Surveillance

4

“IF I WAS TALKING about anything at all,” Tad said after the landlord left, “I hope I was telling him how to grow orchids or peonies.”

“You were making all that up?”

“Pardon my French, kiddo, but one load of bullshit deserves another.”

“But why? He was only asking a question.”

“He just dropped in to terrorize us.”

“Terrorize?” Alida felt like the floor was giving way beneath her feet, and there was a long, long way to fall. “He was only trying to make us safer.”

“Oh, Rabbit…” Her mom slid into the landlord’s vacated chair and laid her arm across Alida’s shoulders, then looked at Tad. “Is he going to triple the rent, do you think? Or turn us into a multistory parking garage?”

“Parking garage?”

“Honey, listen. Mr. Lee bought our building. He bought it to make money, and all he talked about, like new plumbing and video systems, costs big money — maybe millions. It was like he was telling us we can’t afford to live here. That’s what Tad means by ‘terrorize.’”

The room swam in and out of focus as Alida fought a humiliating upwelling of tears. “I still don’t get it.”

“We pay eight-fifty for this apartment.”

“Seven for mine,” Tad said.

“Which is incredibly cheap. Mr. Winslow never put up the rents, he just let us live here for almost nothing, compared with most places around here. Parking lots! I bet the horrible Mr. Lee makes more money out of one parking space than he does out of our entire apartment.”

“That’s not true!” Alida recognized home territory when she saw it. “Even if he made five dollars an hour, twenty-four hours in every day, with every single space, that’d be like…” She calculated furiously, squinching up her eyes and holding her breath. “Eight-forty. But it’s not that much! There’s all that Early Bird stuff, and evenings, and weekends, and tons and tons of empty spaces all the time. You have to average it out.”

She was shocked by her own arithmetic, having expected the sum to come to much less than it did; for one single lousy parking space, that was, like, extortionate. Nevertheless, she tried to put a brave face on the figure. “I bet he’d be lucky to get two hundred a week.” She raced over the last few words to minimize their impact, but felt her mom’s grip tighten on her shoulder.

“We pay eight-fifty a month, honey, not eight-fifty a week.”

Crushed, Alida forced a wobbly grin and dared herself to voice the thought that had just come to mind. “Well, I guess you could get maybe eleven ‘Compact Only’ spaces into this apartment.”

There was an uncertain moment of silence, then her mom and Tad began to laugh, and Alida felt instantly buoyant at being the cause of such appreciative adult laughter.

Strange how by saying the very worst thing you could imagine about almost any situation, you could make it funny — sort of. “So we’ll have to live in the Spider and the heap,” she said, but a treacherous, wavering hiccup came into her voice on the word “Spider,” and Tad reached for her hand, not laughing now, as she had meant him to do, but just smiling, like he wanted to reassure, and to Alida it looked plain scary.

“Ali…”

Whatever he was saying was lost in a brain-curdling shivaree that came through the open window — a crazy concatenation of whoops and warbles, yelps and wails, as a parade of emergency vehicles went by a few blocks away. It sounded like they were heading south on Second. Alida picked out the jarring chords of fire trucks and their deep, grunting blasts; the angry tirra-wirra-wirra-wirra of the police; the caterwauling ambulances. From the noise they made, you’d think that all hell had broken out somewhere in the city, but lately the sound had grown so familiar that you just had to shut your ears to it. You never discovered where the sirens were going, or why, but most days you’d hear them racing along I-5 or the waterfront, like they were out there for the simple fun of frightening the pants off everybody with their mad music.

Tad got up to pull the window down, which slightly dulled the racket from outside. “Act Three of the exercise, I guess,” he said. “They must’ve needed me for only Acts One and Two.”

“When does your lease run out?” her mom said.

“September.”

“Ours is December.”

Alida said, “Are you sure we…I mean, like with his weird English and all, couldn’t he maybe just mean…” Impatient with herself for sounding so dumb, she bit down on her lip. “Suppose it’s all just a big misunderstanding? He didn’t have to be lying.”

“You’re right, Rabbit. We’re jumping to conclusions. We shouldn’t prejudge him like this. Perhaps he really did mean what he said.”

But in her mother’s face, Alida saw all the signs of grown-up untrustworthiness — the uncertain tremor in her smile, the sidelong glance at Tad that meant We’ll talk about this later. Everything was impenetrably “ironic,” a maddening equation full of minus numbers. Mr. Lee didn’t mean what he said, and her mom didn’t mean what she said about Mr. Lee. If Mr. Lee was — x and her mom was — y…

Another procession of horns and sirens. This one was going west down Jackson Street, its ferocious clamor muffled by the bulk of the buildings in between.

“God, it’s like being at a Schoenberg concert tonight,” her mom said.

“I was thinking more John Cage.”

Adults!

What had Mr. Lee actually said? That he didn’t want the street people getting in. That he was going to put new locks on the doors. That he was new to being a landlord. That he wanted “feedback.” How did you get from such data to the idea that he was going to turn the Acropolis into a parking garage? Surreptitiously, Alida squeezed a zit on her chin. She thought of the landlord installing a video monitor beside the door, of how she’d innocently believed in it, but now she believed nobody — not Mr. Lee, not her mom, not Tad, and herself least of all. She felt lost in the fog of her own stupidity. The zit popped, discharging a little bead of pus onto the tip of her forefinger, which she wiped on the grainy underside of the table.

Tad said, “Don’t worry, Ali. You, me, and your mom, we’re a team. We’ll be fine, whatever happens with the building.”

But Alida knew differently. She wasn’t on the team. She was sitting out on the bench, wearing cleats and the team jersey, but the coach would never let her play on the field. Blinking back tears, she made herself smile and say “Okay,” thinking that this was the first time in her life she had been dishonest with Tad, ever.

BACK IN HIS APARTMENT, alone with mouse and keyboard, Tad Zachary was on his usual late-night prowl through cyberspace. He’d long ago given up on television as a source of news. More recently, he’d canceled his subscription to The New York Times, whose reporters he had learned to despise as tame flunkies of the administration. Now he mostly read foreign media to find out what was happening in his own country. His rusty high-school French was just sufficient, and growing steadily better, to skim Libération’s accounts of what was going on in La Maison Blanche and Le Bureau Oval. He moused over to Britain, where he read the Independent and the Guardian, and on to Arabia, where he checked out the Jordan Times and Al-Ahram Weekly. He visited Al-Jazeera. Then he hit the blogs and forums to keep company with like-minded internal exiles — those lonely late-nighters, as full of rage as he was, tapping out intelligence on the latest mendacities and misdeeds. His face lit by the frigid blue glow of the computer screen, Tad followed these theories and rumors as they swarmed from site to site.

Since Michael’s death six years ago, more and more of Tad’s time had been spent like this, afloat in the virtual counterworld, a community of people hidden behind pseudonyms who’d never met one another face-to-face. The virtual suited him. Untroubled by libido, he thought of himself now as postsexual, almost disembodied, as if each day brought a measurable lessening of his specific gravity in the actual world. Soon he’d be walking on air.

Playing stepfather to Ali was his last intimate human connection. Described in his will as “the sanest, most thoughtful human being I’ve ever met,” she was Tad’s sole heir. Only the attorney who’d witnessed his signature knew this.

He meant to leave her a cool million, not a dollar less; so it was for Ali that he went on working, swallowing both pride and principles to star in the terror shows, to be Mr. Autoglass, the MagiGro gardener, the light relief at hideous convention dinners. He wanted to see his mother’s money at last do some real good. In the sleepless small hours, sprawled diagonally across the king bed he’d once shared with Michael, Tad liked to picture Ali at Yale, Ali kitted out in surgeon’s scrubs, Ali at the podium in a packed lecture hall, Ali pith-helmeted in Africa — her career and costume changing from night to night. Ali’s future was another kind of virtual reality in which Tad found solace. He even relished his own necessary absence from these pictures; the not-being-there was part of their allure, like sitting in a darkened auditorium, magically freed from oneself by the more compelling and luminous life on the stage.

Ali, who could recite the value of to the thirty-seventh decimal place, but was considerably prouder of her double-jointed elbows.

Ali, who took better care of her mother than her mother took care of her.

Ali, who was his sternest drama critic. “Is he really meant to be that much like Scrooge?” she’d asked doubtfully of his Shylock at the first dress rehearsal of Merchant at the Rep. She was dead right, and in the nick of time. Hastily but thoroughly de-Scrooged, Shylock got near rapturous notices in the Times and the P-I, all thanks to Ali.

Ali, the brave but comically graceless in-line skater.

Ali as the Wicked Witch of the West at Halloween. At age eight, she had Margaret Hamilton’s voice and delivery to an eerie “t.”

Ali.

It wasn’t light of my life, fire of my loins, but for Tad it headed distinctly, even dangerously, in that direction. He couldn’t take his eyes off Ali when she folded her arms across her chest to hide her nascent breasts — so boy, so girl, so girl-boy.

When he thought of Ali and her life to come, Tad had in clear view the threshold on which he himself would have to stand — not now, not yet, but some time sooner rather than later. When Michael went into the hospice three weeks before he died, Tad had seen the whitewashed brick mansion as a Greek house, a fraternity in which each new pledge went through a ritual hazing. As a college freshman, Tad had joined Phi Delta, knocking off the required quart of Jack Daniel’s before stripping naked and walking blindfolded on broken glass; thirty-five years later, he could still hear the frat boys’ whooping laughter as he trod that bloody path. And so it was with Michael, enduring the relentless, patient smiles of the staff as they put his incredible shrinking body on an IV drip, shot him full of morphine, wrapped and pinned him in diapers.

Death itself didn’t scare Tad. All he feared was the indignity of the initiation ceremonies that he’d have to go through to become a member of that enormous, nonexclusive, admirably egalitarian club. He envied people with dicey hearts: one fine day they simply toppled off their perches, on the way to work or in the middle of a story they were telling over dinner. Lucky for them. But Tad was following Michael’s lead on the more demanding route.

For now, his medication was doing its job. His T-cell count was still up there in the 220s and 230s. On his last doctor visit, Brian, washing his hands in the sink, had said, “Who knows? I’ll probably be pushing up daisies before you are.” But Tad knew differently, and he fretted about timing — better that he go at least a year before Ali took her SATs, or held out, somewhat improbably, until after her graduation from college.

Meanwhile, fury sustained in him a disturbing feeling of intense well-being. Hatred of the president and his administration roused him to a kind of dizzy euphoria that he associated with the bizarre love affairs he’d had back in his twenties — first with girls, then with boys. Same sleepless obsessionality. Same sense of being utterly possessed, caught in the grip of something very close to mania. Even the objects of his affections then bore a troubling resemblance to the objects of his hatred now.

Before Michael, Tad had always fallen in love only with impossible people: wrecked young women with raccoon eyes who swallowed bottles of pills and had to be driven to the ER to have their stomachs pumped; waiflike young men, knife-scarred, arms peppered with needle marks, who invariably robbed him. Nancy. Selina. Jane. Ferris. Charlie. Ron. Umberto. Jesus. Thanh…and so the list went on. Tad had liked to see himself as a rescuer of birds with broken wings, but his wounded birds had a habit of revealing themselves as monsters. Thanh had gone to jail for attempting to murder Tad, though the attempt was so ridiculously botched that Tad had spoken up for him in court.

Now he was involved with bad guys whose badness took his breath away, as they heedlessly despoiled the planet, killed people on an industrial scale, connived with their cronies over billion-dollar no-bid contracts, and cannily subverted the rapidly unraveling fabric of democracy. Their bland manners reminded him of Jesus, blithely cleaning his handgun over breakfast as if sharpening a pencil or polishing a car. Then, as now, Tad was fascinated by the casual insouciance, the innocence, even, with which bad guys went about their daily work. They gave no sign of knowing they were bad guys: just like Jesus, they prattled on in the language of doing good.

The best thing about hatred as opposed to love was the absence of any feeling on Tad’s part that he was here to somehow, against all odds, redeem these people. That illusion, at least, was long gone. He didn’t want to rescue the administration from its folly: he wanted to see it blown to atomic dust or drowned in a sack. And he badly wanted to outlive it — to know it had been judged by history before he passed on.

So he surfed the Net, partly to fuel his outrage, partly to probe for symptoms of terminal disease — leaked secrets, crashing poll numbers, the rotten whiff of scandal yet to break. Over the years, the administration had packed the judiciary with yes-men and yes-women to the point where it could now usually operate comfortably above the law, but there were some honest judges left, and lately there’d been an increasing trickle of defectors, whose enthralling tales of government malfeasance gave Tad some hope that even the Department of Justice would have to recognize, however halfheartedly, that at least a measure of justice needed to be done.

That much was sane. What was insane was the giddy excitement that overtook him on these virtual nighttime adventures — the quickening heartbeat, the sweating palms, the acute mental arousal in which he took such involuntary pleasure. This was being in hate, and Tad, when truthful with himself, had to acknowledge that he liked being in hate. A lot. He was aware that if and when this wretched government really did fall, he’d rejoice, of course, but that a part of himself would feel as bereft and purposeless as when Thanh had been led away under a black hood, in police cuffs.

Sometimes he’d pretend that his rage was noble, altruistic, all on Ali’s behalf: how dare they fuck over the world into which she was just now beginning to step out? These crookedly elected, braggart thugs in business suits were systematically poisoning the future of Ali’s entire generation — and not just of her generation, either, but of every generation yet to come. But if that were truly Tad’s concern, his only emotion would be sorrow, and sorrow, strangely, was the least of his feelings. When he saw the browning of Mount Rainier, read of the melting arctic ice cap or the murderous inferno that blazed across the Middle East and South Asia, when the U.S. military practiced besieging American cities with tanks, artillery, and armored checkpoints in the name of “quarantine,” when the Supreme Court became the brass-knuckled enforcer of the presidential will and whim, what Tad felt was an adrenaline rush of angry elation. It was like getting off on porn, this secret relish for the wicked drama of it all.

Maybe he’d spent too long working in theater and could no longer distinguish real life from a thrillingly gory production of Tamburlaine, whose title role Tad had long dreamed of playing, and whose speeches he’d sometimes used as audition pieces for roles whose directors might doubt his capacity to do butch with suitable conviction:

Now hang our bloody colours by Damascus,

Reflexing hues of blood upon their heads,

While they walk quivering on their city-walls,

Half-dead for fear before they feel my wrath.

Certainly, if you looked for an author of this administration, it’d have to be Marlowe, or possibly Webster. Only an Elizabethan with a strong stomach for Grand Guignol could possibly have written the script for what was going on now.

Tonight the bloggers were off on the trail of laundered money that went straight through the back door of the White House, and the case of the former director of the FBI who’d either jumped or been pushed from the eighteenth floor of a hotel in Baltimore on the eve of his appearance before the grand jury investigating the Vasico affair. The president had made another speech — the usual Tamberlainish stuff about scourging kingdoms with his conquering sword. Great strides were being made in the war of Good against Evil, most of them in secret, the president said, but it would not be long before the American people learned of the noble victories already accomplished in their name. The bloggers were sifting through the text of this speech like soothsayers reading goats’ entrails. It was noted that when the president said “Patriotic America knows its strength. To all nations, we say…” the initial letters of the first eight words ominously spelled out “PAKISTAN.”

Codes, portents, plots, chicanery: Tad was up to speed on them all. Swigging from the bottle of Evian water beside his rainbow mouse pad, he thought of how the ambit of his loathing must now widen to include his new landlord, yet another grinning monkey face in an outsize plumed helmet, as Le Canard Enchainé portrayed the president. Far from being depressed by Charles Lee’s blatant threats, he felt hyped by them. Tad Zachary had always enjoyed fights on stage, and he looked forward to this one: a labor of love and hate, whose twin poles he’d increasingly, during the last five years, become unable to tell apart.

LUCY, too tired to sleep, lay in bed watching the news on the postcard-size screen on the TV-clock-radio on her dresser. So that was what all the commotion that evening had been about — they’d evacuated Safeco Field.

A man “of Middle Eastern appearance” had been spotted hurrying out at the start of the seventh-inning stretch. Police had followed him to his car, a blue Chrysler with Canadian plates. When the mobile forensics lab was summoned, “traces of explosive residue” were found in the carpet of the trunk.

It was the clown on the ferry — of course — and Lucy knew exactly what must have happened. Shaking down his car at the terminal, the National Guardsmen, with their ammo-tainted fingers, would have left traces of explosive all over everything. The guy had left in disgust at the performance of his blessed Blue Jays, down five-nothing to the Mariners, the losingest team in the American League.

Now they were still frantically searching the stadium for a bomb, and reporters on the scene were hyperventilating over the capture of a terrorist “believed to have links with Al Qaeda.”

For a nanosecond, Lucy thought of dialing 911 and correcting the police’s misreading of his flight from the game: he was no more Al Qaeda than she was the Klan. But she’d be on the phone half the night — on hold for ten minutes at a time, asked to spell her name a dozen times over, stuttering wildly, failing to make herself credible to the goon in charge. Let them figure it out in their own sweet time; and it would do that pestering nuisance no great harm to cool his heels for a few hours in the pen.

News just in: Woman dies of heart attack in Seattle stadium evacuation.

So he’d actually killed someone. Or rather, they had. “Woman dies of someone else’s overheated imagination,” more like.

“…reporting live from Safeco Field, this is Tamara Gold for KIRO 7 Eyewitness News.” The tiny screen barely contained the bug-eyed, breathless Tamara, who looked as if she herself were about to go off like the so far undiscovered bomb.

With thirty thousand people summarily pitched into the streets, and with fears of an imminent explosion, there was no other news — no weather, even, and certainly no mention of a fatal car accident on Whidbey Island, which was why Lucy had tuned in.

JOLTED AWAKE from a dream just after midnight, Alida was multitasking: shiny-faced with Clearasil, she was listening to “Wake Me up When September Ends” on her iPod and reading Agatha Christie in the cone of light cast by the hooded halogen bulb on its metal stalk. Insomnia, once a cause of anguish to her, was now a source of pride. While the rest of the building slept, Alida had the world to herself, in the heady company of Jane Marple and Billie Joe Armstrong. With a book propped on the quilted comforter and good music in her ears, she was in charge of her life in these secret watches of the night as she never was during the day.

A pulsing light, now red, now white, played on the thin blue cotton drapes on her bedroom window, as the laser warnings bounced off the low clouds overhead. The lasers were new, put up a few weeks ago to keep airplanes from flying over the city. Alida was still getting used to the spooky quiet of the sky, now empty of the jets that had roared straight over the Acropolis on their approach to SeaTac Airport. But she liked how the lasers fitted their regular flashes to the beat of Green Day’s drummer, Tré Cool.

Agatha Christie was her latest literary discovery. Mr. Kawasuki had a whole shelf of her mysteries in his store, nearly all of them battered, grungy paperbacks at 25¢ apiece. Alida loved Agatha Christie more than any other fiction writer because she understood human algebra. It was what the slow fussbudget Miss Marple did all the time — elimination, substitution, intersection. Everything was logical and necessary, however confusing it seemed right up until the moment when Miss Marple eventually figured out the sum over her knitting, and you realized that of course the pipe-smoking Swede had done it. Alida was sure that if she read enough Agatha Christie books she’d be able to live inside Miss Marple’s mind, take over her brilliant mental machinery, and apply it to her own project. At present, she was on her third, The Mirror Crack’d from Side to Side, and already could feel stirrings of the latent deductive powers with which she’d astonish her friends in the not-too-distant future.

Her worry was that even Miss Marple, so certain of her ground in St. Mary Mead, England, might be baffled by Seattle. Alida was happy drinking imaginary beer in the Blue Boar pub and doing imaginary shopping at Mr. Baker’s grocery. She’d pass the vicarage on the way to visit Colonel and Mrs. Bantry at Gossington Hall, and avoid the cows as she walked across Farmer Giles’s fields. There was a kind of logic in this English village that she feared was absent from the city she lived in. Miss Marple, at home in her ancient cottage, Danemead, inhabited a historical world where everything fit together satisfactorily. Like a jigsaw, it would seem an impossible jumble of pieces to begin with, but you knew that the picture was in there, hiding, waiting to be assembled. Seattle was different. America was different. What would Miss Marple make of her mom, or Tad, or Mr. Lee? Logic was logic: it ought to work everywhere, no matter when. But what if you lived in a world where the rules of logic had somehow ceased to apply? Did they work here and now? Or only in old, logical places like St. Mary Mead?

It was like her granddad’s murder in Montana — a horrible accident, with no motive, no mystery, no clues, no logic at all. It just happened out of the blue, like cancer and hurricanes did. To Alida, her grandfather was more a face in framed photographs than a memory, but she was haunted by the flat fact of his murder — a word so scary that neither she nor her mom ever used it in conversation. “When Granddad died,” her mom would say. But he hadn’t died, he’d been shot to death like a character in an Agatha Christie book, except nothing else about it was Agatha Christie — like. There was no need for Miss Marple in Miles City, since everyone knew from the very beginning that Lewis Olson had done it. The only explanation Alida had ever been given was that he “hated the government,” which was a lousy motive since her granddad hadn’t been the government. Lewis Olson should have gone to jail for years and years, but they let him out early, and he was still writing letters from Montana that her mom scrunched up unread and threw into the trash. They were easy to spot because they always came in blue envelopes. Alida had fished out a couple and read them secretly — mostly crazy stuff about religion that didn’t even mention her granddad or why he’d shot him.

Brain spinning, Alida looked for security in the familiar shadows of her room — the pile of stuffed animals that she’d long outgrown on the chest of drawers, the Avril Lavigne poster that she’d never gotten around to taking down, the cluttered bookshelves where Dr. Seuss and Shel Silverstein and Winnie the Pooh kept Helen Keller and Anne Frank and Go Ask Alice company. She was reluctant to part with all the relics from when she was little, from dolls to old shoes, not so much out of babyish sentimental attachment but because they were essential data by which she could measure how far and fast she was now traveling. It was like keeping an eye on the speedometer in the Spider, watching her mom’s regular infractions of the posted limit. Alida liked going fast, but her mom drove way too fast — one time over seventy in a forty-five zone. Squinting at the dark shapes of flop-eared bunnies and teddy bears on the far side of the room, she wondered if a taste for speed was genetic or something.

On the floor, her soccer stuff was packed, ready for tomorrow, in her gym bag. Homework was safe in her backpack. For her alone, as it seemed to Alida, Billie Joe was singing,

Welcome to a new kind of tension…

Where everything isn’t meant to be okay…

She continued to listen for a few minutes more, then closed her book, switched off the iPod, and with the lullaby of “American Idiot” lingering in her ears, fell almost instantly asleep. Her halogen lamp stayed on. On the drapes, the lasers protecting the city flashed red-white, red-white, red-white, like waiting ambulances.

AT ONE A.M., Tad was deep in enemy territory, reading the Weekly Standard online. He resented subscriber-only sites because he felt they violated the easygoing democracy of the Internet, but had recently forked out $32 for William Kristol’s magazine because it was a source of such rich and alarming intelligence about the thought processes of the administration. Everything Tad hated and feared most — invasions, torture, wiretapping, detention without charge, secret courts — could be counted on to find its champion in the Weekly Standard. The president’s closest advisers were said to read it, so Tad thought it his duty as a citizen to read it, too.

Tonight he was trying to follow the arguments of a law professor at some university he’d never heard of — an “originalist” interpretation of the Fourth Amendment, based on what he called “a first-clause-dominant” reading of it. Apparently, what the Founders really meant when they wrote of the “right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures” was that the federal government could lawfully search and seize, bug and imprison, so long as it deemed such actions “reasonable.” The liberal Supreme Court under Earl Warren — always a black name in the Weekly Standard—had gotten the whole amendment ass-backwards. The true purpose of the Fourth was to free government from the tiresome, time-consuming business of going to the courts and getting warrants.

Once, Tad would have been incredulous. Now he took stuff like this as just part of the normal weather of the times. In the name of fidelity to the original intentions of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, the hard-right revisionists were systematically rewriting both documents to bring them into line with administration thinking, brazenly recasting Madison and Jefferson in their own ugly image, turning sentences inside out to reverse their meanings.

There was melancholy satisfaction in the professor’s article, so amply did it confirm Tad’s sense that a legion of industrious rats was gnawing away at his country’s very foundations. Just as he was phrasing this thought to himself, he felt a rippling shudder pass through the seat of his chair, as if a convoy of big trucks were passing by, and the wooden desktop seemed to momentarily squirm under the heel of his palm. He instinctively looked to the doorframe for shelter, but the temblor was already over — a little one, maybe a two-point-something, so slight and brief that at this hour it would be a secret between a few insomniacs and the shivering needles of the seismographs in the geophysics lab at the University of Washington.

The needles were rarely still. Every day brought half a dozen significant tremors to the state, and Seattle, sitting astride its own fault line, with the Juan de Fuca fault close at hand, was built on jittery, uncertain ground. Tad had lost count of the times he’d heard the sound of rock grinding on rock deep below the earth, though to his chagrin he’d been out of town, in a forgettable production of The Iceman Cometh in Minneapolis, for the Ash Wednesday quake of 2001, which, had it lasted fifteen seconds longer, would have brought down the Alaskan Way viaduct and wrecked half the older buildings in the city.

Growing up across the Columbia River from the palpitating snowy bulk of Mount St. Helens, Tad learned to relish warning tremors like the one just past. He imagined the great tectonic plates ceaselessly slipping, shifting, rubbing, as if the planet were trying to shrug off the unnatural weight of tar and concrete, brick and steel, that humans had carelessly piled on to it. Anative West Coaster, Tad knew the instability of the ground beneath his feet, and when he worked with easterners he was aware of how this knowledge separated them. On the whole, he thought, earthquakes were good for you, and every city ought to be rattled to its foundations every once in a while, to alert its people to their precarious footing in the world.

Cheered by the miniquake, he switched off the computer and went to bed, where he sank almost immediately into a leaden sleep.

THE PRESIDENT and CEO of Excellent Holdings, Inc., slept thinly, hardly grazing the surface of unconsciousness. He was afraid of sleep: whenever he allowed himself to fall into that deep, dream-haunted world, he found himself in the same place, inside the shipping container in which long ago he’d crossed the Pacific from Hong Kong to Seattle — and he always woke up screaming. Nowadays he maintained a vigilant nightly patrol along the dangerous border, forbidding himself to cross into the territory where the barely living and the freshly dead lay in wait for him, tumbled together by the ocean in a floundering, lightless box.

A Delta Airlines blanket he’d saved from a red-eye flight to Atlanta barely covered his body as he lay in his T-shirt, boxer shorts, and socks on the couch in his office. 3040 Occidental Ave. S., Suite #103, Seattle, WA 98134, his home and business HQ, cost him $450 a month: an “executive suite,” 150 square feet of white Sheetrock, including restroom, within close earshot of the rumbling shunts, groans, and mournful whistles of the Burlington Northern line. On the black metal table stood phone, fax, laptop, printer, and TV; in the cramped toilet, his clothes hung on the hook behind the door, sheathed in cellophane from the dry cleaner’s; a microwave was his kitchen and he didn’t bother with dishes, preferring to fork his food straight from the containers. When he made coffee, he heated water in a paper cup in the microwave and added Nescafé and whitener, both collected free from motel rooms that he visited for an hour most Sundays. Parked beyond the single window, whose blinds he always kept drawn, was his new white F250 pickup, a recent acquisition. The owner of a cut-price tow company had tried to get cute with him, so Charles O, as he now thought of himself, had driven his old beater to the guy’s home on the East Side, taught him a lesson in elementary business practice, and come away with the new truck, legal title, and a wad of bills that added up to $1,400—a nice evening’s work. The F250 was loaded: AC, leather, premium stereo with CD changer, heated seats, the works, and it still put a smile on Charles O’s face when he drove it — and never more so than when, caught in a jam in the Battery Street Tunnel, he spotted the tow-company guy at the wheel of his beater, honked, and gave that moron a thumbs-up sign. The guy had stared ahead, rigid as a statue, the veins in his face turning scarlet. What a loser.

The previous tenant of Suite 103 had left behind a four-shelf laminate bookcase, now nearly full, for Charles O loved to read. While the TV played the Cartoon Network on mute, he’d crouch over a Stouffer’s Yankee Pot Roast, picked up at the gas station minimart, eating with one hand and holding his book with the other. His lips moved continuously as he sounded out the words, and sometimes he’d speak sentences aloud just for the pleasure of hearing them — especially the ones that ended with exclamation points. “Who learns to adapt in time when he sees changing leads to something better!” That was sweet music to him — a tune he found himself singing under his breath at stoplights or on the stairs in his new apartment building.

The titles in the bookcase included Who Moved My Cheese? The Fred Factor, The One Minute Manager, Fish! Full Steam Ahead! The Secret, and Winning with People.

For Charles O, buying the Acropolis had been the kind of bold, innovative move that all the books said was the mark of an “elite player.” Go the extra mile! they said. Constantly reinvent yourself! Make yourself extraordinary! A lesser man would’ve stuck with parking lots for their low maintenance and deep, swift revenue stream, much of it in hard, untraceable cash, the many-times-folded ones and fives and tens that he and his team of Mexicans emptied from the boxes around the clock, moving ceaselessly from lot to lot. When he showed up at the bank with his pirate’s chest of crumpled green stuff, even the tellers, trained to never show a flicker of surprise, would go bug-eyed at the sight of so much money. Cutting deals with hotels and restaurants for valet parking, jiggling with prices for early birds and event and monthly parkers, he’d grown the business by more than 50 percent on every lot. Having mastered parking, he’d long felt a growing hunger for something more weighty, more intricate, more human.

Now he was going the extra mile, making himself extraordinary.

When he first saw the ancient brick and stucco of the Acropolis, it filled his shallow dreams as nothing and nobody had ever done before. He so craved it that he surprised himself when trying to beat down the owners’ attorney on the asking price. He’d believed he was fearless, but at the thought of the Acropolis escaping him, he felt a spasm of fear in his gut, as disabling as an attack of diarrhea, and paid $375,000 more than he’d meant to. That was a recoverable loss, but he was deeply shaken by the discovery of his cowardice.

The building was his great experiment. Its palatial seven stories of rooms and stairwells and fire escapes and hallways were his personal aquarium, and he loved to put his eye close to the glass and study the fish. Tap, tap, tap: how they swam away in fright! He enjoyed the neediness of tenants, their faces big with questions they didn’t dare ask, their “Yes, Mr. Lee,” and “No, Mr. Lee,” as they cast their eyes involuntarily on their unmade beds, their unwashed dishes, their untidy piles of garbage. Tenants always showed you what they most wanted to hide, so he was learning to take in all their secrets at a glance. No parking lot could give him the multitude of pleasures that were available to him in the Acropolis.

For now, he meant to do little except watch. Watch and wait. With the cash flow from the parking business, he could afford to sit tight and study up on how his new world worked. Beyond the Acropolis, he had a hazy, unformed vision of new condos, though it still amounted to little more than an image of cranes maneuvering slowly and deliberatively against the sky. Whenever Charles O saw a crane at work, he liked to stop to watch, in case there was, in this, an omen for his future. But he was in no hurry for condos. Master the Acropolis first, then move on. Who learns to adapt in time when he sees changing leads to something better!

Last evening had replanted in his mind the long dormant germ of an idea. The time was coming when he’d need a wife — not for sex, but other things. Sex was an itch to be relieved on Sundays when business was slack, on Aurora Avenue North in a rooms-by-the-hour waterbed motel. At $65 for oral — he disliked the other kind — it was like taking an expensive dump; he was always glad to get back to the truck afterward, and never used the same woman twice. But a wife would be different. The shogun authors of his favorite books all had wives: wives gave substance and background to elite players, making them more 3-D. Wives did accounting and also made food and entertained. Building up his holdings in parking lots, Charles O had treasured the airy lightness of his solitude, the trim and compact life that would fit inside the cab and flatbed of his old truck, let alone his new one. But as owner and ruler of the Acropolis, a landlord, he lacked the ampleness that only a wife could provide.

Of all his tenants, Lucy N. Bengstrom, apartment #701, had interested him the most since the day he first toured the building. Sure, she was old — fifty, maybe even more — but he wasn’t prejudiced: on Aurora Avenue, he picked old ones because they worked harder to please and made better noises. Fat, too. That evening, he’d eyed her thick ankles and the rotund swell of her belly under the loose dress that was meant to hide it. He was okay with fat.

But consider her assets:

• She had citizenship. He needed a wife with citizenship.

• She wrote for magazines, so she had good secretarial skills.

• She had the kid. Two for one, a ready-made family. He needed a family, and starting one from scratch took too much time and money. The kid was smart enough, and seemed to like him, a big plus.

• Good homemaker. He liked the bird’s-nest coziness of #701: nothing too expensive or fancy, but it felt upmarket. Books, pictures, lot of classy-looking CDs. Everything in the apartment suggested money carefully, economically spent, and he appreciated that. Worst thing in the world was big-spendy women.

• That old car. She’d taken good care of it, not like most American women, who trashed cars in a year or two like they were flashlight batteries or disposable razors. Alfa Romeo — prestige brand, and another testament to the fact that, though poor, she had class.

• Her best asset: an insufficiency that he could smell on her like mold. Why else hang out with that fag actor? A real loser, with his cheap homo sarcasm and funny voices. Mr. MagiGro was a prime candidate for an eviction notice. No, to hang out with a half-man like that, a woman must be sick with loneliness, and Charles O could only begin to imagine her pathetic gratitude if she was to be rescued from this misery by an elite player. She’d be in his debt for the rest of her life. Thank you, thank you, thank you! He liked the thought of that a lot.

• What was the kid’s name? Mouse? No, Rabbit. He’d have to call her something else, like Nicole, or Meryl, or Marilyn, or Sigourney — a name already stamped with success. When the time came, he’d send her to college: East Coast, Ivy League. She’d need an MBA to help him in the business. “Speak to my PA, my daughter Sigourney…” That sounded nice.

The more he thought about her, the sweeter appeared the prospect of life with Lucy N. Bengstrom. Lucy Lee! She was made for the name — it fit just right, like the inevitable destination she’d unknowingly been headed toward all these years. Lucy Lee. Charles O. and Lucy Lee. Mr. and Mrs. Charles O. Lee. The Lee Residence. They were fated to be conjoined. It was meant. Once upon a time, he’d been full of superstitions — astrologers, feng shui, all that crap. Now, in spite of himself, he needed to find out her birth year. Water-dragon, water-pig would be the best of all combinations, and he had a powerful sense that Lucy N. Bengstrom would turn out to be a water-pig.

Thinking of her had given him a big hard-on, sticking right through the flap of his boxers. Fully awake now, he reached to the box of Kleenex on the floor beside the couch and pictured her pulling the flowery dress over her head…nice underwear, not like a hooker’s, but lacy, white, high-class intimate apparel from Nordstrom or some place like that. She stood before him in the darkness, strangely luminous, like the Indiglo lighting on his Timex.

“Please, honey, may I take you in my mouth?”

Big-bellied, old, grateful, she went down on him, wet lips busy, making little doggy whimpers of satisfaction as she sucked, cradling his balls in her hands.

Briskly, fastidiously, he jacked off into the waiting tissue. Not a drop spilled.

“God, you taste so good,” Lucy said, then faded into black.

He padded into the bathroom, where he flushed the balled-up Kleenex down the toilet and vigorously soaped his limpening cock in the basin. He checked his watch—4:30. By five he’d be out on the prowl in the F250, searching his lots for overnighters who’d failed to pay and display: 5:30 was the hour of the tow truck at Excellent Parking, and his 60/40 deal with the towing companies meant big profits even before the sun began to clear the eastern mountains. On a good morning he’d catch a hundred or so illegals and deport them to places as remote as Kent and Issaquah. What was funny was that the no-goods were almost never clunkers, but late-model Audis and Lexuses and Jaguars; poor people paid for tickets, and the rich tried to cheat him. Just yesterday he’d waved bye-bye to a new red Ferrari, its nose ignominiously hoisted up on the tow truck. Guy would’ve been legal if he’d paid $6.00, and now it cost him $334 and a $50 cab fare to get his Ferrari Superamerica back. That had made Charles O’s morning.

He set a cup of water in the microwave. The breathy, churring noise of the oven mixed with the clank and rumble of a freight train traveling northward through the city. Far ahead, he heard it bellow like a wounded cow as its locomotives trundled into downtown. They’d just about be passing the Acropolis. He wondered if Lucy heard the whistle, too.

Act with decision. The elite player never wavers once his choice is made!

He’d begin at the weekend, with those crates she had for bookshelves. Sipping his scalding Nescafé, he wondered whether along with his cordless drill he should take flowers.

AT A FEW MINUTES before five, the hand set off on its regular morning excursion from under the covers. The terrain was familiar as it snaked in the dark through the thicket of easily upsettable plastic bottles of aspirin, Halcion, St. John’s wort, melatonin, and protease inhibitors, then across the spine of the book that splayed facedown on the bedside table, a lurid kiss-and-tell memoir by the latest fugitive from the administration, the former Department of Defense chief of staff. Eventually the hand found the knurled volume knob of the elderly transistor radio, whose antenna had long ago been replaced by a wire coathanger.

KUOW was still relaying the BBC World Service, a British voice reciting soccer scores, something about the UEFA cup, a cricket match in Australia.

At five o’clock sharp, National Public Radio’s Morning Edition began with the first news of the day from Washington, D.C., and the sleeper roused himself to listen to the lead headline.

This was how Tad’s mornings always began, with the vague, routine apprehension of atrocity. Pacific Standard Time was in part to blame, for the world’s most shocking events usually happened while the West Coast was still asleep. By this PST, Cairo, Rome, Madrid, Paris, and London had survived the conventional hours of atrocity, while New York and D.C. were just about to enter them.

Bombs in Baghdad, assassination in Jerusalem…the hand embarked on its return journey to the radio. It—whatever it was, and Tad had only a very hazy notion of what it might be — hadn’t taken place today, at least so far. He rolled over on his left side and addressed the toilsome job of trying to get back to sleep. But sleep, as ever, was an artful dodger. Oscillating continuously between torpor and electric wakefulness, he chased it, touched it, lost it, caught up with it, only to have it again wriggle from his grasp. Whole hours would pass in its pursuit until, fractious and exhausted by the hunt, he’d haul himself out of bed and into Michael’s old sun-emperor silk kimono.

So it had been for Tad since September 2001, which now seemed an epoch ago. The overpunctual reaching of his wayward hand for the radio, reliable as an alarm clock, had grown over the years into a motor reflex. What prompted it wasn’t dread, at least not dread alone, but a sick avidity, a hunger for catastrophe. A secret longing for the Big One lurked in his inner core, and its renewed absence each morning must therefore bring it one day closer.

Struggling to sleep, he felt a rankling, rusty stab of shame. Ali, he thought. Think of her now. But even thoughts of Ali never quite freed him from this perversity. Somewhere out there, sooner than later, the catastrophe lay waiting, along with whatever it was inside him that wanted it to happen.

At 6:40, he gave up, reached for the kimono, and, parting the drapes, peered out into the shadow-ridden half-light. It had begun to rain.