“Not to speak of.”
“You’ll show me your address book and phone bills.”
“I will. But you’d do her a kindness if you stopped looking for her.”
“She’s not the person paying me.”
DeMars wanted more from me—wanted contact information for every person Anabel had ever known—and I worried that I made myself suspicious by refusing to provide it. But there was an air of due diligence, of nose-holding, in his questioning of me. He seemed already to have concluded that Anabel was nutty and a pain in the ass, and that the entire case was nothing more than family nonsense. He called me a couple of times to follow up, and then I never heard from him again; never learned if he’d succeeded in locating her. I hoped for her sake that he hadn’t, because I really did think that her letter to David was a message to me. I may have left the marriage before she did, but she was determined to one-up me and be the really radical leaver. I hated her for the hatred implicit in this, but I still felt guilty about leaving her, and it eased my guilt, a tiny bit, to imagine her succeeding in something, if only in disappearing. I’d escaped the marriage but the moral victory was hers.
I didn’t hear from David again until 2002, a year before he died. This time the intermediary was a lawyer, writing to inform me that I’d been named the sole trustee of an inter vivos trust that David had created in Anabel’s name. I dialed the number on the letter and learned that she was still missing, eleven years after her disappearance, and that David intended her to have one-quarter of his estate anyway, in the hope that she’d eventually show up and claim it.
“I don’t want to be the trustee,” I said.
“Well, now,” the lawyer said with a lovely Kansan twang. “You might want to hear the terms first.”
“Nope.”
“You’re gonna make my life harder if you don’t, so please just hear me out. The trust consists entirely of McCaskill stock. Seventy percent of that is illiquid, the other thirty percent can be offered by way of the company’s ESOP program but doesn’t have to be. Just going by book value, you’re looking at nearly a billion dollars. Five-year average dividend comes in at four point two percent, which the company is nominally committed to increasing. Based on that simple average alone, you’ve got about forty-two million annually in cash dividends. Trustee’s fee shall be one point five percent of that. So we’re talking, what, three-quarters of a million a year for the trustee, probably a million soon enough. Since the stock either can’t be sold or doesn’t have to be, the trustee’s responsibilities are nugatory. Nothing more than ordinary shareholder responsibilities. To put it plainly, Mr. Aberant, you get a million a year for doing nothing.”
My salary then, as the managing editor at Newsday, was less than a quarter of that. I was still making mortgage payments on the Gramercy Park one-bedroom that I’d bought after landing my first editing job at Esquire and had held on to through my years at the Times magazine and at the Times. If I’d still believed that a journal of opinion called The Complicater could change the world—if I hadn’t instead come to feel that covering daily news responsibly was a worthier and more embattled cause—I could have funded a fine quarterly with a million a year. But David had been right: I was trying to out-Anabel Anabel. Trying to stay clean in case she ever happened to find out what I’d been doing since I left her. Trying to prove her wrong about me. I repeated to the lawyer in Wichita that I wanted nothing to do with the trust.
I never quite figured David out. He was fabulously good at making money, and he really did love Anabel, for many of the same reasons I did, but the cruelty and the vengeance in giving her a billion unwanted dollars, and in naming the person she most hated as trustee, were unmistakable. I couldn’t decide whether he intended to keep punishing her from beyond the grave, or whether he nurtured the sentimental hope that she might one day return and claim her birthright. Maybe it was both. I do know that money was the language he spoke and thought in. A year after I’d heard from his lawyer, he died and left me twenty million dollars, free and clear, “for the establishment of a quality national newsmagazine.” The bequest seemed to have more to do with rewarding me than with punishing Anabel—so, at least, I chose to construe it—and this time I didn’t say no.
About Anabel the obituaries of David reported only that her address and occupation were unknown, but press coverage of the Laird family continued to be findable if you were curious and did a little looking. Anabel’s three brothers had blossomed into larger-scale failures. The oldest, Bucky, was briefly in the news for trying and failing to buy the Minnesota Timberwolves and move them to Wichita. The middle one, Dennis, dropped $15 million on a Republican primary Senate campaign that he still managed to lose by double digits. The youngest, Danny, the former drug addict, had gone to work on Wall Street and shown a knack for joining firms on the brink of going down in flames. Three years after David’s death, presumably using the money he’d inherited, he partnered into a hedge fund that soon went down in flames. Around the same time, I happened to meet Bucky Laird at a leadership-conference boondoggle in California. We chatted a little, and he told me, quite matter-of-factly, that he and his brothers had always assumed I’d murdered Anabel and got away with it. When I denied it, he seemed neither to believe me nor particularly to care.
I’ve never stopped wondering where Anabel is and whether she’s alive. I know that if she is alive she takes satisfaction in my being unaware of it—a satisfaction great enough, I suspect, to keep her living even if she has no other reason to. I remain convinced that I’ll see her again someday, even if I never see her again. She’s eternal in me. Only once, and only because I was very young, could I have merged my identity with another person’s, and singularities like this are where you find eternity. I couldn’t go on and have children with anyone else, because I’d prevented her from having them. I couldn’t settle down with anyone significantly younger than me without proving that my wish to do this was the reason that I’d dumped her. She’d also left me with a lifelong allergy to unrealistic women, an allergy that tended to compound itself, since the minute I detected a hint of fantasy in a woman and had my reaction to it, I rendered any hopes she had for me unrealistic. I wanted nothing to do with anyone like Anabel, and even when I found someone truly unlike her, a woman with whom it’s an inexpressible blessing to share a life, Anabel’s sadness and her moral absolutism continued to color my nighttime dreams. Her act of disappearance and negation becomes more significant and wounding, not less, with every year that passes without a sign of her existence. She may have been weaker than me, but she managed to outplay me. She moved on while I stayed stuck. I have to hand it to her: I feel checkmated.
The Killer
When the two-way radio chirped and erupted in the burry voice of Pedro, it seemed to awaken Andreas from a dream that was aware of having lasted too long and was trying to end itself. “Hay un señor en la puerta que dice que es su amigo. Se llama Tom Aberant.”
On the table by his bed was a sandwich with one bite taken out of it. He couldn’t have said what day of the week it was. The system that had placed him under house arrest was in his head. Hearing the name Tom Aberant barely moved him. He seemed to remember investing enormous obsessional energy in Tom Aberant, for months, maybe for years, but the recollection was faint and flavorless. He no more hated Tom or feared him than he did anything else now. He had only an intolerable, chest-crushing anxiety. That, and a wan perception of the cruelty of being visited, for whatever reason, by a journalist. He no longer met the fundamental requirement of an interviewee, which was to like yourself.
“Hacelo pasar,” he told Pedro.
* * *
Before he’d quit doing interviews, the previous fall, he’d taken to dropping the word totalitarian. Younger interviewers, to whom the word meant total surveillance, total mind control, gray armies in parade with medium-range missiles, had understood him to be saying something unfair about the Internet. In fact, he simply meant a system that was impossible
to opt out of. The old Republic had certainly excelled at surveillance and parades, but the essence of its totalitarianism had been more everyday and subtle. You could cooperate with the system or you could oppose it, but the one thing you could never do, whether you were enjoying a secure and pleasant life or sitting in a prison, was not be in relation to it. The answer to every question large or small was socialism. If you substituted networks for socialism, you got the Internet. Its competing platforms were united in their ambition to define every term of your existence. In his own case, when he’d started to be properly famous, he’d recognized that fame, as a phenomenon, had migrated to the Internet, and that the Internet’s architecture made it easy for his enemies to shape the Wolf narrative. As in the old Republic, he could either ignore the haters and suffer the consequences, or he could accept the premises of the system, however sophomoric he found them, and increase its power and pervasiveness by participating in it. He’d chosen the latter, but the particular choice didn’t matter. He was in relation to the Revolution either way.
In his experience, few things were more alike than one revolution to another. Then again, he’d experienced only the kind that loudly called itself a revolution. The mark of a legitimate revolution—the scientific, for example—was that it didn’t brag about its revolutionariness but simply occurred. Only the weak and fearful, the illegitimate, had to brag. The refrain of his childhood, under a regime so weak and fearful it built a prison wall around the people it allegedly had liberated, was that the Republic was blessed to be in history’s vanguard. If your boss was a shithead and your own husband was spying on you, it wasn’t the regime’s fault, because the regime served the Revolution and the Revolution was at once historically inevitable and terribly fragile, beset with enemies. This ridiculous contradiction was a fixture of bragging revolutions. No crime or unforeseen side effect was so grievous that it couldn’t be excused by a system that had to be but easily could fail.
The apparatchiks, too, were an eternal type. The tone of the new ones, in their TED Talks, in PowerPointed product launches, in testimony to parliaments and congresses, in utopianly titled books, was a smarmy syrup of convenient conviction and personal surrender that he remembered well from the Republic. He couldn’t listen to them without thinking of the Steely Dan lyric So you grab a piece of something that you think is gonna last. (Radio in the American Sector had played the song over and over to young ears in the Soviet sector.) The privileges available in the Republic had been paltry, a telephone, a flat with some air and light, the all-important permission to travel, but perhaps no paltrier than having x number of followers on Twitter, a much-liked Facebook profile, and the occasional four-minute spot on CNBC. The real appeal of apparatchikism was the safety of belonging. Outside, the air smelled like brimstone, the food was bad, the economy moribund, the cynicism rampant, but inside, victory over the class enemy was assured. Inside, the professor and the engineer were learning at the German worker’s feet. Outside, the middle class was disappearing faster than the icecaps, xenophobes were winning elections or stocking up on assault rifles, warring tribes were butchering each other religiously, but inside, disruptive new technologies were rendering traditional politics obsolete. Inside, decentralized ad hoc communities were rewriting the rules of creativity, the revolution rewarding the risk-taker who understood the power of networks. The New Regime even recycled the old Republic’s buzzwords, collective, collaborative. Axiomatic to both was that a new species of humanity was emerging. On this, apparatchiks of every stripe agreed. It never seemed to bother them that their ruling elites consisted of the grasping, brutal old species of humanity.
Lenin had been a risk-taker. Trotsky had been one, too, until Stalin had made him the Bill Gates of the Soviet Union, the excoriated crypto-reactionary. But Stalin himself hadn’t needed to take so many risks, because terror worked better. Although, to a man, the new revolutionaries all claimed to worship risk-taking—a relative term in any case, since the risk in question was of losing some venture capitalist’s money, at worst of wasting a few parentally funded years, rather than, say, the risk of being shot or hanged—the most successful of them had instead followed Stalin’s example. Like the old politburos, the new politburo styled itself as the enemy of the elite and the friend of the masses, dedicated to giving consumers what they wanted, but to Andreas (who, admittedly, had never learned how to want stuff) it seemed as if the Internet was governed more by fear: the fear of unpopularity and uncoolness, the fear of missing out, the fear of being flamed or forgotten. In the Republic, people had been terrified of the state; under the New Regime, what terrified them was the state of nature: kill or be killed, eat or be eaten. In both cases, the fear was entirely reasonable; indeed, it was the product of reason. The full name of the Republic’s ideology had been Scientific Socialism, a name pointing backward to la Terreur (the Jacobins, with their marvelously efficient guillotine, may have been executioners, but they fashioned themselves as executors of Enlightenment rationality) and forward to the terrors of technocracy, which sought to liberate humanity from its humanness through the efficiency of markets and the rationality of machines. This was the truly eternal fixture of illegitimate revolution, this impatience with irrationality, this wish to be clean of it once and for all.
It was Andreas’s gift, maybe his greatest, to find singular niches in totalitarian regimes. The Stasi was the best friend he’d ever had—until he met the Internet. He’d found a way to use both of them while standing apart from them. Because it reminded him of his similarity to his mother, Pip Tyler’s remark about the Moonglow Dairy had wounded him, but she was right: for all the good work the Sunlight Project did, it now functioned mainly as an extension of his ego. A fame factory masquerading as a secrets factory. He allowed the New Regime to hold him up as an inspiring example of its openness, and in return, when it couldn’t be avoided, he protected the regime from bad press.
There were a lot of could-be Snowdens inside the New Regime, employees with access to the algorithms that Facebook used to monetize its users’ privacy and Twitter to manipulate memes that were supposedly self-generating. But smart people were actually far more terrified of the New Regime than of what the regime had persuaded less-smart people to be afraid of, the NSA, the CIA—it was straight from the totalitarian playbook, disavowing your own methods of terror by imputing them to your enemy and presenting yourself as the only defense against them—and most of the could-be Snowdens kept their mouths shut. Twice, though, insiders had reached out to Andreas (interestingly, both worked for Google), offering him dumps of internal email and algorithmic software that plainly revealed how the company stockpiled personal user data and actively filtered the information it claimed passively to reflect. In both cases, fearing what Google could do to him, Andreas had declined to upload the documents. To salvage his self-regard, he’d been honest with the leakers: “Can’t do it. I need Google on my side.”
Only in this one respect, though, did he consider himself an apparatchik. Otherwise, in interviews, he disdained the rhetoric of revolution, and he inwardly winced when his workers spoke of making the world a better place. From the example of Assange, he’d learned the folly of making messianic claims about his mission, and although he took ironic satisfaction in being famed for his purity, he was under no illusions about his actual capacity for it. Life with Annagret had cured him of that.
Three days after Tom Aberant had helped him bury the bones and rotted clothes of her stepfather in the lower Oder valley, he’d gone to Leipzig to look for her. He’d intended to go even sooner, but he was already much in demand for interviews with the Western press. Already, on the strength of his once having published a few naughty poems in Weimarer Beiträge, lived in a church basement, and blundered out of Stasi headquarters at the right moment, he was labeled PROMINENT EAST GERMAN DISSIDENT. Already, too, there were grumblings among the old embarrassments on Siegfeldstraße, mutterings that he’d done little but sleep with teenagers while the others were riskin
g persecution. But none of them had a father on the Central Committee, none of them a résumé as sexy as the story of his acrostic poems, and by giving a dozen interviews back to back, always under the label of PROMINENT DISSIDENT (and always taking care to acknowledge the bravery of his Siegfeldstraße comrades), he made himself so much realer than the embarrassments that they had little choice but to accept the media’s version. His fame soon changed even their memories of him.
Annagret didn’t live with her sister in Leipzig, but the sister directed him to a teahouse frequented by feminists, a group until recently even more demoralized than environmentalists; polluted though it was, the Leipzig sky was less gray than the Republic’s leadership was grayly male. It was two in the afternoon when he pushed open the teahouse’s squeaky door. Annagret came out from the kitchen in back, wiping her hands on a dish towel.
Smile, Andreas thought.
She didn’t smile. She looked around the room, which was empty. On the walls were a picture of Rosa Luxemburg, a poster celebrating Women of Heavy Industry, and slightly more daring images of Western female musicians and activists. Everything faded and filmed over with the sadness he’d once mistaken for ridiculousness. A Joan Baez tape played quietly.
“We don’t have to talk now,” he said. “I just want you to know I’m here.”
“Now is fine,” she said, not looking at him. “We may not have much to say.”
“I have things to say.”
She faintly smirked. “‘Good news.’”
“Yes, good news. Should I come back later?”
“No.” She sat down at a table. “Just tell me your good news. I think I already know some of it. I saw you on TV.”
“I know,” he said, sitting down, “I’m an overnight sensation. And you didn’t believe me when I said I was the most important person in the country. Do you remember that?”
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