Chapter 2

The Missing Girl

The electronics that were supposed to remain powered made the master bedroom feel inhabited. Rather than sleep there, Vin put an air mattress in a bedroom on the second floor.

After his second night in the house, the puzzling birdcall of the doorbell rang in the early morning. Vin, in khaki shorts and his brown “Faux Museum” T-shirt, found Joaquin Brooks standing on the white cement porch, a thick leather portfolio tucked under one arm.

“Good morning, Vin.” Joaquin was a heavy-set, middle-aged man about Vin’s height, with darker skin and short brown hair. He was wearing a tan, impeccably tailored suit and black leather loafers with small tassels that looked soft despite their high shine. He smelled good. “May I come in?”

When they’d met, Vin hadn’t talked much because he’d wanted to listen to Joaquin, who’d clearly spent a lot of time honing his speech. His lack of an accent was so pronounced it was almost a kind of accent, maybe a variant of Network English, which Vin had read about. Joaquin had the glowing bass of a news anchor and his unhurried, melodic cadences coaxed syllables apart in surprising ways. His diction should have sounded affected, primarily because he avoided contractions and used unusual constructions and “whom” rather than “who” for the objective case. It shouldn’t have worked, but combined with his unusual inflections it did, and produced a calming, almost hypnotic effect.

Vin stepped aside and Joaquin nodded as he passed. They sat on the flimsy plastic chairs at the card table.

“So, how are you finding the place, now that you have had a little time to settle in?” Joaquin asked.

“It’s beautiful.”

“And, do you believe you will be willing to stay?”

“I like it.” Vin nodded.

“Oh, I am very pleased. Of course, as I once mentioned, you can bring in a few pieces of your own furniture. Or purchase one or two new pieces. Nothing too elaborate, but I can provide a small expense account. I will appreciate your consideration of reasonable limits.”

“Thanks. I’m okay right now though. I kind of like the openness.”

“I see.”

“And that great view is like furniture too, in a way, isn’t it?”

“Is it?”

“And we’re not sure when she’s coming back, right? Maybe she should find it the way she left it.”

“I see. I appreciate that, Vin, but Nerdean has given no indication that she will return at any specific time. Frankly, I consider it a possibility that she may not ever be back. I believe that if she does return, it will not be for a long while. At least a few more months.”

“Yeah. This place has so many curious things like that attached to it. When will she come back? Where has she gone? I like that.”

Joaquin’s smile was almost condescending. Vin said, “You said that she didn’t want you to install an alarm system?”

“No. That is correct. Of course, that was why I felt that it would be very important to find a house sitter, after the break-in that occurred next door.” Joaquin was a rendering of the human male as a shiny object, whole and separate from his environment, with no intimation of what might be happening in the spaces within. Vin almost felt sorry for what he was about to do, for touching Joaquin’s smooth surface and causing ripples.

“Well, I think I may know something about that.”

“Oh?”

“I think she didn’t want a house sitter because she didn’t want anyone looking at the electrical system. That might also be why she didn’t want you to install an alarm.”

“Really? Why do you imagine that she would be concerned about the electrical system?”

“You’ve been upstairs, right? And you’ve seen all those devices connected to the television?”

“Yes, of course. Though she left clear instructions that I should not stay in the house, I have walked through it regularly. She contracted for an ongoing measure of my attention. It will be a relief to have you here. I will not need to be quite as diligent about my visits. But yes, the television is—”

“Elaborate?”

“Yes.” A brief and pinched smile of annoyance at the interruption. “Precisely, thank you. And she did not impress me as a person with an interest in movies and other such things. She seemed very focused, very active. I have not met her in person. I assume she is a bit awkward, a bit unusual.”

“I think you’re right, that she’s not interested in any of those things. None of those devices are actually doing anything. They’re all modified, controlled by a system that just blinks their LEDs.”

“Oh?” Joaquin set his portfolio flat on the table and folded his hands on top of it. “Well, I am surprised.”

“I don’t think you are. You don’t really seem surprised.”

Joaquin’s gaze intensified for a moment but he relaxed quickly. “I am. Why do you believe she might leave things in that state?”

“For the electricity, obviously. You pay the bills, right? I found the meter and it’s running pretty fast. She wanted to give you an easy explanation for the high bills.” Joaquin examined and refolded his hands as he patiently listened to what Vin was saying. “I don’t think she expected you to figure it out. I mean, even if all those things were on all the time they wouldn’t use all that much electricity, so she was just betting you wouldn’t look into it.”

“No. I see. And I suppose she was right. I did not figure it out.”

“I think you did.”

Joaquin flattened his hands on his leather portfolio.

“And that’s really why you wanted a house sitter. Because there was no break-in next door.”

A pause, then, “You checked.”

“Of course.”

“And you found nothing, which does not greatly surprise me. There was no police report. Many crimes go unreported to protect property values, and the neighbor in question has plans to move soon.”

“Well, I also talked with the neighbor.”

Again, Joaquin offered Vin the annoyed half smile, this time followed by a curt nod. “I see. That is interesting because I was told there had been a break-in. You are very industrious for a house sitter.”

“I’m an entrepreneur.”

Joaquin inclined his head slightly.

Vin decided to ignore Joaquin’s insistence on the now discredited break-in. “I think Nerdean actually chose this house because the neighborhood is safe. There’s no real crime to speak of. There aren’t break-ins. Every house is alarmed except this one. You chose me for an entirely different reason. You talked to my dad. You expected me to be industrious. You wanted me to look at that rigged pile of junk and get curious about why it was there.”

“But, of course, I did not choose you. It was serendipity. Your father mentioned your situation to me. I thought we might be able to help each other.”

“Well, you hired me.”

From down the long slope of Queen Anne Hill, the deep, prolonged groan of a marine horn sounded. Joaquin waited for it to end.

“A gut decision. I always trust my gut.”

“Why didn’t you just tell me what was going on?”

“It is in my nature to be circumspect, a characteristic that has often proven valuable. And, the terms of my employment also specifically state that if certain subjects arise, I must forbid any investigation of the systems in the home, including the electrical wiring. I can only discuss the conditions of my employment if I judge that avoiding the subject might create suspicion.”

“I’ve never heard of a contract like that.”

“Yes. My employment agreement is very unusual.”

“You still want me to stay?”

“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.”

One by one, Vin’s days in the house were flattened and lost. He bought his own wireless access point so he could get online without touching the other electronics. He bought a blender and established a diet of smoothies, until he got tired of them, followed by pizza, until he tired of it, followed by smoothies, then pizza, etc. He spent time walking about the neighborhood struggling with an aimless, incurious lassitude.

Activities meant to kill time—video games, porn, aimless Internet browsing, Twitter wars, 4Chan, whatever—were fundamentally irrelevant and therefore intensely boring. He joined in a few pranks to experience the “lulz,” but there was no satisfaction in it—torturing clueless bunnies who metaphorically stuck electrodes to their lubed craniums without any notion of the potential risks. It made him feel bent. It wasn’t a worthy use of his limited time in the universe.

Nerdean had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to keep her secrets hidden and, after encountering what he believed was an inflamed avarice beneath Joaquin’s brightly glazed crust, Vin thought he could understand why. At Kerry Park, a small overlook with an expansive prospect that included the Space Needle, the downtown skyline, Mount Rainier and Puget Sound, he watched as wedding parties, teenagers, families and cliques of friends took in the breadth and reassuring stability of the view. He dozed in the soporific warmth of the mid-afternoon sun.

He sometimes tried to battle the sameness of the passing hours, but if he tried too hard he found himself thinking about his final months at Sigmoto, and all the mistakes that other people had made. His schedule began to shift as he woke in the wee hours and stayed awake later, poking around online or starting miscellaneous courses from the Internet schools that kept sprouting up like daisies. Bill asked about parties at the house, but Vin didn’t want any encumbrance on his time. He didn’t want to be involved in plans.

When this dreamlike waking life was punctuated by rare calls from family, he told them about the courses he had started. Whenever he began to relate what had gone wrong with the company, he could sense their attention wavering, at least until they could talk about themselves again. They didn’t understand what he was going through. He sometimes yelled at them for their complete lack of sound structural thinking, and their incomprehension of what actually happened at Sigmoto. He didn’t want to cut them off completely, but decided he had nothing meaningful to say to them. He finally accepted their diagnosis that he was depressed, but didn’t feel like doing anything about it.

The puzzle of the house encroached with creeping inevitability on the regions of his boredom. While wanting to respect Nerdean’s wish to remain hidden, he also began to do just a little bit of research online and, as finding information about her proved difficult, it started to feel like a game.

Nerdean had been an orphan and ward of the state. When she was sixteen she’d chosen her own name. She only had the one name, as if she imagined herself a pop icon, or she wanted a break from her past. She had earned a master’s degree in physics and then a dual PhD in neurosciences and molecular and cellular physiology, all in her early twenties. She apparently didn’t like photographs; he couldn’t find a single one. The most substantial single document he came across was a short profile on the blog of an intellectual property lawyer. By the time she turned twenty, Nerdean had made several million dollars by selling a handful of software patents to a licensing company that the blogger indignantly described as a patent troll.

She was also listed for a time as a staff member at a lab run by a large cancer research hospital. In the few years she worked there, the lab earned some press for research on suspended animation. But after generating a lot of excitement and securing significant funding, the lab went silent. The project leader, who had done a well-received TedX, stopped giving interviews. Descriptions of the work on suspended animation were removed from the lab’s web pages.

In a more recent article about digital brain interfaces, a researcher at the University of Washington was quoted saying, “We had a short but fruitful consultation on the structural subtleties of the proisocortex with the ever elusive Nerdean.”

And that was it, pretty much everything he could find despite many hours of searching. As days passed and he idly pondered those few morsels, Vin created his own portrait of who Nerdean was, a model with no image.

When the doorbell rang, Vin finished what he was doing, running his palm over the final feet of dark low pile carpet in the basement, then tracing his index finger over the carpet’s edge. He rocked back on his heels and picked up the needle-nose pliers. It had taken him a long time to identify the sound, a recording of the Black-capped Chickadee’s “Hey Sweetie” call, a single high note followed quickly by a lower note that fell off like a trailing syllable. The electronic Chickadee called again.

“What’s going on, man?” When he opened the door, Bill was waving a small bag of bud. “Why’d you take so long?”

“I’m busy,” Vin said. It was a warm evening and he was sweating. He pulled at his black T-shirt to unstick it from his chest.

“This place has to have AC,” Bill said.

“She’s here,” Vin said.

“You’ve got a guest? Beth?”

“No, Nerdean. She’s in this house, probably under it.”

“Okaaay. She’s under the house. Did you kill her?” Bill wiped at the hair flattened against his own forehead. He looked refreshed but his dark brown eyes were slightly glassy and maybe his pupils were a little dilated.

“No, I didn’t kill her. What kind of person do you think I am?”

“Nice. We’ve known each other for forever but you still surprise me with the different ways you find to be offended. That was a joke. You were the one who said she was under the house.”

“You know what I meant.”

“How? How could I know what that means?” Bill was pushing into the foyer. “Jesus.”

“This isn’t a good time.”

“Well, this is the time I’m here. Look at you. You’re playing detective, obsessed with the missing girl.”

“I’m not obsessed. You know how I get. I just started wondering why she left the house like this.”

“Nerdean is a fake name, don’t you think? A pseudonym? Maybe she’s not a genius. She’s probably a rich housewife, married and living in Magnolia or Madison Park or somewhere, with three kids. This house was just a project she got bored with.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“No, it doesn’t. But it’s still a lot more likely than that she’s under the house.”

Vin glanced outside as a brindle cat slipped from a low cluster of Achlys Triphylla, whose common name is “sweet after death” because when you crush the leaves they smell like vanilla. The cat fell on its side in the middle of the front walk and stared at him brassily. He shut the door, wanting to close off the cat. The door’s spring-loaded weights caught and guided it firmly and slowly into place.

He said, “Talking with you is like carrying air.”

“Okay. I don’t know what that means either. So, what are you doing?”

Before Bill had shown up at a random time with his pointless agenda, Vin had known exactly what he was going to do. As Bill waited for an answer, Vin looked at the sharp tips of the pliers he was holding and then looked at Bill’s face, Bill’s eyes. It wasn’t something he would ever think about, but the connections just lined up in front of him: his frustration, the tips of the pliers, Bill’s eyes.

Bill said, “Have you gotten any sleep in the last twenty-four hours?”

“I don’t think so.”

“My friend, you’re lucky I got tired of hanging out alone. By the way, you need to shave. You’re doing that obsessive thing. Okay, maybe it’s almost normal, and I get it, you found something interesting. But it just kind of looks like you might be losing it a little.”

“I’m fine. I’ve been looking for her.”

“She’s a grown rich woman. She can take care of herself. And you stink, too, man. Did you know that? Let’s smoke some of this. You can smoke a lot and then go to bed. You look like you need it. Then, when you wake up you can take a shower and shave and it’ll be a new day.”

Vin felt his head twitch involuntarily. The hand clutching the pliers was very tired. Maybe Bill was right. He walked past Bill and up the stairs to the kitchen, to the drawer where he kept a lighter.

Bill fell into one of the folding chairs. He lifted the little bag of pot and tapped a finger against it. “You have that same look you had sophomore year when you were crushing on Leana Rono and you didn’t want to talk about it.”

“You always say that.” Vin found the red plastic lighter and flipped it at Bill. It bounced off Bill’s wrist but he managed a flailing catch before it hit the floor.

Vin said, “I don’t even know what Nerdean looks like. I can’t find a picture of her.”

“Instagram?”

“No.”

“Well, I always say it because it’s always true. You only have one mode with women. You’re like, ah, ah, ah.” Bill rocked his head and body in a parody of wide-eyed lustful panic that was kind of funny, but only because Bill was funny. “So, what do you mean, she’s under the house? Do you mean, like, in a bunker?”

“No, forget it. I didn’t mean anything.”

“Really? It sounded like something.”

“It wasn’t.” Vin didn’t want to explain, but still, the angry way he barked at Bill surprised him. Bill made a face and raised a hand in mock defense.

“Okay. Don’t mind me. I’m just here to visit a friend.”

After Bill left, Vin’s mind was buzzing. He slept a little but woke up stoned and ate two slices of cold pizza. He wanted to flip a crust into the garbage disposal rather than reach across the counter to lift the lid off the aluminum champagne bucket he was using for compost, but his stoned brain was stopping him. His stoned brain preferred that he follow the rules: food waste should go into the champagne bucket. He stared, trying to remember which task his other hand, the empty one, could get started on. He remembered that it should be flicking the switch that turned on the garbage disposal, but doing that wouldn’t help him with the compost. He was stymied.

Then he imagined—saw in his mind’s eye—one hand flicking on the disposal while the other was in it, getting shredded. He winced and felt a flood of fear and adrenaline that made his eyes water. Then a sentence appeared in huge, silver, 3-D letters inside his brain. The letters said, “It’s in an appliance.” Even though the letters hovered in non-space inside his brain, they cast a shadow.

He lowered himself to a squat, turned, and leaned back on the counter, the pizza crust forgotten. Slowly he folded over and lay on his side. He felt as though all of space and all of time were expanding out from where he was lying and at the epicenter of everything there stood a being that made his own existence irrelevant. He closed his eyes and tried to slow his juddering pulse. Eventually, he fell asleep.

He decided to search inside every electrical device, and began by unplugging and disassembling each of the boxes clustered around the TV, unscrewing or prying them open while sitting amid a technician’s debris field of Phillips and flat-head and Torx screwdrivers, pliers, hex keys and spudgers, all of various sizes and shapes. As he worked, he set out the internals of each gutted object until neat rows of tiny screws, plastic clips, black plastic boards, and foam heat pads striped the warm floor. Any of the devices could be hiding a wireless connection, which might control a switch.

He had stopped considering whether or not Nerdean might want this done. He told himself that it was important to find her. She might be in trouble.

After the first day of pulling things apart, he’d discovered nothing of note and everything in the master bedroom was dismantled. He slept fitfully but woke at a reasonable hour feeling refreshed. He decided to find what he was looking for before spending too much time reassembling devices. He removed the panels of fuse boxes, thermostats, and external metering boxes, opened and disassembled air exchangers, air quality detectors, and curtain automation engines.

He finished at around eight, and then spent a couple of hours putting some of the equipment back together. It was a warm night and with the air exchanger in pieces the bedroom sweltered.

The next morning, tired but still enthusiastic, he brewed a pot of coffee and got back to work. He dug into the doorbell, which had a particularly maddening security plate that snapped closed on his fingertips several times in a row. He finally defeated it with a rubber mallet, leaving it permanently bruised. He used the same mallet to pop open a panel that granted entry to plumbing and electronic control for the jetted bath attached to the master bedroom. He stripped portions of the baseboard to find and pull apart the hidden speakers for the built-in audio system. To be thorough, he removed all the rest of the baseboards throughout the house.

Late in the evening of the third day of his project, he began to pay attention to a gnawing worry that he might have gone too far. There were now many pieces of many things scattered about the house. Despite a devotion to organization and systematic disassembly, he had begun to lose track of the fussy bits of devices, and even the location of some tools. He had also created a few inconvenient artifacts, such as a doorbell that remained mysteriously non-functional after reassembly. (He had killed the chickadee.)

He descended to the largest room in the basement, the only place in the house that wasn’t too hot, and lay on the carpet in that dark, open space. He closed his eyes and considered the mess he’d made of the house.

This was how things had been with him since he was a kid. He could be productive, and very creative in the first flush of a project. He could imagine great things and see himself doing the nitty-gritty labor required to achieve them in vivid detail. But something always went wrong. It was as if a seam of chaos were part of the very substance of his ideas, present at the moment he conceived them. It grew within his plans, a tiny malevolent uncertainty that became a critical but unnoticed gap in logic and then spread into a network of cracks, expanding fissures of risk and negative consequence. Each of those crevices grew until they all became things in their own right, distractions that eventually overwhelmed him.

It was as if what was really wrong was something in him, as if he himself were the flaw in an otherwise functional system. He was a destructive self-reference, his life a liar’s paradox of flesh and free will. Three days earlier he had had a perfectly good situation as a house sitter in a custom mansion. And now he had destroyed the house.

He rolled onto his side, but that hurt his shoulder. The concrete under the carpet was inflexible, unforgiving, and the carpet was not thick. He rolled back and threw his arm forward in exasperation. His fingertip smashed into something.

He gasped and pulled back his hand and curled up around it, sucking in breath and waiting for the pain to ease, amazed at how much a single finger could generate. As he recovered, he sat up and slowly gathered himself and then stood, a rising excitement lifting him.

He found the room’s light switch—he hadn’t pulled apart the light switches in the basement yet—and turned on the light. He was looking for the thing that had hurt his finger, a small thing on the floor near the wall. But there was nothing on the floor of the room. He stared at the area where his finger had hit something. He might have been misremembering the sensation. His finger could have hit the wall.

But it hadn’t. He turned the light back off and waited impatiently for his eyes to adjust. When they did, the dark carpet gave away nothing. He slowly walked into the room and then squatted and placed his palms near the wall and began to move his hands over the coarse carpet. Almost immediately he bumped into an elevated square, right at the edge of the wall. He couldn’t see it, but it felt as though it was raised about two inches and was roughly an inch on each side. Its sides were metallic, smooth and cool. He was sure that it wasn’t there when the light was on. He pressed on it but it didn’t respond. Nothing happened.

He turned the light back on and traced the carpet along the edge of the wall. No sign of the elevated square. He turned the light off again and confirmed that the square had reappeared.

He sat cross-legged beside the wall, staring at the point where the square stood two inches above everything else, invisible in the darkness, and he laughed. He fell to his side laughing and stretched out again on the dark carpet in the cool room. He had found her. He was right. He laughed and laughed and laughed.

He still didn’t know how to reach her. The house had only begun to whisper to him, the floor had divulged one single secret; there was more to do; he would have to listen closely to hear what the house was saying. So—start from the beginning: anything worth defending was worth defending carefully. And any single mechanism that Nerdean used might be found accidentally. What if someone happened to walk into that dark room and, despite its size and inconvenient location, happened to hit that one raised piece of floor, just stumble on it? It wasn’t enough to just hide it in the dark. There would also have to be a lock. To reduce the possibility of an accidental activation, Nerdean would have to install a second trigger.

He began to work through possibilities until he felt himself following a thing that felt like truth. She had used electricity to raise the tiny bit of carpet, so the easiest answer would be a switch inside the fuse box, which was in another room in the basement. The last two fuses in the box were both very large and not labeled, which seemed odd in a house of this caliber, but not too odd. People can get sloppy toward the end of large construction projects. And there was a tiny bit of residue on the plastic beside both of the switches, which might imply that labels had been peeled away.

He didn’t want to flip unlabeled fuses. Nerdean had made an effort to mislead Joaquin about how the house was using electricity. Flipping fuses might cut a critical connection and, if she was doing what he suspected, it might actually endanger her.

Of the two fuses, the top one was probably installed first. It would power equipment. The bottom one was probably installed after everything was already working. He’d been pacing as he considered the situation. He walked over to the box and before he was really sure what he was planning to do, he flipped off the bottom fuse.

He waited, frozen in the wake of what he had just done. It was possible—within the realm of possibility—that he had just killed her. But anyone could flip a fuse at any time. Would it really be his fault if her system were so poorly designed?

He walked into the large empty room where the light was off and stepped on the raised square of carpet, adrenaline making his foot shake. As he touched the square it retracted smoothly, sinking quickly until it was flush with the floor.

A moment later, there was a soft rustle from the center of the room as the edges of two pieces of carpet rubbed together. A square of floor about two-and-a-half-feet on each side rose with steady precision and light breathed up from below. Then one side swiveled higher until the panel was on edge. An open door. Vin stepped to the center of the room and looked down a long, bright, human-sized rabbit hole.

Several dull thuds sounded from upstairs, and a muffled shout. Vin had broken the doorbell and someone was battering on the door. He took a step away from the hole and stumbled back another step. He walked out of the room and looked up the stairs that led to portions of the house whose existential integrity hadn’t been compromised.

Then he walked back into the room and stared down the hole. Metal rungs lined one side of the chute. He could see the bottom, maybe fifteen feet below. What most concerned him was that the hole and the hatch that capped it were real.

Even though he had considered the possibility of something like this happening, he could not have prepared himself for its reality. A double-secret passage into the heart of Queen Anne Hill had quietly opened up in his basement. A thing that never happens had happened in his life.