Page 48

47.

No one commented when I slipped in to work two hours late, bedraggled and tearstained. Brianna wasn’t at her desk. Across the room, I thought I saw Lionel tracking my arrival, his head angled toward the door; but I was afraid to look his way, lest he note the culpability in my every movement. As if he might somehow see my father’s face reflected in mine.

I booted up my computer and stared blankly at the project on my screen for a long time. For once, I could feel the tediousness of my entry-level job. Checking for broken links, adding missing hashtags, closing parentheses: It wasn’t making coffee, but it also wasn’t exactly rocket science. Between the grunt work and the massive quantities of pop culture on which I’d been gorging myself, I had barely tapped into my intellect in months. I hadn’t even picked up a pencil to sketch since I got to San Francisco. My father wasn’t wrong.

And yet I loved it here, despite all that.

The latest issue of the Signal magazine was sitting on Brianna’s desk and I picked it up to read the cover. Perpetual Prosperity: The Future Coming Our Way in the Next 25 Years, it said, emblazoned over an image of a smiling child holding a daisy with a microchip nestled in its center . I flipped it open and scanned some of the writer’s predictions. An economic boom due to new technological breakthroughs will enable everyone to join the middle class, so that there are no more working poor. The proliferation of new media will allow truth to disseminate in new ways, through new voices, bringing an end to widespread ignorance. A rise of liberalism due to a connected global citizenry will usher in the New Enlightenment and the end of fascism and authoritarianism.

This didn’t sound much like an apocalypse to me. It was all very confusing. I wanted to stop fretting about the future and just think about the now, but I was quickly learning that this was a luxury that the modern world wouldn’t allow. Today lives in the shadow of tomorrow. And the shape of that shadow is circumscribed entirely by your willingness to hope.

Na?veté, or reality? I sat there, numbed by the horror of the choice my father had placed before me. Did he really just ask me to pick between him and my mother? With the implicit threat of violence just underneath his request? Surely it had just been some sort of harmless test; but if it was, I couldn’t figure out what was benign aboutit.

“Esme?”

I looked up and saw a Black woman standing by my desk, a Bic pen shoved behind her ear. Her braids ended in beads that rattled when she moved, and they were still vibrating from her walk over from the magazine side of the office.

“I’m Marcie, from HR,” she said.

“HR?”

“Human Resources.”

“Oh. Right. Hi.” I tried to muster a smile. “Can I help you with something?”

“Yes,” she said. “I’ve been looking for you all morning. Something strange came back with your Social Security number. According to government records…well, you’re deceased.”

“Deceased?” I parroted this dully.

“Dead,” she said, as if I might not have understood the word. “The Social Security database says that Esme Nowak has been dead since 1983. Any idea why that might be?”

“But I am Esme Nowak,” I said, relieved that I could say at least this with utter conviction. “And I’m not dead. Clearly.”

She laughed, a sharp snort, and the beads chattered softly around her chin. “Yes, I can see that you are not dead. Well, it’s possible that it was a clerical error of some sort. These things happen. God knows the government is due for a technology upgrade, their databases are a disaster. Assuming it’s a mistake, you should really talk to the Social Security Administration because this issue will just keep popping up. But in the meantime, in order to continue your employment with us, we’ll need you to show us some proof that you are who you say you are.”

“I have a birth certificate. And a Social Security card.”

“That’s great. But we’ll also need a government ID with your name and photo on it. It’s just a formality, of course, but we need to make sure you aren’t assuming someone else’s identity.”

“Why would I want to assume the identity of someone who was dead?” I hoped that I sounded indignantly outraged, rather than panicked.

“I honestly couldn’t tell you why, but you understand we need to check all the boxes. Don’t want to get us all in trouble for Social Security fraud, do you?”

“And you’re going to fire me if I can’t prove to you that I’m alive?”

She laughed. “That sounds pretty strange, doesn’t it? Again, we can clear all this up with a passport or current driver’s license. Do you have one of those on you?”

“Not here,” I said. “I’ll bring something in tomorrow.”

“Great,” she said. “Because without it, we’ll have to terminate your employment immediately. I’m sorry, but my hands are tied.”

I watched her walk away, my mind racing. Now what? Was it possible to get a fake ID in twenty-four hours? I had no clue. It struck me that my father might know how—he’d changed my identity once, hadn’t he?—and then it struck me again that asking him for assistance would be a terrible idea. And even if I did manage to scare up a fake driver’s license, who was to say that Marcie from HR wouldn’t start asking some harder questions about why a dead person had suddenly been resurrected?

Barring some miracle, I was going to be out of a job, starting tomorrow. How many more ways could everything fall apart?

As I sat at my desk, feeling my carefully constructed edifice crumbling to pieces around me, I realized that something about the tenor of the office had abruptly changed. An almost imperceptible shift in the familiar pitch of the room. When I looked up, I saw that Ross was making one of his rare visits to our side of the building.

His appearance in the doorway was an electric pulse that swept across the room. As the staff became aware of his presence, people grew rigid in their seats, trash was abruptly swept into garbage cans, the images on computer monitors switched from gaming news back to programming code. The errant children suddenly on their best behavior for daddy.

Ross wasn’t alone, which was even more unusual. He was flanked by two men in gray suits, their hair gelled stiffly into place, eyes narrowly scanning the room as they wove their way between our desks. They did not carry laptop bags or leather portfolios; they were not tech, or even finance guys. Who were they?

Someone turned down the Wu-Tang Clan that was blasting over the stereo. The buzz of the office muted as the threesome worked its way through the zoo to where Frank sat by the window; and then rose again as the foursome adjourned to a conference room in the corner. Once the door was closed, staffers began to congregate in small clots throughout the room, heads tipped together, as they tried to guess what this was all about. The impending IPO? An acquisition?

Brianna returned from the other side of the building, carrying a bran muffin, her face shining. “Oh my God, this is crazy,” she whispered to me as she plopped down at her desk, already summoning over Janus and Lionel with wild gesticulations of her hands. Janus was by her side in an instant. Lionel drifted our way more reluctantly, like an iron filing being inexorably tugged by a magnet, against its will. He came to a stop on the other side of Brianna, as far from me as he couldbe.

“Those guys? They’re FBI,” Brianna told us. “I was just in the kitchen and I overheard some of the people from the magazine side talking. You know how the Luddite Manifesto went offline yesterday? Well, they traced the IP address of the computer that deleted it. And guess what?”

An iceberg dread was threatening to sink me. Lionel was trying assiduously not to look at me. Janus was practically in Brianna’s lap, his voice hoarse with excitement. “What?”

“They traced it here. To our office.”

Janus laughed. “No way. Has to be a mistake.”

I tried to laugh, too, but my pitch was a little too shrill, and I knew that my face had to be frozen in a rictus of terror. Of course they’d traced it here. What an idiot I had been, a Gretel laying out a trail of digital breadcrumbs that led straight to me. I was trying to form a question that wouldn’t give me away when Lionel’s voice cut in, asking exactly what I was afraid to ask. “They traced it to a specific computer?”

Brianna shook her head. “Just our general server, apparently. But seriously, what do you think it means? That someone who works here is working with the Bombaster?”

“Whoever it is deleted the manifesto, though.” Janus crouched down next to Brianna, the two of them wide-eyed with excitement. “So, not an accomplice, but someone who has it out for him. Right?”

As the two of them debated their theories I looked over at Lionel and saw that his skin was the color of sour milk. His eyes slid over Brianna’s head to meet mine and lodged there. We stared at each other in complicit silence. I wanted so badly to know what he was thinking, but the glare on his glasses made him impossible to read.

Without saying a word, he turned and began to walk back across the room, his hands tight against his sides, his shoulders a rigid square. I watched as he passed the engineering cluster, and then his own desk below the Bart Simpson pinata; and then my breath seized in my throat as I realized where he was headed.

The conference room.

Brianna and Janus, their conjecture finally running out of steam, noticed that Lionel had vanished. “Where’d he go?” Brianna asked.

I couldn’t answer. I was watching Lionel knocking on the door of the conference room and I felt perilously close to cardiac arrest.

“He’s been acting really down the last few days, barely leaves his desk,” Janus observed. He gave me a sideways look. “Did something go wrong with you guys? He’s really fucking fragile sometimes.” I danced away from his gaze, thinking, You have no idea. And yet even as I was trapped in a maelstrom of panic— Is Lionel turning me in right now? What should I do? —I still felt an unexpected pang of sympathy for Lionel. How could he possibly be more broken than I was? And yet I somehow knew that he was. I hated that I was responsible for breaking him; I couldn’t blame him for wanting to finally rid himself ofme.

I still wanted to tuck him into my arms and hold him there until his sadness vanished.

Lionel disappeared into the conference room, and it was impossible for me to remain in that office for a single moment longer.

I bolted out of my chair and grabbed my backpack. “I’m feeling a little sick,” I announced. “I think I’m going to go home early.”

Brianna and Janus stared at me as I stumbled past them toward the exit. Down the hall, careening off the walls as I went; my thumb pressing the elevator button frantically; the bright yellow SIGNAL sign pulsing painfully against the back of my eyes. Terrified that at any second I would feel a hand on my shoulder, handcuffs snaking around my wrists.

It wasn’t until I got down to the street, and began walking as fast as I could in the direction of downtown, that I let myself cry. How the promise of yesterday could so quickly give way to the disaster of today. How I could have gotten so close to having everything I wanted, only to have it all yanked away.

I wanted so badly to blame someone else for the situation I found myself in, but in my heart I knew that this was all my fault. Yes, my father was the domestic terrorist—but I was the one who hadn’t gone straight to the police back in Montana. And if Lionel had just turned me in to the authorities, it was only because I’d put him in the untenable position of having to choose between his own sense of morality and me—a girl he barely knew.

I could think of only one place remaining to me. I tugged my mother’s business card out of the pocket in my backpack, where I’d carefully zipped it for safekeeping. I walked until I found a working pay phone—I was so adept at pay phones now!—and then dialed the number she’d written on it in neatly round handwriting.