The Barbarian Nurseries (7 page)

T
he park consisted of a rubber mat and the requisite slides and swings, resting at the bottom of a slope of irrigated fescue overlooking the beach and the ocean. Midmorning dew covered the grass and the park was deserted, a fact that Araceli found disappointing somehow. She expected crowds, children running, the smoke of barbecues drifting skyward, but here the only movement was from the empty swings being tapped forward by the invisible hand of the ocean breeze, their plastic seats garnished with mist. In the distance, the roar of the surf, and sometimes the whine or purr of a car gliding down the street that curved around the park. The overcast was a whitish gray roof, as it was most summer mornings before the sun came to burn off everything to blue. The tableau was quiet, oceanic, meditation-inducing, but for the sound of Maureen berating her two sons inside their idling car.

Thirty minutes earlier, alerted by a series of screams and shouts, Maureen had discovered her two sons gripped in a pretzel headlock on the living room floor underneath the bookcases with their picture frames and two glass vases from Andalusia that rattled when, in their wrestling, Keenan had managed to push his brother backward into the furniture. “You’re going to break something!” Maureen had shouted, referring
simultaneously to their bodies and the objects in her bookcase. They grunted and yelped and Maureen had struggled to separate them as Keenan tried to dig his teeth into his older brother’s wrist, while Brandon screamed “Get off me” and tried to free himself with a kick.
I order them off the television an hour ago, and without the pacifying power of that screen, they are trying to draw blood.
There was no play in this, they were like two drunks on the sawdust-covered floor of a bar. Once or twice a week this happened, a testosterone brawl born suddenly from a moment of peaceful brotherly play. Maureen believed a mother had to eradicate the disease of Y-chromosome violence during childhood, lest her family one day be consumed by the gunplay horrors broadcast on the television news. She had decided to whisk them out of the house, into the punishment of open space and an afternoon spent with Araceli as their caretaker.

Inside the car, with Keenan still in tears and Brandon glaring defiantly out the window, Maureen launched into a familiar monologue of threats that revolved around the loss of “privileges.” “Boys!” she said by way of conclusion. “Sometimes I wish I could just leave you with your father and take Samantha and just go. Go someplace far away.” Then, turning to face the boys directly, she said, “I wish I could just leave you with your father!” It was an unforgivably mean thing to say and Maureen would regret it later, after she had driven off with Samantha and seen the defiant expression of proto-adolescent withdrawal on Brandon’s face, a narrowing of the eyes that suggested a future rebellion with sweaty and disheveled male textures. But in her frustration Maureen told herself she didn’t care, because there was only so much boy craziness a woman could put up with.

“Listen to Araceli,” Maureen told her sons after opening the door and lining them up on the sidewalk next to their housekeeper. “She’s in charge. And if I hear from her that you didn’t behave, you’re going to lose your Game Boy privileges for the rest of the summer.” Turning to Araceli, she announced, “I’ll be back about one.” Araceli was standing with her arms folded across her chest, dressed from head to toe in a pink
filipina,
looking back at her
jefa
with bemused irritation. Maureen thought briefly that perhaps this was not such a good idea, suddenly leaving her boys at a park with this ill-tempered Mexican woman of un-proven child-rearing skills. Araceli was allergic to her boys; she would just as well limit her contact with them to making their meals and picking
up their scattered toys, but in Araceli’s severe disposition there was an air of ample responsibility, the sense that she wouldn’t panic in an emergency. Maureen looked around the park and saw a pay phone: she gave her maid a handful of quarters. “You should really get a cell phone,” she said, provoking no response from Araceli. “I’ll be at home with Samantha. Call me if there’s a problem. I can be here in fifteen minutes.”

Araceli tugged at her uniform, wishing she’d had a chance to change. She had been plucked by Maureen from the laundry room as she folded a stack of
el señor
Scott’s boxer shorts and in the chaotic evacuation of the boys from the home she had carried that underwear into the dining room and left it on the table, and it annoyed her to think it would still be there when she got back.

When the car turned a corner and disappeared, the boys and Araceli shared a few moments of contemplative silence.
She’s really gone,
Brandon thought,
our mother left us here on the sidewalk.
Even though it had been announced with that angry speech, his mother’s absence felt stark and sudden, and for a moment he imagined that he had been dumped into the plot of a melodramatic novel, like the parentless hero of a multivolume series of books he recently finished reading, the adventures of an adolescent boy unwittingly thrust into an adult world of crime and magic. He was alone out here in public, without even Guadalupe to take care of him. Araceli did not yet register in Brandon’s mind as a protective force, and he quickly scanned the park like a young warrior about to enter a dark and threatening forest. He imagined a “strike force” suddenly descending on the park, a hooded army of armed underworld types, the machine-gun-toting villains in one of the books he was reading.

“Do you think the Russian mafia would ever come to Orange County?” he asked his brother.

“What?”

Keenan believed that his big brother read entirely too much and knew him to be an incessant confabulator, prone to confusing and scaring his younger brother with fantastic thoughts. At their very expensive private school, Brandon’s big imagination caused him to run afoul of the otherwise laid-back teachers there, primarily because he had freaked out many of the girls with new and ever more elaborate versions of the Bloody Mary myth, causing them to avoid the girls’ bathroom, with a handful of peeing-in-the-hallway incidents the result.

“You know,” Brandon insisted. “Like in
Artemis Fowl.”

“Nah,” Keenan said. “It’s too sunny here for the Russian mafia.”

Brandon was still only eleven years old, and the morbid and fantastic imagery from his middle-reader novels did not linger in his mind’s eye for long; in less than a minute he was running down the grass with his brother chasing after him, the reasons for their living room fight forgotten. Araceli followed them down the slope of the park toward the rubber play mat and swings and took a seat on a bench facing the ocean. Brandon watched her as she looked off in the distance at a lone surfer tossing himself into the waves, the charcoal skin of his wet suit swallowed up by water the color of the backwash in her mop bucket. Araceli was a major planet in Brandon’s universe, and he studied her often as she shuffled around the Paseo Linda Bonita house. Sometimes he wondered if she was angry at him, if he had done something to upset her, because why else would someone be so quiet in his presence for so long? But after careful consideration of his actions—he was, in his own estimation, despite a few flaws, a “good boy”—Brandon arrived at the conclusion that Araceli was just lonely. And when he thought about her loneliness, he concluded that she should read more, because anyone who read was never alone. In books there were limitless worlds, there was truth, sometimes brutal and ugly, and sometimes happy and soothing.

Brandon considered giving her the book he had managed to bring with him, but then he thought better of this, and instead left it on a bench and joined his little brother on the plastic body of the play structure and its short hanging bridge, and began to playact with battle sounds formed by trilling tongues and popping cheeks. Araceli listened to them and slunk down on the bench, looking up at the gray sky and wondering why it was that here along the beach the sun seemed to come out less during the summer than it did during any other season. The blankness of the sky reminded her, for some reason, of Scott’s underwear left on the table, and of other things left undone at the house up on the hill, where Maureen was probably just now arriving to the quiet of a house without boys. Araceli would give anything to be back in Mexico City on one of those summer days when balls of white drift across the blue canvas of the sky and you can follow them on their march across the valley of the city, and know that they will soon drop a cooling rain shower on your face. She wanted to feel something cold or warm, because
in this uniform, in the amphitheater of this park, she felt like a stiff pink box and not like a human being. Looking down at the beach, she saw the surfer climbing out of the water, a brown-haired teenager in a black wet suit, and in an instant she imagined he was Pepe the gardener, dripping water from his bare chest. She imagined herself sitting on the beach on a towel, Pepe walking toward her with beads of water clinging erotically to his pecs, climbing up the sand to reach her, leaning over her, dripping salt water over her dry and lonely skin.

T
en miles away from the Laguna Rancho Estates, on the third floor of an office building in a business park on a wide and sparsely traveled boulevard, in a corner of the city of Irvine, itself sparsely populated by various medium-sized corporations with generic and quickly forgettable names, Scott Torres toiled at work, sitting before a flat-panel computer screen displaying five different images of the perimeter fence at the Cincinnati/Northern Kentucky National Airport. He waited with a dulled sense of anticipation for the knee-high grass at the base of the fence to be whipped back and forth by a gust of wind or the back-draft of a passing airplane, a confirmation that the image was, in fact, “live.” Over the course of the morning, Scott had opened windows on his screen that revealed various locales in the United States, noting that it was raining at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota, and watching the long, Arctic-summer shadows stretch underneath the Alaska Pipeline. The pipeline to the Bering Sea was a favorite summer place to spend time at the Elysian Systems office because there was a chance you might see an elk or deer scurrying across the tundra. All day long the computers on the third floor of the Elysian corporate headquarters were open to windows showing lonely stretches of fencing that seemed static and frozen in time, like the peopleless backdrops to a deep and disturbing dream, with only the effects of the weather and the moving of the shadows to prove they were objects in a real, living world.

Scott and his programmers at Elysian Systems were drawn to the images for their clandestine, remote allure and for the rare pleasure of officially sanctioned voyeurism. They had been given access to this government system to develop software, a contract that happened to be the only source of positive cash flow in the Elysian Systems corporate spreadsheet. When Scott thought about his responsibility to enforce
this contract by telling his seven programmers never to discuss their project “with any individual outside our direct work group,” or when he was forced to ask them to sign numerous promises of confidentiality and loyalty to the United States of America, he could not help but feel silly, because such admonitions ran counter to the iconoclastic programming ethic of his youth, and even the essential élan of his initial foray into entrepreneurship. This was the central contradiction of Scott’s professional life, to be the enforcer and organizer of a project that did not fire his imagination, and to be the oddball in a moneymaking culture that as of yet generated little money. He was a relic, an aging survivor from that clan of “robust” programmers who came of age in the interregnum between the slide-rule epoch and the Ethernet era. There were moments during the workday when he felt this characterization growing among his underlings and Elysian’s executives; it was a fleeting sensation, a truth just beyond his grasp, like knowing the meaning of a word but not remembering the word itself, the syllables that described the idea unwilling to gather on your tongue.
No one here admires me, no one looks up to me,
Scott thought, except maybe Charlotte Harris-Hayasaki, a young and as yet unsuccessful game designer who was as misplaced at Elysian Systems as Scott was, and who often stole glances at him through the glass of his office.

The executives running Elysian Systems were serious, middle-aged, and worked on a separate floor, the fourth, as if to immunize themselves from the eccentricities of the programmers: the executives wore suits and ties, and decorated their walls with plaques earned during their days as mid-grade managers at detergent and soft-drink companies. They had charged this government contract to Scott, the “vice president of programming,” even though any first-year graduate student in computer science could have managed to write the essential code. The contract was for the “accountability software” of the “Citizen Anti-Terrorist Sentry System,” CATSS, by which the Department of Homeland Security, the Department of Defense, the Department of Energy, and other agencies farmed out guard duty at airports, nuclear power plants, and military bases to thousands of Americans sitting at home staring at their computer screens.

Scott’s programming mission was to find ways to make sure the “citizen sentries” were actually monitoring the 12,538 cameras in the system,
instead of using their computers to play solitaire or shop for shoes. His programs gave these people, like rats in a laboratory experiment, meaningless tasks to do while watching the camera images on their computers, then rated them on those tasks and produced a waterfall of statistics that was especially pleasing to Washington. Scott clicked through fence images from a half dozen more places, including a perimeter fence in a piñon forest in Los Alamos, New Mexico, then went back to the work he was supposed to be doing: analyzing his programmers’ progress on a project to design animated fake “intruders” who would “walk” and “dig” and perform other suspicious acts alongside the fences and gates, frightening the citizen sentries into pushing the
alert
! button on their computer screens and causing an Elysian Systems server to register another entry in the
vigilant
column. He tried out “turban man,” an image of a swarthy fellow with a towel wrapped around his head running and ducking: the actor was his lead programmer, Jeremy Zaragoza, and the clip had been filmed at a rented studio along with others of “binocular lady” and “shovel man,” all played by various programmers in this office. Scott made turban man run along various fences: the challenge was to create animations in correct proportions to the various barriers on the screen as they ran and shoveled alongside them, which was proving to be trickier than anyone had anticipated. After watching turban man pass improbably back and forth through the steel mesh fence at the San Onofre power plant, like some superhero possessed of special powers, Scott absentmindedly clicked open the latest numbers from NASDAQ, which had been especially bad all morning.