Page 32

31.

The mood in Lionel’s car as we drove back to the city was one of abject gloom. Traffic was now clogging the highway, the fog closing back in overhead. As we inched our way toward downtown San Francisco, Lionel glanced sideways at me. “Mind if we go back to my place for a while? I forgot something.”

I shrugged, still mired in despair. I hadn’t thought past finding my mother; now that this fantasy had popped like a soap bubble, I had no plans at all.

But as we pulled off the freeway and began to drive through Hayes Valley, my mood began to shift. Here, finally, was a San Francisco that felt familiar from reading Steinbeck and London: Victorian homes in candy colors, pressed tightly together like books on a library shelf. Hilly streets that climbed at implausible angles, vertiginous stairways ascending into parks where moisture dripped from wind-beaten cypress. Quirky little stores and restaurants with names that sounded more like baby babble than businesses: Noc Noc and Zam Zam and Cha Cha Cha.

Lionel parked in front of a three-story Queen Anne with an octagonal turret and gables that had been painted bubblegum pink. Inside, he led me up a set of carpeted stairs that smelled like cat pee, to a dimly lit landing, where he battled with the front door in the gloom.

He hesitated before ushering me in. “If it’s a madhouse, I’m sorry.”

I liked his apartment immediately: the foyer with its worn-smooth wooden banister. The long hallway papered in sweet knots of green flowers (faded paper that I would much later recognize as a William Morris print). Ceilings of pressed tin from which dangled milk-glass fixtures that were missing half their bulbs. Overlaid across these original features were the leavings of a half-dozen twenty-something boys: a tangle of bikes leaning up against the balustrade, a bong sitting on a fireplace mantel, a spilled bag of Cheetos ground into nuclear-orange dust on the original hardwood floors.

In the living room, two of Lionel’s roommates sat on a sagging leather couch, playing video games. They lifted their eyes to us as we passed by the doorway and then shot their attention straight back to the carnage on their TV screen. I lingered in the doorway for a moment, fascinated. “What’s that?”

“Duke Nukem.” Lionel made a face.

“You don’t like it?”

One of the boys piped up, his eyes still fixed on the screen. “Not cerebral enough for him. Too much gore.”

Lionel shrugged. “What can I say, I’m a pacifist.”

The roommates seemed radically uninterested in me, which suited me just fine. Lionel grabbed my elbow, tugging me farther down the hallway, until we reached the last doorway.

“It’s a mess,” he warnedme.

It was neat as a pin. A twin-size futon took up most of the floor space, made up with an old, crocheted blanket and two perfectly stacked pillows. A row of science fiction novels, arranged by size, marched along the floorboards. A fish tank burbled away on top of a milk crate, with a lone betta fish swimming in surly circles. A framed family portrait—a chubby teenage Lionel, his face peppered with acne, flanked by two younger sisters in identical pinafore dresses, empyrean parents looming behind.

What the room lacked in size and furnishings, it made up for with technology. Whatever space wasn’t used by the futon had been taken up by a battered metal desk, on top of which sat a hard drive and a printer and two separate monitors. Animated toasters flew slowly across the screens, in hypnotic syncopation.

Lionel reached across the futon and grabbed a pill bottle that was sitting by the bed. He popped a pill in his mouth and swallowed it down with the remains of a glass of water, grimacing. His eyes met mine, over the glass. “Prozac,” he mumbled.

Prozac had been a perennial subject of my father’s. The technological age has triggered widespread chronic depression, but instead of addressing the root causes of society’s unhappiness—feelings of uselessness, the awareness of impending doom—we drug people into oblivion. “You’re depressed,” I realized, surprised.

“Not as much as I used to be.”

“Why were you depressed?”

He looked taken aback by my question. “You’re not supposed to ask that.”

“Why not?”

“Because depression is the result of a chemical imbalance, your brain’s inability to regulate moods. So it’s hard to explain why, it’s not like some situation caused it.”

“So you can’t pinpoint anything that contributed to your depression? Like, feelings of useslessness or worries about the apocalypse?”

He coughed, dribbling water. “What? No. Not those. But yes, sure, I can think of things that exacerbated it. I was a weird kid, didn’t have any friends, so I got into computers instead and became a programming whiz and escaped off to college early. Which also wasn’t very helpful in the end because I was still the oddball, but now I was also a few years younger than everyone else to boot. Plus, a little OCD. So. Yeah.” He had grown quiet. “It’s taken a while to find my people, you could say.”

“I could say the same, about finding my people. Quite possibly I was depressed, too, living in the middle of nowhere without any real friends, except my dad. But how would I even have known if I was? My dad and I never talked about emotions. Only ideas.”

“You’d know,” Lionel said. “Plus, I know we only just met, but you don’t strike me as a depressive. You seem to be pretty good at dealing with your problems without spiraling into a black hole of despair. It’s nice to see, to be honest.” He put the pill bottle back down and then we stood there, side by side, looking around his room. He smiled apologetically. “Anyway. I told you my bedroom was small.”

“What do you do with all that computer equipment?”

“Mostly play PC games. I’m trying to write one myself, a kind of puzzle fantasy thing, like Myst, but everything I come up with is stupid.”

We were standing so close in that tiny room that I could feel the heat coming off his body. The moment had crossed from curiosity into awkwardness: The longer I stood there taking in his monklike existence, the more it reminded me of my own life back in Montana, which made me feel oddly sad for him, and then equally sad for myself. “Do you mind if I use your computer?” I finally asked, breaking the silence.

He waved a hand at his desk with an expression of relief. “Oh yeah, of course. You need to check your email or something?”

“I actually don’t have an email address.”

“Seriously?” He looked horrified. “I can help you sign up for Hotmail, if you want.”

I had no idea who I was supposed to email, but I nodded, pretending that I was equally concerned. I sat at the desk chair and jiggled the mouse until the flying toasters disappeared. Lionel hovered over my shoulder, ready to help, until I finally turned around. “I’m just going to read some things online.”

He flushed. “Oh, right. Sorry.” He flopped down on the bed and grabbed the novel that was closest to it, turning so that he was facing away fromme.

Once I was sure that he wasn’t watching, I opened up his browser and typed in the address of the Luddite Manifesto . I stared at the front page as it loaded, fear bitter on my tongue. I don’t know what I was expecting—that my father might have updated it himself? that the government might have pulled it down?—but it was exactly as it had looked the week before. The only thing that had changed was the visitor counter, which was now hovering just shy of two hundred thousand views.

Two hundred thousand people had read his manifesto.

I wondered if my father had seen this number. Surely he had, wherever he was. And my heart sank as I understood the message that it would have telegraphed to him: that the murder of his friend had been worth it for the fame. That people were finally listening .

“Have you read that thing?”

I whipped around to see Lionel gazing up at me from where he lay on the bed, his eyes impossible to read behind the reflection in his glasses. I tried to keep my face still. “Sure. Have you?”

“We all did,” he said. “Apparently it’s the most visited page on the internet, ever. And that guy he killed? Peter Carroll? Ross knew him.” Off my blank face, he added, “Ross Marinetti? He founded Signal. You could say that he is my boss’s boss. Anyway, Ross brought him in to Signal last month, as part of the futurism lecture series that he’s making us all attend, and he gave a talk about AI and machine learning. Everyone freaked out when we heard what happened to him.” He hesitated. “That thing you’re reading , that so-called manifesto, it was written specifically about us, wasn’t it? My industry, and everyone working in it. What a pile of bullshit.”

I bristled despite myself. “I mean, some of it makes sense, don’t you think? Technological progress as the opiate of the people, making us obedient to corporations, disconnecting us from what’s most vital about human nature. That we should be scared about where this is all going.” I knew, even as the words came out of my mouth, that saying this was a mistake.

He stared at me, his jaw slightly agape. “The guy’s a psychopath, Esme. You can’t possibly take any of it seriously.”

Hearing that word— psychopath —did something to my innards, and my eyes involuntarily filled up with tears. “Of course I don’t. Just thought I’d take the contrarian view.”

“Hey. Don’t cry.” He fumbled around and grabbed a tissue box and offered it to me. “What’s wrong?”

“It’s just…” The totality of my problems came crashing down on me suddenly, a tidal wave of woe. “I’m not sure what to do now. I have no other leads to find my mom. And the thing I keep kicking myself about is that if I hadn’t so stupidly let that girl on the bus steal that bag with my money and all those pages my father wrote, I might actually have some information to go on. Who knows what I would have found out if I’d had a chance to read them? Maybe where else they lived, or the name of the school where my mom taught, or her maiden name and where she grew up so I could at least reach out to my grandparents. Instead, I’m left with nothing, other than going to the police, which I can’t bring myself to do. Meanwhile I’m broke, and I’m homeless, and I don’t know what the hell to do.”

Lionel looked a little shell-shocked by my barrage. “We’ll figure something out,” he offered. “You can stay at the office a few more days, if you need time to sort through your options.”

I chewed over his offer, which seemed at once supremely generous and utterly insufficient. “I don’t exactly have options. I mean, what would you do if you were me?” Then, as a cautious look crept over his face, I added, “And don’t say go back to my dad. That’s not an option.”

“I wasn’t going to say that,” he said quickly.

“Then, what?” I demanded.

“Live your own life. Get a job, find an apartment. That’s what people do.”

He might as well have been telling me to build a rocket ship, that’s how little I understood about how to go about those kinds of things. Find an apartment? Where did you even start with that? Get a job? Who would hire someone without any experience or school transcripts or skill sets, whose existence could be boiled down to a Social Security card and a fishy-sounding life story?

“I’m too tired to think about any of this,” I said. “Can we pick up some food and head back to the office?”

He leaned across me to shut down the computer, his body so close that I could smell the spicy deodorant he wore. From this vantage point, I could see how long his eyelashes were behind his glasses. I felt a curious impulse to lift the frames off his nose in order to touch the delicate freckles underneath. I wondered if he still thought of himself as the chubby, pimply misfit in the photo; I wondered if he took Prozac partly because he did.

Electronic dance music started up in the other room, fast and thumping and frenetic. Lionel turned and blinked at me, his face inches from mine. We stared at each other until he tore his gaze away, and snapped the monitor off.

“Let’s go,” he said.