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13.

I was clicking around the internet one evening when I realized that I could feel my father’s breath on the back of my neck. Could smell it, too, and the hand-rolled cigarette he’d smoked after his dinner. I’d been so absorbed, I hadn’t even heard him leave his study.

I turned, with a reddening face, knowing that it was too late to slam the laptop closed to hide what I’d been doing. Not that I was doing anything particularly objectionable. I’d been reading articles on the website of the company that Lionel said he worked for, a sprawling internet destination that offered advice for coding HTML alongside cocktail recipes and articles about adventure sports. It wasn’t like I was looking at celebrity gossip or researching bus schedules to New York City. But I still felt like I’d been caught doing something terrible.

“I’m just doing some research,” I mumbled.

He peered over my shoulder and read the headline of the article I’d been reading: “?‘Hypertext, the Web’s Unsung Hero.’ Computer code is the hero. See how they do that? Personification of technology, pretending it’s better than we are. That’s how the computers will end up in charge someday, because we’ve forgotten that we need to be afraid of them.”

Usually, I would have nodded and filed this away for future regurgitation, but for some reason his pontificating grated on me. “It’s just an article about how to use links on your pages, Dad. It’s not a harbinger of the apocalypse.”

“Don’t kid yourself, that’s how it all starts.” He remained hovering over my shoulder, staring at my screen as I sat there, frozen, waiting for him to leave. He looked decidedly unhealthy, which wasn’t surprising, since he’d barely slept in weeks. “I basically invented this thing,” he muttered.

“ You invented the internet. Got it.” Were delusions of grandeur a sign of a mental breakdown? I’d been too distracted to pay attention to him lately, and now I wondered if that had been a mistake.

He ignored this. “OK, let’s do it. Show me how this thing is working now.”

I turned around to look at him. “Are you sure?”

“I can’t write about it if I don’t know about it.”

I tried to think what my father might be interested in. News seemed like a safe bet. I typed in the URL for The New York Times and we sat there watching together as the site resolved, pixel by tedious pixel. He leaned in closer, squinting. “They put the newspaper up for free? You can read the whole damn thing?”

“Every day.” I thought of the dog-eared newspapers that Lina saved for us, weeks old by the time we read them. Surely this was proof that the internet had something of value.

“ The New York Times is a liberal rag, read that thing too much and you’ll end up a mouthpiece for their left-wing propaganda. What about Reason, is that here?” He had already leaned over me to take control of the trackball and was scrolling wildly up and down.

“See, if you click on this underlined word here, it’ll take you to a different page—” I offered, but he wasn’t listening to me anymore. He nudged me aside with his shoulder, and then sat down in the seat he’d just pushed me out of. I stood watching him as he began to click away at the browser. “How do you see the code behind this thing?”

I showed him how and he studied the source code with curiosity, then clicked back to the Web. The familiarity of his fingers flying across the keyboard made me feel uneasy: It was as if my father had been taken over by a stranger I’d never met. One who clearly knew computers. One who clearly knew code.

“Dad, what were you doing, exactly, in Silicon Valley?”

He turned to look at me, his mouth slightly agape, and I could tell he was working through his memories to recall what, exactly, he’d already told me. “Working for a technology research institute, in a group that was trying to figure out the future of computers. What they might be used for.” His response was slow, each word carefully weighed and measured. “And I didn’t feel good about what we were hatching up. Felt downright ill about it, actually. I could see what was coming down the pike, the way these things were going to take over our lives. Governments putting them in missiles and spaceships, using them to conduct wars and track civilians. Artificial intelligence, stupidly teaching the computers to be smarter than us, so that they would eventually control us instead of the other way around. A society composed of brainwashed keyboard slaves, addicted to their screens. I didn’t want to be part of that. So I quit.”

“Was that before or after Mom died?” I tried to keep my tone casual, but something about the way I asked this gave him pause. He looked up at me with a sharp, inscrutable gaze, meeting my eyes. I stared right back at him.

In the end, he was the one who caved and looked away. “Around the same time. Went through a crisis of faith after she died, you could say. Suddenly saw what was important in life.” He reached out and gripped my hand, squeezing it so hard I could feel my finger bones pressing against his. An urgent smile spread across his tightened lips. “You, squirrel. You were what was important. And I wanted you to have all this”—he gestured out the window—“without first being poisoned by that .” He pointed at the screen.

Something about this sudden burst of affection felt contrived, like a shiny bauble thrown out to distract a wayward child. “And my mother, did she feel that way, too? Was she…one of the good guys?”

His smile drooped. “That’s a strange question.” He turned back to the laptop and went back to typing.

I sat watching him, weighing what I could get away with asking next. “Dad?”

“What?”

“Did you ever change my name?”

His index finger hesitated. Just the slightest hitch, before striking the key. “What do you mean?”

“Just wondered. If we ever had to, you know, disguise ourselves. To throw the feds off.”

“To throw them off?”

“You know. Because you were in trouble with the law.”

He whipped his head around. “You think I broke the law? Doing what, exactly?”

“I don’t know. It’s just, you worry about them an awful lot. And you’re never exactly clear why. ”

He gave me a long, assessing look. “Thought crimes, squirrel. I commit thought crimes.” Then he turned back to the screen. I’d been dismissed.

I stood there a beat longer, watching him click away, and then went to my bedroom to finish Great Expectations, which I’d abandoned not long after Miss Havisham died. But I found that I couldn’t focus on the words on the page. My eyes ached in an unfamiliar way, dry and throbbing. Too much screen time. It was already damagingme.

Instead, I lay there, trying to imagine my father sitting at a computer in Silicon Valley, surrounded by notebooks full of calculations and prognostications. And my mother, drinking her coffee in that big wooden chair, as I sat in her lap. Where had we been?

I fell asleep to the sounds of our chattering modem, softly clicking and humming as it reached its electronic feelers out across the network, allowing my father to creep his own way around this new frontier.