Now and Again (38 page)

The streets were unplowed and the snow was piling up, concealing the familiar. Then Tula tugged at him with her mittened hand and they were running again, past the turnoff to the Ash Creek settlement where Tula lived and past the municipal recreation center before heading up the slope to the Super Saver parking lot and down the street to where Lyle's truck was parked next to an empty lot where the foundation for a new office complex had just been poured.

“Go inside and ask him for the keys,” said Will. “Tell him the truck is in the way of the snowplow and that you'll move it for him.”

“I can't say that,” said Tula. “It's a lie!”

“You'd be protecting him,” said Will. “If he doesn't know our plan, he can't be held accountable for what we do. He can't be pressured into revealing it to anyone.”

“Pressured by whom?” asked Tula.

“Whoever's out to get us,” said Will, winking like a conspirator.

Tula blinked at him, her eyelashes heavy with snowflakes, and just when he was going to grab her again, right there on Main Street where anyone could see them, she pushed him away and sashayed into the bar, leaving him to stamp his feet on the icy pavement, trying to stay warm. After what seemed like a long time, Tula emerged, swinging her hips like a cheerleader and dangling the keys triumphantly above her head.

Will hadn't expected there would be side effects to drinking. He hadn't expected that he'd want to kiss Tula's neck and her belly button or that he wouldn't want to stop there. He hadn't expected that driving the truck would become increasingly hazardous or that it would get stuck in a snowdrift driving back from Glorietta or that he'd push Tula into the drift instead of getting it unstuck or that he'd dive in after her when someone in a passing car stuck his head out the window and shouted, “Get a room!”

“We've got the truck, don't we?” he said to Tula. “It's even better than a room.”

“No, no, I can't,” said Tula. She looked sorrowful and frail, shivering in her too-big parka. He wanted to protect her, so he put an arm around her shoulders, but instead of snuggling in close to him, she moved away. Tiny snowflakes were drifting down, and the light from a streetlamp made a halo around her head.

“Why not?” asked Will. Something had changed for him; or, rather, many things had changed. He was motherless. He had joined the army. He had a girlfriend. And pretty soon he'd be quitting school. He was giving up a lot, so it seemed right that Tula give up something too. Not that she'd really be giving something up—they'd both be gaining. He said the word “sacrifice,” but it wasn't exactly what he meant. Apparently it was the wrong word to use because suddenly, Tula no longer seemed frail. Will suspected she was even angry, but the alcohol was affecting his perceptions and he couldn't be sure.

“Give up. Abandon. Kill,” said Tula. “What kind of sacrifice are we talking about?”

Will was confused as to whether having sex or not having it entailed sacrifice and whether sacrifice was a good thing or a bad one, but before he could ask, Tula stepped beyond the circle of lamplight and faded away behind a veil of snowflakes, leaving him to ponder the effects of the beer, which no longer made him feel happy and light-headed, but leaden and angry and thick. He ran partway down the road in the direction she had gone, skidding and panicked and shouting for her to come back. Now and then a car pushed past him, its taillights smearing in the snowy dark. Then there was only silence and a small but growing blister of loneliness and desperation. He was walking back to the truck when an SUV stopped and the driver helped him push the truck out of the snow.

“Christ almighty, son,” said the driver. “You're already at the Loop Road. Your girlfriend probably just walked on home. You must have really pissed her off.”

Will drove around the loop, slowly at first as he looked for Tula, but then more recklessly when he realized she had probably taken a shortcut across the fields to her house, which was no more than a mile away as the crow flies. He turned the wheel this way and that just to make skid marks in the pristine whiteness. He opened the window and shouted out into the swirling blizzard, “I think I know a little bit about sacrifice, Tula Santos! I joined the army after all!”

The snow absorbed the sound while Will absorbed the strange quiet of the town where he had lived his whole life. As he drove, he gazed at it in wonder, as if he had already left it or returned after an absence of many years. He was as good as gone, and he thrilled to imagine the adventures he would have while the citizens of Red Bud plodded around the same old track. He slammed on the brakes, turning into the skid before speeding up again and letting the thrill overtake him until he was riding the razor's edge of chaos and control. He marveled at how the plumes of exhaust coming from a car that appeared in front of him turned red in the glow of the car's taillights, at how the shapes of things seemed sharper and more brittle in the frozen air. He marveled at how things were already changing and would never be the same again. And he marveled at how slowly and inevitably the collision happened when the driver of the car he was following suddenly hit the brakes.

L
e Roy was alone in the warehouse when a visitor knocked at the door saying he was a reporter and asking to be let in.

“How did you find us?” asked Le Roy.

“A woman named Dolly Jackson sent me here.”

“Hunh,” said Le Roy. “Danny's girlfriend sent you? How do you know her?”

“A while back I wrote a series of articles on innocent prisoners. One of my sources told me that Dolly was on to an even bigger story, and Dolly told me about you.”

“Hunh,” Le Roy said again.

Three months before, Le Roy would have let anyone in. One day a serviceman who had been summoned to the building across the street installed a new Kenmore refrigerator before Danny returned and pointed out the mistake. Another time, Le Roy enjoyed takeout from a local Chinese restaurant that wasn't meant for them. After that, Danny helped Le Roy develop a method for sensing when something was about to go off track, and a surefire indicator was that the doorbell would ring when everyone but Le Roy was out of the warehouse.

“Don't answer the doorbell,” Danny had reminded him just that morning. “If no one else is here, you should just let it ring.”

But the reporter didn't ring the bell. He clomped up onto the front porch and rapped on the windowpane.

“The door's not locked,” shouted Le Roy when he heard the rapping. He only heard it because he didn't have his headphones in his ears. He didn't have them in because the captain and Kelly had gone off somewhere and Danny had gone somewhere too, which meant he could turn the music up as loud as he wanted as long as the upstairs neighbors didn't complain. Headphones were a good invention, but they weren't as good as no headphones, which allowed the surfaces of the building to rattle and become part of the music, which Le Roy thought was not only the way the musicians intended it, but what the music itself wanted.

“Listen to this,” he said to the reporter, who just happened to be carrying a video camera and some recording equipment. “Does this sound better to you or this?” He played two versions of the same song, one recorded in a high-tech studio and one out on a busy street.

“No contest,” said the reporter in a smooth voice.

“Yeah,” said Le Roy. “Fuck that other shit.” He put the live recording on again and amped it up until the windows rattled and the computer speakers buzzed a little. “Even better, am I right?”

“So right,” said the reporter.

“More real,” said Le Roy.

“Exactly what I was going to say.”

“I'm thinking of recording this and then playing the recording so it picks up other sounds and then recording that and playing—you know, keep doing that until I reach a point where it no longer sounds better—if I ever reach that point. That's what I want to find out.”

“I've got a digital recorder,” said the man. “Why don't we try it now?”

After a while the man reached over to turn down the volume and said that his name was Martin Fitch and that he was investigating how a particular top-secret document had found its way to wartruth.com. “The document is called
Countering Misconceptions,
and it showed up on your website a couple weeks back.”

“Sure,” said Le Roy. “I can help you with that.” Then he opened the email log he had created to track all of the submissions they had received in the weeks since the site went live. “This column shows who sent it, and this shows what, if anything, we did in terms of authentication. And this is the date when I put it up on the site.” He spent a minute scrolling through the log. “Oh, yeah,” he said. “That's the one we got in the mail from Dolly Jackson. You know Dolly, right?”

“I do,” said Martin. “She's the one who sent me here.”

After giving Martin the information he wanted, Le Roy told him a little about how the website had started and how the captain felt responsible for Pig Eye and the others even though it wasn't his fault.

“Whose fault was it?” asked Martin.

“That's something I think about too,” said Le Roy. “What if the world is just a giant computer simulation? What if the grand master isn't God, but a computer geek at his keyboard who just wanted to find out what would happen if we took out Saddam? Maybe he also wants to see what happens if we bomb Iran or North Korea or let the polluters run amok. Or what if he makes half the people warlike or hyper-religious or a combination of the two and the other half, you know, all goody-goody and passive. Or if he gives all of the money to a handful of people and everybody else has shit.”

“Hunh,” said Martin. “Cool.”

Just then E'Laine and the single mother came in with bags of groceries. Le Roy had forgotten E'Laine had come to visit for a few days. He was glad to see her, but the gladness was more like satisfaction, the kind a person felt when problems were solved and blanks filled in. Like if he had been wondering where E'Laine was, now he'd know. “There's E'Laine!” he said, marking the instant a tiny gap closed up inside him.

“We're cooking for the guys tonight,” said E'Laine after shaking hands with Martin. “You're welcome to stay for dinner if you like.”

“Thanks. I'd like to meet everyone involved with this project. I'm hoping they can help me with my article, and in return, I can help them publicize the site. The more publicity, the more traffic, and the more traffic, the more donations—that sort of thing.”

“Sure,” said E'Laine. “I'll set another place.”

Le Roy swiveled his chair to see E'Laine. He thought about how his chair could be turning on its axle, or it could be that with a mere push of his foot, he'd sent the entire universe spinning around his chair. “Oh,” he said. “Oh, yeah.”

Martin said he had an errand to run, so Le Roy got back to work. He put on his headphones. He turned up the volume to the point where the room went away and it was just him and the screen and the liquid slip of the keys under his fingers. He liked to tap in time to the music, which made it seem like he was the one playing the keyboard, and if the train just happened to come through as it did now, all the better for the bass. He entered another line of code and felt like a master of the universe, even if his universe was still small. Once he got tired of the website, he'd try something bigger. He wasn't joking about simulations, which were a combination of games and real life and were starting to get some press.

He kept his eyes on the computer screen, but the sides of his face could feel E'Laine walking toward the door with Martin. Probably she was only seeing him out, but maybe she was going with him. E'Laine had a mind of her own. He knew he could tap and tap and he couldn't keep her from going with the reporter if that's what she wanted to do. The tiny gap threatened to open up again. Then she was waving—he couldn't tell if it was to catch his attention or to say good-bye to the reporter. He felt a slight unraveling in his chest as if he wanted to tell her something, but then he typed another line of code and E'Laine was gone. Martin Fitch was gone. Everything was gone but the screen in front of him until Danny came back with some books under his arm and a few minutes after that the captain and Kelly returned with the supplies. Danny made sure everything was in order—the tape on the tape shelf and the coffee on the coffee shelf—while Kelly answered the phone when it rang, and the thing that had clicked out of place when E'Laine went out the door with Martin clicked back in until Kelly started shouting at the captain about something and Le Roy tuned him out.

In his simulation, Le Roy would make a world where everything was in its place, at least at the beginning—at least at what he thought of as ground zero or the big bang. He could set the parameters so that if Kelly or Danny went out the door, they were guaranteed to come back in again. That way, the people in the simulation who depended on Kelly and Danny would feel secure the way he felt now that his friends were back and the supplies were put away. But then he thought, What would that prove? The point of a simulation wasn't to keep things static. The point was to shake things up. He'd like to see what happened if an alien race attacked those people who were feeling all safe—ha! Or if the icebergs melted all at once or if computerized robots started to make decisions for themselves. Like if the rich people somehow got the poor people to vote against their own interests and if the poor people ever figured it out. Or what if they were in a simulation now and just didn't know it—a simulation within a simulation, he thought. Now that would be a project worth working on. Now that would be fucking cool.

A
fter Fitch's article was published in the
New York Times,
leaked documents started to pour in to the site's secure drop box from anonymous sources.

“Shee-it,” said Kelly. “Who's sending us all this stuff?”

“Martin says we don't want to know their names,” Penn told him. “It's better for everybody that way.”

Le Roy increased site security and developed a network of volunteers to help with encryption and document authentication. Some of the documents needed to be redacted, so they developed another network for that.

“We all know Dolly's name,” said Danny. “Does that put her in some kind of danger?”

“She's not the insider who stole the document,” said Penn. “Outsiders are safe.”

“What about us?” asked Danny.

“We're journalists,” said Kelly. “Journalists are protected by the First Amendment.”

“But probably not leakers,” said Penn. “Fitch says that the prevailing view is that they aren't protected, even though some scholars disagree. Everything in this arena is changing pretty fast, and the law is far from settled. But the bottom line is that the less we know about the people sending us this stuff the better.”

The site's email box was even busier than the drop box. One soldier wrote anonymously of participating in the Haditha massacre, where twenty-four unarmed Iraqis were shot at close range. Others wrote about being advised to carry drop weapons in case they killed the wrong person. Soldiers wrote about indiscriminately rounding up all able-bodied men and sending them to Abu Ghraib for processing, and interrogators at Abu Ghraib wrote about being overwhelmed and undertrained. There was footage of an Apache helicopter firing on men armed with what turned out to be cameras and more footage where a wedding party was the target of attack. In the forum section of the site, the soldiers asked each other how you could tell the right person from the wrong one, and the answer was you couldn't.

They wrote about bellying up mountains through storms of artillery fire and about taking out snipers and disarming bombs and providing clean water and helping the local businesses that sprang up in areas that had been rife with sectarian violence, and then they wrote about how the sectarian violence crept back in as soon as the soldiers left.

Political operatives wrote about burying information in the run-up to the war and about inserting sentences into official speeches. A Vietnam vet sent a documentary of the Winter Soldier Investigation, which was intended to show that war crimes in Vietnam were a direct result of official policy, and another one told about how he'd been present at the Gulf of Tonkin—no torpedoes had been fired at U.S. warships that day, which meant a deadly and divisive conflict was started on a lie.

There were stories about how one third of veterans from the First Gulf War suffered from Gulf War Syndrome and how they were still fighting for treatment seventeen years later and how much of the debate centered on what to call the mysterious constellation of symptoms that was now starting to affect a new generation of returning soldiers and how what you called it had implications for how seriously it was taken. There were stories about how exposure to Vietnam-era Agent Orange was only getting official attention now that it was too late to help the men and women who had suffered from multiple myeloma or soft-tissue sarcoma or cancers of the lungs or larynx or trachea and finally died. There were stories of benefits delayed or denied, of soldiers who fought for their country overseas and then had to fight the bureaucracy at home.

There were statistics too: 148 combat casualties in the First Gulf War; 145 noncombat deaths. And explanations of the statistics: official figures for soldier deaths only counted those who died on the ground, not the ones who died on the C-130 taking them to the hospital or the ones who died after they landed in Germany or the ones who died at Walter Reed Medical Center or the ones who died a few years later from wounds or illnesses contracted during the war or the ones who waited eight or ten or fifteen years to die of worsening symptoms that were variously attributed to vaccinations, oil well fires, pesticide use, bacteria in the soil, anti–nerve agent pills, solvents, metal-laden dust, depleted uranium weapons, and infectious disease. Of 694,000 soldiers who served in Desert Storm, 115,000 would soon be dead. Of a group of eight friends, only two remained.

A soldier wrote to say, “Why are you doing this? People don't want to know all the risks because then no one would do anything.”

But Kelly kept passing the stories on to Le Roy and Le Roy kept blasting them up on the site and Martin Fitch kept advising them on which documents to release to the public and E'Laine came more and more often to do odd jobs and the single mother was there almost every evening with a hot, home-cooked meal. Now and then one of the men would say, “Man, this thing is really taking off,” but mostly they concentrated on the daily tasks, with Penn feeling good that the other men needed him less and less, because wasn't the whole point to set them up on their own? When he couldn't sleep, he tramped through the neighborhood on patrol. Once, he scared off someone who was trying to jimmy a lock on a building down the street. Another time, he chased two men from the shadows, gaining on them as they cut through an empty lot and circled back toward the river. He was running easily, his shadow catching up with him when he passed a streetlight before disappearing in the dark. The closer he got, the more infuriated their heavy, labored breathing made him. “You shouldn't go on a mission you're not ready for,” he shouted.