After James (20 page)

We wouldn't tell Durant just yet. We agreed to test the theory's holding capacity, though how, we had no idea. A way forward would come to us if we stopped looking for it.

“Tell me about Michigan,” I said.

The verb
surveil
is young, a 1960s back-formation of
surveillance
, itself young, nineteenth century, though from older fragments, the French
sur
, meaning “over,” and
veiller
, meaning “watch,” from the Latin
vigilare
, to “keep watch.” As I noodled around online in Amanda's bed, learning all this, these unsuspected links between, say,
surveil/watch
and
vigil/witness
, with their half-opposing connotations, I pictured Voth's reflection, there or not, in the window of the watch shop, and felt I was skirting the labyrinth again. One of these days my cha-chas would dance me completely out of sense. Maybe they already had.

Alpha
,
beta
,
gamma…

“Detta,” she said. Somehow we were dressed and walking now, eating so-so pastries, watching the rhythms of the traffic shooting along beside the Tiber. “Her brother works in cybersecurity.”

She began to tap Detta on her cell, paused.

“Is it safe?” Holding up the phone.

Seeing it in her hand made me think again of my mother, tapping me on her cellphone when she'd sent the picture of the cuneiform tablet. After they died I dreamed of my parents, one or both, almost every night for months, and was still dreaming of them in Rome. Dreams are ours alone. Never to be spied on, stolen, and never really to be shared, even when we try. If we're lucky something in the waking world, some artifice, roof of wet cedar shingles, sail of meringue on a passing dessert plate, poem, maybe a poem
about a dream of a dog in a port slum street, will seem to have the impress of the dream, and for a short time we can set the secret inside the found shape, and imagine that we are known.

We took a trolley car north and walked to the wide mall outside the entrance to the MAXXI museum. In the courtyard was an enormous, maybe one-hundred-foot sculpture of a human skeleton on its back, all its bones present and exact except for a long, sharply pointed god's doodle of a witch's nose. We sat on a low wall in the sun and watched people walk around the skeleton, interested but not visibly moved. Were they thinking of mortality or thinking about the artist thinking about it? Some leaned in very close, inspecting the bones, the materials. I was re-experiencing the thought of my parents lying on their backs, struck and struck until struck dead, working backward to them getting out of the car, my father hit hard in the face, unconscious and no trouble, my mother next, the both of them dragged back into the car, and then I stopped thinking altogether, closed my eyes and listened to the day, to my breathing, and opened them on the curving, white museum building. I told Amanda the museum was audacious simply for being contemporary and in Rome. We discussed ancient capitals, how age and beauty are oppressive, and nostalgia to be feared as a bearer of troubles, losses, animosities, and gilded never-weres.

Or else they died in a car accident. I got some purchase on the idea and decided I could hang on for the day.

Detta's brother, Pierluigi, a suave, young hypomaniac, turned out to be a lot of work. She'd told us he had a disorder, which she had trouble translating but seemed to be a kind of
compulsive talking problem, which would be worse when he spoke about the internet. As he emerged from the museum and crossed toward us he looked somehow both fashionable and genuinely (as opposed to fashionably) unkempt, like an undead model, the summer-weight grey sports jacket wrinkled and unevenly faded, tie improvisationally knotted, blond hair wilted from the over-application of some product. He said hello and explained without prompting that he worked with the museum, building the database and conducting penetration tests and vulnerability assessments. It took him some time to convey this because though his English vocabulary was good, his pronunciation was god-awful, as if he'd never heard the language. Amanda addressed him in Italian, which she spoke musically but not well, it turned out, because they settled on English.

We outlined the Three Sheets phenomenon and my theory. We asked about hacking. Suddenly he became very animated and, oddly, more fluent. His hands began moving in little circles before him, slightly out of phase with each other, as he started to talk about himself. As he spoke through his lunch hour and dinner that night at Detta's apartment (Detta helping in real time and afterward with the clarifications), and then again in an email sent in the middle of the night, when I was asleep, written in a mix of English and idiomatic Italian that I used Detta and an online site to work through, with a few interpolations of my own, I developed a composite sense of his thoughts, and a very clear one of the ways his condition presented.

“When you think of the ‘hacker,' ” he said or wrote, “you will imagine subcultures, crooks and perverts, the geeks in the basements. But these groups overlap like it's crazy. Political,
criminal, government, black hats and the white hats, hats of other stripes and races.” Sometimes his fingers held a cigarette, the smoke sailing in little loops as he performed his hand circles. “No matter how strange we are, always there's someone who feels like us. We can find these people online. My people are called Keyholers. The name comes from the spy satellites. We are nineteen, in Italian branch. We agree in words and thinking. In English they would call us ‘hacktivists.' Why have I never met you, Amanda? Are you two lovers?”

She smiled and asked if we could record him on our phones. He nodded.

“Detta has mentioned you often. We were bound to meet,” she said. I put my arm around her waist, a move not native to me. Pierluigi seemed to be looking at her clavicle and nodded at it, and kept nodding for maybe twenty seconds after she asked if there was any way of finding out if our computers had been hacked.

“In Keyhole language, what we do, hacker practice, is we call ‘entering all.' We are the sailors. We sail on virtual wind. We are”—this took many tries to arrive at—“ ‘lifted up into the god prospect.' Like satellite cameras we can see at same time great distances and smallest movements far below. We see search trends within masses, hear music in the tap tap of the password,” he said. He talked about his special connection to the world, the hunger that develops once you realize you can know more and more. “It's like religious, the hunger, but the faith is not being blind. It's all right there in one
grosso
evidence field.”

Detta got up from the table (there were four of us, it was evening now) and began massaging his shoulders, trying to
relax him, slow him down, but he stopped only to scold her jokingly, in English, for not having introduced him sooner to her North American friends. Around his sister he seemed to speak with more control but then couldn't stop himself from accelerating. I wanted to pour cold water over his head to save him from his all-seeing vision.

“Hackers know the living and dead. We're all the same, no clock time. We float with ghosts and angels and some of them turn and look in your face from the screen, and you know inside them. I am a secret inside a secret.”

Whenever he started into what seemed to be an answer, he lost track of the question. He never once answered a direct question about anything. I began paying more attention to Detta and Amanda. Their silent exchanges were about managing Pierluigi, Amanda nodding interrogatively at his third empty beer glass, Detta shaking her head slightly. I was worried about him, too, but admit to hoping for some signal about me. Did Detta know Amanda and I had slept together? But then I barely knew it. It was sleep, after all.

Detta put her hand on her brother's arm and asked him again to assess our theory. Could he determine if we'd been hacked?

“Of course they are hacked. Everyone is hacked.” He explained the mechanism. There were dozens of ways into our files. Even clicking on an unsubscribe button could open the gates. “You know Troy, story of the horse. You're all hosts for remote-access trojans. Someone controls your computer camera and microphone. They've installed the keylogger and tracked every password you have.”

The information seemed sound but his certainty felt unjustified and made me doubt him. I had no idea what to believe now. He began talking about hacker intuition, an ability in some hackers to predict keystrokes, words before they even formed. The Keyholers all had some version of this talent to predict.

“But then the thing. It came to us all in the same time. We all had it before anyone spoke. If you see ahead in time, even just for a tick and tock second, you also see, not so clearly, what's longer away. It's a vague shape but all of us have seen it and all of us are scared. I'm telling you. We've seen the end of time and it's much closer than you think.”

Of course he was an apocalyptic. So many troubled minds washed up on the same shore at the end of the world. He explained that when the Keyholers understood they were all seeing the same thing, they agreed not to talk about it, not even with one another, and because it had a shape, they'd all draw what they saw. One day, on an agreed-upon minute, they all uploaded their drawings. They were the same shape.

Detta tore a page from a notebook and Pierluigi worked over it for two or three minutes with a sad intensity. When he finished he stood and left the table. Detta, Amanda, and I stood over the sketch.

“We all see it,” Pierluigi said from across the room. “It comes to us in dreams but also when awake and offline. We wonder who else outside our group has these visions.”

“But what is it?” asked Detta.

“It's obvious,” he said and refused to say anything more.

I'd been hoping to return with Amanda to her flat but our night ended with her leaning into a cab and kissing me, briefly. I arrived home to find Durant making tea in the dark. He asked how things were “progressing on all fronts.” It seemed a veiled question about Amanda. I said I'd had a breakthrough but couldn't tell him about it yet.

“Well, if you've enlisted her to help you, I'm all for it.”

Our agreement not to talk in detail about what I was finding had started to claim more conversational territory. I was tired of the circumspection.

“For a while yesterday, I thought someone was following me.” I described the episode with Voth, and confessed I was still conjuring spy scenarios. “I could have misread what was happening.”

His face gave nothing away, not even concern. A cone of lamplight from the main room cast his shadow hugely on the kitchen wall.

“I'll get you a security escort for a few days. Carlo knows people who do that sort of thing.”

“No thanks.”

He held the ear of the teacup in one thick finger.

“It's prehistoric, an adaptation, the sense we're being followed. A part of us is still on a plain somewhere, moving through long grass, easily spooked. But sometimes…”

He looked like he was about to start into one of his lectures, but his expression changed. He drained his cup and set it on the counter.

“You owe me a report.”

“It's written. But today I have a better theory.”

I saw doubt or regret pass over his face. He said we'd find a place to meet the next afternoon, wished me good night, and disappeared into his dim room, no doubt to reread “Streams” and nurse the code hypothesis that carried all he had left of hope. How could I take it from him?

In the morning I heard him leave. From my bedroom-study I looked into the narrow, quiet street and heard his steps receding on the stones. There was no one in sight, no locals or tourists, no Voth or whoever had or hadn't been following me. Things were half-defined all around.

I opened my laptop, stared at the screensaver, the bare trunk and branches of a dead staghorn sumac tree. The Londoner had sent me the image on the day she left. She said it was the most peaceful thing she'd ever seen and she hoped I'd draw peace from it. The sumac, which I'd always found slightly disturbing, now seemed to be staring back at me one-eyed from a knot or wound below the most dramatic of its staghorns. I switched it out for one of my screensaver photos of poets' faces. When I was in a northern mood I chose a Swede or Scot or one of my countrypeople. The southern faces ran clear to Zimbabwe's Zimunya. The poets had little in common. I chose the first up alphabetically.
A
is for Ashbery. He was young, moustached. His first book of poems was
Some Trees
. His name sounded like a tree. Ashbery replaced sumac.

There were no new poems at Three Sheets. I checked SHEPMETSOR and followed links to letter exchanges. A woman in New Zealand was finding tide charts useful in understanding the poems. A prof in Calgary had put the site
on a graduate syllabus. Someone in Leeds was arguing that “Nanny/@/The Poet” (which he refused to stop using) was a desperate and implausibly successful stab at “aura buzz” by a publishing house in its death throes, and predicted there'd soon be a great reveal and volumes for sale. A singer-songwriter in Dublin had set one of the poems to music. I clicked on the video link and made it about twelve earnest seconds into “Invert Program” before I couldn't take any more and stopped it in midpennywhistle.

I felt a long way from recent events, from Voth and the Keyholers. Said together they sounded like a band out of a Pynchon novel. How could they even be real? But the world was such now that characters and events once thought to be broadly ironic and clearly imaginary were part of the given. They showed up in our towns, sat at our tables. We shared a weakening sense of the discordant. You caught a frequency, something you thought of as your life, and then the interferences began.

I looked at Pierluigi's sketch. The shape was familiar but hardly unusual, rectangular, humanly designed. Within the borders, certain geometries held but things got more complex, maybe crazed. The sketch had a terrible innocence about it. Had the other Keyholers really seen this in their dreams? How could the apocalypse look so clearly machined? At the end of all things, a great bar code.