1 #11
What I wanted desperately was to tell him about Kareem, the foreign Kareem in the green silk shirt, telling me a story about my double—no, a story about a doubled country, a country very unlike the State—in an interrogation room six months ago.
I wished I could say to Anton what Kareem had said in passing to me, No country lasts forever, because there was such hope in that, but I couldn’t take the risk.
I was thinking about the silver tape that Anton had left in my old house in Fillmore.
I remembered his twins using it for their art projects, but why did Anton own tape that could foil facial recognition sensors?
I didn’t want to know. The only way to keep him safe was by not knowing, and I feared for him now.
I remembered Nico shaking her head and refusing to hear me when I’d mentioned the way the tape foiled the sensors all those years ago, and recognized the same instinct in myself, that desperate desire not to learn anything that I’d have to report.
There’s so much you have to ignore to live peacefully in a place like this.
“I don’t have to leave for another thirty minutes,” I said. “Shall we get some dessert?”
“There’s a line I’ve been trying to walk,” Alberto said, “for literally my entire professional career.” It was late now, around eight thirty p.m., and we were staring at his fish.
“What kind of line?”
“Humanity versus not, I suppose. I don’t mean to be grandiose about it. In the past several weeks,” Alberto said, “you’ve deviated from your usual routes to walk by Nico Li’s house nine times. What are you looking for?”
“I’m concerned,” I said, after a moment. I was watching a particular fish, bright blue with black stripes. “As a friend, not as a Service agent. Nico and Kareem have two small children, and I don’t think Kareem’s a good father.”
“Our psychologists would back you up on that,” Alberto said. “Listen, the reason I brought you in tonight is to tell you I’m modifying the recusal order. You won’t speak with either of those men again, but I want you running surveillance on the children.”
“To what end?”
“Nico broke a number of internal rules,” Alberto said, “and needs to be interrogated. If she ever returns, our analysis is that she’ll go directly to her children.”
“The children are bait, then?”
“Essentially.” He glanced at me. “If our work were easy,” he said, “anyone could do it.”
“Can I ask you something about the case?”
“Yes.”
“Will their father be arrested?”
“Tentatively, no. We’re more interested in Nico.”
“So her husband’s also bait?”
“I wish you’d stop using that word,” Alberto said.
“What happened to the other man? The version of Kareem Fayed from . . . the other place. From somewhere else.”
“Well.” Alberto rose and went to the fish tank.
He was studying a zebra fish down in a corner, a lethargic little creature with its face close to the glass.
He tapped the glass lightly, and the fish zigzagged away.
“The question to ask here isn’t really what’s in the best interest of the individual, but what’s in the best interest of the State.
We have this man, this reluctant arrival from a different world.
The place he’s from, Ibari, it’s some kind of violent nightmare version of our country, isn’t it?
You read his interview transcripts. There is no State where he’s from, just militias battling for control of the fragments.
It’s the absolute opposite of the harmony we work for, you and I. ”
“Hardly his fault, though,” I said carefully.
“Not his fault at all. It’s regrettable on every level.
But imagine the potential,” he said, “of having a man out in the world who comes from a place where the State doesn’t exist. Spreading wild ideas about an alternate system, or absence thereof.
Talking about a place that isn’t an idea, but that actually exists, so far as anyone can tell, because this man is the living proof of its existence.
That’s in no one’s best interest, is it? Spreading subversive ideas?”
“I see your point.” I want to dive into the ocean and keep swimming through the blue. Was this an old passphrase? It was an idea that I couldn’t shake. Lately I’d come to an awareness that I wasn’t entirely well. “Has he been imprisoned?”
Alberto glanced at me. I was asking too many questions.
“We’re not monsters,” he said. “Of course not. He’s in Camp Five.
Working in exchange for room and board, surrounded by scenic desert.
It’s a pleasant place by all accounts. There’s a pool.
The deal we’ve reached with him is that so long as he doesn’t talk about where he’s from, he will never be imprisoned. ”
“I see,” I said. And then, “Thank you for indulging my curiosity. It’s just . . . I’ve never been involved in a case that concerned someone I knew.”
“I understand,” he said. “It’s jarring, the first time that happens to you.”
How were the passphrases generated? I’d always assumed they were AI, pulled from the depths of the infinite internet, more or less random, but it couldn’t be denied that they contained patterns and pieces of something, a narrative of some kind.
On my way home that night I was thinking of the passphrases I’d cycled through in the year I’d left Fillmore, that liminal moment between one life and the next.
Variations on something, a poem or a scene: At night on the ferry there is no sea and no sky, the horizon marked by scattered lights.
Moonless, starless, cold wind, cold night.
You avoided the airless interiors of the ship, preferring at all times to stand on the bow.
The problem was, setting aside the absolute injustice of what had happened to the foreign Kareem, I recognized that I had entered a trap.
Service knew I was sympathetic to Nico. If Nico returned, she would go to the children, and she would be arrested.
If I failed to act decisively in that instance, if I protected her in any way, I would be arrested too.
I understood the logic of Service, and I knew I was on probation with as much certainty as if I’d read my own personnel file.
The only way I could protect myself now was by doing my job impeccably.
Move deeper into the police, I thought, my mantra from Fillmore, from that night when I stood looking down at the lit-up streets of the town and considered which way to go.
When I arrived home that night, I logged into the Service system, and opened two new surveillance files.
Samir Li, age four. Marlowe Li, age three.
Residence: Harbor City / Los Angeles / California / United State.
Parents: Kareem Fayed (Harbor City / LA).
Nico Li (whereabouts unknown). I didn’t actually enjoy opening surveillance files on two preschoolers, but there is such a thing as duty.
7
A month or so later, Nico was declared legally dead, and I was surprised to receive a phone call one morning from an attorney on the subject of her will.
She had left me a painting, the lawyer told me.
What could he tell me about it? Not much.
The title was Swan Dive, the artist was Lucas Alkaitis, did I know his work?
No, I knew very little about art, but the mention of that painting gave me a thrill: I remembered it from my interview with Nico’s husband.
When I came home from work a few days later, it had been delivered to my front door.
I unwrapped the little bundle, and gazed for a while at the oil-paint sea.
Later, at my computer, I looked up the artist. Lucas Alkaitis died of a heroin overdose in New York City in 1960.
I spent some time scrolling through other paintings of his, and later, in a meeting with David Grissom, I was distracted by the memory of those works.
He’d been talking about visiting an informant out in Camp Five, which was located in the Mojave Desert. The mention of that camp focused my attention. Was Kareem still there, the foreign Kareem from the other place?
“I haven’t been out there in a while,” I said.
“They need an equipment upgrade. I called for transport from the train station, and my car’s radar system was broken.”
“So the warden didn’t know you were coming?”
“She knew I was coming,” David said, “she just didn’t know when I’d arrived, so no one let me in. I was stuck outside for an hour because they thought my car hadn’t arrived yet.”
There was something here, the wisp of an idea just on the edge of my thoughts. Later it seemed to me that I didn’t formulate the plan, exactly, it was more that the plan was already there and I had to find my way to it.
“What are you thinking about?” he asked, and I realized I’d been staring into space.
“Oh,” I said. “You’ll think it’s silly, probably.”
“What?”
“This room,” I said. He looked around. We were in a cramped conference room between our offices, with buzzing lights, cup stains on the fake-wood table, and mismatched chairs. “We have a substantial budget,” I said. “Why do all of our rooms look like this?”
“I don’t know,” he said, “but I kind of like it.”
“You’re into mismatched chairs?”
“Not specifically, but I guess it reminds me of my high school? There’s just something familiar about it. I’ve got to run to a meeting, but I’ll see you later on this afternoon.”