Whiskey Tango Foxtrot (35 page)

Louis was ashen and shaking on the drive back across town. Cola licked Leo wetly on the ear. Getting out of the little Mazda at his house, Leo said to Louis, “You forget about what I said, okay?”

“Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m going to do, Leo,” said Louis, looking out the windshield. Then turning to look at his friend, he said, “You can understand that, right, Leo? My girls.”

“Perfectly.”

After that, Leo was more careful. He acted exactly like a man who was
not
trying to get to the bottom of something. Walk. Breakfast. Meds. Meeting. Look for work. Clean too-big house. Walk. Dinner. Sleep.

The watchers seemed to be everywhere. Or were those just random men, thick-coated and alone, nearby? They could be dads on the way home from work, guys heading back from the gym, a legitimate telephone repairman in a cherry picker across the intersection from Leo’s house.

The man buying one loaf of bread and a quart of milk behind him in line at the New Seasons could have been just that. But why wasn’t he using the express lane in the busy store? Maybe because this checker was hot. So after she rang him up, Leo said loudly, “Damn. Forgot something. Be right back.” He left one heavy bag of purchased groceries at the end of the station to attest to his return. He grabbed the other bag and walked back into the store’s aisles. Then he ducked quickly through Bulk and into Produce. He slipped on a squished grape, lost his balance, and felt the twenty lemons in his bag rumble weightless and almost spill. He caught himself and ducked through a portal made of hanging plastic strips, into the store’s offstage. Busy employees took little notice of him. He found an exit by the loading dock.

If that bread-and-milk buyer had been following him, he wasn’t anymore, Leo was certain. So he went to his local library and found a public computer in a carrel at the back. He spent an hour online.

That night Leo squeezed twenty lemons and soaked sheets of raggy paper in their juice.

He’d tried this once, at Brand-New Day. Well, not this, exactly. He’d let the children paint with lemon juice on a big roll of white butcher paper; they’d used fat ink brushes. The lemon juice dried to nothing, and he rolled up the work again. Then he brought the paper outside and unrolled it in a bright sunny corner of the OPZ. In minutes, the sunlight exposed the lemon-juice figures on the long roll: hand turkeys and love hearts and dinosaurs in proud, confident strokes; misspelled names a foot tall. The children cheered wildly.

This was a more delicate operation. But after a few hours of experimenting with types of paper, length of soak, and drying time, Leo had produced the result he needed. Then he had to figure out how to increase the impression force on the little electric Smith Corona that he’d picked up at a yard sale. He found the knob that adjusted that. Then he slipped one of his lemon papers into the typewriter’s platen, sandwiched it between two plain white sheets, and wrote a letter to Lola Montes.

L
eila was driving downtown to have dinner with Roxana at her office. She was late, because the 405 was crawling. A huge white box van—
Stan’s Sewerscopes: We Look Down There
—had been behind her since at least Balboa. Was it the van that was making her nervous? Or was she nervous because she had decided to ask for Roxana’s help?

Roxana was still frosty about Leila’s unexplained delay in getting home. Big sisters like to be kept in the loop. Leila hadn’t wanted to get into the whole thing with Roxana, because where Dylan was skeptical, Roxana would be scathing. Plus, Leila hadn’t gotten her alone yet. Roxana lived in a spare and highly modified Echo Park bungalow. She mostly went between home and whatever office, driven by her mobility assistant and body man, a now-old Pole named Eddie who had been at her side for seventeen years.

Roxana was born a phocomelus. That is, she was born with phocomelia syndrome. That is, Roxana had no arms. Her first years, in Iran, she was a travesty. Take the arms off a baby and what’s left looks so much like a fish that Mariam’s friends started avoiding her—most were saddened and secretly disgusted by the daughter. The market is the grown woman’s school yard, and Mariam found herself alone buying dates, buying butter, sipping tea.

When the Majnouns escaped to America, it got better. There were programs for Roxana; there was help. Iranian refugees were cool for a while there, in academia. Cyrus earned a master’s degree in education, and the Majnouns met people eager to show support for the exiled family. Grants and loans paid for home modifications; other costs were defrayed or subsidized in kind, mysterious ways.

And when Roxana’s staggering linguistic and computational skills began to emerge, the people who had helped felt vindicated, and they helped more. The circle of benefactors grew. Now Roxana was a prodigy, not a travesty. There were all sorts of scholarships for an armless girl who at eleven had learned to speak fluent Ojibwa from a documentary on PBS. Magazines and TV news shows even called, and Mariam and Cyrus said,
Yes, of course, run a profile, but we’re sorry, no photos,
which made most of the magazines and all of the TV news shows go away.

Leila hadn’t even noticed her sister’s missing arms until around age seven. Then one day at the corner store, Roxana balanced on one leg like a shorebird and used her toes to count her change at the candy rack.
Gross,
Dad, look!
said a boy. And his dad yanked his hand, and in a flash Leila understood that Roxana’s armlessness was a
problem
. It was grotesque. Leila had four stuffed unicorns, but all her dolls had arms. Her sister was the
only one
. Leila glared daggers at the boy, then went home and cut the arms off her dolls.

Roxana did a steely job of ignoring the gapes and gasps, and she also ignored the limitations it was assumed she had. At eighteen, a junior at Cal, she announced that it was her intention to become a doctor. No one had the balls to say to her,
But you have no arms,
so she pursued that for a few years. As it turned out, Roxana’s lack of interpersonal skills posed more of a problem than her lack of arms. When an MD career was ruled out (“Well, you can’t really lay hands on people, now, can you?” said Dylan one Thanksgiving), Roxana moved to research genetics, and then to research oncology. In these labs and faculties, she was generally ten years younger than her closest-in-age colleague. From oncology, Roxana moved into some sort of mathematical-linguistic crossover research that Leila had never been able to grasp. The last time Leila had visited Roxana at work, she’d been at some laid-back cubicle-based research facility in Pasadena—Leila remembered a golden retriever wandering the halls and a lunch bag in the break-room fridge that said
I am Jim’s sandwich. If you are not Jim, don’t eat me.

Roxana had a new job now, and Leila assumed from the company’s name that it was in some kind of astronomy facility. As it turned out, though, it was in a huge, windowless building that Leila could see minutes before she found a way to reach it. It looked like it was
right there,
but then the exit to it was suddenly four lanes over, and you’d have to be a test pilot to cross them in time. Leila pulled all the way around in a tedious loop and made another pass, this time making the exit. The maneuver also allowed her to shake Stan’s Sewerscopes, which was a relief.

She parked beside a freeway pier, in the thick shadow of its rumbling deck, and spent ten minutes looking for a front door to the mammoth building. She walked by it twice before she noticed a small sign beside an otherwise unmarked door that read
LA County Large Array Facility Visitors Must Wear ID at All Times.

Leila waited at the front desk for Roxana to collect her. There was only one wooden bench in the lobby. Nothing else. Not a magazine or a potted palm or a wastebasket. Leila sat on the bench, the pleasing heft of a white deli bag on her lap: chicken salad sandwiches and pickles, Roxana’s favorite. It was quiet in the desolate lobby, so quiet that Leila could hear the small hydraulic hiss of the receptionist adjusting her desk chair.

Her sister arrived wearing what looked like a desk lamp with a huge whisk on the end of it, secured to her trunk with straps. It was one of the beta-version prosthetics she sometimes wore, test-driving them for a prosthetics-inventing friend. She did it as a favor: no robotic arm would ever give Roxana anything close to the grace and functionality she achieved with her dexterous legs and feet.

“These came for you, Dr. Majnoun,” said the receptionist, and she held up a worn manila interoffice envelope as well as a USPS Express envelope. She handed these to Roxana’s robotic-whisk-clamper thing without clumsiness or embarrassment.

“What’s with the no-signage and why’d they take my phone?” Leila asked Roxana as they walked to a bank of elevators.

“There’s a fifty-tesla magnet on the third floor of this building,” said Roxana. “For the Plasma Working Group. And I think they get a lot of Pentagon money, so the whole building has to be secured.”

“Wow, a fifty-tesla magnet, huh?” said Leila. She was imagining a gigantic horseshoe-shaped magnet in a vaulted laboratory, little lightning bolts zapping from its feet, attracting distant paper clips.

Leila hadn’t understood Roxana’s work in twenty years and knew only that Roxana now worked in a field called control and dynamical systems and that she’d spent the past five years “modeling language” and that two years ago she’d won a lucrative prize that nonscientists have never even heard of and that three Czech mathematicians in their sixties were totally supposed to win that year. Since then, Roxana had been operating in extremely-smart-people world, a world in which her severe physical handicap was no professional impediment. Her colleagues were in far-flung learning capitals, screens away, married to desks and number clusters like she was. Her job required neither arms nor tact.

And so the girl whom the neighbors told the parents to throw out when she was born now worked in the upper atmosphere of the world’s best research institutions.

They ate their sandwiches in Roxana’s little office, which was all screens and tablets and specialized furniture. Also a lot of cacti. No photographs. Roxana didn’t eat in front of anyone but her family and a few lifelong friends. Even the well-meaning and well-trained couldn’t help but stare, and once or twice people in restaurants had asked loudly to be sat well away from her.

But in fact Roxana was so graceful that Leila, in her sister’s presence, felt her own arms were excess appendages, that Roxana was a swan and she was a spider.

“I wanted to say thank you, Leila,” said Roxana a few bites into her sandwich.

What was this? Roxana didn’t exactly rain
thank-you
s. Leila couldn’t remember the last one.

“For what?”

“Dylan said you know the people who got us the proof that Dad’s computer had been tampered with. So thank you for that. If that’s why you were delayed coming home, I’m sorry I was a jerk about it.”

“That’s actually what I need to talk to you about. Not about your being a jerk. I’m used to that”—a smile, to show that this was just play—“but about the people who got us the proof. Rox, I need your help finding them again.”

“What do you mean?”

Leila’s plan was
not
to get into the politics with her sister. Politically, Roxana was well to the right of Leila. Always had been. When Leila, at ten, had sat behind a cardboard box soliciting donations for Save the Whales, Roxana had really grilled her:
Do you even know what they do with the money you send them?

So when Leila told Roxana the story, she told a truncated version. She told Roxana about Ned and Ding-Dong.com, how the owl icon had appeared on and vanished from her desktop. She said she’d been “diverted” to Dublin, and that she’d met some people there who had told her that they had proof that their dad was framed by a totally evil cabal. She said the Dublin people had asked her to meet with someone in Oregon to find something out for them, and that, in return, they would provide this proof that might clear her father.

Stumbling through it, Leila saw that she was leaving sizable gaps in the story, gaps that Roxana would probably want filled in before she’d help. Leila kept talking, hoping to race past the gaps. “So if there were, like, a hidden Internet—like, hidden inside the real one—would you know how it could be accessed? Or would you know someone who knows? Weren’t you doing that kind of work for a while, at PARC, that place in Pasadena? Because this woman in Dublin definitely said I could find her through the Dear Diary homepage.”

Roxana didn’t ask about how Leila had been diverted, and she didn’t ask about the people in Dublin, and she didn’t ask about what they wanted Leila to ask the guy in Portland about. Roxana asked only one question.

“So this is your fault?”

Leila sat there, stomach-punched.

“Isn’t that what you said Ned said? That the evil cabal people did this to Dad because
you
went snooping around where you didn’t have any business being, like you do?”

“Like I
do?
What the fuck, Roxana? Do not choose right now to pick me apart. Why would you do that?”

Leila had wanted to slug her sister one thousand times in her life. She had succumbed only once, at her own eleventh birthday party, when Roxana had stolen the love and pity and admiration of the room yet again, and on purpose. She’d learned then that slugging the armless is considered very poor form.

“If Dad gets hurt by this—” Leila said, after catching her breath.

“
If?”

“—if Dad gets
more
hurt by this, I will never forgive myself, okay? I will hate myself, actually. Every day. I promise. Please, Rox. Right now, just help me find these people.”

Roxana’s face was set hard, but something gave in her eyes, and she spun in her netted chair. There was a mouse and a joystick below her desk; she worked them swiftly with her toes.

“You said ‘Dear Diary’?” she asked.

Leila nodded confirmation.

Roxana entered the words in a search field, using an eye-line entry device, flitting her gaze over a keyboard on a screen.

“I already put the name into all the search engines,” said Leila.

“Yeah. These aren’t really search engines,” said Roxana snootily.

As Roxana searched she asked Leila more about Dear Diary. Leila tried not to sound like a jabbering nutjob when describing it. But Roxana used a stay-silent trick that made Leila blab to fill the void, until Roxana said, “Leila. This totally evil cabal thing—you sure that’s not just…is it possible that you, you know, went native a bit when you were in Burma?”

Roxana, with her pretending not to know that the neocolonialist language bugged the shit out of Leila.

“Went native?” said Leila, ticking her head to the side.

“Just be sure these people aren’t playing you. Sometimes you want to do good so bad that you forget to be careful.”

Ah, the Roxanian condescension. The big sister’s knowing know-it-all-ness. “Well, they obviously didn’t play me, Roxana, because I didn’t get them what they wanted and they still helped us out.”

“Yeah. Dylan told me what their ‘help’ amounts to. Dad pleads to some dinky shit, and everyone still thinks he’s a pedophile. You said they use fifteen-digit identifiers?”

Leila nodded. She had decided to go with
they,
not
we
;
she had omitted mention of the eye test, just as she had with Dylan.

“Okay, did she say
the
Dear Diary homepage or
a
Dear Diary homepage?” asked Roxana.

“‘The.’”

“I just don’t want you mixing with the wrong side,” said Roxana. She was really pressing her advantage here, the fact that Leila had asked for her help and had to just sit there and take this.

“The wrong side?” said Leila. “You serious? You looked outside of your bubble recently? Shit is going down out there.”

“Look, Leila,” said Roxana, “did a squeegee man give you a particularly pathetic look today? I know you’re always out there swinging for the dispossessed, but remember that it’s only because we got here that you can swing for anyone. Only because they let us in.” This was the line she was always returning to. “You think I would have done okay under Ahmadinejad?”

“Once he realized you could calculate rocket trajectories, I bet you would’ve done fine.”

“I would have been dead or behind some dumb wall before that. You know it.”

Leila rolled her eyes. She wanted to stamp her feet. “Look. Yes. You’re right. I do not think you—or any of us, actually—would have done okay under Ahmadinejad.” Roxana didn’t look appeased. “Rox. I’m proud to be an American. Okay?”

“Are you really, though? Aren’t you one of those apologetic Americans? That’s kind of what you do professionally, isn’t it?”

“Screw you, Roxana. I’m not out there apologizing for the Bill of Rights. And just so you know? Every year, wealth and power are becoming more concentrated in a smaller mafia. Five hundred men, fifty multinationals. The way to get really rich is still—
still,
Rox, and we’re well into the new millennium—to take advantage of all the poor schmucks beneath you. The way we have it set up now, there have to be thousands of poor people to offset each rich person. You think I apologize too much? Maybe you should be apologizing to some girl who has to shit in a canal while you have people building you prosthetics.”