It was a period of offensive suggestions. He’d received, for example, a lead on a pharmaceutical company copywriting job from Alexandra Chen that was so ludicrously outside his ethical standards that he would not reply. Was this how far he’d fallen, he wondered, that his own acquaintances imagined him part of the psychopharma hegemony? It was not something he wished to ponder.
Instead, in the corners of the apartment, Lyle inserted sticky traps and waited for a sighting of bedbugs. There were bites, itches all along his body. He’d think he felt them on his skin, check, and the only time he saw them was when they were disappearing into a crevice. He began to house his clothes in trash bags. He searched for the entry points, cracks in the wall, holes. He could see a way in everywhere, so many testaments to the insecurity of his home.
Lyle began to knock on doors. He asked neighbors if they’d bought used furniture, traveled. He asked about their guests and where they’d been.
“Ever thought it was you they came from?” the man next door said. This was the second offensive suggestion.
But the third, the third had come from an unexpected source.
It had come from Bri Freeman.
Sledgehammer was one name. There was documented evidence. A plan for two: two mosques. Two explosions. We are talking both ends. Assassinate Jews. Assassinate Christians. Erdogan and his people would blame the shooting down of the Turkish plane on Greece. They would point to Gülen behind the conspiracy, if it could be called a conspiracy at all.
“This so-called coup is going to so-called trial,” Bri had said. “It’s getting almost no coverage. This is your book, Lyle.”
He ran a glass of water out of the sink. He drank it, and somehow the water was white before it was clear.
“There are echoes of 2007,” she had continued. “What a lot of locals are saying is it’s a fake plot. Get critics out.”
On his knees, he plucked white cards inscribed with story ideas from the floor. He fluttered dust off each. Bar fight. Raised rent. “You know I won’t get a US publisher interested in that,” he said. “Too expensive to report. Too expected. They expect that part of the world to be a shitshow.”
“This is classic authoritarian optical illusion. They will say they must protect the regime from the radicals. It could happen here.”
“To Americans coups happen elsewhere,” he said. “We expect moderate politics, liberal Republicans, conservative Democrats. You know that.”
“If we can believe terrorists are radicalized online,” she said.
“This isn’t my book.”
“It is. It’s good, Lyle.”
“So why don’t you write it then?”
“I’m working on a project already. Historical contextualization of Western websites outsourcing comment moderation. I’m busy. I have students. I have a mortgage.”
“But I have the time to tell your leftovers.”
A blur in the corner of his eye was probably a bedbug. He stood too late, knelt back down. He was on his knees, and he was tired but twitchy. The tingle on his forearm. Ankle.
“Do you need a loan?” she said. “Just to get the reporting started?”
“Jesus, Bri. I don’t need anyone to take care of me, least of all you.”
“Isn’t that what your dad’s doing?” she said. “That is not a provocation, by the way.”
And he had, because he knew she intended to help, done the counting thing in his head. He counted down and before he responded imagined taking off, that he could depart himself.