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35.

The magazine and digital sides of Signal used the same kitchen and bathrooms; but beyond the sharing of urinals and coffeepots, the two divisions barely mixed at all. I’d never ventured beyond the central kitchen, a domain ruled by a tattooed chef who doled out portions of vegetarian chili and eggplant paninis; and featuring a refrigerator of Odwalla juices that you could buy using the two-dollar honor box, but that everyone mostly stole.

Beyond the kitchen, a hallway opened up into another cavernous room that roughly mirrored the size and shape of ours, and yet couldn’t have felt more different. Here, on the magazine side, there was no music blasting through the office or inflatable toys hanging from the exposed air ducts. Instead of open-plan chaos, the space was portioned out by a neat maze of cubicles; desks were clutter free, and shades blocked out the glare of the afternoon light. The average age was a decade older, and no one was barefoot—unlike digital, where staffers often didn’t bother with shoes, and digging industrial rug staples out of the sole of your foot was a hazard of the job.

I’d heard that this disparity was because Ross had his office on the magazine side, where he kept a tight leash on his orderly, firstborn child. Whereas digital was the precocious bastard that he’d accidentally birthed but didn’t know quite what to do with, so he’d abandoned it to the zookeepers on the other side of aisle, hoping for the best.

It was easy enough to find Ross’s office: It was the glassed-in box in the corner, with a view that looked down over the entrance of South Park so that he could monitor the steady growth of the neighborhood that everyone had started calling Multimedia Gulch. As I approached, I could see him through the windows of his office, puzzling over a set of magazine layouts with a red wax pencil.

I stopped at the open doorway and waited for him to notice me standing there. When he didn’t, I knocked tentatively on the frame. “Mr. Marinetti?”

“No one calls me that. What’s up with the formality?” He didn’t even bother to lift his head.

“I was raised to believe that it was a sign of respect, to honor the intellect and experience of my elders.”

He frowned, finally looking up at me. “ Elders . Christ. I’m only forty-two. Let’s leave outmoded ways of thinking behind us, shall we?” He put down his pencil on his desk, aligning it carefully with the edge of his layouts. “And who are you?”

“Esme,” I said. “I’m a new production assistant over in digital.”

“And I’m pretty busy here. Issue closes tomorrow. Did you come by just to introduce yourself or is there a reason for your presence in my office? Because if every new hire over there drops by to say hi, I’m never going to get anything done.”

I held out the photograph. “I’ve been asked to do some research. For a story someone is working on.” This was the most plausible cover I’d been able to come up with; it seemed pretty thin, but then again, this was a magazine, and it seemed like a task that he’d warm up to. “I need to identify the people in this photo and someone said you might be able to help me. They said you know everyone in tech.”

He unleashed a tight, bemused smile, seemingly less for my sake and more as if he’d just remembered an inside joke. He put a hand out for the photo, and I gingerly placed it between his fingers. The smile vanished the minute he gazed down at the snapshot. “Oh. That’s Peter.” He looked up at me sharply. “Is digital working on a story about his murder? I heard the same guy might have killed someone else yesterday, is that right? I’ve been too busy closing the issue to turn on the news.”

“I don’t know,” I said, hedging. “I’m just helping assemble some biographical details. Where he worked before Microsoft, for example.”

He squinted at the photo. “Well, I’m going to guess this is Peninsula Research Institute.”

“What’s that?”

“A nonprofit that does scientific R it was just that the staffers started drinking at their desks—first surreptitiously, and then brazenly—and no one bothered to stop them. Six-packs of beer and bottles of tequila materialized out of drawers, and a coalition of potheads made their way to the roof, returning with red-rimmed eyes and a wildly inflated sense of humor. Often, Monday mornings were spent surreptitiously undoing the coding that happened on Friday evenings, after shots and joints were consumed. It was just part of the routine.

When I got back to my desk after visiting Ross, still giddy with excitement about my new lead, I found Brianna sipping from one of the dusty bottles of Zima that had been abandoned in the bunk room. “I didn’t know people actually drank that,” I said.

She grimaced. “We’re out of everything else and no one felt like going on a booze run. Want to try one? They’re actually not terrible if you close your eyes.” She pushed one towardme.

My father never kept alcohol in the cabin, so I had no comparison point. But I thought it didn’t taste bad at all; in fact, it was rather pleasantly sweet and malty, despite the chemical tang and the hint of artificial lemon. And so I drank it quickly, enjoying the way the bubbles fizzed at my nose, enjoying even more the way it made my brain fizz. And when it was gone, and Brianna silently pushed another one toward me, I drank that one, too. I silently toasted Ross, who really did seem to know everyone, and who just had slid me one square closer to finding my mother.

By the time Lionel wandered over to where we were sitting, it was dark and much of the staff had departed for other adventures; the ones that remained were playing basketball with a trash can and someone’s collection of Beanie Babies. I was supposed to be proofing the HTML of a new batch of stories—an interview with Neal Stephenson, an article about a feud between two hackers—but the Zima had left me feeling loose and floppy, and I kept forgetting to close my tags.

Lionel and Brianna were conferring, and I was drinking yet another Zima, and then somehow a collective decision had been made by the basketball crew that we all needed to pile into the van belonging to Janus, the redheaded news editor, and drive out to Baker Beach, where there was a Full Moon dance party happening. And so I found myself shoved in the back of a VW that was normally used to transport Janus’s bass cello to his string quartet performances, sharing a square of Astroturf with two girls from the art department named Amy and Jamie. And we were talking about…I honestly couldn’t tell you what we were talking about. It was nothing important at all—maybe it was office gossip, maybe it was something we’d all watched on television that week—but the point was that I felt for the first time like I fit in easily with them all. Like I’d finally achieved some semblance of normalcy, despite myself.

The van deposited us on a beach that was freezing cold and very dark, and we followed the muffled throb of a bass line that sounded like it had been trapped inside the fog that pressed down from above. A few hundred people had gathered at the far end of the cove, in front of a DJ table and a stack of speakers and a strobe that illuminated intermittent snapshots of the shoreline. The Golden Gate Bridge loomed overhead, a copper-hued sentinel piercing the cloud cover.

Lionel and Brianna flanked me as we picked our way across the sand, and Brianna leaned across me to talk to Lionel. “I have some E. Would it be considered child endangerment if I gave Esme some?”

“I dunno. Do you think she would like it?” The strobe flashed white in Lionel’s glasses.

“ Everyone likes it. I’m asking: Is she ready for it, you think? Our country girl.”

“We don’t want to overload her. We don’t want her to go all Go Ask Alice on us.”

“Hey. I’m standing right here, you two. And I’m a legal adult and perfectly capable of making my own decisions; and I don’t need to ask Alice, whoever she is, what I can do . ” I had only the dimmest grasp on what was being debated—wasn’t there a Beverly Hills, 90210 episode I’d watched about club drugs? I seemed to remember things hadn’t ended well, that police raided the party and people had to flee; I really didn’t want to think too much about that part of it—and I also knew that my father would be horrified by this entire scenario. Narcotics are just another tool of institutional oppression, blunting the minds of the common man rather than freeing them, turning them into addicts who are incapable of intellectual autonomy.

But I was Esme Nowak now, not Jane Williams. And Esme wanted to be part of everything in this new life; she didn’t want to have to think so hard all the time; she didn’t want to worry about what her father would say or the consequences of every action. After a life of having nothing and doing nothing, she wanted to have and do it all. She wanted to just say yes .

Yes yes yes.

And so I said yes to the little white capsule that Brianna handed me. And then, when something warm began to build inside me just a short time later—a crescendo of elation that felt like a volcano erupting inside my heart—I said yes to dancing on the sand. And when I said yes to that, I discovered that I could actually dance—me, who had never been on a dance floor before, who had always been embarrassed not to know how my feet were supposed to move or what I was supposed to do with my hands, out there stomping to the beat. And maybe I wasn’t a particularly good dancer, but I was surrounded by my new Signal friends who all looked just as blissfully uncoordinated as I felt and so we were all yes together. Yes to the hammer of the bass line and yes to the lift of the chords and yes to the peak and the drop, over and over again, a tension and release so exquisite it almost hurt.

And sometime after the full moon revealed itself from behind the parting clouds, and everyone cheered in unison— yes! —I turned to find Lionel beside me. His pale face was like a reflection of the moon above us, his hair falling in damp hanks, his tie undone and wrapped around his forehead like a sweatband. He’d shoved his glasses in his pocket, and with his eyes closed he looked like he’d found his own personal oblivion. But then he opened his eyes and saw me, and he leaned in and said something. I couldn’t hear him so he shouted it again, his mouth so close to my face that I could feel the heat of his breath in my ear: “You look happy.”

“I am. I think I figured out how to find my mother. I found someone who can help tell me who she is.”

His face was pure empathic joy. “That’s so fantastic, Esme.”

And so I pushed my own mouth close to his ear and shouted back. “You look happy, too.”

“Life is amazing . Right? It’s easy to forget it, but then you have these moments that remind you how incredible it is that we even fucking exist. The rest of it—all the crap we worry about, the cerebral contortions we go through to try to make meaning of existence—is nothing at all compared to the miracle that we can do this. Just being together with other human beings. Dancing. Alive .”

“ Yes, ” I said, because what else was there to say?

And then he was smiling at me and I was smiling back at him, and we were dancing together with our hands entwined, sparks lighting up in every nerve, and he was leaning in, and then we were kissing and I was saying yes to that, too. Yes yes a million times yes.

—

The night vanished. I remember it only as fragments now, emotional impressions like the flash of that strobe. Kissing Lionel on the sand; and then sitting on the edge of the beach by a bonfire someone had started, still kissing with swollen lips but also talking about feelings; and later yet, piling in a heap on the sand with the rest of our Signal friends. I remember Brianna kissing a strange girl—a sight I’d never seen before, and it seemed amazingly normal—and Art Department Amy massaging my scalp, and the taste of the watermelon lollipop someone stuck in my mouth. I remember Janus pontificating earnestly about the concept of karma, arguing that perfect nights like this were a cosmic reward for all of our previous good deeds.

And I remember wondering what good deeds I’d done; and realizing, with the thunderbolt clarity of intoxication, that I’d sidestepped the most important good deed of all, and that if I wanted my karma to remain balanced I needed to turn in my father. And then—earnestly, so earnestly—promising myself that I would make that call to the FBI tip line, I would, just so I could have more nights like this, with these wonderful people, the best ones I’d ever known . Whatever happened after that would be fine, it would all be fine, yes yes yes .

And then light was dawning in the east and suddenly we could see the other people out there on the beach with us, sandy and sweat-stricken, their baggy jeans puddling around their legs, their jaws chewing at the air, eyes like pinpricks. Beautiful zombies.

And I gazed over my new life and felt like an overripe fruit, about to burst out of my skin. This was a happiness I’d never experienced before. Joy is always sweetest when loss lurks just below it. Like that orchestra on the Titanic, playing their final arrangements while knowing that everything would be gone by daylight. You fiddle as hard as you can, close your eyes to what’s to come, obliterate yourself in now because it may be all you ever have.

Even then, I must have known that the new world I had found wouldn’t last forever, but in that moment, I deluded myself into believing that it could.