Page 42

41.

The CBS docuseries about Signal aired that night, and I decided to take Brianna up on her invitation to watch it at her apartment in Hayes Valley. Communal television viewing: This was new to me. I still thought of television as a furtive thing, a guilty pleasure to be consumed in secret, where no one could see your brain cells winking out, one by one, like dying stars. A television-watching party sounded like an exercise in collective obsolescence.

Of course I said I’d come.

Brianna had put out a plate of fancy French cheese and miniature hot dogs wrapped in pastry and bottles of sour wine that made everyone’s tongues turn purple. At least a dozen of my coworkers were crammed into her tiny apartment, getting increasingly drunk as they waited for the 10:00 p.m . hour to roll around.

The show was about to start when Lionel finally arrived; and it wasn’t until I saw him in the doorway and felt that little kick in my chest, that I understood this was the real reason I’d said yes to Brianna’s invitation. I needed to do damage control. He’d avoided me all afternoon, ever since he caught me tearing down my father’s portrait: Barely leaving his workstation, plugged into his headphones, his hands flying over his keyboard. His hunched form a warning to me not to approach.

At one point, Janus had wandered past my desk and noticed me staring across the room at Lionel. “Just go talk to him,” he offered.

“I’m not sure he wants me to,” I said.

“Really? Well, it’s possible his circuits got a bit overloaded on Friday night. It happens,” he whispered, patting my back. “But don’t worry. He’s not exactly a player, if you know what I mean.”

“A player? Like, chess player?”

He laughed. “Sure, chess, that’s kind of an apt metaphor. My point is, don’t take it personally if he’s acting hot and cold. I’m sure he’ll come around.”

But I did take it personally. I knew it was personal. That I’d revealed something about myself that I hadn’t intended. I’d told myself that I’d go talk to Lionel again before the end of the day, just to feel things out; but then he left work early, before I could muster up the nerve to doit.

It didn’t escape me that he hadn’t stopped by my desk to say goodbye.

As the credits began to roll, Lionel settled in near the door, as far as humanly possible from where I sat wedged into a corner of Brianna’s corduroy couch. I felt his presence like a magnet, pulling my attention from what was happening on the screen. Around me, my coworkers were shouting at Brianna’s television, cheering so loudly whenever one of us showed up on camera that it was hard to take in what the newscasters were actually saying. This new media Mecca is ground zero for… and a shout as Janus walked past the camera… industry growing at a breakneck pace despite a lack of business model… and more cheers at the sight of Brianna drinking a mango Odwalla… these modern Bohemians see themselves as artists with the capability of changing the entire direction of modern society… and groans as Frank appeared on the screen, bags under his eyes… despite doubts about the longevity of this still-fringe cyberspace medium… and shrieks as the camera pulled wide to show the entire staff, sitting raptly in chairs listening to Ross talk… many still believe is just a fad.

Everyone was so animated, the atmosphere in the room so manic, that it was easy to keep sneaking glances at Lionel, who didn’t seem nearly as amused as everyone else to see himself on TV. He sat with his hands shoved in the pockets of his khakis, his tie a little too tight, looking glum.

And then suddenly there was an elbow in my side and I was jolted back to the television set, where my own face filled the screen. The futurist lecture, of course. I was standing and applauding at Ross’s speech, clapping my hands like my very life depended on it. How had the camera gotten so close to me? You could see every pore of my skin, the tears that sprang to my eyes as I cheered, my wonky upper incisors (my father had, unsurprisingly, neglected my dental work) as I cupped my hands around my mouth and let out a shriek.

… A movement of idealistic youth, many still in their teens, which begs the question, who is really in charge here, and do we need to be concerned?

My face was still frozen on the screen as the end credits began to scroll, as if the producers wanted to make extra sure that I’d been captured on film. I tried to keep my smile steady as my coworkers patted my back in congratulations. “Esme Nowak, the face of idealistic youth,” Brianna said, laughing, and handed me a glass of wine, which I drank quickly, to take the edge off my sudden panic. What a nincompoop I’d been not to call in sick as soon as I’d heard a camera crew was going to be in the office. My new haircut wouldn’t fool anyone who knew me back in Bozeman. I might as well have sent a map of my current whereabouts to the police.

I tried to reassure myself that the police didn’t really know what I looked like; nor would they ever imagine finding me at Signal, the belly of the beast. And the handful of people back in Montana who did actually know me—Heidi and Lina, our curmudgeonly neighbor Shirley, maybe the cashiers at the Seed and yet I felt the cold here in a way I never had back home. It was a creeping damp that pressed through my clothes, penetrated deep into my skin; the kind of cold that made you feel like you might never be warm again.

I waited for Lionel to speak but he just sat glumly next to me, looking out at the city lights.

“So?”

He opened his mouth, and then closed it again. Finally, he said. “I don’t really want to talk about this because verbalizing it will make it real and until then, it could just be me who is being paranoid. And I’d much rather have it be that than what I think it is.”

“You’re not making any sense,” I protested. Inside my sweatshirt my heart was beating twice as fast, my armpits sticky and damp. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

“Don’t make me say it,” he said.

I could have walked away then. He was warning me. He wanted to not know, to be permitted his ignorance, in order to blindly salvage whatever vestiges of our relationship he could. But I just couldn’t let him do it. After working so hard to shed Jane Williams —after so many weeks of wearing this strange new skin—I found myself suddenly missing Jane despite myself. I wanted to be seen by someone: not just as Esme, this freshly birthed stranger, but as all of the different versions of me, with all the confusing contradictions that would entail. Maybe he could tell me who I actually was now.

I was tired of being alone.

“Just say it,” I said. My body drooped with fatigue.

In the silence that followed, I could hear the low moan of a foghorn in the distance, the hiss of car tires on damp pavement. I waited, as he seemed to be trying to formulate words, until finally he just spat it out, like a cat regurgitating a hair ball.

“You’re the Bombaster’s daughter.”

He looked at me then, and even in the dark I could see the anguish in his eyes, and the tiny flash of hope that I might somehow still convince him that he was wrong.

And the strange thing is that instead of feeling panicked that I’d finally been discovered, I felt a painful sort of release. Because whatever happened next, this was always going to be the worst part. Going to jail wasn’t going to feel as viscerally awful as knowing I’d blown up the only important relationship I had in San Francisco, just by virtue of beingme.

“Are you going to turn me in?” My voice sounded very, very small.

He flinched. “You really think I’m an asshole?”

My arms were wrapped painfully tight around my waist—for warmth, but also because I suspected that if I let go of myself, I might fly into a thousand fragments that I would never be able to reassemble again. “Was it because you saw me tearing down his portrait?” I asked.

He kicked his sneaker nervously against the leg of the table, a dull repetitive thump that vibrated straight through my bones. “Yes. No. I guess I’ve been wondering for a while. That first day at my house, when you had such a defensive reaction to The Luddite Manifesto —it kind of stayed with me. And over time I began to piece things together—that you were from Montana, that you’d grown up in a cabin in the woods, just like the people in the news. The way you didn’t want to talk to the police, even if it was going to be the easiest way to find your mom. And your weird father, of course. The things you told me he said—the way you talk, sometimes—it just sounded so much like the manifesto. But still I thought, OK, maybe it’s just a coincidence. Maybe that’s just what people are like in Montana. I just couldn’t square the whole Microsoft bombing story with you, as a person. And you didn’t look anything like the blond girl in that police sketch. Plus the second bomb went off after you were already working at Signal, so I figured, I had to be wrong.” Thump. Thump. “But it wasn’t until we went to Desi’s house and I saw what was in that bag that it became really clear that you’d been keeping a lot of things from me. That you weren’t exactly who you said you were. And then, today, with the picture—that kind of cemented it.”

“I am who I said I was,” I objected. “Nothing I’ve told you was a lie. I just…omitted some things.”

“Those are some pretty big omissions, don’t you think?” His foot drummed faster against the table. Thumpthumpthumpthump.

I sat huddled in my parka, my body jolting with every kick. “You’re angry,” I said. “I don’t blame you.”

“The thing I’m upset about isn’t who you are. I mean, yes, it’s a pretty upsetting realization that a girl I’m”—he paused, apparently flummoxed by the thought of defining our relationship—“that she’s a fugitive who is wanted by the FBI. I mean, they’re saying you shot someone.” He was silent for a moment, giving me an opportunity to deny it, but of course I couldn’t. “What upsets me the most, though, is that you didn’t trust me enough to tell me. To ask for my help . ”

“It wasn’t that I didn’t trust you. It’s that I didn’t want to implicate you in my mess. Because I liked you too much for that.” I rubbed my hands together, trying to warm them up. “Plus, I knew that you’d never look at me the same way again. And I was right, wasn’tI?”

And it was true, he wasn’t looking at me at all. He gazed down the hill, still kicking his foot, and I noticed that his pristine white tennis shoes were now covered with black scuffs. “I just…” He sighed. “I don’t even know what to say. This is really hard to wrap my head around.”

“You can ask me anything,” I said. “I’ll tell you the truth. What do you want to know?”

“Everything would be a start.”

And so I told him all the sordid facts I’d been afraid to tell him before. About helping my father with The Luddite Manifesto; and my creeping concerns about his state of mind and my future; and how I’d only managed to escape from the cabin by offering to be my father’s accomplice; and how I’d shot a man but really it was self-defense; and how I truly didn’t know what my father had done until I saw the news later. How I’d stolen evidence and destroyed even more by burning down my childhood home, and how I’d escaped when the authorities arrived. I talked and talked, as the park leaked its few remaining occupants, until it was well past midnight and we were the only people left out there in the cold.

Lionel listened in silence; and the quieter he grew the more I felt compelled to reveal every quivery detail—my feelings of complicity in my father’s propaganda machine, the withered friendship with Heidi, the way the tight red dress felt so creamy against my skin, the security guard’s rough hand on my thigh, the heady mix of panic and power that I felt that day. And this purge felt good, like I was emptying my heart of the toxins that had been poisoning it for so long.

When I was done, he let out a long sigh, the cloud from his breath a wraith in the dark. I sat there, watching the trees sway in the wind, sure that at any moment he would stand up and walk away. Instead, I felt something brush along the side of my jacket; and when I looked down I realized it was his hand, seeking mine. I curled my cold palm inside his and we sat there wordlessly, as I felt the heat of his body seeping into mine.

“And here I thought my childhood sucked,” he said. “You win.”

“It wasn’t all bad,” I said. “It’s more complicated than that.”

He turned to study my face. “But you’re still going to turn your father in, right?”

I felt my guts twist themselves into a knot. “Would you turn your father in, if you knew it would mean he’d probably get the death penalty? And what about me—what if they throw me in jail, too?”

“I see your point,” he said. “Still. It’s your moral obligation to do something . People are dying.”

“I know.” The knot tightened, making it hard to sit upright. “But there’s got to be some other way to stop him that doesn’t involve me betraying him. At least until I can talk to my mom and see if she can help me. I was thinking—what if I reach out to the people he’s targeting, so they can protect themselves? I already warned Nicholas Redkin.”

“You sure you know who he’s targeting?”

“The people in that photo, people he used to work with. Both of his victims were former coworkers. But I only know their first names.”

He digested this. “OK. We figure out who the rest of the people in the photo are—that shouldn’t be too hard. We can send them anonymous emails or something.”

“ We figure it out,” I repeated, just to make sure I’d heard correctly. “You sure you want to be part of this mess? What if this makes you an accessory of some sort?”

He hesitated, then reiterated, “We.”

I looked out at the city as the meaning of his word sank in. The lights from the skyscrapers refracted through the mist, a lustrous vibration. It all still felt so painfully new to me, this urban beauty; I found it impossible to fully grasp its scope.

“What about the hard drive?” he asked. “What’s on it?”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure how to hook it up.”

“I can help you with that, too.”

There was something tickling my face and when I lifted my hand to my cheek I realized that I was crying, tears that had gone cold in the wind. Was it gratitude, or relief, or just months of pent-up fear finally being purged? Thank you, I said to Lionel, thank you for not running away from me, or maybe I just thought it, because I was too choked up to speak.

He jumped off the table then, and held out his hand to help me down. I stepped down and took it, and we walked down the hill—our sneakers squeaking in the dew-soaked grass, our bodies enveloped by the swirling fog—together.