From across the courtroom Julia’s mother and then father met her gaze, smiled, and tentatively waved. For once her mother had taken off her reading glasses altogether—she must have put them in her purse—instead of parking them up in her hair like the goggles of a speedster who had just stepped away from the racetrack. Her mother had such lovely, thick hair. She left it silver.
It was a pleasant enough courtroom. The little banisters that fenced off the chancel or whatever it was called were a honey-colored wood. The room didn’t smell, and though it was vile to notice smells, the fact is the smells hadn’t been too good up to now and the not-too-goodness had been a pretty salient aspect of the setting. The ceiling in the courtroom was too high for anyone to scratch into it, or pick at it, or smear it with the brown, dried, brittle-looking, fingerpainted swirls that Julia, downstairs, had at first feared were feces but eventually pieced together must be peanut butter, scooped out of the insides of the provided sandwiches. Which was resourceful.
There was solemn coughing. A lamp or a glare from a window had caught in her father’s eyes, and the reflection glittered there almost uncannily, in a way she had never seen in real life before, though she had seen it in animated movies.
Her lawyer, Kenneth, was clasping his hands over his crotch, in the style of a pallbearer or a groomsman. She imitated him. Under the circumstances there wasn’t much else one could do in the way of making oneself look presentable.
“Julia Di Matteo?” said, in an almost conversational tone, a young black woman who had been standing silently next to the defense’s table since before Julia had been brought into the courtroom.
“March fifth, nineteen eighty-five,” Julia supplied.
The woman smiled, and Julia felt stupid for being all promptness and compliance.
“Docket thirty-six five twenty-seven,” the woman said, in a voice that was now one of proclamation. “The People against Julia Di Matteo.”
What a horrible thing to say.
“Consent to waive the reading, counsel?” asked the judge, who, at his remote desk, had flipped open a manila folder.
“So waived,” said Kenneth.
“Your Honor, a few notices, if I may,” said a tall man with a politician’s pompadour, who made no eye contact with Kenneth or Julia or even the judge before speaking. He was standing at what had to be the district attorney’s table, since its placement mirrored that of hers and Kenneth’s. “Hereby give notice that our office will be presenting the case of People versus Julia Di Matteo to a grand jury.” He went on to give several more notices, droningly, rocking on the balls of his feet as he did so.
The judge registered his words with irritated glances. After the man finished, there was silence for a few moments as the judge flicked through papers in the folder before him.
“You have a proposal?” the judge prompted.
“Computer trespass and criminal possession are Class E felonies, Your Honor,” resumed the man with the pompadour, “and the accused and her co-conspirators had reason to know they were breaking into the network of a contractor working with the city police and through the police the Department of Homeland Security. These are serious charges, Your Honor, and we don’t currently know the modality of the break-in or who else might be involved. Because we believe that through her family the accused has access to considerable resources, we’re asking for bail of one hundred thousand over twenty-five thousand, with a ban on all internet and computer activity.”
“Counsel?” the judge said to Julia’s lawyer.
“Your Honor,” said Kenneth, “we will be contesting all these charges, as you are aware, and not even my colleague here has suggested that there was any vandalism or any intent of personal gain. My client was born and raised in the city and owns an apartment here, which is her primary residence. Her parents, who are present in the courtroom, also live in the city. Her father is a respected member of the investment community, a position that my colleague makes allusion to, and her mother works here as a college professor of, I believe, art history. My client told me, just now, that last year she performed her civic duty in this very court system as a juror. She belongs to this community, Your Honor, and we ask that she be released on her own recognizance.”
Looking down at his papers, still rocking on his feet, the man from the district attorney’s office shook his head and silently, admiringly mouthed the words civic duty.
“Bail is set at five thousand over fifteen hundred,” pronounced the judge, “with an absolute ban on all computer and internet activity. Counsel will explain the ban to the accused carefully. I don’t want her saying she didn’t know her phone was a computer when we have to put her back in jail.”
Kenneth spoke again: “Your Honor, my client’s father would now like to post bail on her behalf.”
“He may approach the clerk.”
Julia’s father put a palm up like a schoolboy and left his seat in the gallery.
Kenneth had told her only a few minutes ago, in the waiting cell, that the judge was likely to forbid her to use the internet, and she still had a little trouble believing in the condition. How would anyone know if she read the newspaper later tonight on her mother’s tablet? Of course her mother would feel obliged for Julia’s sake to keep the tablet away from her, and at the moment she hardly wanted to worry her mother further or force her mother into the position of having to try to deny her something in order to protect her.
“I wonder, ma’am,” Kenneth said to the woman who had read the docket number at the start of proceedings, “whether, as a courtesy, the officers of the court would be willing to provide for a private egress.”
“But, Kenneth—,” Julia interrupted.
“Julia?” he responded. To the woman beside them: “One moment, ma’am. My apologies.”
“I want to see the others. They’re ahead of me, aren’t they? They’re probably just outside. I want to see them just for a minute.”
“I don’t think they’ll still be outside, sweetheart. Because of the press.”
“Oh, the press is just writers.”
“It’s your decision.”
“Then I think that’s what I want.”
“It looks like we’ll make our way out of the building on our own steam, ma’am,” Kenneth said to the judicial officer. “But thank you for your consideration.”
The clerk finished a third counting of Julia’s father’s hundred-dollar bills.
“Adjourned to Part F,” the judge declared, and rapped his gavel.
“That’s it?” Julia asked.
“Oh, I know,” Julia said, when Kenneth reminded her not to speak to the reporters. She embraced her parents. “Momma, I want to go home with you and Daddy. I don’t know if I’m going to spend the night, but I want to go home with you for now, anyway.”
“We can order Szechuan.”
“No, something with vegetables.”
“We can get Szechuan with vegetables.”
“I want vegetables that look like vegetables. My god, I’ve been dreaming of vegetables.”
“Julia,” interrupted Kenneth, “you and I need to have a little more conversation, so if you don’t mind, I’ll ride uptown with you. Can I call you a taxi?”
“Daddy can call one.”
“No, I got it. I got someone I work with.”
“Oh, that’s lovely. Momma, I just want to see my friends first, on the way out. Really quickly.”
Her mother looked to Kenneth, but he was talking to his driver. “I’ll just tell Eileen that we’re ordering food and to go ahead and feed Robbie,” her mother said, taking out her phone. “I haven’t told Robbie anything yet.”
“There’s plenty of time,” said Julia.
“They may need the courtroom for another hearing,” said her father, who had been monitoring the looks that they were getting from the bailiff.
Julia was aware, as she neared the door, that a file of people were now glancing up from their phones at her, despite being still so intent on their texting that they occasionally wrong-footed themselves. She wasn’t going to be afraid of them. She needed to see Raleigh, if only to find out what she was feeling for him, which seemed to have hidden. Of course she wanted to see the others, too.
“Kenneth, you’re coming with us, aren’t you?” she asked.
“I’m right here.”
She pushed her way into the gloomy marble corridor. Greenish stones like these were known as verd antique, she remembered. Men and women crowded near the doorway looked at her at first unseeingly and then with something like alarm. “Julia,” one said, holding out his cell phone. “Julia Di Matteo,” said another, making the same gesture.
How unpleasant to be beckoned as if one were a dog.
“Kenneth, you’ll stick with my mother and father, won’t you?” she asked.
She shoved firmly, and once she had broken through the crust of reporters, she wheeled around, scanning for her comrades. The reporters watched her, appalled; they hadn’t expected a person in her position to run their gauntlet. She hesitated, in their presence, to call out her friends’ names. Where were they? She had been looking forward to telling them the whole story, starting with the way the police had woken her up—by calling her landline and ringing her doorbell at the same time. It had been unnerving.
She made a little dash down the length of the corridor. The pattering on marble of the reporters’ footsteps behind her—as they hurried to narrow the gap she had briefly put between herself and them—sounded like soft, reluctant applause.
They must not have waited. Maybe they had wanted to but hadn’t been able to.
“Were the others in the same courtroom?” she asked the nearest reporter.
“Did you have an arrangement to meet them?”
“Oh, you’re no help, are you,” Julia said. She had the mad idea of trying to picture where her friends had gone as if they were a misplaced set of keys. But she knew without any conjuring that of course they had returned to their homes on the far side of the river. She hadn’t been aware until this moment of how much strength she had been borrowing from the idea of her solidarity with them and theirs with her.
“Julia,” appealed one of the journalists.
“Julia,” appealed another.
The reporters were typing into their phones notes about the look of dismay on her face. It was a strange way for a person to make a living.
“We just push on ahead, sweetheart,” said Kenneth.
“Oh, I’m fine,” she reassured him. She smiled for her parents and took her mother’s arm.
It was a luxury, in a city so crowded and expensive, for one’s parents to have preserved a shrine to oneself, even a slightly stripped-down one, and Julia sat on the limp, quilt-covered bed in her lamplit childhood bedroom with appropriate gratitude. Appropriate and familiar. On top of a lime green dresser stood a bowl full of spools of ribbon. The room was now usually vacant and therefore private, and on that account her mother found it to be a convenient place to wrap presents. Beside the bowl of ribbons was a wooden carrousel, painted in candy colors, which played a folk tune when wound up. It was too babyish and too girly for Robbie, and it should have gone to Goodwill long ago, but perhaps it had become a sentimental favorite of her mother’s. Still hanging on the wall was Julia’s poster from when she was in high school of poker-playing puppies. Such an excellent poster, and it wasn’t just out of loyalty to her younger self that she thought so.
“How long are you staying?” asked apple-faced Robbie, at the threshold.
“Just to say hi.”
“How was your day?” he asked.
“It was so busy! I haven’t been able to take a shower yet, can you believe?”
“Are you stinky?” he whispered.
“I think I am.”
“Momma will let you take a shower here,” he said with confidence.
“She might even make me take one.”
“But you wouldn’t mind,” he inferred.
“I wouldn’t mind,” she agreed. “And what did you do today?
“I had class,” he said almost wearily.
“Which one?”
He sighed. “Nutrition.” He would probably never live alone, but their parents wanted him to know how to. He was only twenty, but his hair was already thinning, and the lenses of his glasses were as thick as ice cubes.
“Did you like it?”
“Yes,” he said flatly.
“Are Agnes and Charlie still in your class?”
“Agnes is,” he said. “Do you want to play Life?”
“I can’t tonight, honey. I’m sorry.”
“Okay,” he accepted.
“I need to go ahead and take a shower.”
“Okay.” He shuffled out of the room.
Was there ever anyone so heartless, Julia wondered of herself. But Raleigh didn’t have the number here.
There were three space heaters, girdled by their power cords, in the closet of the bedroom, and after her shower, over dinner (undistinguished Middle Eastern, in the end), Julia asked if she could take one back with her.
“Is there anything else you need? Don’t we still have those little phones we bought for Spain? That’s the kind Kenneth wants you to use, isn’t it?”
“We threw them away, remember? While we were still in Barcelona.”
“How wasteful.”
“It was very one-percent of us.”
The glass of the little kitchen television remained dark. Julia knew her parents were refraining from turning it on out of a wish to protect her, and out of a wish to protect them, she refrained from saying that in fact she wasn’t so fragile. Of course they would watch it later, in their bedroom, after she had left. And she would watch it in her bedroom, twenty blocks uptown.
“I’m going, after dinner,” she told them.
“You know they’re still downstairs,” her father said.
“Are they? But the little alleys in back are connected, Daddy. If I go out that way, I can come out to the street two whole buildings down.”
“Through the basement?”
“Behind the basement. The alleys connect in back.”
And that was how she left, after hugging Robbie, who was more solid, in an embrace, than other people. More surely rooted. Edgar, their doorman, took her down in the elevator. She pushed all her hair up under her hat. After Edgar threw the bolt that deactivated the alarm on the rear door, she walked the length of two shallow, unwelcoming cement yards, climbed a fence with the help of two giant tractor tires that had been chained to it years ago by the neighbor’s super, for what purpose no one had ever been able to discover, and from the third yard took an underpass, through which that building’s porters carted out the weekly garbage and recycling. The underpass was lit by only one bulb, weak and jaundiced, and she opened and shut behind her the steel-grate door at the end of it, with two hands, so gently that there was no clang. Only a clean, pleasant snick. Without looking back to where the reporters would be, she walked briskly toward the lights of the avenue, at the end of the block. No footsteps followed her.
At the corner, a taxi slowed, and she got in with a nod, without speaking. Only once she had clapped the door shut did she give her apartment’s address.
“Straight ahead for eighteen blocks is all, really,” she told the driver, the space heater lolling on the seat beside her, in a brown paper grocery bag that her mother had insisted on fetching from the kitchen utility closet.
She had got away. She was herself still.
How strange, she thought as she noticed her relief, to worry not that one might cease to be but that one might be overwritten. Scripted by other parties.
She wished she could take notes. She was so certain that Kenneth would discourage her that she hadn’t bothered to ask for permission, but she knew she was going to write about this someday, when it was all over. And she would want then to be able to remember not just her perceptions but the textures of her perceptions. Including the taut helplessness of not being able to write anything down while it was all happening. She would have to register as much as she could on her memory. On her self, as it were. The way one writes a phone number on one’s hand.
“Halfway down the block, on the left, where those forsaken-looking people are standing,” she told the driver. This time there was no dodging them. The meter chittered out a receipt as the taxi coasted to a stop.
The reporters began to try to talk through the closed window.
“Is this all right, ma’am?” the driver asked. He had a desi accent.
“No, but they can’t hurt me.”
He opened his window. “Get away. Go,” he said chivalrously, but the reporters only massed at the opening he offered them, and he had to raise the glass of his window again. He shook his head. “Are you famous, ma’am?”
“Tonight I seem to be.”
“And what is your name, may I ask?”
“I’m sorry.”
“It’s all right,” he said, with a little wave. “You are perhaps an actress?”
“I’m a writer.”
“A famous writer,” he said with satisfaction.
“Hardly.”
“Good night, ma’am,” he said, as he handed her the change. “But tell me your book, and I will buy it.”
“I wish I had a book.”
While she was climbing her stoop, she didn’t reply to the reporters, but once inside, she said quietly, through the glass, “You should get some sleep; it’s quite late.” They probably didn’t hear her over their own talking.
While still on the threshold, she heard her landline ringing, and she left her keys dangling in the lock to answer it.
A strange man asked for her.
“How did you get this number?” she asked.
“From Information.”
“It’s not in Information. I pay an extra dollar and forty-five cents every month not to be listed. And I’m in the Do Not Call registry.” She hung up. “Jesus,” she said, allowing herself, now that she was in private at last, a note of exasperation.
She dropped the space heater onto the sofa and tossed down beside it the mail that she had carried upstairs pinned under her elbow. She shut and locked the door. She flicked off the overhead light that she had flicked on when she had hurriedly entered, and she fumbled at the switch of the lamp beside her sofa, which gave a gentler light.
There, she thought.
In the kitchen, by the light of the open refrigerator, she made herself a vodka tonic. She stirred it with a spoon; she tasted the spoon. Returning to the sofa, she took pleasure in its being such a nice sofa, in its charcoal, minimalist way. Even tonight she was not sorry she had chosen not to have a cat, because thanks to the catlessness of her apartment, the sofa was still a nice sofa, two and a half years later. She sipped; she picked through the mail. There was a handwritten note from a woman she had known a little in college. The girl was producing a documentary; you could donate online.
The door buzzed. At the intercom she hesitated but then, pressing Talk, asked, “Who is it?”
“It’s me.” It was Raleigh.
She scrambled down the upper flight of stairs, but at the landing, as she turned, she slowed. She wasn’t going to let him in if the reporters were still there. She didn’t want it to be a matter of public record. She loped down the lower flight of stairs more cautiously, in a syncopated two-step, knowing that on the lower flight she was visible from the sidewalk.
But the reporters were gone. She looked past Raleigh, up the street and down the street, to be sure.
“They left,” Raleigh said. “It’s completely safe.”
“Just come in,” she replied impatiently.
“I waited for them to leave.”
Men were always more boyish when you had them on your hands than when you imagined them.
“Would you like a drink?” she asked as they walked upstairs. She sounded like her father, she thought. She sounded public. She hadn’t known whether they were going to do this again. She hadn’t known whether she wanted to. In her apartment, once she turned the deadbolt, she left him in the living room and slipped into the bedroom for a moment, to look down at the street again from behind the curtains. They really did seem to have been left alone.
“It’s okay,” Raleigh said when she returned. He seemed to be insisting that she agree with him.
“There’s so much going on,” she said noncommittally.
They hadn’t touched yet.
“You didn’t wait,” she said, when she gave him his drink.
“For what?”
“At the courthouse.”
“You wanted me to wait?”
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said.
“Julia.”
“What? Don’t tell me to be reasonable.”
She rocked her glass in an attempt to make the ice cubes in it clink, but they would only swivel. She wanted to pick at them with a finger, but that would be unladylike. When they had first kissed, two weeks ago, on the very sofa where he was now sitting, he had said afterward, almost angrily, God I wish I hadn’t done that. And she had replied, with asperity, You weren’t the only one doing it.
“We could go to that horrible diner,” he suggested.
“It’s a nice diner. It’s only the food that’s horrible,” she said. “But we should stay here.” Which more or less sentenced them, but not yet, she told herself. Not just yet.
As if there had been a gentle tug, the blinds of sleep scrolled up and let in her senses, even though it wasn’t light yet. Raleigh’s warmth beside her under the sheets was sweet, and she was aware of wanting, dangerously, to hold on to the sweetness. To have a younger man as a lover in late fall, and maybe early winter. Would it last that long? It was sweet now, whether or not it was going to last. The smell of his anxiety had softened over the course of the night to something like nutmeg.
This much, even unto staying the night, hadn’t happened before. It might not happen again.
He curled inward as he stretched. “You can’t have this, in jail,” he said.
“Sex?”
“Just, lying in bed with someone.” He brushed his knuckles across one of her breasts.
“Raleigh,” she said.
“We’re in so much trouble, aren’t we.”
Would she put a scene like this in, or would it seem like too much? “We’re hardly Bonnie and Clyde,” she said. She got up.
“Where are you going?”
She slipped into her robe and peered down at the street. “They’re already here,” she said. “One of them, anyway.” A woman in terrible clothes.
“I can’t be here,” he announced.
She let the corner of the curtain fall.
“Where are you going?” he asked again. “Why are we getting up?”
“To make coffee.”
“Come back,” he said.
“But you can’t be here.”
“Oh, don’t be like that.”
She sat on the bed but didn’t get into it again.
“You know what I mean,” he said. He began to stroke her.
“Let me go ahead and make coffee,” she told him.
She took the good beans out of the freezer and milled a handful in her little spice grinder. She filled the kettle and put it on to boil. She wondered if everything was going to be different now. Maybe she wouldn’t have time anymore to wonder how a day was going to pass and also whether it was passing too quickly. Whether she was putting up enough resistance to its passing. From now on, after all, there was going to be a lot to keep track of. She was going to have the inside story, when she finally wrote it, unlike the importuners downstairs.
“What if I offered to give her a quote,” she suggested, when Raleigh, in underwear and a T-shirt, joined her in the kitchen. “In order to lead her away, so you could make a run for it.”
“I doubt your lawyer would be crazy about that idea.”
“Kenneth is a teddy bear. Don’t you have to get to work?”
“Why? So they can fire me?”
“Why would they do that? Do you want anything in it?” she asked as she poured.
“Black is fine.”
“You’re still innocent.”
“I can’t do tech support if I’m not allowed to touch computers. But I do want to go in, actually. I want to hear how they put it. I want to be there when somebody has to try to figure out how to say it.”
“If I gave her a quote, I wouldn’t say anything, really,” Julia reassured him. “I would just lead her on.”
“Do you know about the mosaic theory?”
“I think so.”
“What is it?” he catechized her.
“Oh, I don’t know, Raleigh.”
“It’s the idea that you shouldn’t reveal even a little detail that seems unimportant, because if there’s someone on the other end collecting all the little details and fitting them together, the mosaic he assembles could give the whole picture away.”
It must be very terrible, if he felt compelled to hector her about it.
“Felix doesn’t even want me talking to anyone from the working group anymore,” he added.
She didn’t give him a reaction. And all this time she had been afraid that she would lose him because of Elspeth.
“Had you heard of Felix before this week?” Raleigh continued. “He wrote that op-ed a couple of months ago, about end-user agreements.”
“Was it good?”
“He’s got a book coming out in May. Seeing Through Internet Privacy.”
“That’s so great for you,” she said, smiling. She was going to hold on in her own way even if she lost him. She was going to learn everything about him—about all of them—and then she was going to write her account. She was even willing to read this vile Felix’s book if she had to.
While he was showering she put out bowls, spoons, cereal, milk, and raspberries. She rinsed the raspberries without taking them out of their plastic clamshell. They didn’t keep.
“You don’t have cable, do you?” Raleigh asked as he sat on one of the barstools at her kitchen counter. Like hay, his hair was darker when damp. He was apparently one of these men who don’t even need to comb their hair, let alone brush it.
“I do.”
“I wonder what they’re saying on TV now.”
“It’s okay, right?” she asked as she tapped the On button of her remote. “My TV isn’t secretly a computer?”
“I don’t know.”
“I don’t think it is. How horrible would it be if one were sent back to jail because one hadn’t appreciated all the functionalities of one’s cable service.”
With a jagged advent there issued from the television labored, modulated shouting. A number of people had allegedly been killed by an American drone on the other side of the world.
“We’re not the news anymore,” Julia said.
“That was fast.”
She tried another channel. “Oh, wait, here we are,” she said.
“‘I know you know I know you know I know your password,’” a news announcer read aloud. A chyron displayed this text, over a blue background, as the announcer was reading.
“And this is from @OccupyESP, which seems to be a parody account,” reported the announcer’s co-host. “At this point we don’t know who, if anyone, is authorized to speak for the group, and an account like this is pretty much all we have to go on. Is that right, Jason?”
“They can’t decide if we’re a joke or if we’re terrorists,” said Raleigh.
“That’s not us, is it?” asked Julia.
“Who would it be? Jeremy’s not that funny. I mean, that’s not funny, but Jeremy’s not even that not-funny.”
“They’re usually little aspiring TV writers, aren’t they?” Julia commented. “The people who do these accounts. Who pretend to be the weasel escaped from the zoo or whatever.”
“‘Yeah, we read your mind,’” read the announcer. “‘Sea salt and vinegar, amirite?’”
“This is like the CIA’s Twitter account,” said Raleigh. “A little ‘irony,’ a little shit-eating knowingness.”
“This doesn’t count as being online, does it? If we see social-media messages on TV?”
“Elspeth is going to hate this. She got so mad about my T-shirts.”
“But she liked mine, didn’t she?” Julia asked. “I mean, they were essentially hers.”
“Everybody liked your T-shirts,” he reassured her, though they both knew that nobody would ever wear one again.
On another channel, a man in a red tie said, “Kind of a misconception, to say we were hacked, and I want to get out in front of that.”
“Is that Bresser?” Julia asked, just as CEO, BRESSER OPERATIONAL SECURITY unfurled on the screen.
“The truth is, we were tracking them before they were aware of us,” Bresser said.
“What do you mean, tracking?” asked the interviewer.
“I can’t say too much because it’s something we’ve been coordinating with the authorities, but what I can say, I think, is that we’re a private company, and this has actually been a kind of proof of concept for us.”
“This has been a good outcome for you? To be a security company hacked by Occupy?”
“There’s a lot of data out there about people, public data, and what our company has is a new way of looking at it. A new way of putting it together.”
“How does it work, Joe?”
“You know, okay, if you have a big enough database of, say, the English language and the Spanish language, you no longer need anyone to tell you that five is the same as cinco. You can just tell the AI to look at the way five relates to all the other words in English, and then at the way cinco relates to all the other words in Spanish, and the AI will see that the patterns have the same shape. They match. They’re what we call homologies, and what we’re doing at Bresser is we train the AI to look for these homologies.”
“In order to find people?” the interviewer prompted.
“I shouldn’t say any more because we’re a business and I don’t want to give away the company store. But the other thing I wanted to get out in front of, in this conversation, is the idea that these young people are psychics, or whatever they want to call it. There’s no such thing. They’re hackers, and the other thing is a smoke screen. There are things they knew . . .” He trailed off.
“Things about you?” asked the interviewer.
“They were watching us the way we were watching them. That’s all it is. And they’re in jail now.”
The interviewer thanked Bresser for speaking with her and swiveled to face a camera at a new angle. Julia clicked her off.
“They were waiting for us?” Julia asked.
The blank screen was still holding Raleigh’s gaze. “I don’t know. He’s selling his product.” He looked away from the TV. “Our names were on some of the folders we downloaded.”
“What was inside?”
“The files wouldn’t open. I was going to try to figure out the file extensions the next morning. Yesterday morning.”
“We don’t even know what we did, do we,” Julia said.
“Was I a sucker to believe in this shit?” Raleigh asked.
She put their dishes in the sink and ran a little water into them. She didn’t like to leave dirty dishes for her cleaning lady, but she could, when she needed to. She made a mental note to remember to lay out the woman’s cash.
From the bedroom window Raleigh and Julia watched the reporter below as she snapped and fluttered the pages of what was probably that morning’s edition of her newspaper.
Ten minutes later, when Julia, strategically alone, opened the front door of the building, she saw that the woman had stowed the newspaper, folded, in a pocket of her backpack. The capitals on the front page were inches high.
“What’s the headline?” Julia asked, from the top of the stoop.
The woman hesitated. “We don’t write the heds.” She was wearing a fake-leather skirt trussed on one side with what looked like rope. The cuffs of her blouse peeking out of her coat sleeves seemed to be ruffled.
“Who writes them?”
“The editors.” Keeping her eyes on Julia, the woman unshipped her copy of the paper. FREAKS AND GEEKS. The woman was chewing gum, Julia noticed.
“I liked that show, anyway,” it occurred to Julia to say. She restrained herself from glancing up to where Raleigh would be monitoring her progress. “Well, heading to the bus,” Julia said.
“Where did you grow up?” the woman asked.
“Oh, it’s not interesting.”
“In the city?”
Julia laughed, slightly, at the incivility of the woman’s persistence. As Julia began to walk down the street, the woman fell into step beside her. The decoy at least was working.
“I want to know,” the woman continued.
“It’s your job.”
“No, this is an interesting story for me.”
Julia laughed again. It was always pleasant to be flattered, even if one had the good fortune—or was it misfortune—to see through it. She took a deep breath of the November morning, and the air was cold enough and dry enough to have a menacing, almost diagnostic sharpness. The chill traced an outline of the air’s passage into her.
The reporter was holding a digital recorder halfheartedly extended between them. Its red LED pulsed silently. An invitation, a hazard. With the arrest, the authority that the group had given to Leif had been interrupted, and everyone in the group was free to have a voice of her own now.
“But you went to school in the city?” the reporter tried again.
“No one cares!” Julia said cheerfully.
The arm holding the recorder drooped. “Do you not want to talk because you think we don’t believe you?”
“Oh, I was never any good at it,” Julia said.
“But I can tell you have it a little.”
“Are you telling me that you have it?” How did we get here, Julia silently regretted.
“I know when I know something.”
“What are we even talking about?” Julia asked. “I need to catch the bus, you know.”
They had reached the avenue, though Julia’s only real idea about the bus was that she would be able to look out the window.
“I read some of your friends’ posts,” the reporter said.
She wanted to hear the good news, Julia realized. She wanted to hear from the lips of one of the apostles that it would be all right if she let herself have feelings about everything she knew without being supposed to know.
“A week ago I could have talked to you,” Julia said.
“I know,” the woman replied. She shifted her backpack to her other shoulder. “Do you have any comment about Christopher Finn? He was released on his own recognizance.”
It was a relief, probably to both of them, that the reporter had returned to her adversarial role. “Do you have his address?” Julia asked.
“Me?”
“You have all our addresses, don’t you?”
In the end the reporter even mapped a route to the address on her phone. It didn’t make any sense to take a bus, Julia saw. She walked to the subway.
A plastic potato chip bag that had been pulled into wiggly flaps—its delicate, oily inner pocket exposed—was drifting down the subway steps as Julia marched up them.
She emerged onto a treeless avenue. Sun-faded stuffed animals were wired to the metal frame of a drugstore’s raised security grille. A trestle sign promised a sale. Two blocks away, an expressway was whining in its artificial canyon. Years of exhaust soot, cast off by the expressway, stippled the ledges and crevices of the drugstore and neighboring buildings. The soot had aged the facades the way a flashlight pointed upward at a raking angle appears to age a young person’s face.
Julia had decided to interview Chris. He was the member of the working group she knew the least about. There was something arbitrary about assigning herself the task, but she would never do any of the research she needed to do unless she made an effort to will herself to.
Chris’s street was slightly less grim than the avenue that led to it, the usual ratio between streets and avenues. At the edge of the sidewalk stood a row of brick tenements, their shoulders hunched. Surprisingly, the bricks were umber rather than the garish coral that were what one mostly saw through a taxi’s window on the way to the airport. Julia checked building numbers as she walked, but because three unremarkable-looking people were waiting halfway down the block, she knew which building it would turn out to be.
“We don’t know how late he sleeps,” one of the reporters said, as Julia pulled open the outer door.
“That’s very thoughtful of you,” she replied, and let the door shut behind her.
The reporter tugged it open again. “We had agreed to wait until nine or until he came down himself.”
“I’m a friend,” she said, into the glass of the inner door.
“Who?” he asked.
“Even if you ask nicely, I don’t think I’d like to say.”
A door slammed upstairs.
“What do his tattoos mean?” the reporter blurted.
“Does Chris even have—?”
“I mean Leif Saunderson,” the reporter interrupted. “What do his tattoos mean?”
“I never thought about it.”
As Chris approached the door, in his heavy male way, a glow of anger reddening the dark-honey bur of his skull, the reporter withdrew.
Chris opened the door at first only enough to talk. “Who sent you?”
“It was my own idea.”
He eyed the reporters beyond her. She remembered how badly she had wanted to see Raleigh after her arraignment. She had had the primitive fear then that while locked away from her he might have changed. That the fairies might have switched him. They had switched Chris, she saw.
He opened the door a little further. “I have to leave for a job in a few minutes.”
“I just wanted to say hi.”
He trudged up the stairs. His T-shirt hugged his skin, and under his broad shoulders, his narrow back had a snakelike compactness. The linoleum on his landing, she saw when they reached it, was that wretched, ancient, common pattern, the one that looks like a cross-section of gray-pink pavlova, the color of hamburger meat just slightly cooked. The pattern was scumbled by heavy wear. Chris picked his way past a basketball, a heap of cleats, spattered cans of paint, a full trash bag, and a bicycle. She could smell that he had just showered.
“Sorry,” he said, unemphatically, of the debris. He unlocked the door at the end of the landing. There wasn’t room for her to step past him, so he stepped inside first and yanked a ceiling light’s beaded chain.
Nothing in the tiny room stood independent from anything else. Flush in a corner against two walls was a twin bed, which touched a dresser, which in turn touched a small desk. The chair that belonged to the desk was backed up against the doors of a wardrobe.
A plain navy blue quilt had been pulled square with the corners of the bed that it covered. Its fabric had begun to pill. Had it been worn rough by Chris’s unshaven chin? By time, merely? Julia imagined that if she were to lie down on the quilt, it would powder her throat with house dust, but she didn’t know, journalistically speaking, whether she could write about what she imagined unless she actually did lie down on it.
“I’ve never been out here,” she said.
“What do you want?”
“To see how you’re doing?”
To imagine that one was going to write about the same moments that one was living through—it was like treading water. One made flurrying gestures, but with one’s mind, and kept an inch or two above the surface.
“And no one sent you.”
“I don’t think anyone’s in a position to ‘send’ anyone anymore,” she told him. She couldn’t help delivering her lines as if she were on a larger, brighter stage than Chris’s bedroom afforded. She leaned over Chris’s desk toward the one narrow window, in part because to peer out the window was to not be studying Chris’s bedroom, which it would have been tactless to seem too observant of.
“You’re just here for yourself,” he said.
“I have this idea, Chris. I know it’s a little . . .” She had the gingerly feeling that artists have when they first mention to another person a new work they hope to begin. “I’m going to write a book about all this. Someday. About what’s happening to us. It’s a project, I guess. Maybe it’s just a way for me to, you know, process all of this.”
“Are you fucking kidding me?”
She was so startled that she almost laughed. “Yes.” She shut her mouth, which she realized was hanging open. “I mean, no. I don’t know. How is it for you?” she asked vaguely. “All of this?”
“Do you know how I got out?”
For a wild moment she thought he was going to tell her he had made a jailbreak. “Didn’t the judge . . . ?” she began, but she faltered.
“None of you threw me a line.”
Neither for Chris nor for any of the others would there have been a father who knew at once the name of the attorney he wanted for the case.
“I watched Raleigh on the phone,” Chris continued. “I watched Leif on the phone.”
“Chris,” she said pityingly.
“Chris what?”
“You had to get on the phone yourself.”
“You think I don’t know that none of you wanted to talk to me?”
“But I thought you weren’t able to . . . ,” she began, but she couldn’t bring herself to say it. What she couldn’t now bring herself to say had been the ground that they had met on. It had all been nonsense, of course. She hadn’t ever thought that any of them did have it, not really. Now that she acknowledged her disbelief, she saw that there had never been a ground for them to meet on where they could in fact have met. They had never really met. Her inability to say flatly now what she and Chris were talking about meant that they had never even really spoken. It had all been a misunderstanding. But did he have to be so horrible about it?
So horrible and so magnificent. Because, look at him. His face was like a war mask, of chased gold. She folded her hands.
“You’re such a fucking idiot,” he said, shaking his head—a little showily, she thought. “You don’t even know what I’m saying.”
It stung, but this was experience; she had wanted experience. “Then tell me what you’re saying.”
“I’m cooperating with the prosecution,” he told her. “You shouldn’t even be talking to me.”
“Oh, Chris.” She realized, as she waited for him to say more, that she wanted to hear that it hadn’t been her fault. Which was stupid of her.
“At least the people on the other side know what they’re talking about,” he said, speaking softly because, she sensed, his voice was in danger of breaking. “At least they know where they are.
“You haven’t talked to Elspeth?” he added, still more quietly.
She shook her head.
“I have to go,” he said. “I’m gonna be late.”
Chris’s apartment was far enough from the center of the city that on the subway going back Julia was able to find a seat. From station to station, the car filled up with commuters—underslept, vaguely put upon, purposive. They assembled in a silent forest around her, unspeaking because they were nursing for as long as they could the privacy they were soon going to have to surrender when they began their workdays. Their presence was required somewhere, unlike hers.
Talking to whom she shouldn’t was what she had most wanted to save. Once she confessed to Kenneth, there would be a long, boring conversation in which she would be gently guided. There would be an appeal to the pride she took in being sensible. But what if she didn’t want to be sensible anymore? What if she understood that this was her last chance?
The postman always came early to her parents’ apartment, and Julia carried the mail upstairs. “Is somebody getting married?” her mother asked, as Julia took out of the pile a heavy cream envelope, hand-addressed to herself.
“I don’t know, Momma. I haven’t opened it yet. Is there any grapefruit?”
“I didn’t think it was in season yet, so I didn’t get any. I could make you an egg, or maybe Robbie would let you have some of his cream of wheat?”
“No,” said Robbie.
“Do you want an egg?” asked her mother.
“I need the cream of wheat,” Robbie explained.
“I understand, sweetie,” Julia reassured him.
“Will you play Life with me?”
“Oh, I can’t today. Isn’t Thanksgiving coming up? Maybe we can play on Thanksgiving.”
“It’s in two days,” said Robbie.
“Is it really? I’d forgotten all about it.”
“How can you forget about Thanksgiving?” he asked skeptically, as if he suspected that she might be making a joke.
“I’ve just been losing track of things lately,” she apologized. She resheathed the invitation. “It’s a dinner slash fund-raiser,” she told her mother. “For a friend’s art space slash gallery.” Rich people were so continually asking one another for money. Maybe it was to distinguish themselves from people who would be ashamed to ask for it. From people who lived in rooms so small that all the furniture touched.