Normally, I garden when night falls, when the urges come. But I was up most of the night writing an article titled “Is Your Pornography Watching You?” I just posted it—under a pseudonym, of course—to a fairly influential IT security website, and it’s going to get people talking. The article describes how a tracking beacon has made its way into child pornography files on the Web—every time a picture is copied, the beacon is copied, and every time the file is transferred, the beacon sends a signal. I’m the one who heard the signal.
I step from my small bungalow into the North Hollywood predawn dark. You can’t hear a peep from the Ventura Freeway, and the first 737 won’t lift from the Burbank airport for a little while yet. So I go to my roses, which line the chest-high fence around my yard.
The key to gardening at night is the headlamp. Don’t go for the xenon or halogen or LED models. The ideal beam should be soft and pale—by its glow, you should struggle to make out the true nature of something. The proper light can cast no shadow.
The neighborhood is a mix of aging Ukrainians and young Latinos, of spent porn actors and newly arrived hipsters. I turn on my headlamp and inspect the dusky crimson buds of my tall Othellos. Then I check on the Applejacks, the Chorales, the Blue Skies and the Bourbons—there’s a fascinating National Geographic article on the crossbreeding that produced the Bourbon. I spot a Marlowe on the cusp of perfection. Just before I touch it, someone approaches out of the darkness. In the faint glow of my lamp’s beam, I can see it’s Rhonza from down the street—she’s out walking at all kinds of crazy hours.
As she strides by, she says, “I got my eye on you, you spooky-eye motherfucker.”
A Marlowe is orange-red outside but opens pale pink. I clip the rose, trim its stem, then place it in a white bucket I’ve mounted to the fence. I leave roses for anyone in the neighborhood to take. I’ve got no great love of roses—the bushes were planted by the old lady who used to live here. “Missus Roses,” everybody called her. Without National Geographic, I wouldn’t have even figured out which rose varieties were which. But tending them is soothing. Besides, what kind of guy would I be if I let some old lady’s roses die?
I pause to enjoy a carton of milk, a half-pint, the kind kids drink at school. I know most early risers are brewing coffee, but it’s best to limit external stimulation. I toss a few more roses into the bucket, and here is where I see the Tiger’s Mom staggering down the street toward me. She lives in the apartment complex next door and has two daughters, a music blog and a committed relationship with alcohol. She’s out every night on the L.A. band scene, and it’s true that her blog is well regarded, that she’s famous for discovering breakout bands.
The Tiger’s Mom stops right in front of me, her drunken eyes fixed on the bucket of roses. In her attempt to select one, her hand floats like a conjurer’s, and though I’m standing right here, she seems not to see me. The Tiger’s Mom selects two roses, one for each daughter, I assume.
The first jet of the day rises out of Burbank above us. It’s five thirty A.M.
“You look like you could use a carton of milk,” I tell her.
“Mr. Roses,” she says. “Jesus, don’t creep up on people.”
She takes her roses and ambles toward her apartment’s stucco courtyard, trimmed with dwarf palms and painted Hotel California pink.
The Tiger is the older daughter, a sixth-grader responsible enough at twelve to take care of her little sister. I see the Tiger riding her bike to school. She is her school’s mascot—the tiger in question. Some mornings, she pedals past in her tiger costume, its oversize tiger head strapped to the rack on her bike. The Tiger doesn’t activate. The Cub is the younger sister, a ten-year-old. Sometimes she walks to school on her own. The Cub often stops to examine the flowers in my bucket, but she never pulls one out.
I don’t have a dungeon or an ankle monitor. I don’t follow ice-cream trucks. I don’t even have the Internet, which is God’s gift to child sexual exploitation. You have to understand that I have never hurt anyone in my life and that I am the one who gets wounded in this story.
But I’ll admit this now, because this is going to be a certain kind of story: the Cub activates.
In the morning, I take Laurel Canyon south to Studio City, where I partition a faulty array of servers—all serving porn, of course. Then in Encino, I hack in to the laptop of an Armenian dude who claimed his daughter password-protected the thing and then forgot the code. For lunch, I stop for Salvadoran on Lankershim Boulevard. I eat outside, under a Los Angeles sky that is blizzard white. The pupusas are good, but I stop here because there is a permanent rainbow overhead, caused by the mist of a car wash next door. Don’t let anyone tell you there are no rainbows in L.A.
I used to eat next to my van to make sure it didn’t get jacked. Ten years ago, when I started my computer-repair business, my van was a crash cart of parts and diagnostic equipment, but these days I do mostly tech security, and a wallet of thumb drives is my only set of tools. Porn is a huge security issue, especially child porn. One employee downloading it can crash an entire network. Just glimpsing it can get you locked up, so nobody’s studying the stuff, which is racked with malware and sinister code. Nobody but me, it seems. Seems like I was the only one in the world when the beacon sent the signal.
In the afternoon, I’m circling the Valley, kicking a few firewalls and doing some general debugging, when I get a text for an old-fashioned repair job, and what the hell. In twenty minutes, I’m knocking on a door in Van Nuys.
The guy answers, but he stands there, staring at me.
I say, “Someone messaged me about a problem with a hard drive?”
“A guy I know said you were cool,” he tells me.
To the untrained eye, you’d think this was the type of guy you went to Northridge with, the kind whose baby fat, hipster beard and searing irony landed him in a crappy studio apartment like this. But I recognize his kind right away. There are those who are born, those who are made, and then there are ones like this guy, the kind who choose.
I can see the computer, a high-end desktop with a liquid-cooled multicore driving twin cinema displays. It’s a standard movie/animation editing setup.
“The thing suddenly stopped,” he says. “And it won’t turn on. I tried everything.”
“Did the screen flash or go blue?” I ask. “Did you see a cursor blink or hear a ticking noise?”
“I don’t remember,” he says, but he seems to make a decision about me and steps aside.
Inside, I give the computer a quick visual. There’s a bar-coded property sticker, probably from a studio lot. “If this is a work computer, just turn it in,” I say. “Your boss will get it repaired.”
“This guy I know, he said you fixed his computer for three hundred dollars, no questions.” He holds up three one-hundred-dollar bills.
I pull on purple latex gloves and unplug the wireless router.
I drop the desktop’s side panel, pull the fans, then attach an I/O cable and reboot. Soon I get the error codes and kernel logs, and while the system profiles, I insert a thumb drive that I’ve loaded with a few dozen pictures. I command the root system to search for data strings in these pictures, images that would look like nothing special to the average person—a photo of a shoulder, a table, a bedspread, a foot. But they’re really innocent corners of pictures that depict adult sexual encounters with minors. Immediately, the search results appear, and together we see the screen fill with the flashing images of his child porn collection.
“All this stuff was on the computer when I got it,” he says. “I was meaning to get rid of it.”
“I’m sure.”
Then he volunteers, “There are no boys on there.”
“Wonderful,” I say.
I do a quick inventory—it’s all the usual fare. He’s got the Teensy Series, the Fawn Trilogy, Pale Ribbons and so on. A search like this is easy because the vast majority of child porn available to the average Joe consists of a few dozen image sets that are commonly traded back and forth or resold through zombie servers.
I stop on an image. “You see this girl here?”
He says nothing.
“What’s your name?” I ask.
He pauses. “John.”
“You see this girl, John?”
He nods.
“Her name’s not really Sissy. And this guy here, in his socks. That’s the girl’s uncle. He’s doing thirty-five in federal for the extended sexual abuse of a minor.”
“Look,” he says. He holds out the money, but I don’t take it, not yet.
“You wanna know her real name?”
He shakes his head.
“Good,” I say, “because she’s all grown up now, and she has a court order—a blanket judgment against anyone found in possession of these images. That’s how you find out her real name—after your arrest, you get a writ informing you that you owe her a hundred and forty thousand dollars.”
I survey the rest of his directories, but it’s all the standard business.
I ask him, “You know one thing child pornographers always get wrong?”
He eyes me suspiciously.
“The lighting,” I tell him.
And here is an opportunity to test the thesis of my article. I swap thumb drives and search the computer’s file formats for the signal, which is a simple ASCII string, 256 characters long. Right away, John’s porn directories light up with the beacon. I sort the pictures by date and see that the first set he bought, over a year ago, was a legendary set of scanned Polaroids nicknamed Summer Poppies, which means that whoever is tracking these images has been doing so for a while.
John and I fall silent, staring at Poppie in her makeup and fake eyelashes, with the look on her face that made her famous. This is a series I find especially disturbing. I understand that humans are deeply corrupted and that over the course of life, each of us comes to understand the depth of our species’ sexual depravity. But in Summer Poppies, the worst perversions are candy-coated with false innocence, with bunny slippers and lollipops and Snoopy bedspreads. Here, even pearls of semen hover and catch the light.
“There is a signal coming from this picture,” I tell John. “It’s like a Trojan horse. When you download the picture, you download the beacon. And when you connect to the Internet, the beacon goes ping.”
“What are you talking about?” he asks.
“Here’s the beauty of it,” I tell him. “The beacon’s not in the image but in the file format, as metadata, so you can alter the image, crop it, whatever, but the beacon is still there. No matter what you do to the picture, it can still call home, and that’s how they know.”
“Know what?”
“That the pictures are here, John. On your hard drive.”
Then I notice an image that doesn’t emit the signal. It’s of a girl I haven’t seen before. And she is a girl—not a teen, not a tween, but a child. She is alone, captured from the waist up, and she wears a small yellow T-shirt. There is nothing sexualized about the picture, not even a pigtail, and she’s not on a set—there are no Hello Kitty curtains, no tripods or floodlights. No, this is a girl and she’s in someone’s kitchen and this is not a “shoot” but a normal day from her actual life, one that finds her standing next to a screen door, the diffused light from which casts a pale pattern across her skin. On her face is fear, and the wide-eyed uncertainty of what will happen next, laced with perhaps a glint of hope that she can spare herself in some way from the unknown bad thing that is about to begin. Then I see her arm is blurred, that it’s lifting—to fend something off, to latch on to an adult for security, or is the arm lifting on its own, the way arms lift involuntarily when something horrible is encountered.
“Where did you get this picture?” I ask.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I traded for it. I forget.”
“Do you know this girl?”
“Of course not,” he says. “Look, I just want my computer fixed.”
I understand that whether a child is hurt under the bright lights of a highly produced shoot or atop the dingy linoleum of a family friend’s home, the damage is the same. But the illusion is that the latter is happening right now, not long ago, that if the right series of actions were taken, taken by anyone, even someone like me, it could be stopped.
I copy the picture of the girl and eject my thumb drive.
“You’ve got a bad pin on a RAM card,” I tell John. “It only fails in heavy data cascades. It’s an easy fix, but don’t bother. You need to pull those drives out of their bays and take them out back and break them with a hammer. The spindles must crack to ensure the data cannot be retrieved. Tell your boss the computer was stolen and then crack the drives. Understand?”
He nods, but I can tell it hasn’t sunk in.
“And don’t try to save those pictures. They know you have them.”
“Who knows?” he asks.
I take the cash from his hand. “Who do you think?”
At home, I walk right past my rosebushes. Inside, I turn on all the lights and pace the small rooms. The image of that girl has me completely fucked up. Everywhere I look, there she is. I am racked by the little blur of her arm. It lifts, but there’s nothing she can do to stop what will happen. Innocence is on that face, as well as knowledge of what’s to come. And the arm lifts. The past, the present and the future all exist at once. And the most fucked-up and wrong and horrible part is that I activate. It kills me to masturbate, to stand there at the bathroom sink and jerk off into the basin—when I close my eyes, I see her; when I open them, there in the mirror is myself—but it’s the only thing that will make it stop.
I start crying while I do it, I really do, because she knows what’s going to happen, she knows it can’t be stopped, and even though you know what’s ahead, it still comes as a surprise when, after a day of sailing, after the Skipper has doled out performance ribbons to your Sea Scouts troop, and you’ve been having fun and there’s a sense of wonder and achievement after rounding the tip of Catalina Island, and despite all the times it has happened before, it takes you by surprise when the Skipper comes for you in the dark and you’re taken down to the storage cabin, with the musty smell of sail canvas and the petroleum bite of foul-weather gear. Atop a mound of the other boys’ dirty laundry is where he forces you facedown. The anchor chain pulls taut against the hull, and there is no light beyond the pale glow of the bilge-pump sensor, no sound beyond the scratch of his razor stubble against the back of your neck and the cinch of his hands as he grips the straps of your life vest.
For the next couple nights, I ignore my gardening and instead initialize my computer. Here is where I keep a library of images. The pictures activate, strongly, like a muscle capable of folding you in half. There is nothing erotic about them. They are actually quite troubling. But they activate. I view before-and-after pictures, hundreds at a time, just before and just after. It helps to modify the pictures, to make a big one into little ones—focusing on a small hand, defiant, clenching the sheets, or a hand open and limp, fully relented. A single look can tell an entire story, so I often crop pictures down to the eyes—eyes fallen, eyes without focus, eyes closed, the pinwheel of an eye that’s seeing something far different than what’s before it, or a single, daring upward glance.
When you view these pictures, the best way to handle what you must confront is to view a picture series backward: something awful is happening to a child, it becomes less bad, and less bad, then the child and the adult separate, and after talking a brief moment, they exit through different doors.
At my computer, I do not masturbate, because that ends the sessions too soon. I can only say that in pushing me to the edge, the pictures help me find center again. I feel purged somehow. For a couple of days, I’m just like everybody else.
I’ve read a couple of books on the topic. This One Doctor Lady writes that by watching the scenario, the victim revictimizes himself. This Other Doctor Guy’s book says that emotional development is arrested at the time of abuse, which makes you incapable of a relationship beyond the level of an adolescent. There’s only one thing I’m sure about: these experts have never been victimized—they have never even seen it. They couldn’t stand a single image. Not for a minute, not for sixty measly seconds, could they direct their gaze at a video portraying the brutalization of an innocent.
A knock at the door wakes me. It is midday. Since I sleep fully clothed, I’m able to answer right away. By sleeping with your clothes on, you don’t need to climb under the sheets. You don’t need to disturb a perfectly made bed or even fold the bed back into the couch.
When I open the door, a police officer is standing there.
“Those are some pretty serious flowers,” the cop says, nodding at the yard.
“They’re from the lady who used to live here,” I tell him.
“I’m Officer Hernandez,” he says. “Jaime Hernandez. A colleague of mine, Sergeant Rengsdorff, said I might talk with you. He said you helped crack a couple laptops a while back, that you helped with a kiddie case.”
I nod. “That’s right. Denis. How is he?”
“Sergeant Rengsdorff retired last year. I took his place on the Crimes Against Minors task force.”
His phone keeps vibrating with text messages, but he pays them no mind. I peg him as the cool cop who gives out his number to the troubled and at-risk, letting them know he’s there.
Just then Rhonza comes walking by. “You finally busting that creepshow?” she calls out. “Someone’s been peeping in the neighborhood, and I knew it was him. I could see it in his fucked-up eyes.”
The cop lifts his hand in a semi-salute that says, I heard you, ma’am; thanks for the input.
But Rhonza isn’t done. “Look at him,” she demands. “He got Rikki-Tikki-Tavi eyes.”
When she’s gone, Officer Hernandez offers a knowing smile.
“There’s one in every neighborhood,” he says, but he is now studying my eyes.
“Please,” I say. “Come in.”
He steps inside. “You just move in?” he asks, and I almost tell him I’ve been living here for seven years. Instead, I shut my mouth and watch him sweep his eyes along the empty white walls and blank refrigerator and neatly made foldout bed.
“You never really get settled,” I tell him.
“When you do, it’s time to move again,” he says, staring at the bookcase that houses my National Geographic magazines, the rows and rows of yellow spines.
We stand at the kitchen counter. “Glass of water?” I ask. “Half-pint of milk?”
“That’s a lot of magazines,” he says. “I didn’t know they still published that one.”
“I have a lifetime subscription.”
“What’d that set you back?” he asks hollowly, for he is really scrutinizing the contents of my fridge when I open it.
“I received it as a prize when I was a boy in the Sea Scouts. I was our troop’s scout of the year, though I didn’t do anything special to earn it. It was more of a consolation prize, really.”
The cop returns his gaze to me. “Sea Scouts?”
“It’s just like the Boy Scouts, but on water. You learn navigation and maritime skills. The troop I was in doesn’t exist anymore. It disbanded after our troop leader took his life. He hiked up Topanga Canyon and hanged himself.”
He watches me unfold the carton’s spout.
“Sorry to hear that,” he says. “I’m sure his legacy lives on.”
I take a swig of milk. “Well, the magazines keep coming.”
“Right,” Officer Hernandez says. “I’m here because of an article on the Web. It basically says that a code can be placed in explicit imagery, that it can be tracked somehow. I can’t claim to understand it. Denis, Sergeant Rengsdorff, he said you were the guy to talk to.”
“I know the article,” I tell him, and I explain the whole thing, about the signals and beacons, how the child pornographers seem to have no idea their files have been modified, which suggests that some agency, probably federal, has swapped the pornographers’ source files for doctored ones. Rather than shutting them down, the feds are using them to build a database of viewers.
After I pour this information out, Hernandez stares at me a moment. Then he begins asking questions, all the right ones, about detection, distribution, how come I know so much. Then he asks me, “The guy who wrote this article, he signed his name ‘Dark Meadow.’ Does that mean something in computer talk?”
“Not that I know of.”
“Here’s what I don’t understand,” Officer Hernandez says. “If this signal, if this two-hundred-and-fifty-six-digit code is the key, how come this Dark Meadow guy didn’t publish it with the article?”
“I don’t know,” I say. “Maybe revealing that would jeopardize a major federal investigation.”
“But didn’t writing the article do that?” he asks. “I mean, are we dealing with one of the good guys or one of the bad?”
“I don’t understand the question.”
“The question is simple. Is this guy trying to protect kids by alerting the authorities of a way to catch predators? Or is he trying to help pedophiles by warning them of a vulnerability?”
I still don’t quite follow. “Information is information,” I tell him.
Hernandez asks, “Do you know this Dark Meadow?”
I don’t say anything.
“Maybe I will take that milk,” he says.
When I open the fridge, he again peers inside. There’s nothing of interest to see, just a few shelves stacked with neat rows of milk cartons.
“If I understand you right,” he asks, “a person with this code could find all the child porn viewers in L.A.”
“If you had the code,” I say, “you could make a real-time Google map of them.”
I hand him a carton. He shakes it to froth the milk inside.
“But who would you catch?” I ask. “I dig in to a half-dozen computers a day, and any number of them are loaded with porn. It comes in all varieties. So I run across this kind of stuff. And you must believe me—there is no pleasure in seeing it. In fact, it is quite painful to me. But you got to understand that most of these pictures are from ten, twenty years ago. The victims are grown, the offenders are old, probably sucking on oxygen bottles somewhere.”
“Yeah?”
“You can’t go back in time,” I say. “You can’t stop what’s already happened. It can only be dealt with.”
Hernandez takes a drink from his tiny carton. “You know they sell this stuff by the gallon.”
“I like to take things in increments,” I tell him.
“I got kids,” he says. “So I’m on this task force for personal reasons. And I’m going to share my belief that there’s no difference between the guy who rapes children and the guy who looks at pictures of children being raped. Most officers on the force think these guys should be hunted down and shot like dogs in the street. I haven’t dwelled too much on that end of it. For me, it’s the children, they’re the ones I’m concerned about. And how long ago it was that they got hurt, that doesn’t matter to me at all.”
He regards me a moment, almost sadly.
“Personally, I don’t think you’re one of the bad guys,” he says. “But you, whether you think you’re a good guy or a bad guy—that’s something you should be very concerned with. There’s a way you can prove to yourself that you’re not a bad guy. You can save us a lot of trouble and pass along that code.”
He leaves his card.
I follow the cop outside and watch him drive away. From the porch, I can see the Tiger and the Cub have opened a lemonade stand. They’ve taken a table and two folding chairs into the parking lot and are sitting, waiting. They have some lemons, a sugar jar and a pitcher of ice water. The Cub’s legs swing back and forth below the vinyl tablecloth. Nobody visits their lemonade stand, including me.
Come dark, I initialize my computer and crop images for a while. This is controlled, orderly work, and it soothes me. I take the images I’ve copied from people’s hard drives, and then I crop out the erections and penetrations and grimaces. I don’t need to tell you that I hate videos. You can’t crop a video. And once it’s in motion, it’s impossible to control.
I call up the picture of the girl in the kitchen. First I crop her photo down to an image that shows only her eyes. Save. Then I frame the pattern of light that falls across her skin. Save. I crop an image that is simply yellow—a square of her yellow shirt, nothing else. Save. And then the hand. I trim and trim, narrowing in until there is only blur. You wouldn’t even know it was a hand. Then I destroy the original. In this way, I cripple the picture’s power to hurt—it’s not child pornography, it’s not pornography, it’s not even a child. I remove what racks you, what leaves you unable to raise yourself from the bottom of the boat.
Outside, I harvest a few flowers but soon find myself staring at my hand in the headlamp’s beam, which is pale and even. The light is eclipse light, as when the moon is in transit across the face of the sun. There was a weekend when Skipper had us sail to Santa Cruz Island to witness an eclipse. On the voyage over, he showed us girlie magazines and told us jokes about sailors and sharks and faggots and priests. We anchored in Potato Harbor, then rowed in teams to the beach. As the eclipse began, the light slowly dimmed. Most of the boys stared upward with their stupid black glasses. Only I recognized the kind of light we were standing in. Suddenly, the Skipper had his hand on my shoulder.
Normally, his Merchant Marines ring flashed aqua, but here it glowed a royal blue.
How had he gotten close without my noticing?
“When most people think of light, they think on or off,” the Skipper told me. “But the observant scout will see there’s a hundred kinds of light. Just like there’s a hundred kinds of water. Each with its own set of rules.”
He produced a twelve-pack of beer—one for each scout in the troop.
We toasted the sun and the moon and their temporary union. It was my first taste.
“What happens in the eclipse stays in the eclipse,” Skipper announced, and we cheered.
The way he said it was both funny and menacing, like when he’d tell a gay joke. We all knew what he thought of the gays.
The next day, the Tiger and the Cub are having a yard sale. They sit at a table covered with household goods. I drift over. The Tiger is wearing gym shorts and a jean jacket. The Cub has on a red hand-me-down hoodie.
When I approach the table, I ask, “Why aren’t you guys in school?”
The Cub says, “It’s Saturday, Mr. Roses.”
This is the closest I’ve been to the Cub. There is no single trait that makes her activate—it’s not the brown ringlets or baby-fat cheeks or exaggerated expressions. It’s just the cusp she’s on. I can see on her face a wide-eyed, trusting openness. She directs this look to a world that has yet to reveal its dark and unapologetic nature. Part of me wants to kill the person who manages to steal that look from her. And a loathsome, unfathomable part thinks it’s only natural to be the thief.
When I let my gaze fall upon a power juicer, the Tiger says, “It’s like new. We never even used it.” And when I look at a waffle iron, the Cub forlornly lifts her eyebrows and says only, “Waffles.”
“You guys trying to save up for something?” I ask.
“Just making ends meet,” the Tiger says.
They are eating slices of frozen French toast straight from the box.
I look over at their apartment, door standing open. “Your mom sleeping?” I ask.
The Cub says, “She’s on tour with a band.”
“What band is this?” I ask.
“We forget,” the Tiger says. “And we can’t check Mom’s blog. The Internet’s not working.”
“The cable, too,” the Cub adds.
“Is your Internet working?” the Tiger asks.
“I don’t have the Internet,” I tell them.
The Tiger nods in sympathy. “Anyway,” she says, “the band is going to be the next Nirvana.”
“Do you know when your mother’s coming back?” I ask. “Are you in contact with her?”
“Yeah,” the Tiger says. “We texted her, and she texted back. She said we shouldn’t worry about her, that she’s just fine.”
The Cub holds up a clock radio. “Five bucks,” she says. “It beams the time on the ceiling.”
“No, thanks,” I say.
“The sad part,” the Tiger says, “is that our place is filled with rock memorabilia.”
“It’s priceless,” the Cub says.
“But we can’t sell any of it,” the Tiger says.
“Because it’s priceless,” the Cub says. Then she adds, “My dad is a rock star.”
“Mine, too,” the Tiger says. “But her dad is seriously famous. Like, sell-out-stadiums famous. He sends us a check every month, which is why we don’t have to work.”
I look at some of their things—a bathroom scale, a pop-up Polaroid camera, a lamp.
I try to remember how long it’s been since I’ve laid eyes on their mother.
“You guys have any relatives looking after you?” I ask. “Some folks you can call?”
They shake their heads, and I nod at the situation.
“I always have to buy something at a yard sale,” I tell them. “It’s an addiction I have.”
“What about a picture?” the Cub asks. From behind the table, she lifts a painting of a boat upon a moonlit velvet sea. The wooden frame is hand-carved and darkly stained. It’s the kind of painting you see Mexican guys selling at stoplights on Sepulveda.
The Tiger says, “I think it’s a clipper ship.”
“It’s actually a sloop,” I tell her. “A Bermuda sloop, rigged to sail alone.”
“You a sailor?” the Cub asks.
“I used to sail,” I say. “I haven’t in a long time. But it’s easy to tell ships apart—you look at the sails and masts. It goes sloop, cutter, ketch, schooner, clipper.”
The Tiger says, “Now you have to buy it.”
“It is a fine painting,” I say, and scratch my chin. “Probably worth more than I can afford.”
The girls look at each other. “Make us an offer,” the Tiger says.
I open my wallet and look inside. I pull out those three one-hundred-dollar bills.
“This is the best I can do,” I tell them.
After darkness falls, I sit on my small porch and read the latest National Geographic. I don’t want to be in the same room as my computer, and my heart’s not into gardening tonight. There’s an article about U.S. soldiers who defuse bombs in a distant land. First they must approach the bomb—this is nerve-racking because anything they inspect might contain explosive material. Once they become acquainted with the device, they try to break it down to its elements. They separate the power source from the trigger, then the trigger from the charge. When a device detonates, it’s not like Hollywood, one soldier says. You wake up later and you can’t really be sure what’s real and what’s the echo in your head. He says you can defuse a bomb in the real world, but the bomb in your head, that’s forever.
Somehow, without my noticing it, the Tiger and the Cub have appeared before me on the porch. When I lower my magazine, there they are, the Tiger in her tiger-striped mascot suit, the Cub in pajamas patterned with rainbows and unicorns.
The Tiger says, “Some guy was looking in our window.”
“He was scary,” the Cub says.
“We heard a noise,” the Tiger says. “When we looked up, there he was.”
“I don’t want to go back there,” the Cub says.
“Everything’s going to be fine,” I tell them. “Come, let’s have a look.”
We cross my yard, the parking lot and the courtyard to their one-bedroom apartment.
Inside, the walls are covered with guitars, album covers and cymbals autographed in black marker. The Tiger’s Mom has the bedroom, so the girls sleep on the floor in front of the TV. The floors: there are heaps of dirty laundry, cardboard boxes, bikes on their sides, and strips of masking tape worked into the carpet to mark the mascot’s dance steps.
“Where did you see him?” I ask.
They point at the window above a small breakfast table.
“I heard someone say there was a peeper in the neighborhood,” I say.
“What’s a peeper?” the Cub asks.
“He’s a guy,” I say. “He’s a fellow who likes— What he does is—”
“He looks in your windows,” the Tiger says.
“Oh,” the Cub says. “Why would he do that?”
The Tiger looks at me, wondering if she should explain, and I shake my head.
“Wait here,” I tell them. Outside, I make my way to the back of the complex, squeezing between the trash bins and dryer vents as I traverse the apartment’s rear wall. Here, I cup my hands to the glass and peer inside, observing the girls the way a pervert would. When the Cub looks in my direction, she screams and then the Tiger screams and then they realize it’s only me.
I move to inspect the bedroom window. Below the window frame, the grass is trampled and someone has ejaculated many times onto the pink stucco. Nearing the glass, I gaze into the mother’s bedroom. Here is the mattress where the Tiger’s Mom sleeps off her hangovers, where—out cold, sheets balled, robe flopped open—she spends her days.
Inside, I tell the girls that some guy probably just looked in the wrong window. Still, we hang towels over both panes. The girls are happy to have a visitor. The Tiger shows me her tiger dance. She cages her eyes and moves seriously through a drill, like it is the fourth quarter and the home crowd is depending on her to spark a rally.
The Cub, too, performs for me. She begins to move about the apartment like a dolphin. Her elbows become fins. She puffs her cheeks and holds her breath. When she lifts her head, she’s breaching the surface, and when her neck lowers, she’s diving deep, and she is not running through soiled clothes, she is swimming in the open ocean. In this faraway sea, alcohol doesn’t exist and neither do North Hollywood one-bedrooms. Here, men don’t fuck groupies or masturbate while your mother dreams. I watch the Cub swim laps around me, her limber young body silently circling, wholly unaware of the designs the world has drafted for her.
When her eyes lift to mine, seeking my approval, I call a halt to this swimming and dancing business. I go to their fridge, papered with nightclub flyers. Inside, I find nothing, not even milk.
“You hungry, Mr. Roses?” the Cub asks.
The freezer, too, is empty. “What happened to the money I gave you for the painting?”
The Tiger says, “We had to pay a bill.”
“What bill was this?”
The Tiger says, “A guy came by. He knows our mom, and it turns out there was a bill she forgot to pay.”
“Wait here,” I tell them, and then head to the 7-Eleven on the corner, where I buy whole-grain cereal, bananas, a gallon of milk and some dodgy-looking taquitos, but at least they are warm.
Behind the checkout counter are racks of dirty magazines. I turn from them. I feel like a good guy, a normal guy who has normal interactions with others. The Cub is a powerful force. She activates. But I feel strong and good. I deliver the groceries, and when I take leave of the girls, I stand on the front step and tell them to close the door and lock it.
“I want to hear it lock,” I say.
They close the door on me, but instead of locking it, they say, “What are we going to do?”
“Read a book,” I say through the wood. “Better yet, go to bed. Now lock the door.”
They are quiet a moment. Then the deadbolt locks.
At home, I hang the boat painting where I can see it from my bed. I lie atop my covers, thinking about the guy who is sailing alone. All the lights in my apartment are off, but there’s enough glow through the window to see the weight and size of the ocean rollers, to note how the rigging strains in the wind. The sailor is looking toward a dark horizon, so the viewer can’t see his face, but it’s easy to tell his story is an old one: a sailor has lost something far out at sea. Now he’s heading back to claim it.
It’s just a cheap painting, but for hours I wonder if the sailor can get the thing back, if he can find the place where he lost it. To do that, he has to sail back in time, to before. The journey is impossible, but he has his boat rigged right, and the rope is in his hands. The wind is up and he’s bowfronting the waves. Most important, the sailor has made the decision. He has embarked.
I decide to text Officer Hernandez. It’s the middle of the night. Using software to alias my SIM card data, I send him this message: 5c2758ba7d4f4dd90c5525b5aa6a09cb4305452c121e5a5961c1f4fc451223fee2982285274b6e2ca36d2587f848b72517236ca950bf8934a6afada07976aaac098aeaf54e83b70c4a00442bf548d7e307c5e1f93abfc0ef1d4777b69d9d9eaaa685947050483d8907f9516eb7f6870edbf52d7e7153e737a80a60f2b5366eaf.
In the morning, I get a text for a computer consultation in Sun Valley. Shittier even than Pacoima, Chatsworth, Reseda and my own North Hollywood is Sun Valley. I take Tujunga north to La Tuna. I pull up in front of a defunct dog kennel sandwiched between a cement plant and a maintenance yard. There’s a chain across the lot, so I park in the street.
I double-check the address. Then I text the number back: “Dog kennel?”
Right away, I get my answer: “Yes, DM14097. Just knock, we’re home.”
No one in the world has connected the real me with DM14097. I’m no longer that person. I no longer use screen names. I don’t surf forums, chat rooms or P2P directories. I stopped using Tor, eDonkey and Fetch. I don’t swap, barter, buy in or burn-request. I gave up the entire Internet. I have only my little library, and I’m chipping away at that.
I check my phone, but this person also knows how to alias his SIM data.
Just then he texts back: “btw, this is Dodger6636.”
In the world I no longer inhabit, where people exist only online, fantasy and deed are indistinguishable. Yet there was one man known by his deeds. And that was Dodger6636, a legend in the realm. He must have outlasted them all.
I look at the abandoned dog kennel, taking note of the improvised satellite dishes on the roof and the aluminum foil covering the storefront windows. I get that feel, that kinetic conk inside when I’d receive a delivery from Dodger in my Fetch Dropbox: a puppy avatar would alert me by dancing across my computer window and then laying the bone in his mouth at the foot of my screen. When you got a delivery from Dodger, you knew it was special, it was some long-lost tidbit you’d never laid eyes on.
I step over the chain. Glass and gravel crunch as I cross the lot.
Dodger opens the door before I raise my hand to knock.
“Dark Meadow,” he says, taking a good look at me. “You made it.”
“Looks like you made it, too,” I say.
He’s older than me, a bit potbellied. He’s had what were maybe some small skin cancers removed from his forehead and scalp. We’ve never met—I’ve never met anyone from that world—but he says, “I remember you well. You’re different than I imagined, but tastes never change. Pictures only, if I recall. And you’re a vintage guy, right, you like the classic stuff?”
One look into Dodger’s eyes, and you can tell what kind he is: the kind that is born.
“Actually, I’ve embarked on a new life,” I tell him.
“Certainly,” he says. “I understand completely.” He removes a thumb drive from his pocket. “You won’t be needing this, then. But I’ll give it to you for old times’ sake. It’s custom-loaded for you.”
He holds out the thumb drive, and I take it, warm from his pants.
“You know how hard it is to find new vintage material?” he asks me. “What was it Wordsworth said, ‘A springtime loss is autumn’s gain’? Just remember that I made the effort, I walked the mile for you. It’s encrypted, but the key is ‘Dark Meadow.’ ”
When I close my fingers around the drive, Dodger beckons me in.
“You weren’t easy to find,” he tells me. “But we need you.”
I follow Dodger through the empty waiting room into a hallway stacked with blinking server arrays; several box fans hum full speed to keep them cool. We enter what might have once been a dog-grooming area—there are stainless-steel counters and tables and sinks. The sinks are deep. One is filled with dirty coffee cups, and the other is ringed with beauty supplies. At one metal table, a man is editing video. He’s got a couple of cinema screens and a mixing board.
Dodger addresses him, “Bert, this is Dark Meadow. He doesn’t like video. It’s only pictures for him.”
Without turning from his screens, Bert says, “Old-school.”
“Dark Meadow’s the one who posted that article,” Dodger says. “He’s here to make sure our servers are clean.”
The tables are tall and ringed with director’s chairs. When we sit, Dodger says, “You don’t know how glad I am to see you, old friend. Your article touched on a matter of grave concern for us. Can you lend us your expertise?”
“You’ve got a regular server farm in there,” I say. “Do you have a T1 line?”
Dodger lifts his hands. “Our business requires it,” he says, and he starts detailing all their hardware configurations.
I can feel there are other rooms down a short hall, maybe veterinary exam rooms or rooms filled with animal cages. When I glance over at Bert’s screens, I see footage of a girl. She is naked except for her socks. She walks into the shot, facing away from the viewer, and she approaches a table. Bert backs the footage up so that she enters again, approaches the table again, and leaning forward slightly, she places her hands palm-down upon it.
“This should be no problem,” I tell Dodger, even though I haven’t completely heard him. Such is the absorbing power of video. “Let me grab my diagnostic drives from the van.” I glance again at the screen.
Dodger catches me and smiles. “He said he didn’t like videos,” he tells Bert.
“I heard,” Bert says.
“Who could blame you?” Dodger says. “She’s special, brand-new. Look at her, knock-kneed and wobbly. She doesn’t even know where to look. I have them leave their socks on. It’s one of those touches.”
On the screen, a naked man with pale skin enters. He approaches the girl from behind.
“She needs a name,” Dodger says. “All the good ones have been used up—Dazzle, Sparkle, Crush, Taffy, Daphne, Tumble, Twist.”
“What about Trample?” Bert asks.
“Go back to your editing,” Dodger tells him, then says to me, “Bert has no sense of beauty, he appreciates nothing.”
On the screen, the man nears the girl. He reaches around her and places his hands firmly atop hers, pinning them. Behind his large frame, she disappears, her little-girl self is gone, and I activate. It happens so fast that a shudder races through me and I feel my body jerk. The man’s body hitches as he begins, and then she’s gone, there’s nothing of her left.
“Whoa,” Dodger says when he sees my face. “Looks like we have a new fan. Bert, burn an extra copy of this, Dark Meadow here’s an admirer.”
Bert turns and gives me a sour look. He looks like he hasn’t slept in a long time.
“You can’t even see the girl,” he says. “This is the part I’m editing out.”
“What works is what works,” Dodger says. “You said you didn’t like videos, but this does it for you, yes? Help us out, and I’ll give her to you. Give our servers a sweep, and she is yours.”
For the first time, I notice that the table in the video is stainless steel. And just as it dawns on me that I, too, am at a stainless-steel table, a girl walks into the room, right past me. She’s carrying a bowl of cereal in both hands. The cereal’s the kind with rainbow marshmallows and the bowl is filled to the brim, milk threatening to spill, so she’s moving slowly, eyes glued to the rim. I see that her hair is wet, that she’s wearing a bathrobe, and this is her, this is the girl on the screen, and I understand that when Dodger offered her to me, he was not talking about a video file.
My arms rise as if in self-defense, and I stand so fast that the director’s chair is knocked to the ground. The girl turns to look at me, milk sloshing onto her hands. We lock eyes for a moment, and then I am running. I drop the thumb drive and run. I bump Bert’s table, his monitors threatening to tip, and I almost take down a tower of servers as I race for my van.
At home, I drag my computer out front, and on the cement driveway, I start swinging a hammer. With the claw, I split the aluminum casing. I carve out the GPU and the optical drive and the RAM cards. I scrape all the circuitry off the motherboard. I pull the drives from their bays, and I think, I am a bad guy, I am a broken guy. I start to bang on the drives, actuator arms flying off, spindles cracking. “I am bad,” I mutter to myself. “I am broken.” I pound and I pound until there is nothing left but crumbs of plastic and aluminum meal. Of the hard drives themselves, the alloy discs knurl under the waffled face of the hammer into raw nuggets. Rhonza walks by. She casts a quick glance, but if she formulates an opinion, she keeps it to herself.
Hammer in hand, I rise and turn to look at my house. What kind of person lives here? I know there are those who are born. But what of those who are made? Do they also have a choice? Can they still choose?
I drive all day. I drive to the marina and park in its blindingly bright lot. I make my way along the floating docks, and things are familiar—ice being shoveled into plastic coolers, a charter captain hosing down saltwater tackle. But when I reach the slip where a sailboat named Ketchfire perpetually resides in my mind, I find nothing. There is only a rainbow sheen of spilled diesel on the water. Were there other boys? Was I the only one? My mind won’t let me picture the Skipper except in snapshots: white-soled shoes, tanned forearms, grey stubble.
Just off La Cienega was a pizza joint Skipper used to take us to, and when I drive there, it is still open. In fact, it is still filled with boys—soccer teams, Little League, a brigade of boys in matching black karate uniforms. I drink diet root beer from a red plastic cup and stare at their faces. I study them as they hold pizza slices and tromp around in their cleats, and I don’t care if people eyeball me. This is where, after our troop was formed and we sailed the Ketchfire for the first time, Skipper brought us for pizza and gave us our nicknames. Other boys got names like Nav and Crusher and Sparks and Cutter. Then he looked at me. He must have seen something in me. There must have been something about me. He said, “And you are Dark Meadow.”
I head up Topanga Canyon, passing the Charlie Manson ranch and the lodge where Jim Morrison wrote “Roadhouse Blues.” I suppose I should share the fact that there was another sound in the bottom of the boat. The Skipper had a camera, the old disposable kind. It used real film, and to advance the roll, he had to turn a plastic wheel three times—scritch, scritch, scritch. There would be a whine as the flash charged. He framed his pictures carefully, taking his time, and you never knew when that bright light would blind you.
I park at the Santa Ynez trailhead and walk up, above the dog park with its barrels of eco-bagged dog shit, above the footpaths where multicolored condom wrappers flutter in the thornbushes. Up here, tawny grass surrounds a giant coastal oak. According to the newspaper, this is where it happened. There is a stiff breeze. Looking west: a panorama of ocean. I study the ancient tree, with its burdened trunk and gnarled branches, and I wonder which limb Skipper Stevenson threw his rope over.
It is dark when I arrive home. The Tiger and the Cub are on my porch.
When I approach, the Tiger says, “There was someone outside our window again.”
“We heard him,” the Cub adds.
“Seriously,” the Tiger says. “He was super-creepy.”
“Was there really someone out there?” I ask.
They both go quiet.
“I don’t want to go home,” the Cub says, and the Tiger nods in agreement.
“Come on,” I tell them, and open the door. Inside, I turn on all the lights and, in the kitchen, retrieve three milks.
The girls run around, inspecting everything. They race to my bedroom, where they discover only boxes of computer parts.
They come back, disappointed. “Where’s your bed?” they ask. “Where do you sleep?”
I hand out milks and point at the foldout couch right in front of them.
The Cub, feeling kinship, says, “You sleep in the living room, too.”
The Tiger asks, “Where’s your dinner table?”
“I eat my sandwiches at the counter,” I tell them.
“Don’t you own a chair?” the Cub asks.
“It’s on the porch,” I answer. “You were just sitting in it.”
“Where’s the TV?” the Cub asks.
“Just drink your milk and go to bed, you two.”
They are amped and squirmy, but they obey; slipping under the covers, they try to lie still.
The Tiger focuses on the Bermuda sloop.
She says, “I never really looked at this painting when it was on our wall.”
I glance at the sailor, rigging in his hands. He has started his journey, the all-important one. He has decided his direction and charted a course. All he had to do was choose.
“Let’s try to get some sleep, you two.”
On the porch, I begin an article about Mars rovers, but I can’t focus. Officer Hernandez keeps texting me, and so does Dodger. I don’t often think back to the Sea Scout days, but the boy I used to be, he is everywhere tonight, his trusting face, his quiet hopefulness. Also in my head is the girl with her hands on the stainless-steel table. And Dodger’s thumb drive, I keep hearing the satisfying click it would make sliding into my computer’s USB port. My mind begins filling the lost drive with a thousand images. Already I miss my computer, its calm and order, how things would stop spinning if I could just boot it up. On the driveway, the crumbs of its carcass sparkle when a car passes.
When I figure the girls are asleep, I head inside.
They are awake.
“Turn the lights off,” the Cub says. “I can’t sleep with the lights on.”
“Let’s try them on a little longer,” I say.
I sit on the side of the bed, where I unlace my shoes and loosen my collar. Then I lie beside them—me atop the covers, them below.
The three of us stare at the ceiling.
The Cub asks, “Are you the son of Missus Roses?”
“She’s just the lady I bought the house from.”
“I want a nickname,” the Cub says.
“Trust me,” I tell her. “You don’t.”
Though the Tiger is between us, the energy of the Cub radiates to me. I feel her. Her unaverted gaze. The inquisitive lift to her brow. The dark hollow at the cuff of her pajama sleeve.
“Have you ever done anything bad?” I ask the girls.
The Cub stares into space. She says a slow “Yeah,” like she’s visualizing a graveyard of her bad ten-year-old decisions and the wasteland of their consequences.
“Everyone’s done something bad,” the Tiger says. “What about you?”
“I’ve done some bad things,” I tell her. “But I’ve never hurt anyone. Not directly, not me doing the actual hurting.”
“Did someone do something bad to you?” she asks. “Is that why you brought it up?”
“A long time ago, yes. Something bad happened to me.”
The Tiger turns toward me, our faces not far apart. “Like what?” she asks.
“I suppose there are pictures of it,” I say.
“Pictures?” she asks. “What do they look like?”
I shake my head. “They’re out there somewhere,” I tell the Tiger. “But I haven’t seen them. That’s because I don’t look at pictures of boys.”
Narrowing her eyes, she tries to understand this.
She is the older one, so I tell her the truth.
“I look at pictures of girls.”
The Tiger considers this. She says, “Some of the girls on the cheer squad, they trade pictures of boys on their phones. That’s all they care about.”
She begins to tell me all about it—her friends, their crushes, the perils of a forwarded pic.
“Will someone please turn out the lights?” the Cub pleads.
The Tiger begins to sing to the Cub. It’s a song about a girl who goes alone into darkened woods. “ ‘My girl, my girl,’ ” the Tiger sings, “ ‘don’t lie to me.’ ”
The Cub sings, “ ‘Tell me, where did you sleep last night?’ ”
Together, they sing, “ ‘In the pines, in the pines, where the sun don’t ever shine.’ ”
“That’s a pretty strange lullaby,” I tell them.
They ignore me and finish the chorus together, “ ‘I would shiver the whole night through.’ ”
The Tiger then throws me a look. “Tell that to Kurt Cobain,” she says.
I stand awkwardly, because of my erection, and walk to the light switch.
I regard the girls a moment, their outlines under the covers, their small mouths as the Tiger leads the Cub through the final lyrics about going to where the cold wind blows. Perhaps I was too hasty with regard to the Tiger. Maybe I judged her too early. There is something about her. She does, in her own way, activate.
I turn out the lights.
Outside, I step across the yard into my rosebushes. Here, I lick my hand. I lick up and down, coating my palm and fingers. I position myself behind some Blue Skies and Bourbons, so I’m less visible from the street, and begin masturbating. It’s not about pleasure but about security and stimulation control and self-management. I’m doing it for the girls. They need me to look out for them, I understand that now. I can be a force of good in their lives. I’m the one who heard the signal. I’m the one who knows the code. What Officer Hernandez doesn’t get is that once something bad happens, it happens every minute of your life, and it can’t be undone, not by a rescue or a raid or a rope or a hundred and forty thousand dollars. The time to act isn’t after, it’s before, it’s now. And there is nothing beautiful about a pearl of semen tumbling toward a rose in the moonlight. It’s just a duty. While the innocents sleep, it’s just a thing that must be done.