamed of her family’s black sheep. Still penitent. Allison squinted northward, to where the Richmond Bridge disappeared behind Angel Island.

  “Brendan …”

  “Hmmmm?”

  “Is it what happened in prison that’s eating you up, or what landed you there?”

  He mulled over her question. Closed his eyes. Opened them again. “Both and neither,” he said. “I can’t shake Tlaxitlán out of my dreams. That’s at night. In the mornings I obsess over what I’m going to ask the guys who set this thing in motion. Assuming I can convince them to meet. But I’ll tell you, Al … the thing that’s really killing me?”

  “Yeah?” She turned back toward him.

  “Is what didn’t happen.”

  “How do you mean?”

  “You get a lot of time to count in prison.” Now Brendan measured what he ought to say. “You count everything. Bars on a cell window, spoonfuls of soup in a bowl, how many times the same narcocorrido track gets played on somebody’s shitty boom box in a single afternoon. People who write in the course of four hundred twenty-six days. People who come to visit.”

  Allison looked away.

  “Padre Raúl Jaime de la Cruz came calling, first thing,” Brendan said. “Local priest, damned by a maudlin nature to visit any prisoner willing to suffer his company.” He tallied up on his fingers. “My attorney, Jorge Vertiz, conniving bloodsucker at justice’s bar. Doña Erlinda Cordella, paid by Vertiz to keep me fed. My beloved father, neoconservative diehard, steadfast despite his suspicions about the true nature of my road trip. And, last but furthest from least, Timothy Whalen James. You remember Tim, right? The most unremarkable ophthalmologist in the state of Maryland, long-suffering brother, gritted of tooth and rich in disappointments.”

  “Five,” Allison said, acknowledging the obvious.

  Brendan sat up. A catamaran was motoring by, its gray-and-blue sails furled. They watched it skim out of the harbor, then tack around toward the Marin Headlands. “It’s not anybody’s fault,” he said. “I know that. I know what I wrote to everybody who offered—that the bastard warden wouldn’t let gringos visit unless they were blood kin.”

  “That was true, wasn’t it?”

  “Hell yes, it was true. If I could’ve … had an honest conversation? Let’s just say I wouldn’t have been too proud to ask. This was the deepest shit I never imagined for myself, Allison. It taught me something I never wanted to learn.”

  She narrowed her eyes, almost imperceptibly. Bracing herself. “What was that?”

  “It taught me that when you scrape off the lies we tell each other about solidarity—when it comes down to the raw real deal—either your family comes through or you’re
out on your own.”

  Allison exhaled a pent-up breath. “I don’t want to believe that.”

  “Neither did I.”

  The catamaran disappeared behind a spit of landfill that sheltered the harbor.

  “Do you really think we tell each other lies? Or is that poison that’ll work its way out of your system?”

  “I don’t know yet. There’s a lot we don’t know ’til we’re tested, and my test isn’t finished.”

  “I believe the people I live with tell me the truth. And that our loyalties are proven.”

  “You believe it, but do you know it?” Brendan asked. “Maybe you can only know in retrospect.”

  Allison thought for a while before answering. “You can only act in the present. And belief isn’t entirely blind. We have history as a guide. In fifteen years with Chris and Marty and Nora, and Zac for most of that time—history hasn’t let me down.”

  “Maybe the tests haven’t been severe enough.”

  “Severe enough for what? We’ve been living our lives. Should we creep around in fear of what-ifs? Should we seek out adversity?”

  “No, of course not.”

  “Look at when Seth split. I had no idea how that was going to turn out, whether I’d have to give up everything to be a single mom. But everybody stepped up—Nora especially, but in the end, everybody. And now Jonah trusts his housecomrades as parents, because that’s what they’ve been to him ever since he can remember. Another example: when Winton Collier got busted, during the first Gulf War. That was a situation where we could mount a political defense, and everybody we knew came through.”

  “Then Winton dropped out of politics, same as Seth.”

  “Come on, Brendan! Why are you so intent on finding weakness and fraud?”

  “I didn’t go looking, Al. They found me.”

  She sighed. “Maybe so. But where do you fit into all this?”

  “All what?”

  “The decision to go south. What happened. The support network watching your back.”