“What happened after that?”
“What happens when a boot connects with a young boy’s head?” His lips puckered into white ridges like scars as he flayed a long strip of paint free.
“I’m not sure I like this story.”
“Oh? Here’s another one then. Once, God, for shits and giggles, went to a man who’d been beaten up by his neighbor. He healed the man and told him He’d grant a wish for all the wrong he’d suffered. Whatever he wished for, his neighbor would get twice as much. ‘Why, God?’ the man raged. ‘After all the injustice? Why does he get rewarded?’ The man raged. ‘My son,” God told him, “I love you. Let go of your hate. Let go of your pain. I will reward you. I will take care of you.” The man spent the night thinking it over and next morning, God appeared. ‘Child, what is your wish?’ The man had his answer. ‘I want you to blind one of my eyes.’ Everyone hates us so we hate them back. People like me, we never forgive, we never forget.”
“I like you, Anton.” Luka does too; he’d been delighted to find Anton. The F.S.B. doesn’t hire mixed-bloods, he said. But if I told Anton that, he’d probably misunderstand everything. Again.
“You?” He examined a square crust of paint he pried free, then showered me with crushed blue confetti. “That’s for liking me. Alright, alright.” He reached for my hair, and I batted his hand away. “Your birthday’s coming, isn’t it? I’ll give you a present.” He sat down and typed on his laptop. Seconds later, an attachment appeared in my inbox.
“What’s that?” I tried not to sound suspicious. Among the three of us, I prefer to confront a program head-on and pick it apart, while Luka’s a jack-of-all-tricks. Neither of us comes close to Anton when it comes to churning out Trojans and converting computers into serf-bots.
“What’s this? What’s that? Too many questions.” He pretended to sigh. “Since you’ve never travelled, let me show you a different world.” He tilted his laptop towards me. There’s a room with pink walls, trimmed with white crown molding. The polka-dot curtains were tucked beside the window frame, and the fabric swayed slightly. This wasn’t one of his virtual reality games. It’s too real. In the corner of the room, there was an empty bed. A rosy glaze over the window hinted at dusk. It’s early afternoon in Moscow. Where’s this?
“It’s my pet-bot. You can control everything. Press this button, and the webcam turns on without anyone knowing. This webcam is fancy. It even pans.” He pressed a button and the view shifted. I saw a wardrobe with carved knobs. Beside it, a mirror reflected the computer. How many layers of reality can a looking glass offer? “Don’t move the webcam when she’s around.”
“She?” I felt my pulse quicken. I thought of how my father made me close my room door whenever he brought one of his female students home. Once, I peeped and saw them on the couch, their limbs tangled. I’d closed the door softly, fearing that they, the world, would hear my heart thumping.
“I thought you hated porn.” I played it cool. “Didn’t you crash a porn site last month?”
“This? This is art,” he scoffed. “Don’t mistake this for your typical spyware, it’s undetectable, with built-in zoom and image optimization. And to clarify, I have nothing against porn, it’s exploitation I fight against. That, and oppression of all kinds. I’m a freedom fighter.”
Maybe I’m not that old after all because I don’t get it. His is a complicated morality.
“Here, you try, Andrei.”
Old Nelya told me temptation is a snake in Paradise. The warehouse is hardly Paradise but Temptation reared in my lap.
I wanted to look away. I edged closer to the screen instead.
1.25
Two weeks have passed and we’ve made little progress. Luka’s mood has steadily worsened. Until today.
“The system administrator’s name is Garrett O’Brien,” Luka trumpeted when we met up. “We’re back in business.” I knew he’d come up with something; he always does. Online, there are black market exchanges where you can buy information, from credit card numbers to personal secrets. It’s a fragmented and furtive market; the best exchanges are available only to a select few. I wondered whether Luka bought the information and how he knew to trust it. “Play the man, not the ball.” Luka instructed us to start prying into Garrett O’Brien’s life. Social networks, trade journals, blogs—we trawled the internet. “It’ll make sense once we have all the pieces.”
And he was right. O’Brien was cautious, but he made one mistake.
“Look,”—Anton sent the link around—“it’s a site for his wedding four years ago.” The website was updated with honeymoon pictures of a plain-looking couple travelling around. In one picture, they posed against a bridge. Golden Gate Bridge, San Francisco, the caption read, although I didn’t see any golden gates, only rust-colored girders. Another album had them posing against a starry night somewhere. In the next, they’re high up, pale flabby figures steeped in an infinity pool, which overlooked a deep blue sea wrapped around an island city like a scarf. “Sometimes when you travel around the world, it leads the world right back to you,” Anton said, as we flicked through the pictures.
The internal site counter revealed that few have visited this obscure and abandoned digital shrine. “Why do people create something like this?”
“Love,” Luka replied. “Idiocy,” Anton said at the same time.
Love and idiocy sounds about right. The way I see it, they’re a subset of each other. Each time I think of Anna, something gnaws my insides.
Luka ignored Anton. “Andrei, if you’re lucky enough to meet the right woman, make sure you never let her down.” He ran his hand through his hair, then it was back to work. “Keep digging.”
Apart from their travels, the O’Brien’s seemed like a solitary couple. No kids, few friends. Then, Anton found the wife’s Tumblr account. She used an anagram for her login, “As though that would hide her identity,” Anton sneered. One site led to the next and we discovered she belonged to a bird-watching society and maintained their official blog. On it, she posted pictures of sightings: birds singing, flying, posing with wings spread, mating, flapping. Kestrels, peregrines, blue-banded hawks, and ibises. Birds, birds everywhere.
“If we can get a key logger on the man’s computer, we can figure out his VPN setup,” Luka mused as he reviewed our findings.
“You think he’ll be that careless?”
“He isn’t. But Mrs Cuckoo Brain is,” Anton said. “I’m sure they share a home network. If we can get to her,”—he snapped his fingers—“that’s our way in. It’d be easy from there.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Luka said.
They exchanged the first smile in a long time. The sun and the moon were friends again.
“Would he log in to work from home?” I asked tentatively, afraid to break the peace.
“Does a mother suckle her child?” Luka retorted. I thought of my mother who had never suckled me. “He’s a system administrator, they’re slaves to their machines. Those birds will lead him to us, you’ll see.”
1.30
Once, Anton asked, Hey Andrei, what does it feel like to be an orphan?
I told him that everyone becomes an orphan eventually, what’s the big deal? He’d looked impressed by that, or pretended he was. I don’t know why but I couldn’t concentrate on work the whole day.
Maybe it’s the quiet in my bedroom that brought back that particular conversation.
It’s night now, the silent hours when every creak of the floorboards, the sound of people quarreling next door, even a random cough on the street, carried. Anna had been practicing the piano earlier, but she stopped over an hour ago. Old Nelya had left me too. During dinner, I’d wondered about the O’Brien’s and asked her what it felt like to be married. Her wrinkles had disappeared as she spoke about her husband, a pilot, who died decades before I was born. After a few sentences, her face fell, as if her memory had been gunned down somewhere, somehow. Her hand twisted the ocher-colored kerchief around her head, fumbling to keep one end tied to the other. Eventually, she pleaded a headache and left.