Gmail’s home page glowed back at me from my computer. The filled-in ID and password, my finger again poised above the mouse, Ariana over my shoulder, her breath scented of the strawberries she’d eaten in a cereal bowl with milk and sugar. The day, like yesterday, had passed in an excruciating crawl, Ariana and I on top of each other, slogging through mind-numbing work and household tasks, trying not to reference clocks and watches. The time in my menu bar showed 4:01 P.M.
As my finger lowered, Ariana said, “Wait.” She pulled the mariposa—orange again—out from behind her ear and fiddled with it. “Listen, I know we were getting suspicious there for a while. Of each other. Now that we’re getting clearer, I just wanted to ask you . . .”
“Go on.”
“Is there something—anything—you want to tell me?”
“Like what?”
“Like what that e-mail’s gonna hold?”
“As in me snorting blow off a stripper’s thigh? No, there’s nothing, Ari. I’ve been racking my brain, and I can’t think of a single thing.” I clicked “Log In” brusquely, in protest of her question. Then it hit me to ask, “Is there something you want to tell me?”
She leaned forward. “What if it’s me and Don?”
As the page loaded, I sat with that one, the weight of it low in my stomach. That was all I needed—my wife’s one-night mess sent right to my desktop. A high-water mark of invasiveness. The thought brought to mind a snatch of my conversation with Punch—how e-mails, even once they’re deleted, leave an evidence trail in the hard drive.
With dread, I stared at the loading page. It hadn’t occurred to me that once I opened that e-mail, I couldn’t control what it carried with it. Into my computer.
Before I could do anything, there it was, a single e-mail staring out at us from my in-box. The sender line, blank. Subject line, blank. For now, the unopened e-mail still resided safely on the server, not yet called up on my computer. I moved the cursor all the way to the side of the screen, in case it decided to double-click the e-mail by itself.
They’d visited this computer already, printed out those JPEGs of our floor plans. I checked the history function of Explorer to see which Web sites had been recently visited. It listed none I didn’t recognize.
“Wait,” Ariana asked. “Why aren’t you opening the e-mail?”
I mimed someone listening, then gestured a question: Where’s the jammer? In answer she tugged the fake pack of Marlboros from her pocket. She never let the thing out of her sight.
“I don’t want to do this here,” I said. “From my computer.”
“Look,” Ari said, still back a step, “if it is me and Don, we might as well face it together.”
“No, I mean I shouldn’t be retrieving data from them on my computer. Even if I erase it, the record of it stays in the hard drive somewhere. Or they could use an e-mail to piggyback in some virus that lets them read my computer remotely.”
“Wouldn’t they have just installed that when they were here?”
I was up now, whistling down the stairs, Ariana at my back. I said, “Jerry checked our computers for spyware, remember?”
Tugging on my shoes, I hurried for the garage. “Wait,” she said. She pointed at my feet.
I looked down. I was wearing my bugged Nikes. Cursing, I kicked them off and stepped into my loafers. Given my white socks, not my best look, but I didn’t want my stalkers to know I was heading to Kinko’s.
Patrick Davis.
That’s all the e-mail said, though my name had been turned into a hyperlink. Buried in a rented corner cubicle, I looked over my shoulder. The Kinko’s guy was busy servicing a loud woman in louder clothing, and the other customers Xeroxed and stapled at the bank of copiers toward the front of the store.
Raising the hem of my shirt, I wiped the sweat from my forehead. Gritted my teeth. And clicked on my name.
A Web site popped up. As I took in the Internet address—a lengthy series of numbers, far too many to commit to memory—bold letters appeared: THIS WEB SITE WILL ERASE UPON COMPLETION OF ONE VIEWING. They faded into the black background, a ghostly effect.
Digital photos flashed one after another, like a PowerPoint presentation.
Ariana’s greenhouse framed against our trees at night.
Then, inside, the shot bathed in a green, otherworldly glow.
The row of pots on the middle shelf of the east-facing wall. Her lavender mariposas, unpicked and unworn these past months.
A familiar hand in a familiar latex glove, lifting the end pot and saucer. Beneath them, on the soft wood, a purple jewel case.
That disc hadn’t been there three nights earlier when Ariana and I had searched the greenhouse.
I was leaning forward at the monitor, my hands tensed like talons. The discs, the devices, the phone call—none of it had acclimated me to watching someone pry around in our possessions, in our lives. If anything, my reaction was worse, trauma compounding trauma, sandpaper on raw skin.
The photo disappeared, replaced by a written address: 2132 Aminta St., Van Nuys, CA 91406. Desperately, I looked for a pen and some scrap paper—none in my cubicle. I flew around the corner to the next desk, knocking over the plastic supply caddy and grabbing a pencil and Post-it from the spill. When I got back to my monitor, the typed address had been replaced by a Google Maps screen, the location marked smack in the shittiest part of Van Nuys. I managed to jot down the address, grabbing it from the location bubble, before that screen also blipped off.
The next featured four numbers, evenly spaced: 4 7 8 3.
I wrote those down as well, an instant before they were replaced by a shot of a dingy apartment door. Flaking paint, cracking seams, and two rusty numbers nailed where a peephole should be: 11. One of the nails had come loose, so the second 1 had sagged to a tilt.
And then, like a breath of icy air down my rigid spine, a message appeared, as bold as its type: GO ALONE.
The browser window closed on its own, quitting out of the program. When I reopened it, it had no records stored of recent Web sites visited.
There was no evidence, no artifact that said this was anything more than an evil dream. All I had were an address and four mystery numbers written in my own hand.