Now and Again

10.0 VISIONS AND GOALS

10.1 Le Roy Jones

Le 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.

10.2 Penn Sinclair

After 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.

When the slower of the two men tripped, Penn made the decision to keep after the faster one, sensing weakness there too, and panic. With panic, he knew from experience, came mistakes. The man took to the street where the running was easier, which gave Penn a further advantage because the path was predictable and because he could save a few feet on the curve. When his quarry ducked left, headed across a parking lot and toward a forested hillside that dropped toward the river, Penn knew he had won — because of a chain-link fence that was hidden in the tangle, which meant the man would have to retrace his steps back up between the parked cars to the road, and because he was faltering while Penn stayed strong. Penn hung back. It was better to tackle a spent man than one with some kick left in him. As predicted, the man cut up the embankment toward the highway. Penn turned on one last burst of speed, and in another minute he had the target on the ground.

“Okay, mister, okay.”

When he saw it was only a teenaged kid, the anger drained out of him and he said with more violence in his voice than he felt, “This is my neighborhood. You mess with it, you mess with me.”

“Okay,” the kid said again.

His hat had fallen off. Penn picked it up and held it out in a gesture of conciliation. “Where do you live?” he asked.

The boy waved vaguely at the surrounding streets of ramshackle houses.

“Give me the exact address,” said Penn.

The boy gave it to him.

“I’ll tell you what. You bring your friend here tomorrow night at eleven and I won’t tell the police about you. I need recruits for my patrol.”

“What patrol?” asked the kid.

“You’ll find out tomorrow. You’ll start off as grunts, but you can work your way up.”

In February, Colonel Falwell contacted Penn to say he was using his time stateside to check on his wounded troops. “The families said some of them are with you.”

“Yes sir,” said Penn. “Some of them are.”

“I’d like to touch base with them. Do they want to come down here to Washington?”

“We were there in the fall,” said Penn. “It didn’t go so well, but I’ll ask them.”

“And if that’s not possible, you might make the trip yourself. You live in Connecticut if I remember correctly.”

Instinct told Penn to let the misinformation stand, so he said, “Yes sir, I do.”

On the day of the meeting, Penn set off when it was still dark. It was peaceful in the car. He hadn’t been alone for weeks, and he liked listening to the whoosh of tires on the damp road and watching the light come up and the scenery change. He liked seeing the small businesses pop up as he approached a town and the neat suburban lawns unspool into farmland as he left it. He liked pulling into a service station and smelling the mix of gasoline and coffee and saying, “Morning” to the station attendants in their neat gray uniforms with their first names stitched in red script on white canvas patches and knowing just that about them, nothing else. He wondered what Falwell would say to him, if he knew about the protest or the website. But something about the closed capsule of the car protected him from the birds of worry, so he fiddled with the radio as he drove and mostly he thought of nothing, just let impressions flow over him: a hill with fruit trees, an abandoned baseball field, a middle-aged woman on a bicycle, a man in a cap and faded jeans who had been pulled over by the police.

But now and then one of the worries would peck through and he would think about Louise and all of the people he had let down and about how, if things kept going the way they had been, they were likely to cover their expenses with donations alone, without tapping into any more of the seed money from Penn’s trust fund. And just that week, Kelly had said he had thought of a way for the site to turn a profit.

“I’ve applied for nonprofit status,” Penn had told him.

“Yeah, sure,” said Kelly. “But what if I could find some advertisers in addition to the donors?”

Penn had been noncommittal, but now the word “profit” rattled around in his head like unexploded rounds. He should be happy the men were pulling in different directions because that meant he had accomplished what he had set out to do, so why was he so bothered by it? He supposed that alongside his desire to help them was an equally strong desire to prove himself as a leader, and what kind of a leader was he if his men weren’t following enthusiastically along behind?

Just after the turnoff to Annapolis and Fort Meade, the highway cut through a thick stand of trees. He tried to imagine that he was lost in a primeval forest, that all anybody needed to live was a simple cabin with a rough pine floor and a plot of land with a river running through it and a few tools and some farm animals and of course a rugged inner core, but with cars and semis whizzing by, it was hard to hold on to the vision.

Anyway, he thought as he pulled off at a rest stop for another cup of coffee and a piss, there was no denying the fact that Kelly was developing a knack for business and that Le Roy was a whiz with computers and that Danny could go for an entire day without hitting the deck when the train went through. In that regard, the website was a complete success. It was Penn himself who lacked a real direction, and in the back of his mind he was hoping his meeting with Falwell would help him with that.

10.3 Gordon Falwell

Falwell shuffled through the stack of reports on his desk — the one that said ten of eighteen benchmarks had been met in Iraq and the one that said eleven of the benchmarks hadn’t been met and that only three had been completed. He found the report he was working on, and then he picked up a pen and changed “modest” to “significant.” He changed “trained” to “empowered,” and in front of “leadership” he wrote “committed and determined.” Fuck the benchmarks. Was there a benchmark for understanding the enemy? Was there one for unit readiness and self-sacrifice and morale? Was there one for showing that Americans wouldn’t put up with crazy fucking shit? “Unmistakable signs of progress,” he wrote. “High levels of local cooperation and trust.” The counterinsurgency was working. They were definitely winning hearts and minds.

Falwell was in Washington to provide input for an operational assessment and, if all went well, to be recommended for a promotion and to see someone about a persistent pain in his gut and a worrisome rattling in his chest. To top it off, now one of his after action reports was being called into question on the Internet. Miller, his old NCO, had brought it to his attention, and if certain other people saw it, it could torpedo his career. He could only surmise he had Captain Sinclair to thank for drawing attention to the inconsistencies. Sinclair was the one who had first written up the IED incident, and he was the one with the guilty conscience. Any report depended on the person writing it, as well as on the freshness of the memories and on biases and agendas the writer might not even know he held. A reasonable man could argue that Sinclair’s version of events was less accurate than the more measured official version, but the colonel didn’t want to have to make that case. Things were muddied enough without going down some he-said-she-said rabbit hole. Falwell wasn’t angry so much as irritated. Mightily irritated. And, to be honest, his feelings were a little hurt. When he’d altered the report, he’d been looking out for Sinclair’s interests as much as for his own.

Once, back when he himself had been a captain, he’d led a tank company in the wrong direction. Visibility had been next to impossible due to hundreds of burning oil fields. He’d had to make a split-second decision, and he had called it wrong. The lessons learned were many: to listen to his subordinates, to take a moment even when all hell was breaking loose, to realize that mistakes came with the territory in any pressured situation. Most important of all, he had learned that the reaction of a superior could foster learning and renew confidence, which is exactly what his commanding officer had done when he had called Falwell into his office and said, “You’ll get ’em next time.” That was what had been done for him and what he had tried to do in saving Sinclair from the consequences of his overly emotional report.

The very next day, Falwell’s tank company had led the charge into occupied territory, and he had earned a Bronze Star for decisive leadership and superlative courage in the face of enemy fire. “Superlative” was a good word, one he liked to use whenever he could.

10.4 Penn Sinclair

What the fuck? asked the expression on Falwell’s face when he opened the door of his Arlington hotel room. Falwell was up for full-bird colonel, and he was quick to make sure Penn knew it. “What the fuck?” he asked when the formalities were over and they were sitting down.

“I’m sorry, sir, but I’m not sure what you mean,” said Penn, who had decided to listen and say as little as possible until he found out why he was there.

“You told me you deleted your statement.”

“What statement?”

“Now someone has posted it on a website right next to my official AAR, and I’m guessing it was you.”

“What if it was?” asked Penn, worried that the colonel knew more about the website than he was letting on.

“What the fuck for?”

“I’m just telling the truth,” said Penn, grateful now for the fist that gripped his insides because it kept him from letting his guard down. And grateful for the guilt that was his constant companion because it kept him from backing off his commitment to his men. “I’m hoping it will even save some lives.”

“Truth,” said the colonel. “How exactly will your version of the truth save lives?”

“Only by acknowledging a mistake can we learn from it,” said Penn.

“Who said that?” asked Falwell.

“You did, sir. You said I could quote you.”

Falwell picked up a sheaf of papers and put them down again. “Do you see this report?” he asked. “Sectarian violence is down; local law enforcement is up; a constitutional review committee has been formed. Ten of eighteen benchmarks met or exceeded.”

Penn looked out the window to where a glossy bird sat on a railing and pecked at the glass.

“Damn bird is trying to get in,” said the colonel.

“Why in God’s name would it want to get in?” asked Penn. “We can’t even understand ourselves, so how can we expect to understand birds?”

“I think we can understand birds,” said Falwell. “At least a little bit. Otherwise why would we care about them? Why would we create bird sanctuaries and set out birdseed in the winter? Why would we give a crap about the spotted owl?”

“We’re so good at understanding that we barge right on in without realizing that we don’t have a clue what we’re hoping to accomplish. Nobody had a handle on the big picture, but they were too stubborn to admit it.”

“But that’s changing. That’s what the surge was all about.”

“Oh, now we understand. We didn’t then, but now we do. There’s nothing different about this time. That’s the real lesson learned.”

“Who really knows anything?” asked the colonel. “You do your best with what you have.”

“And our best wasn’t anywhere near good enough. The war has harmed countless soldiers and families, and it’s made the world more dangerous.”

“The world has always been dangerous,” said the colonel. “We in America have an illusion of safety, but it’s only an illusion. The war might have opened a few eyes — it might have opened your eyes — but it didn’t change anything fundamental about the world. You want to see a dangerous world, just dismantle the American army and bring all of our soldiers home.”

Penn remembered what he had learned from the man in the library, and he couldn’t disagree. “Man is warlike,” he said, but the heat had gone out of his anger. All he felt now was tired.

“What would our place in a peaceful world be, Sinclair? Do you think a peaceful world would be one where everyone agreed and justice magically prevailed? No, it would just be one where people didn’t give a shit. No one standing up for anything. Everybody neutered and complacent.” He laughed without smiling. “In a peaceful world, my daughters would be in charge of things, and much as I love my daughters, that isn’t something I’d like to see.”

Penn thought about what the world would be like if Louise and her friends were calling the shots. Everything would be attractive and well planned, with peonies and parsley garnishes and sparkling beverages served in champagne flutes.

“Everything becalmed and stagnant — is that the kind of world you want?”

“No sir.”

“If there’s nothing worth fighting for, there’s nothing worth living for either.”

“Yes sir,” said Penn.

“Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs, even though checkered by failure than to rank with those poor spirits who neither enjoy much nor suffer much, because they live in the gray twilight that knows not victory nor defeat.”

“Theodore Roosevelt,” said Penn.

“My point is that you take your best shot. That’s all any person can do.”

It was something Penn had said himself, most recently to Danny. He had not only said it, he had believed it. Now a tiny particle of hope started expanding in his breast. Maybe people could know, or if they couldn’t, maybe partial knowledge was good enough.

“What do you want to do with your life, Sinclair? What are your plans?”

It was the question Penn had been asking himself. “I want to see my men back on their feet. I think that’s happening — at least I’m hopeful. And after that, I haven’t decided.”

“I called you down here for two reasons,” said Falwell.

“Sir?” The bird was back. Penn wondered if it had choices or only instinct and if he was more, or less, like the bird.

“One was to ask you if you are the one who posted the two versions of the IED incident on the Internet. And if you did, to ask you to take them down.” Falwell drummed his fingers on a pile of papers, and when Penn didn’t reply, he said, “And the other is to ask if you are interested in this.” He took a sheaf of papers from the pile and passed it to Penn. The top page showed a group of soldiers standing at a safe distance while a robot dismantled an IED. “When I saw it, I thought of you.”

Penn had wondered if the colonel knew who was behind the website, but as he paged through the document, he concluded he didn’t. The knot in his chest dissolved as he listened to a rambling story about burning oil fields and a botched tank attack, where the moral seemed to be about second chances and where the punch line seemed to be “the smog of war.”

“I see something in you,” said the colonel. “And what I see is me.”

“Yes sir,” said Penn.

The bird was back, fooled by the expanse of glass and probably by the reflections in it of the view from the hotel window: the blue sky and the puffy clouds and a chevron of geese silhouetted against a disc-like sun. Penn decided it wanted in after all, but only because it thought that in was out.

“That was a defining moment for me,” said the colonel. “Things could have gone one way and they could have gone another. The thing is, my commanding officer had my back. The thing is, I learned from my mistakes.”

“But what if the war itself was the mistake?” asked Penn. “That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

“I have to admit I think about that too, but the bottom line is, deciding that is not our job. Our job is to get the supplies from point A to point B. Our job is to find and defuse the IEDs.” He reached out to tap the papers Penn was holding. “Our job is to run patrols and build infrastructure like water treatment plants and even schools. I’m here for another couple of months, but then I’m headed back. I can take you with me if you want.”

“Let me think about it, sir,” said Penn.

“It’s another chance,” said the colonel. “It’s another chance to get it right.”

10.5 Joe Kelly

Meaning had always eluded Kelly until he started fighting for his country, and then it suddenly seemed embedded in the smallest of events. He would be eating breakfast or loading a truck or cleaning his weapon or buckling into his body armor when a blast of meaning would nearly knock him over: One for all and all for one! You’re with us or you’re with the terrorists! Live free or die! Now he thought, People have a right to know. It felt good to see the big picture. It was gratifying to know the big picture had a place in it for him. Maybe he was a businessman after all. Maybe he’d buy himself a suit. Ha! Every now and then he got up to stretch and tried to see what Danny was doing because when Danny went down the rabbit hole with his epic poem, it was hard to get him out. But it seemed like that morning everyone was busy with work-related tasks. Everyone except the captain, who had driven down to DC to visit with the colonel.

Kelly worked through the emails, feeling a zap of pleasure whenever he handled one particularly efficiently. If he came upon something unusual, he would say, “Hey, Le Roy, I need your wizard skills,” and now and then Le Roy would lean over Kelly’s screen and say, “Ya got anything new for me to post?”

Kelly almost always did. In the past two weeks alone he had gotten photographs of flag-draped coffins and a story about how pre-election fear-mongering had incited someone in Ohio to spray a chemical irritant into a room full of Muslim children and statistics showing that one third of female troops would be raped by fellow service members and that some of the victims would subsequently die under suspicious circumstances of non-combat-related injuries. He’d gotten reports that post-9/11 security measures had led to spying on American citizens and that a facility was being built in the Utah desert large enough to store data at the rate of an entire Library of Congress every minute and that twelve billion dollars in shrink-wrapped hundred-dollar bills had been sent to Iraq only to — go figure — be squandered or lost. And just that morning he’d received a story about a unit that was ordered to kill all military-age Iraqi males, after which four low-ranking soldiers were arrested and caged for twenty-three hours a day in seven-by-seven cells while sworn testimony was shredded to ensure they took the fall for their commanding officers.

At first, they were stories and reports sent to him by soldiers, but then it wasn’t just soldiers posting on the site. There was Mark O’Hara of Tampa, whose war involved being sentenced to twenty-five years in prison for possessing a bottle of Vicodin for which he had a valid prescription, but because the prosecutor charged him with trafficking rather than possession, no prescription defense was allowed. And there was Genarlow Wilson, who was seventeen when he had consensual oral sex with his fifteen-year-old girlfriend, an act that earned him ten years in prison. Vaginal penetration would have been okay. Girls who were arrested for dropping chewing gum on the sidewalk — black girls, that is. The white girls could put their gum anywhere they wanted, but they couldn’t jaywalk near the University of Texas without carrying an ID card. Then they risked being slapped in handcuffs and hauled off to jail.

There were Jennifer Boatright and Ron Henderson, who, under civil property forfeiture laws, were stripped of the cash with which they had planned to buy a used car when a police officer pulled them over, found the money, and threatened charges of child endangerment and money laundering if they tried to get it back. The usual constitutional protections didn’t apply because it wasn’t Boatright and Henderson who were the named defendants in the case, it was the $6,037, which went straight into the coffers of the police department that had seized it, where it joined the money that was supposed to pay for James Morrow’s dental work.

There was Irma Alred, who got thirty years, and Theresa Brown, who got life, both for drug charges where no drugs had been found and the only evidence was the word of people who were given immunity in return for their testimony. There were the seventeen Uighurs who escaped Chinese persecution only to wind up in Guantanamo Bay and remain there because no nation wanted to upset the Chinese government by granting them asylum. There was Otto Zehm, developmentally disabled and wrongly suspected of robbing an ATM, who was batoned seven times from behind, Tasered, hog-tied, and fitted with a non-rebreather mask that was not attached to an oxygen tank. There was twelve-year-old DeAunta Farrow, who was playing with a toy gun when he died.

“I thought we weren’t going to post that stuff,” said the captain when he came back from DC. “I thought we were going to focus on information pertaining to the war.”

“There’s more than one war going on,” said Kelly.

“But they’re not our war,” said the captain.

“That’s ’cuz you’re rich and white,” said Kelly.

“Well, we can’t post everything we get. That stuff just takes away from our mission. Tell Le Roy to take it down.”

Ever since the Times article, the captain had been going on about tough choices, but it seemed to Kelly that “choice” was the captain’s way of saying, This is how it’s gonna be.

“And what’s our mission?” asked Kelly. And then he said, “Captain, sir.”

“Helping other soldiers, you know that.”

“What if there’s other people I want to help? People who didn’t get to choose the war they’re fighting. Believe it or not, I even want to help myself.” Kelly was eager to explore the site’s commercial potential, but he had been waiting for the right time to press the issue. “I’m thinking the human-interest stories might attract advertising, so if we concentrate on those…”

“Commercial potential is something I think about too,” said the captain. “The practical answer is that it’s pretty darn hard to make money on news. And the philosophical one is that I don’t think we should be making money on the war.”

“So everyone can make money on the war but us?” asked Kelly.

It was cold in the warehouse. Danny talked about installing storm windows, but they were expensive, so Kelly had been sitting with a blanket around his shoulders. Now he took it off and paced to the refrigerator, but it was empty. “Shee-it. We couldn’t afford new windows, and now we can’t afford beer?”

“The thing about making money off the war is, then there’s no incentive for peace,” said the captain.

“Is it wrong for farmers to make money off of hungry people or doctors off of sick people?” asked Kelly. “Or should everybody just focus on selling people shit they don’t need?”

“Martin agrees with me that the documents are the important thing,” replied the captain.

“Martin isn’t my boss, and neither, frankly, are you.”

Martin was working on a new series of articles, which would be published in the Guardian, and would only communicate with them via secure back channels or on the burner phones he sent them. “That’s where our focus should be,” said Penn. “The documents are the thing people can’t get anywhere else.”

Instead of arguing further, Kelly went on a beer run, and an hour later Danny said he wouldn’t mind a little food. “Burgers or pizza?” he asked.

“I’d go for some Chinese food,” said Kelly. He didn’t really care what they ate, but there was a pretty girl at the Chinese restaurant, and if they wanted Chinese, he’d go for it himself so he could see her shock of black hair bob around her ears as she shook her wok back and forth and dipped rice out of a big metal vat.

The beer worked on all of them differently. Danny would get hungry, Le Roy would get even quieter than usual and eventually fall asleep, and the captain would start dwelling on everything he was doing or had ever done wrong. Kelly thought he was immune to beer. He wished he had some of those pills Harraday used to give him. If he had those pills, he’d go back and get to know the Chinese girl better. He’d like to see the shock of hair without the pointed cap the owner of the restaurant made her wear. It had been a long time since he’d really had some fun, but then he realized he was having fun now. Mostly he was having fun, even if it was of a tamer variety than he was used to.

10.6 Joe Kelly

Kelly was thinking about the Chinese girl, who had turned out to be engaged, when he opened an email that had no subject line and no signature, just a compressed file containing a clip of videotape and a message that said, “I want to make sure I have the right recipient. Tell me what this means to you, and if I’m satisfied with your answer, I’ll send you the rest.”

The video clip showed Kelly and Pig Eye up on the Toyota. It showed them raising their fists in the air. It showed Pig Eye stepping up on the truck and standing beside and slightly behind Kelly. “Stand right up next to me, motherfucker!” Kelly hissed at the screen, but even though he watched the video several times, Pig Eye never did.

Kelly played the clip a total of five times before it vanished. “Hey, Le Roy,” he called out. “Is it possible for emails to self-destruct?”

“Yeah, man. I think I heard of that,” replied Le Roy.

But what did the video mean to him, and what was he supposed to say to the person who had sent it?

He could answer with his name and rank, but the sender hadn’t given a name, which made Kelly apprehensive about giving his. He finally wrote, “I’m the guy with his fist in the air. Who the fuck are you?” As an afterthought, he asked the date of the event. He figured that was something only someone who had been there would know.

The next bit of film didn’t come until almost a week later. Although Kelly had been expecting it, he jumped in his chair when he saw it in his in-box. The new clip was date- and time-stamped. It showed a television crew milling around while a convoy was preparing for departure. Thirty seconds into the tape, Colonel Falwell drove by and waved. Someone called out from off screen, “Colonel, is it true that Al Anbar Province is lost?”

The colonel gestured for the driver to stop the vehicle. “The situation there is certainly deteriorating,” he said. “But lost? Not by a long shot.”

“Should we go there then, or accompany this unit to Tikrit?”

“That unit isn’t going to Tikrit,” said Falwell. “But keep that to yourselves for now. They’ll get the news soon enough. Now I’ve got a chopper to catch.”

This clip didn’t self-destruct, and Kelly watched it again and again, letting his head of steam build until he couldn’t contain it any longer. When the captain came back with Subway sandwiches for everybody, he called out, “Hey, Captain! Get a load of this!” The captain didn’t immediately answer him, so Kelly walked around the table and grabbed him by the collar of his jacket and hauled him over to his computer terminal and pushed him down into his chair.

“Did you know?” he shouted. “Did you know that we were never going north, that we weren’t waiting for orders, that even the film crew knew the supplies were going west — that everybody knew it except for you?”

“I knew it was a possibility,” said Penn. “Falwell told me I should sit tight until I heard from him. The new orders finally came through about three hours after you left that morning.”

Kelly played the tape for the captain, and then he played it again, and again after that.

“Who sent it?” asked the captain.

“The television crew, obviously.”

“Why is it obvious? Did they say so?”

“Because they were a film crew. Because it’s a piece of fucking film. They must have seen our website. They must have seen your email exposing the cover-up of the IED incident and noticed that the dates didn’t match up, and now I’m seeing that the colonel knew the supplies weren’t going north before he even left for HQ.”

“He didn’t tell me,” said Penn. “He acknowledges that right in the film. Maybe he wanted to be absolutely sure first. Hell, that wouldn’t be the first time he held information until he couldn’t hold it any longer — like the way he sat on the stop-loss orders.”

Then Kelly told Penn about the vanishing email that showed him up on the Toyota with Pig Eye.

“The film crew didn’t send it,” said the captain. “Think about it. The first clip showing you and Pig Eye was the teaser. That was just to get your attention. The second clip was what whoever sent it really wanted you to see. But it wasn’t sent for the website. It won’t mean anything to anybody but us — who else is going to spend the time to work out where the convoy was going and when the orders changed and who knew about it and exactly when they knew it? And why would the film crew send you something that can only have one effect?”

“What effect is that?”

“Exactly the effect it’s having. It’s causing us to turn against each other. What if it was Falwell who sent it? What if it was from someone who wants this site to disappear? Whoever it is sent it to sow the seeds of discord. If they know you, they know exactly what buttons to push — hell, it was right there on the first film clip they sent you. You don’t need to be a genius to figure out it’s pretty easy to tick you off. Did you ever think of that?”

Kelly hadn’t thought of it, and he didn’t want to think of it now.

“Or maybe it came from someone who is trying to find out who we are, which you very obligingly told them.”

Kelly wanted to let the steam rise up in him. He wanted to take something gigantic and make it broken and small. But then he found himself remembering how Pig Eye had stepped up onto the hood of the truck beside and a little behind him and how he had liked it that way. If Pig Eye had stood right next to him, he would have stepped forward a little, just enough to preserve the front-and-center position he had thought of as his due.

“If the supply convoy was going west, what about the road-clearing crews?” asked Danny. “Were those moved, and if so, when?”

“I was curious about that too,” said Penn.

It was Kelly who said what they all were thinking: “That would have made the northern route even more dangerous than usual. It would have raised our chances of being hit.”

10.7 Penn Sinclair

Penn was at his desk, but his mind was elsewhere. Falwell hadn’t changed the date on the AAR just to give Penn a second chance. He was covering up his own mistake too. He hadn’t passed on critical information, information that would have caused Penn to make a different call about the convoy and the school. But whenever he started to get angry at Falwell, he remembered that Falwell had told him to hold the convoy, and the bottom line was, he hadn’t.

When the phone rang, he rushed to answer it, hoping, suddenly, it was Louise. He hadn’t talked to her in weeks, but now he realized he was missing something and maybe it was her. Halfway to the phone, he stopped. Why would Louise be calling him out of the blue? It was his responsibility to call her first, and he would. He’d call her that evening, after she got home from work. Meanwhile, what if it was Falwell on the phone? Let Kelly answer it. Ever since the meeting in DC, Falwell had been silent, and even though no news was better than bad news, something told Penn the silence wasn’t entirely good. Almost two months had passed since then — more than enough time for Falwell to have investigated the website and discovered Penn’s involvement in it. More than enough time for him or one of his subordinates to come up with a plan for shutting the website down. Miller, thought Penn. I’ll bet Miller’s the one who sent the tape.

“Danny,” called Kelly, rapping on the windowpane. “Dolly’s on the phone.”

A late-season storm had blown in overnight, and they had awoken to find the ground covered with snow. “What happened to spring?” Danny had asked before going with his notebook to sit on the stoop with his head resting on his hands and his elbows on his knees and tiny flakes turning his hair white. He’d been sitting in the snow working on what he was now calling his rap epic, but he was no longer there. An hour earlier he had stuck his head in through the door to ask, “Anyone have a synonym for ‘help’? I have ‘help’ in there now, but it’s missing the connotations I want. I want it to say ‘solidify the position of.’ I want it to hint at ‘aggrandize’ and ‘enrich.’ I want there to be an undercurrent of corruption, where one person helps another only because he thinks it’s going to pay off for him personally. I want the emphasis to be on the subject, not the object of the verb. Altruism laced with greed — that’s what I want. Nothing to do with helplessness. Maybe there isn’t a word for it after all. Or maybe there is, but it’s in a language I don’t speak.”

“Where’s Danny?” Kelly asked, and then he told Dolly that Danny would have to call her back.

The snow was coming harder now, slanting down and swirling where the wind eddied around the building. Penn and Kelly put on parkas and gloves and headed out the door, one going left and the other right, their movements perfectly in sync as they canvassed the neighborhood, up one street and down the next, meeting in front of the railroad crossing and then continuing together past the squat building where the single mother lived with her three kids before turning back across the tracks, which is when Penn noticed footsteps going toward Bridge Street and the river. The footsteps were just faint impressions, mostly filled with new snow, as if a ghost had passed through, only touching down lightly now and then.

“Over there,” Penn said. Kelly followed Penn’s gaze to where the prints left the road and plunged down the steep embankment to the railroad bed. The two men started down after them, stumbling at first and then getting their footing and doing what they had been taught to do — no words necessary, only gestures and bodies and eyes. Penn’s adrenaline was pumping now. Inside the parka, his core was heating up. And then they were at the trestle bridge and the river, with the straight shot of the tracks over the gray-black water and, on the other side, Pennsylvania. He caught Kelly’s eye. Cross?

Kelly nodded: cross. He held up his watch for Penn to see. It was ten minutes after the hour. “When does the train come through?” he asked.

Penn shrugged. He didn’t know the schedule. Danny was the only one who paid attention to that.

Kelly nodded again, and they started across, sprinting now, legs working in a steady rhythm, eyes sharp and wide-angled, ears straining and sifting through the muffled sounds and slotting them into categories: interesting but irrelevant, pay closer attention, ignore. Penn paused to take in the ribbon of black water, made gray by the cross-hatching of snow, but Kelly didn’t break his stride. And then they were on the other side, with better options for avoiding a train should one come through.

“Hey, Captain,” said Kelly, motioning to the disturbed snow of an equipment yard where a row of open sheds housed lumber and lengths of PVC pipe and sheets of corrugated roofing. “He could be in there.”

Penn nodded and circled left while Kelly circled right, each man ducking into the first shed he came to before shaking his head and moving down the row, sliding in and out with his back to the wall and now and then checking the other man’s position and scanning left and right, alert not only for signs of Danny, but also for signs of anyone else who might be hiding there with less-than-benign intent. Their paths met at the far end of the yard, and they circled back toward the tracks, this time drifting silently between the buildings, quick and catlike in the snow. But Danny wasn’t there.

The tracks curved behind the last of the commercial buildings before one set veered west toward the rail yards and one cut south along the river. Kelly pointed to some footprints going south. Above them, the clouds were low and shredded. On one side of the spur, a marsh. On the other, the steely expanse of the river, with the far bank only a faint pencil sketch of rocks and trees against the snow. They found Danny sitting on an embankment one hundred yards farther down the tracks, his eyes closed and his hands folded on his lap.

“Hey, man, what’re you doing?” asked Kelly.

“Come on,” said Penn. “You’re coming back with us.”

It took a long time for the words to sink in and for Danny to nod in their direction. But then Danny heaved himself upright and stood tall and straight, hands extended as if he were welcoming them to his white and blanketed kingdom.

“Dolly called,” said Kelly. “She wants you to call her back.”

Now it was the three of them moving abreast — Penn on the right and Kelly on the left, with Danny between them, eyes sharp, ready to dive onto the snowy verge if and when a train came, half-jogging so as to limit their exposure on the tracks.

“When does the next train come through?” asked Kelly as they passed the place where the spur joined the main line.

“East or westbound?” asked Danny.

“Either one will kill us.”

“Two or three minutes,” said Danny, “but the snow will make it late if it hasn’t been canceled.”

They walked a little farther in silence. Then Penn said, “We’ll wait for it here. We can cross the bridge once it passes.”

Danny stopped and turned, and the men on either side of him stopped and turned too. They stood side by side but not quite touching and waited, gazing out over the frozen river as if they were protecting it, listening to the silence and blinking their eyes against the snow, which was coming at them horizontally now, propelled by a stiff wind shooting off the water. They sensed it before they saw the light, a humming vibration that felt and sounded like a giant was running his violin bow across the tracks, with the faintest of bass notes resonating up from the earth’s core. Then a bright smudge in the surrounding whiteness, a whitish-yellow halo, small and indistinct, but steadily growing in size. Penn couldn’t tell how close it was. Everything was muffled. There was no depth to anything, no clear waves of sound. Just the three of them, arms linked now, surrounded by the pelting snow.

“Come on,” said Kelly. “Let’s get off the tracks.” But Danny’s feet were planted, and when Penn pulled on his arm, he encountered an equal and opposite resistance.

“We don’t go until Danny gives the signal,” said Penn. He held his right hand up, gloved fingers spread. “Count it out, Danny,” he said. “Count it right on out.”

But Danny was silent, immovable.

“I’m not going until you do,” said Penn, and Kelly nodded in agreement. “All for one and one for all, man.”

“One for all and all for one,” echoed Penn.

The train was closer now, the smudge of light dead center in the white-on-white hollow of the tracks, the engine the barest silver with a streak of red. It was the whistle that seemed to have force and mass, though, and Penn had a vision of being destroyed by a thick and lethal blade of sound.

Danny opened his mouth, but it took another second for any words to come out. “Five,” said Danny. Then “Four,” then “Three.”

With each number, Penn closed a finger against his palm. First the thumb and then the pinkie and then the ring finger, until he was making the peace sign — or perhaps it was the V for “victory.” But even when the middle finger protruded alone — even when Kelly said, “Fuck you, Danny” and Danny finally said, “One,” Penn wasn’t sure if he would give the signal. And he wasn’t sure if Danny would jump even if he gave it.

The tracks were screaming beneath their feet now, the train a silver tear in the softness. Stretching left to right was the water, and across the river, spread out for miles in every direction, substandard housing and urban decay laced with pockets of modest but vital renewal. None of it was visible in the snow, but Penn saw it because he knew it was there.

There was a long pause. Danny’s mouth opened wider, but whatever he said was devoured by the cacophony of the train, and then they were tumbling down the bank, laughing with relief and shouting, “Oo-rah” and scooping up handfuls of snow and throwing it at each other and Penn feeling considerably more alive than he had when he had rolled out of bed that morning.

It suddenly seemed so simple. He’d make sure the men were all right, and then he’d take Falwell up on his offer. He would marry Louise and they would buy a house somewhere, with mourning doves roosting in the hemlocks and swallows flitting between a little meadow and a pond. In the summer he would stand on the porch, looking on as Joseph and Jules tumbled down a new-mown hill. In the winter he would festoon the house with colored lights and the kids would ride down the hill on toboggans and then Louise would make hot cocoa while he lit a fire. Every year he would hold a picnic with races and games just the way his father had done. It could happen eventually, even if it didn’t happen right away. He’d call Louise. He’d ask her to marry him as soon as his next tour was over, or maybe he’d marry her before he went.

10.8 Joe Kelly

Spring came, and with it came new disagreements. Now that they had their heads above water money-wise, the captain kept talking about “visions” and “goals.”

“Advertising dollars,” said Kelly, sounding like a broken record even to himself. “Donations are fine, but if we went after advertising dollars, I could definitely get me a car.”

“It’s not about money,” said the captain, and Danny said, “Do you realize that if we actually stop the war, all of this goes away?”

“Fat chance of that,” said Kelly. The week before, sixty-five people had died when two suicide bombers attacked a crowded Baghdad market, and just that morning, someone had forwarded him a link to a site that made a case for perpetual war. Not that perpetual war was good, but that it was inevitable.

One day in early May, Kelly received another email, and instead of sparking an argument, this one made the room go quiet. Someone wanted to buy the site.

Kelly was the one to break the silence. “If we sell, we’ll have money for pretty much anything we want to do. We can have our cake and eat it too.”

The captain asked what would happen to the stories people had trusted them with. “And the documents you can’t find anywhere else — what will happen to those?”

“I assume the new owners will carry on with it,” said Kelly.

“Assume,” said the captain. “Ass. U. Me.”

“Will they have the necessary programming skills?” asked Le Roy.

“I assume they’ll keep some of us on,” said the captain. “And our volunteers — they’ll certainly need those.”

“Assume,” said Kelly. “Ass. U. Me.”

“Doesn’t it worry anyone that the site isn’t worth a fraction of what they’re offering?” asked Danny.

“You know what it’s worth?” asked Kelly. “Exactly what someone is willing to pay.”

Every day they were popping open the beer a little earlier, but when the purchase offer came in, Kelly made a case that noon was not too early. “Noon’s normal,” he said, and the captain laughed and replied, “I’ve been wondering what normal is. Now I finally know.”

“I just don’t know why they’re offering so much for it,” said Danny. “I can’t make the numbers add up.”

“Money’s money,” said Kelly. He was picturing himself in a convertible like the one in the coming-home parade. This time, though, he’d be driving, with a pretty girl beside him in the passenger seat.

“True enough,” said Danny. “True enough.”

“That’s two hundred fifty thousand each,” said Le Roy.

“Three hundred thirty three,” said the captain. “I don’t need the money. Which isn’t the reason I think we shouldn’t sell.”

“Whatever’s fair,” said Danny. A few minutes later, though, he was back to worrying. “The numbers don’t add up,” he said. “Even if there was some way to get advertisers, it would take them years to earn that money back.”

“Unless that’s not the point,” said Penn. “Unless they only want to shut us down.”

Outside the warehouse window, two teenagers threw a rock at a stray dog. The dog yelped and ran off just as the third beer was sliding down, causing something to catch in Kelly’s throat so that some of it came up again.

“Jeezus, Kelly, be careful of the keyboard,” said Le Roy.

When the captain went outside to talk to the teenagers and recruit them for his patrol, Kelly stumbled after him and sat on the stoop thinking of the day he had lurked on a street corner while Joe Senior was stopped and searched, eyes down, arms out, compliant and sacrificial. The sight had filled Kelly with a bottomless swamp of bitterness and sorrow. When he had a son of his own, he wouldn’t send him off to school telling him to keep his head down or to smile and make new friends. He’d send him with the name of a lawyer in his pocket and a checklist of do’s and don’ts: do be polite, don’t make furtive movements, do ask if you are free to leave, don’t tell the cop to fuck himself. But you can think it, son, he’d say. So far they haven’t made thinking illegal, and you can think any damn thing you want.

The dog was back, eyeing him warily from across the street. Then it tucked its tail between brindle haunches and slunk into the bamboo that ran along the railroad tracks. “Hey, dog,” called Kelly, but by then, the dog was gone.

“Any luck?” he asked when the teenagers got into their car and drove off.

“They’ll come,” said the captain. “If they don’t, I’ll track their asses down.”

The magnolias were in bloom, and up the street, the single mother was digging in her garden. Kelly thought about the convertible he was going to buy. He told himself he hadn’t made the world the way it was and he wasn’t responsible for human nature, not even his own. If they sold the site, he could do anything he wanted, but what did he want to do? He seemed to have a head for business — he could make something of that. He could find a nice girl and get married. He’d figure it out once he had the money, but they should definitely sell the site. He’d call Hernandez and get him to come to New Jersey to help with whatever they did next, or maybe he’d go to Texas and Hernandez could give him advice about settling down. He dialed the number, but Hernandez’s voice was guarded. “What?” he asked. “What do you want?”

Kelly tried to explain it, but the spoken words didn’t sound the way they had in his head. It sounded like he wanted something from Hernandez, when what he wanted was only to reestablish their old connection. “Remember how you got the Humvee out of the ditch?” he asked. “Remember how Harraday smoked those guys down by the canal just before the helo got there?”

“Hey, man. I’m trying to forget.”

“I was thinking you could come out and help us with the site,” said Kelly. “If we don’t sell it, that is, or if we start a new one. Either way, we could work something out. I can send you a ticket, just so you can see the place. And I might buy a convertible — I haven’t decided yet. If I do, you can help me pick it out.”

“I’ll think about it,” said Hernandez. “But I’ve got a kid, you know? He’s already three years old. And I’ve got Maya, and a little house — maybe you should get a woman too. It’s not perfect, you know what I mean? But it’s sure as hell not bad.”

“Yeah, that’s something I’ve thought about. I’ve thought about that a lot.”

But Kelly needed a woman who could stand up to him, which basically meant he needed a man.

“There are men in the army,” said Hernandez.

“Ha!” said Kelly. “No way I’m going back there. Besides, I’m pretty good at what I’m doing now.”

“Me too,” said Hernandez. “Not great or anything, but definitely pretty good.”

10.9 Le Roy Jones

An inspector from the building department knocked on the door one evening when Le Roy and the other men were eating fried chicken out of a paper bucket. “I heard you guys were living here,” he said. “This area is zoned commercial. No COs for permanent occupation.”

“Hey, man, nothing’s permanent,” said Danny, and Kelly said, “Hell, we’ve lived in bigger shitholes ’n this.”

“We just work long hours,” said the captain.

“I heard you’re here day and night.”

“This is a start-up, so we kind of are.”

“I’m afraid you’re gonna have to find another place to live. I’ll give you a week or so, but I can’t let it slide much longer than that.”

“Fuck that shit,” said Le Roy.

“Christ,” said Danny when the housing official was gone. “It’s like they don’t want us to succeed.”

“We’ve already succeeded,” said Kelly. “We should definitely sell.”

“I’m telling you. They’ll buy it and they’ll shut it down,” said the captain.

“Why would they spend a million dollars on a website just to shut it down?” asked Kelly. And then everyone was quiet except the captain, who said they all knew why. Everyone but Le Roy knew why. “Why?” he asked, which started up another argument, with the captain going on about “visions and goals” and Kelly banging his fist on the desk and Danny pacing up and down saying, “Let’s all calm down here. I’m sure we can work this thing out.”

Le Roy couldn’t fully comprehend the source of the disagreement, but he suspected it was located in the place E’Laine kept harping on when she talked about the things they used to do together or about how Le Roy’s body had been taken over by someone else’s soul. So when Kelly said, “What do you think, Le Roy? Weigh in here,” Le Roy could only try to guess what Kelly wanted him to say. It was like hacking a password, but with no end run where you used machine language to reset the basic user information. “What if I make a memorial to the guys in the company?” he asked. “Or what if we make a second site?”

“We can’t do that ’til after we sell,” said Kelly. “We don’t want to divert traffic and scare the buyers off.” Kelly did the thing where he slammed the refrigerator door and chugged a beer and threw the can so hard it hit the wall behind the trash can.

Le Roy thought it might be time to bring out his new idea. “I’m thinking about a simulation,” he said. Just the thought of it was calming. Just the thought of all that new-idea blankness turning into lines of code. He started to describe how in the simulation, the parameters could be set so that most of the people would be totally screwed, and then they would band together to take their country back. Wasn’t that what the captain meant when he said “visions and goals”? It had occurred to him that they were in a simulation now. The odds of it were good. It was generally accepted that intelligent beings would eventually create realistic computer simulations, which meant that someday the simulated worlds would far outnumber the real worlds, which meant a person would have a better chance of being in a virtual world than in a real one. Maybe someday had already come. “In the simulation—” he started to say, but Kelly interrupted him.

“We’re not talking about any simulation here, Le Roy. We’re talking about real life.”

“But what if we’re already in a simulation? What if we only think it’s real? In that case…”

“Besides, there’s plenty for you to work on finding people to help authenticate that new batch of documents. Whether we sell or not, we’ve got to keep going full strength for now.”

Then the conversation died down, and after a while, everyone went back to work.

“Hey,” said Kelly later in the day. “I got a funny call from Martin.”

Le Roy had forgotten about Martin Fitch, but now he said, “What’s up with Martin?”

“He’s getting some heat about the sources for his new Guardian series, and he wants to make sure our security is up to snuff.”

“Blast it on over here,” said Le Roy. “Let me take a look.”

“What do you think he means when he says ‘heat’?” asked Kelly.

“I guess we can’t expect to post some of this stuff without ruffling some feathers,” said the captain.

“But Dolly’s okay?” asked Danny.

“Yeah,” said Penn. “Dolly’s just fine.”

“All the more reason to sell,” said Kelly. “Get out from under while we can.”

Here it came, Kelly yelling and throwing another beer can at the wall and the captain telling everyone to calm down and Danny taking his notebook out onto the porch and staring off up the tracks to where they disappeared behind a patch of urban bamboo and Le Roy snapping his noise-canceling headphones into place and trying to induce the sensation he got when someone was passing through his peripheral vision, when he could feel them sliding along toward being forgotten.

The issue of the sale didn’t go away, and a week later Danny suggested they vote on it. “A yes vote means we sell,” he said.

Kelly voted yes, Danny voted no, and the captain abstained. “The website belongs to you,” he said. “Besides, I redeploy in another couple weeks.”

“That leaves it up to you, Le Roy,” said Danny. “You get to decide this thing yourself.”

“That makes zero sense,” said Kelly. “That makes less than zero sense.”

Le Roy looked from Kelly to the captain and tried to figure out which of them had the more compelling expectation, but just then a glitch on the screen caught his eye and he was narrowing the cone of his vision and feeling the music of the ether coming up through the pads of his fingers and letting his mind resonate with the vastness of the universe, of all the worlds within the universe, of all the worlds within the worlds.