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42.

My father took me to the library in Bozeman only a handful of times. Free reading material was a draw, yes; but the part where we needed to register for a library card was a deal-breaker. ( Don’t need the feds tracking what we read, do we? ) And so our visits were limited to the rare occasions when my father wanted to dig up something that wasn’t in stock at the Country Bookshelf. Then, we would temporarily camp out at a library table, speed-reading while the librarian warily eyed us from the checkout desk.

The Bozeman library was an eighties-era brick box, featureless and anodyne, a study in harsh fluorescence. And so, when Lionel told me we were going to the library, this is what I imagined, down to the stained blue carpet and the metal shelves that swayed precariously when you replaced a book too hard.

I should have anticipated that the San Francisco public library would outstrip what Bozeman had to offer, and yet the scale of the place still came as a surprise. The main branch—newly remodeled—featured a five-story atrium topped by a windowed rotunda that filled the building with soft afternoon light. Above my head, glassed-in balconies crisscrossed the open space, and an imposing staircase navigated to the top. My sneakers squeaked on the polished stone floors.

I stopped just inside the doors, taken aback by all that grandeur. “This is all books?”

Lionel turned to see me staring up at the rotunda. “And magazines, I guess. Computers, too.”

“It’s the most beautiful building I’ve ever seen.”

“You haven’t seen many buildings, have you?” But he looked up, too, taking it in with fresh eyes. “You’re right, it’s very pretty. I guess I never stopped to think about it. C’mon, let’s go hit up the research desk.”

An hour or two later, after several dead ends with a database of periodicals, some fumbling with microfiche and assistance from a helpful librarian, we found ourselves leafing through a book called The Genesis of Progress: Five Decades of Innovation from the Peninsula Research Institute. This was a slim volume, full of dry jargon and meaningless names that we flipped through quickly, on the hunt for one thing in particular. And suddenly there it was, in a collection of black-and-white photos bound into the center of the book: a picture of my parents.

A strangled sound came out of my throat that caused the people sitting at the tables near us to look up. Lionel glanced around nervously and then scooted in closer to me. “That’s your mom and dad?”

I nodded, studying the photo. They stood next to each other, on the edge of a group of men with familiar faces—faces I recognized from the picture that I’d stolen from my father. This photograph was a formal portrait of some sort, with everyone arranged in a semicircle in front of a whiteboard covered with diagrams and formulas. PRI’s Computing Research Group circa 1981, the caption read.

My parents weren’t touching, and yet there was something about the way my father’s body curved toward my mother’s, the way her hand hovered near the thigh of his trousers, that made it clear that they were together. 1981—I had been born by then, I realized, probably still in diapers.

Lionel put his face close to the photo, his fingertips tentatively tracing their faces. “He doesn’t look much like that police sketch, does he?” he finally said.

I could have studied the picture all day, the only true evidence I had that my parents had ever been in the same room together (besides, of course, my own existence), but we had a more pressing agenda. Lionel had brought a notebook with him and in this we jotted down the names in the captions: Nicholas Raymond Baron Peter Ajay Mike Isaac, all the names I already knew, but this time their last names were included, too.

“Baron and Peter are dead,” I said. “I already warned Nicholas. So that leaves Raymond, Ajay, Mike, and Isaac. How do we find them?”

“If they still work in tech, they’re probably easy to find online. Let’s go see what we can dig up with an internet search.”

It didn’t take long to figure out that my father’s former cohorts were all technology industry leaders, most meriting multiple pages of search engine results. Had my father known that, too? He must have. When had he learned what Peter and Baron were doing now? Was it those few nights when he was surfing the internet without me, or did it come before then? Did he come across the Fortune magazine profile of Ajay Chawla, now the founder of a cybersecurity software company? Did he read a Wall Street Journal article about Mike Swanson, who ran a technology venture capital fund in Palo Alto? Did he somehow see Isaac Cohen get interviewed on 60 Minutes about the launch of his palm-sized personal digital assistant? What about Raymond Starr, did my father know that he had stuck it out at PRI and was now its executive director?

I sat there, watching with fascination while Lionel tinkered with increasingly arcane searches, digging his way into interfaces that crawled below the graphical surface of the Web, trying to hunt down their email addresses. He was capable of talking to computers in a way that felt magical to me, as if his brain was fluent in an alien language. “What is that?” I asked at one point.

“This? Just a Unix terminal,” he said.

“How do you know how to do that? Are you a hacker?”

He laughed. “No. Just your standard programmer. A real hacker would have been able to get into that encrypted hard drive your father stole.” We’d set the drive up the previous evening, connecting it to one of Lionel’s computer monitors, but had immediately been stymied by its demand for a password. Lionel had tinkered and tinkered, but eventually gave up. The hard drive went back under my bed, its contents still a mystery.

A bell softly chimed, warning that the library would be closing soon. “OK, that’s it,” Lionel finally said. “I have email addresses for all four of them.” He glanced at the clock and then quickly loaded up Hotmail. “If we’re going to email them anonymously, we should do it from here, a Hotmail account on a public internet terminal, so no one can track our IP address,” he explained. When he was done setting up a new account, he turned to me. “So what does the email say?”

I leaned across him and typed: Pay attention, the Bombaster is targeting people from your group at PRI. Baron and Peter already. You may be next. Protect yourself.

I clicked Send, and then turned to Lionel with an unsteady smile. It felt as though an anvil had just been lifted off my chest; only now did I realize that I hadn’t been able to breathe since I’d understood my father’s plan. “OK, now they can reach out to the authorities themselves and get help. Right?”

But Lionel was still staring at the computer monitor, even though the email was already working its way through the wires and toward its destinations. A librarian was walking in our direction, prodding the last stragglers to leave, but Lionel didn’t move. He blinked at me when I put my hand over his. “What?” he asked.

“That’ll work, won’t it? They’ll know what to do to protect themselves?”

“I think so,” he said. “I hope so.”

And, God bless him, he was able to muster a smile that was brave with his belief in me. Just because you’re smart and rational doesn’t mean you’re immune to the myriad ways that infatuation can fry a person’s logic circuits. And I was young and green enough not to wonder whether I’d just led him blindly into the dark. No, I was just happy that I was no longer alone.

—

When I was a child, one of my favorite books was a dog-eared collection of Greek myths that I plucked off the dollar rack at the thrift store. The book’s illustrations were baroque and particularly grisly—Medusa’s severed head dripping blood, an eagle snacking on Prometheus’s guts—and the previous owner had embellished many of the pages with purple crayon, but I loved the stories nonetheless. I was perfectly capable of reading them myself, but I still preferred my father to read them to me out loud.

One of our favorites was the tale of Alcyone, the daughter of the god of the winds, and her mortal husband, King Ceyx. They were beautiful and just and admired by all, but they doomed themselves when they started idly comparing themselves to Zeus and Hera. Hubris, of course, was an unforgivable sin in Greek mythology, and so a vengeful Zeus decided to wreck Ceyx’s boat during a sea voyage. When Alcyone found Ceyx’s body washed up on the beach, she threw herself into the waves and drowned. Impressed by this macabre devotion, Zeus changed his mind and turned Alcyone and Ceyx into kingfisher birds so they could be together again.

Perverse and capricious, yes—but hey, that was the gods.

As the myth goes, the god of the winds now calms the seas for two weeks every winter solstice, so that the kingfishers can mate and hatch their eggs by the shore, without the waves washing away their nests. Halcyon days, then, are this beatific window of time: peaceful and calm, pure and happy, before the winter storms return.

You and I, we’re living our very own halcyon days, my father would say every time we finished reading this myth. Sitting on the porch beside him, listening to the birdsong lifting out of our meadow, I could see exactly what he meant: what kind of paradise we inhabited, the utopia he so desperately wanted our world tobe.

But what he didn’t seem to absorb (besides the fable’s dire warnings about pride and ego) was the fact that halcyon days are always doomed to come to an end. They’re just a lull before a coming storm.

Maybe those childhood days in the woods were my halcyon days; but my memory of them now is tainted by the edifice of falsehoods that our peace and tranquility was built upon. How can you be nostalgic about a facade? My father poisoned my memories with his lies, and so I no longer recall them in the same pure way that I once lived them.

But if those weren’t my true halcyon days, then what were?

When I ask myself this question now, all these years later, I sometimes find myself thinking of the days that followed that visit to the San Francisco library: After I clicked Send on that email, we went back to Lionel’s apartment and immediately climbed into his bed.

By some measures, that was a week just like the weeks that had come before. Every day I woke up and went to work. I sat at my desk and corrected meta tags and studied JavaScript tutorials, clicked Send and Save and Publish . I watched Brianna tinker with her zine when she should have been working; and I accompanied Janus on his coffee runs to Caffe Centro; and I sat dutifully through another futurist lecture and applauded Ross’s speech (noting that Lionel had been right: Ross was repetitive).

Evenings were different, though. Instead of going home alone and gorging myself on sitcoms until I fell asleep over my spaghetti , I boarded the J Church line with Lionel and went back to his apartment. We’d pick up a falafel on Haight Street and rent a video, the latter of which never got consumed because we were otherwise occupied. (Yes, I lost my virginity that week. No, I’m not sharing the details. Needless to say, it was sweet and awkward and earnest and not particularly skillful on either of our parts.) And then we’d stay up late, wrapped in limp and fragrant sheets, trying to find ourselves within each other.

Was it love? Looking back now, I see no reason to believe that it wasn’t, for either of us. Sometimes love manifests itself as a kind of amazed awe, as potent a feeling as any other form of connection: the shock of knowing that you are desired just as you are, no matter how broken you might feel.

I remember these few days now as an emotional smear, a warm pulse of pink, the color of my heart. In this bucolic window of time, I let myself believe that all my problems had been resolved. I’d done the right thing and foiled my father’s plans, but without betraying him. I’d located my mother and would be meeting her in person in a matter of days. I had a job I believed in, and real friends, and my very first boyfriend—things that I couldn’t even have fathomed just a few months before.

The winds had finally stopped blowing, and I believed that, like the kingfishers on their beach, it was safe to build my nest and lay my eggs.

I didn’t stop to consider the fact that it might just be the eye of the storm.