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20.

The dress was red and shiny, with puckering threads along the seams from a previous owner who had stretched it out. It had spaghetti straps and lace insets and was made from polyester ineffectually masquerading as satin. It was the kind of thing you’d wear to work in a nightclub, or quite possibly the streets.

The dress was spread out on my bed, a blindingly bright interloper in our realm of browns and grays and greens. A pair of cheap silver sandals sat neatly on the floor in front of it, as if the person wearing the outfit had sat down and then just vanished, leaving their clothes behind. I had no clue what it was doing there, or how it had mysteriously appeared in my bedroom.

I stood in the doorway, contemplatingit.

“Dad?”

My father appeared at my shoulder. I pointed at the dress. “What is that?”

“A dress. For you.”

“It’s a gift?”

“Do you think it will fit?”

I picked it up from the bed. It was so light, it didn’t even feel like real clothing. How could you wear this and not feel naked? I wanted desperately to put it on. The longing made me feel weak.

“When am I supposed to wear it? While I’m working in the vegetable garden?”

My father walked past me and sat down on my bed. “Think of it as a costume.”

Now I was really confused. “A costume?”

“You said you wanted to help me. I’ve got a job for you.”

“Go on.” I stood there watching him. He’d been in a strange state since my offer to help a few days earlier. I’d expected him to be in one of his black funks because of the failure of his manifesto, but instead he’d been preternaturally calm, like something critical had been decided. There was a distance in his eyes when he looked at me, though, his focus boring straight through me to something on the other side. He’d even made a rare solo trip into Bozeman the previous morning; for this dress, I had to assume.

“I need to go talk to an old friend. In Seattle. And the thing is—he isn’t an easy person to see.” The words came rattling out in a toneless staccato, almost like he was reciting a speech he’d memorized. “He works in a building with a security guard who won’t let anyone in to see him. So, I need some assistance getting past the front desk. That’s where you’re going to come in.”

“You can’t just call him?”

This gave him pause. He scratched his beard, gazing over my head at a fixed point on the wall. “I don’t have his number.”

I couldn’t quite make this add up. It was the first time I’d ever heard of the existence of a friend, beyond my father’s loyal Libertaire correspondents. Then again, my father had told me so little of his life before me. “What exactly am I going to have to do?” I asked. I ran a hand across the silky fabric of the dress. It felt like escape.

“Nothing,” he said. His smile, toothy and yellow, was not reassuring.

“Nothing?”

“You,” he said, pointing at the dress, “are just going to be a distraction.”

I was weirdly flattered by this. The idea that anyone could find me interesting enough to be distracting . “Is this related to The Luddite Manifesto ?” I asked.

“ Everything is about The Luddite Manifesto . Oh, and—”

He shoved a hand into the pocket of his jeans. When he pulled it out, there was something wedged in the palm of his hand. A small, pink, plastic cylinder. It took me a minute to recognize it as the lipstick that I’d stolen from Walgreens, the one that had disappeared from my sock drawer a year earlier. The pastel tube was incongruous in his big, calloused palm.

“Go ahead and use this.”