1 #2
“Here’s to that,” my father said, and I smiled and joined them in sipping wine.
Why did that comment bother me so much? She’d meant it kindly.
Soon enough they returned to Ohio, and I settled back into the rhythms of my life.
I was good at my work, both in Service and at the college.
My students seemed to like me well enough, and I enjoyed teaching them.
My Service work involved surveillance on a handful of local people, adults much older than me, who’d attended the last pro-democracy demonstrations a decade earlier.
It was easy work, observing their activities, listening to their mind-numbingly boring phone calls, meeting regularly with their next-door neighbours, friends, and colleagues.
In my cover life, I liked my colleagues at the college.
My home was beautiful. The dating pool was small, but I maximized it by dating both women and men.
I collected a few local friends and enjoyed their company.
But in the years that followed my parents’ first visit, my mother’s comment—a quiet life in a beautiful place—stayed with me in a way I didn’t understand.
It was like a splinter I could ignore for months at a time.
Occasionally, in unexpected moments, I was struck by an uneasy sense that I was living the wrong life, or conducting my life in the same way I checked items off my grocery lists, or doing the wrong thing, or in stasis.
Sometime around my fortieth birthday, while my friend Nico was visiting, I broke my glasses.
I was picking oranges in the backyard when it happened.
I’d taken the glasses off for only a moment, to wipe sweat from my face, but managed to drop them.
I stepped back, looking at the ground in the dim greenish light under the orange tree, and heard a quiet snap under my shoe. The nose bridge was broken.
“You got a backup pair?” Nico asked, from the lounge chair. She’d been reading a book.
“In my office at the college,” I said.
“Do you have tape?”
“Probably. Keep reading, I’ve got this.” But all I seemed to have in the house, tape-wise, was a reflective silver tape that my cousin Anton had left behind on a recent visit, when he’d come for a few days with his four-year-old twins, who were forever immersed in complicated art projects.
The tape was very narrow but surprisingly strong.
I carefully wound it around the broken section, then the right lens popped out, so I added more tape on the right.
The glasses felt secure when I put them on, but the overall look was insane.
I was staring in the mirror when the doorbell rang.
“Nice repair job, Ibari,” the UPS driver said. He came around often enough that we were on a first-name basis. In those days I did a lot of online shopping.
“Thank you. I just stepped on them.”
“Happens to the best of us,” he said, and raised his device close to my face. “Voice?”
“My voice is my passcode,” I said reflexively, and waited, with the driver, for the signature of my voice and the image of my face to match with my address in the UPS system, so that the driver could leave the small package he held, which I thought was probably my new toothbrush.
Instead, his device emitted a sharp warning beep.
“Seems like there’s a problem with the face scan,” the driver said. “Let’s try that again.” He raised the device.
“My voice is my passcode.” The beep came again.
“Try again without the glasses?”
“My glasses have never been a problem,” I said, but took them off anyway. “You’re sure you can’t just leave the package?”
“Without ID verification?” The driver grinned. “I didn’t know you did stand-up. Okay, take three?”
“My voice is my passcode,” I said, with the glasses in my hand, and this time the machine produced a melodic chime.
“There you go,” the driver said. “Enjoy the rest of your day.”
I thanked him, and brought the little package in.
I felt very strange. It was as if a curtain had been pulled aside, just for a second, and I’d seen the machinery hidden behind it.
I’d never really thought about facial recognition systems before, because they were everywhere and always had been, my face recorded and uploaded to a central database several times a day since earliest memory.
The question was whether the glasses could thwart any facial recognition software, or if it was just a faulty UPS scanner.
I returned to the backyard with a feeling of carrying a dangerous secret. I wanted to test my glasses again.
“Nico,” I said, “you want to go for a walk, maybe get some iced tea downtown?”
Nico smiled. “Your poor glasses,” she said. “Yes, iced tea sounds perfect.”
We walked slowly, in the direction of iced tea.
It was a hot day, but the solar fans in the business district created a gentle breeze.
There was a man walking a block or so ahead of us.
One of the former pro-democracy agitators whom I’d been surveilling.
I’d studied him so carefully that I’d have known him anywhere.
“When do you need to be back in LA?” I asked.
“I thought I’d take the four o’clock train.
” It was still only late morning. As we entered the tea shop, a discreet scanner embedded in the door frame flashed white—Face not found—but confirmation didn’t come until I reached the front of the line, ordered an iced tea, and stared directly into the screen to pay with credit.
“I’m sorry,” the barista said, and swivelled the screen so I could read the message: Facial recognition error. “I can’t remember the last time this happened.”
“Oh,” I said, “no problem, let’s do fingerprints.” I pressed my right index finger to the screen, and a moment later a green check mark appeared. Nico was studying the muffins.
“I think these glasses are throwing off the scanners,” I said.
Nico went still for just a second, and shook her head. The movement was barely perceptible. She was still looking at the baked goods.
“The muffins here look good,” she said, as if I’d said nothing.
This was when I understood: my friend was Service.
I had no doubt that she was who she said she was, which is to say an associate professor in the physics department at UCLA, but also she was something else.
It shouldn’t be disappointing, I told myself.
A lot of people were Service. I was Service.
The barista could be Service. Anyone around you, at any given moment, could be observing and reporting.
But was she reporting on me? We were quiet on the walk back to the house. The iced tea tasted like cardboard.
“I’ve never reported on you,” Nico said, when we were close to my house. She spoke so quietly that I barely heard her, and I knew it wasn’t a coincidence that she’d waited until our backs were to the downtown camera array.
“Okay.” I felt vastly relieved. I knew that rationally there was no reason to believe her, but all my life I’ve had a sense of intuition, and I felt very strongly that she was telling the truth.
And then, because she was my closest friend and she’d taken the risk first: “I’ve never reported on you either,” I said.
She didn’t stop walking, but I heard a slight intake of breath.
“You know,” she said, again very softly, “I think it doesn’t take that much to become a ghost.”
“You’re probably right.” I appreciated the warning.
Ghost was slang for a person who ran afoul of the State.
A ghost is undesirable. A ghost lives in the shadows.
A ghost is not entitled to a home, or health care, or the protections of the law, or a social security number, bank account, credit, or entry into most spaces, because does a ghost even really entirely exist?
There were rumours of people out in the hinterlands who hunted ghosts for sport.
I have lived all my life in the ordered calm of the State, and I have always believed in its essential contract, which can be summarized as follows: The opposite of disorder is harmony. Peace is achieved through surveillance. Service is the surveillance department of the State. Harmony at any cost.
This last one was the most important, and if you grow up here, it’s the first of the tenets that you learn.
Three-year-olds memorize it in preschool.
But my broken glasses revealed anomalies in the surveillance, and what is an anomaly if not the encroachment of disorder?
In the weeks after Nico’s visit, I found myself distracted.
I kept it together in my work, because I am nothing if not a professional, but sometimes when I was alone in my house I found myself drifting into strange thoughts, and I’d realize that I’d been staring into space while the teakettle shrieked, or that I’d let my pasta boil over.
The surprise wasn’t that chaos had always been there, embedded just under the surface. The surprise was that I liked it.
When the silver tape was on my face, facial recognition almost invariably failed, but these failures played out on a spectrum of mystery.
When I wore the broken glasses, screens flashed white instead of green.
Usually this meant that access or payment was denied—my identity couldn’t be verified—but sometimes I was allowed through doors that shouldn’t have opened.
When I wore my broken glasses, the Donors Lounge at the college let me in.
A discreet light on the door frame glowed white when I approached, no name appeared on the screen below, but the lock clicked open and I was allowed into a quiet, beautifully designed space with a view of the Santa Clara River, where the only other people were extremely wealthy visiting donors, and everyone assumed I belonged there, because if I didn’t belong, then how could I have gotten in? I enjoyed the circularity.