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24.

There are moments, even now, when I think back to the time before I knew anything about the world—when the extent of my awareness began and ended with what I could touch with my fingertips, what I could see from our window—and wonder whether it might have been better to remain that na?ve forever. We sentimentalize childhood innocence for a reason: Kids have no reason to fear the world. They believe themselves immortal. They know nothing of evil and decay. They don’t know to be afraid of hungry bears.

And don’t all adults wish that we could still feel that way, too?

I lived in that liminal place for far longer than most children—lived it deep into my teens—and maybe I would have stayed that way forever, if I hadn’t begged to leave the cabin. I’m convinced, even now, that this is what my father wanted for me: for me to stay in that protected bubble, na?ve to the feeling of despair, until the day I died.

The irony, of course, is that kids believe that knowledge unlocks happiness. More than anything, they crave access to all the things that they aren’t supposed to know yet; as if being privy to the secrets of the world will open up some magical door to adulthood. They believe that if you know, you will understand . But in fact, the opposite is true. The more you come to know about the world, the less it makes sense; and the more you wish you could just climb right back inside your mother’s arms and hide there, an oblivious kid, forever.

Of course, I didn’t have a mother, so I was shit out of luck on that front.

As I drove, I found myself wishing that I’d obeyed my father and gone straight back to our cabin to sit by the phone. I realized that if I hadn’t gone to Heidi’s house—if I hadn’t managed to watch the news—I might never have found out what actually happened in Seattle. For a brief, hallucinatory moment, I let myself believe that if I’d just managed to stay ignorant, it would have somehow nullified what happened. My father wouldn’t have killed a man; and I wouldn’t have been his unwitting accomplice.

But life doesn’t come with a Rewind button. There is no convenient amnesia that can undo the damage already done.

—

Heeding caution, I parked my father’s truck on the old logging road at the edge of the forest and crept in on our secret path, my feet soggy and numb in my frozen boots. But there were no strangers waiting at the cabin, no cars in the drive, or police waiting on our porch. The cabin stood silent, windows dark abysses, the chimney cold.

Inside, nothing had changed at all in the two days that I’d been gone. Newspapers were still strewn across the sofa and my quantum physics textbook was open to the same page and the hens had produced exactly zero eggs. Everything felt bizarrely normal, and for a fleeting moment I almost believed that my father and I could just step back into our lives and resume as we were.

I was cold and starving, and what I really wanted to do was light a fire in the stove and make a plate of pasta; but there was no time for that. Sure, Heidi was my friend; but how good of a friend was she these days, really? What were the odds that she picked up the telephone after I drove away, and made a call to the Bozeman police? I’d fucked up, and I knew it. My father was going to be livid.

Get the go bag, light the fuse, run. My father’s voice kept running through my head. I was a fugitive now, wasn’t I? It would be stupid of me to stay here and just wait for the cops to showup.

But before I took off, I at least wanted to know more about what I was running from.

The laptop and modem were sitting on the dining room table where my father had left them. Five minutes after I arrived home, I was online and clicking through the pages of The New York Times.

My father and I hadn’t made the front-page headlines. For one glorious second I let myself believe that this meant that everything was going to be just fine; that whatever had happened, it wasn’t that bad; that it was possible I’d even misheard the news reporter entirely.

That fantasy blew up the second I clicked to the U.S. News section.

There we were, in an alarmingly large font. EXPLOSION KILLS AI PIONEER AT MICROSOFT CAMPUS.

In a smaller font, underneath, an equally chilling subhead: Suspects leave behind anti-technology screed.

I read the article, my brain at a boil. An explosion on the Microsoft campus on Sunday had caused significant damage to a research and development building. One person had been killed: Peter Carroll, the chief scientific officer at Microsoft, a pioneer in the study of neural networks and artificial intelligence. There had been no additional casualties, but a security guard had been treated for minor injuries stemming from a gunshot wound.

At this, something inside me unclenched. At least there was this: At least I hadn’t killed a man. Though, apparently, my father had. Which made me an accomplice to murder.

No suspects had been identified yet. Video footage from lobby security cameras had pinpointed two unidentified visitors to the building, and they were wanted for questioning. (The footage stills were not available online, photos still being a luxury in those glacial-download days; but of course, I’d already seen them.) Authorities believed the explosion was the result of a homemade incendiary device. Meanwhile, the perpetrator had left behind a URL, scrawled on a hallway wall, which led to a website with a long, anti-technology screed.

The URL was printed in the article. It was, of course, the Luddite Manifesto.

I’m embarrassed now to confess that seeing that URL in print thrilled me, despite myself: that something I had made was in the pages of The New York Times . But that momentary frisson was accompanied by a rising swell of nausea, as everything else began to sink in. The dead man, the injured security guard, the charred remains of a tech campus office. My father, his face bleeding, running off into the mist. Me, in a red dress, fleeing the scene.

I raced to the front door, leaned over the edge of the porch, and vomited into the snow.