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10.

My father came back the next day, when I was dutifully studying my partial derivatives. He was carrying a large cardboard box, which he dropped unceremoniously on top of my calculus homework.

“New project,” he said.

I reached out and pried open the flaps of the box. In it was a big black slab of a laptop, with IBM emblazoned on the cover.

I gave my dad a questioning look. “Keep going,” he said. I could feel the excitement zinging off him, a manic energy that I recognized with a faint ping of alarm.

I put the laptop on the table and dug back in the box, this time coming out with a flat, black, plastic device. “Is this a…?”

“It’s a modem.” He had lost his patience with this game and was fishing around in the bottom of the box. He handed me a book, bright purple and thick: Teach Yourself Web Publishing with HTML in a Week.

I stared at it, unsure how I was supposed to respond. Was this some sort of a test?

“I’m finally going to write my manifesto, and put it on the World Wide Web,” he announced. “And you’re going to help me do it.”

I didn’t know how to respond. I flipped open the laptop and ran my hands over the keys, with their mysterious symbols and inscrutable labels. I touched a fingertip to the little red trackball and was surprised that it felt spongy under my touch. “How did you pay for all this?”

“A friend gave it to me,” he said. I looked at the pile of technology, which surely represented thousands of dollars. Who was this friend? One of the letter writers, I assumed. Malcolm or Ben or Jim.

He was extracting more things from the box: instruction manuals, loose cables, a CD with a purple symbol that looked just like the Eye of Providence, as if access to the World Wide Web had been divined by God. 1,000 HOUR FREE TRIAL, it said, in big yellow letters.

“You know how to use all this?”

He was distractedly studying the manual for the modem. “The computers have gotten faster and smaller since I worked in Silicon Valley, but it’s still the same concept.”

“Silicon Valley? What’s that?”

He looked up, his brows knitting together, realizing he’d just said something he didn’t intend to. “Where the computer industry is based. In California.”

“So that’s what your ‘high-profile job’ was? In computers? Why didn’t you tell me that before?”

“I didn’t think it mattered to you. Anyway, you see that I have firsthand knowledge of why all this is dangerous.”

This is what my father did: He told me something fascinating, then expected me not to be fascinated by it at all, and changed the subject. It was the boring stuff that he wanted me to pay attention to. “If it’s so dangerous, then why are we doing this?”

He put the manual down and picked up a wire, plugging it into the back of the laptop like this was something he did every day. “I know it may seem hypocritical. But I’ve thought about it a lot lately, and it’s the logical next step for us. Bookstores are phasing out their zine racks, not just the Country Bookshelf but at least half of the stores that have been selling Libertaire tell me that they’re paring back their shelves. Print is going to be obsolete soon, they say. It’s all going online. Christ, what a miserable future, can you even imagine that? No books, no magazines, no newspapers—nothing tactile and intimate. Everyone just staring at screens until their eyes fall out. Someone needs to stop this nonsense, before it gets out of control. They call it progress but they’re blinkered idiots, the whole world is just going about blithely ignoring how this ”—he waved the instruction manual in the air, like a priest gesticulating with a religious text—“is going to utterly shift human existence as we know it. They’re just ushering in their own obsolescence.”

I stared at my father, really seeing him for the first time since he’d arrived home. His eyes were red-rimmed and wild, and I wondered if he hadn’t slept since he left two days before. His salt-and-pepper beard was far too long, his hair was stringy, and there was a pungency to him that cut through the woodsmoke smell that perpetually lingered in our cabin at this time of year. Something about him felt off.

“Dad, when was the last time you took a bath?”

He looked down at his chest, as if the answer was to be found in his lap. “Exterior surfaces are irrelevant, squirrel. It’s all about the interior.”

“Well, the exterior surfaces smell. It’s not pleasant to be around. And this cabin is small.”

He was frantically plugging and unplugging things now, fishing around in the box for wires. “Here’s the conundrum. We have to find readers where they are. If they’re truly all going on the internet, well then, we have to go there and shine a klieg light on the whole goddamn charade. Show them what they’ve bought into. Otherwise, aren’t I just preaching to the choir? My current readers, they’re already believers. So where do we find more? We need to convert them. And we can capture so many more readers online, where you have unlimited reach for free. You know how many issues of the last Libertaire I sold? Eighty-nine. On the internet you can get that in one day. One hour .”

“Dad, it sounds like you’re arguing in favor of technology now.”

He whirled around to look at me, wires dangling from his fingers. “Not at all. Don’t you see? We make it work for us, instead of working for it. We’re smarter than them.”

“If you say so,” I said uneasily.

“Your job is to read that book,” he said, gesturing at the bright purple manual. “You learn how to get online and make a website. I’ll start working on my manifesto. See, that’s another benefit to publishing online. No need to fit everything in twenty-four pages; I can write as long or short as I want, there’s unlimited space. I can write a whole goddamn book and I don’t even need a publisher.”

He must not have been listening to his own words, because if he’d heard himself he would have realized that he sounded more like an evangelist than a critic. I found his self-contradiction alarming: What was I supposed to believe now? Surely, he would wake up in the morning, see his delusions in the clear light of day, and change his mind. Surely, he would wake up to the fact that he had just invited the enemy right into our house, given it a seat at our kitchen table. Surely, he would dump everything right in the trash.

And yet I knew, looking at the wires in his hand, that something vital had already shifted, and was never going to go back. This was so much bigger than a television and a few stealthy viewings of The X-Files . My father was opening a direct conduit to the outside world, and what he failed to see—and what I, in some subconscious way, already understood—was that this wasn’t just going to be about Saul Williams announcing his presence to the world. Instead, the world was about to come tous.

And that was when it hit me. My father had brought my method of escape straight into our cabin. I wouldn’t even have to leave the woods to visit the outside world and get the answers I wanted. I had my portal right here.

I opened up the pages of that purple instruction manual and began to read.