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29.

He took me to Burger Island, a graffiti-tagged diner just down the street, at the end of a run-down strip of old industrial buildings; it was a dive, but considering that I could count the number of restaurants I’d eaten at on one hand, I still found it magical. We sat at a chipped Formica table eating baskets of burgers oozing with cheese as I laid out the rough outline of how I’d found my real birth certificate and the story about the car crash that “killed” me; how I’d stolen money and some personal papers from my father and run away to San Francisco to look for my mother, but had been robbed of everything on a Greyhound bus by a girl with blue hair. I left out any inconveniently self-incriminating details. For example: that I’d shot a security guard, that I’d unknowingly helped my father murder someone, and that the police were looking for me; or that I’d burned down the cabin I’d grown up in; or that the purloined duffel had contained $23,000 and a stolen hard drive. He didn’t need to know any of that.

By the time I was done, his jaw was practically in his fry basket. “That’s the craziest story I’ve ever heard. Are you…OK?”

“Depends how you define OK . That’s a pretty vague and nondescriptive word, don’t you think? My idea of OK is probably completely contextual, compared to yours. Do you mean, am I going to have a nervous breakdown?” He gave a tentative nod. “Probably not. But I would say that I’ve had better months.”

We were silent for a long time, Lionel frowning as he tried to piece together the puzzle I’d just thrown at him. “So,” he said slowly, “it’s pretty clear you were kidnapped by your dad, right? And that’s why he changed your names, because he was in hiding from the authorities.” I nodded; realizing, as I did, that this was probably why my father had always been so cagey about why he thought the feds were after him. It wasn’t for his thought crimes; it was because he’d faked our deaths and then absconded with me. This was why we had lived so thoroughly off the grid, in a libertarian state where we could exist without much scrutiny. Where no one would ask for his ID, or mine.

God, I’d been so blind.

“OK, so, it also stands to reason that your mom has probably been thinking about you all this time. I mean, she thinks you’re dead; how excited will she be to learn you’re actually alive ? And the accident sounds like it was a big deal, surely there’s a police report and all that. So all you need to do is go straight to the police, and they’ll help you figure it all out and take you to your mom.” He smiled, pleased to have solved the puzzle so easily.

“No.”

“No?” He looked confused.

I toyed with the fries left in my basket. “I just…don’t like police.”

“OK…” He frowned. “I guess you could visit city hall and ask for the records department, see if you can dig up a marriage certificate with her maiden name or something? You might need to visit a bunch of city halls, though, if you don’t know where they got married.”

“City hall. That’s a government building, right?”

He nodded. I shook my head. He sighed.

“Not sure how else to tackle your problem, in that case.”

“But see, I already know where she is. I have her address,” I explained. “She lives not far from here, in a town called Atherton. So there’s no reason to talk to the authorities.”

“The address from the birth certificate?” He frowned again. “You really think she’s still living there?”

“Why wouldn’t she be?”

“That address is eighteen years old. Most people move houses, a lot. I think I read that the average American moves, like, 11.7 times during their life.”

Oh. Having lived in the same cabin for my entire existence, this had not occurred to me. “But maybe she didn’t want to move. She’s my mother, aren’t mothers supposed to just know things about their kids?” I didn’t know where I’d gotten this idea—from watching the unspoken intimacy between Lina and Heidi, perhaps—but suddenly I felt it very deeply. “Maybe she suspected what really happened. Maybe she never believed I was dead and has been waiting this whole time for me to come back to her. They never found our bodies, right? So maybe she held out hope. Maybe in her heart, she knew. ”

“God, if one person in this world truly knows nothing about me, it’s my mom.” He took his glasses off and examined them, then wiped them on the end of his shirt. When he put them back on, they were just as smudged as they’d been before. “Sorry, that was harsh. I mean, I don’t know your mom, so who am I to say? It’s possible. I’m just not usually a glass-half-full kind of guy, so feel free to ignore me if I’m being a downer.”

I shrugged. “I’m a pessimist because of intelligence, but an optimist because of will . ”

“What?”

“It’s a quote from Antonio Gramsci.”

“Should I know who that is?”

Was it fair of me to be frustrated that I knew so many things that other people did not? Especially when they knew so many more practical things of which I was completely unaware. “He was a Marxist theorist. Italian. My father loved him. Gramsci came up with the idea of cultural hegemony. How the ruling class manipulates ideology to oppress the common man through cultural institutions they control. Government. Education. The media.”

Lionel nodded thoughtfully. The neon OPEN sign in the window above us lit our faces with a surreal yellow glow. “See, that’s why the internet is cool. It can’t be controlled by the ruling class. It’s the ultimate equalizer.”

“You think?”

“It’s totally decentralized, totally neutral. Free information, for everyone. I mean, if anything, the internet is a socialist medium. Something your dad might like . ”

I opted not to correct him. Instead, I tipped my head back, tugging at this thought, reeling the thread back toward my father’s writings. My father had spent the last decade teaching me that technology was oppressing society. What if he had gotten it all wrong, and it was actually our liberator? The notion lodged in me, a warm glow in my chest. If it was true, it certainly validated my decision to come to California instead of fleeing to North Dakota to be his Luddite sidekick. I hoped like hell that Lionel was right.

“Anyway. I assume you need a ride to Atherton?”

“Why? Do you have a car?”

“Sure. I mean, it’s a piece of crap but it works. I can drive you, no problem. Tomorrow? It’s Saturday. I don’t have anything else going on.” I smiled at him, a lump in my throat suddenly rendering me mute. “Also—you said you need somewhere to sleep. This is going to sound weird but…you can sleep at the office.”

“Where? Under your desk?”

“No, there’s a little room in the corner, we put a bunk bed in it. When the programmers have to pull all-nighters, we’ll sometimes crash in there. But it’s the weekend, no big deadlines coming up, so no one will be sleeping there. You can stay there tonight.”

“Is there a reason I can’t just stay at your apartment?”

The freckles on his nose flushed pink. “The thing is…my bedroom is basically a converted closet with a twin mattress on the floor. I mean, you could take my room and I’d sleep on the living room couch. Except that it’s a Friday, which means my roommates will be partying until the sun rises. It’s always a zoo on the weekends. Believe me, the office will be quieter than my apartment.” He hesitated. “I’ll stay there, too, if you want. So you’re not alone. And then we can drive to see your mom in the morning.”

I’d spent the previous night sleeping upright in a bus seat with a window as my pillow. Anything sounded better than that. And honestly, I was intrigued by the idea of spending more time in that office. It felt like a place where I might be able to get lost, on my way to finding myself.

“Thank you,” I said. “It’s so nice of you to do all this for a complete stranger.”

“Well, we’re all strangers to each other, when you get down to it. It’s just that we sometimes choose not to be.” He shrugged. “I’m choosing not.”

—

By the time we wandered back to Signal, it was past eight o’clock. As we exited the elevator, a group was getting on. They smiled glassily at us as we crossed paths, a miasma of skunk clinging to their clothes. A gangly red-haired boy wearing carpenter pants and a sweatshirt with an alien head looped around to call after us. “Hey, we’re headed down to the Eagle’s Drift-In to play some pool. You wanna join?”

“We’re good, Janus, thanks.”

The redheaded boy cocked his head at me and raised an eyebrow before the elevator doors slid closed.

The office that had been such a buzzing hub a few hours earlier was now mostly empty. The music had been turned off, along with most of the lights. But a scattering of people still sat at their desks in the semi-dark, their faces ghoulishly illuminated by the glow of their computer screens.

“There are still people here,” I whispered.

“There are almost always people here,” he said. “It’s kinda nice, if you don’t like to be alone.”

“Are you going to get in trouble for bringing someone into the office?”

He shook his head. “Frank’s hiring people so fast that no one knows who everyone is anymore. Most people will probably figure you just started.”

“Even though I’m only eighteen?”

He shrugged. “You wouldn’t be the first. They’ll hire anyone who knows HTML.”

I know HTML, I thought, with a little surge of pride; feeling, for the first time, that I might not be so woefully behind.

The sleeping quarters were just as he’d promised, a room taken up entirely by a bunk bed and a green corduroy couch that looked like it might have been dragged off the street. A case of some kind of drink called Zima sat in the corner, one bottle missing, the rest gathering dust. I changed into a clean T-shirt and sweats, brushed my teeth in the bathroom sink and washed my face with pink hand soap. Lionel hovered stiffly in the doorway, seemingly unsure what to do with himself, as I settled into the bottom bunk. I had a sudden memory of my father tucking me into bed when I was very young. He used to read to me, poems by Yeats and Wordsworth, tangles of old-fashioned verse whose effect on seven-year-old me was mostly soporific. When had he stopped doing that?

“I’m just going to work for a while, OK?” Lionel offered. “I’m not really tired yet. I’ll be quiet when I come in.”

“That’s fine.” We stared at each other, strangers-turned-unlikely-roommates. “You didn’t have to be so nice to me, you know. Just because you talked to me for a few minutes online.”

He shrugged. “I have a thing for underdogs and outcasts,” he said.

“Why? Are you an underdog, too?”

“Honestly, everyone here is. This is where you land when you don’t fit in anywhere else. It’s a wonderland of weirdos.”

And maybe he meant this dismissively, but all I could think as I slipped under those dirty sheets, was that it sounded like my kind of heaven.

—

Despite my exhaustion, I couldn’t sleep. Instead, I lay awake in the bottom bunk for hours, listening to the rasp of Lionel’s breathing. City noises—so foreign to me—drifted up from the street, breaking the night: boisterous drunks stumbling out from the bars and clubs, a cacophony of honking car horns, a woman’s plaintive wail. And then, every time I drifted close to sleep, my brain would seize on an image that would jolt me awake again. The terror in the face of the security guard as the blood pulsed out from his thigh. Flames, outlined against the night sky. My father’s eyes, welling up as he called me my girl. The blackened hole in the side of the Microsoft building.

I finally drifted off near dawn. When I woke up, thanks to the sun that blazed through the wall of windows, Lionel was gone. I found a note at the end of my mattress that explained that he was going home to change and retrieve his car. Back in an hour, it read, though I had no idea what time it was or had been.

While I waited for him to return, I wandered through the empty office, studying objects left behind on the desks as if they were archeological artifacts. A collection of miniature Lego toys, dressed like medieval knights. A collage of printed-out photographs of Celtic knots. A glowing lamp with bubbles that floated in pink oil. Books everywhere, none that I had ever read before, with titles like Neuromancer and Infinite Jest and Society of the Spectacle and Stolen Lightning: The Social Theory of Magic. I riffled through a few and then decided to borrow one of the more interesting-sounding novels, a fat book called Snow Crash . It would be my first science fiction, but not my last.

Even empty, the room seemed to hum with an electric static, like a high-pitched wind; and as I walked through the office I finally realized it was the sound of a hundred whirring hard drives. I imagined them connecting to the outside world through those hot pink cables, like a particularly elaborate spiderweb unfurling its strands out toward a million anchor points.

Halfway through the room, I stopped abruptly. There, on a desk piled high with newspapers and magazines, was a copy of the most recent New York Times . I scanned the front page with a sense of dread, already anticipating what I was going to see.

There it was, in the lower corner of the front page: Authorities Identify Suspects in Microsoft Bombing.

The story didn’t have any photos of me—and how would it? I couldn’t recall ever having had my photo taken. We didn’t even own a camera. But that was only a small consolation because there I was in the first paragraph anyway:

Authorities have identified a Montana man, Saul Williams, and his teenage daughter (a minor whose name is being withheld), as suspects in the Microsoft bombing last weekend. Authorities were able to trace the IP address of Williams’s website, called the Luddite Manifesto, to a cabin outside Bozeman, Montana. An explosion at the cabin, as agents arrived at the scene, is suspected to have been triggered by their arrival. Authorities are currently combing through the ruins for clues.

Little is known about the father and daughter, who are described by locals as “recluses” who lived mostly off the grid in the woods and had few ties to the community. Their current whereabouts are unknown, although authorities are offering a $100,000 reward to anyone who can provide information that leads to their arrest.

There was a black-and-white photo of the smoking ruins of our cabin, with police caution tape threaded around it. I stared at this, a pixelated heap of burnt wood and corrugated tin and fire-scarred stones. Was that the blackened cushion from the chair on our porch, leaking its innards? The only thing that remained truly recognizable among the ruins was our cast-iron woodstove, which still stood sentry over the ashes of my childhood.

My mind whirred. The authorities knew who we were. They knew, and yet they didn’t know that Saul Williams wasn’t actually Saul Williams, nor was I Jane . No one was looking for Esme Nowak—and why would they? I was dead. For that small mercy, I was begrudgingly thankful. I was lucky, too, that the authorities believed I was still a minor—who had told them I was seventeen? Presumably Heidi, or her mother. Regardless, even if Lionel happened to be following the news, he wouldn’t necessarily connect his Internet Jane from Montana with this unnamed fugitive from the same state. I hoped.

As I scanned the story, I realized that the authorities had identified us not because Heidi turned us in, or because of evidence somehow left behind at Microsoft, or even by the images in the surveillance cameras. They’d found us because of the Luddite Manifesto. Technology had led them straight to us. My father clearly hadn’t thought that part through; or maybe he just didn’t know what he was doing; or maybe, just maybe, he did know and didn’t really care. Maybe he wanted to be found, and made a martyr.

How long would I be safe as Esme Nowak? Would the feds find anything in those ashes that would point them toward my current (and past) identity? I put my nose close to the photo, studied it as if it were a rune that might reveal its secrets. But my father’s incendiary had done its job, hastened along by the massive stacks of brittle books and newspapers and magazines that had lined our rooms. There wasn’t much left to see.

And yet. It was hard to breathe; it felt like someone had slipped a noose around my neck and was pulling it tighter and tighter. I felt incapable of navigating this alone; but who was there to help me? I certainly couldn’t lay all this on poor unsuspecting Lionel; it was bad enough that I’d asked him to unknowingly harbor a fugitive.

My mother. We would find her, and she would help me. Wasn’t that what mothers did? Make all your problems go away? I thought of Lina, gently tucking away the loose strands of Heidi’s hair, always watchful, always ready with a solution.

The elevator in the hallway pinged, announcing Lionel’s arrival. I dropped the newspaper back on the desk, racing back to the bunk room with my cheeks aflame. By the time he appeared in the doorway with a paper bag in his hands, I was sitting on the bed, tying my sneakers, my face hot and my fingers shaky.

Lionel looked pinkly scrubbed. His straight dark hair, freshly washed, still had comb marks in it. Even on a Saturday morning, he was wearing a shirt and tie. I found it oddly endearing; for some reason I couldn’t quite identify, he made me feel safe.

“You’re up! I bought bagels. Do you need coffee? There’s a pot in the lunchroom, I can make you some if you need it.”

I smiled at him, my face a bland mask of eagerness that hid the panic thumping through my veins. “No, I’m good,” I said. “Let’s go. I just want to meet my mom.”