Ellie had been staked out for a couple of hours, trying to vanish into her contoured driver’s seat with meager lower-back support, when a sinister-looking man who probably wasn’t sinister at all came walking along the avenue toward Maureen Jones’s house. He was wearing clothes of astonishing bagginess. Everything about the bagginess of his outfit was meant to facilitate the concealment of contraband items. Or not. Ellie Knight-Cameron watched the man look both ways before crossing the street. He strode to the door of Jones’s house, knocked, was admitted, and disappeared inside.
Ellie would grant that one man, even at this particularly late hour, was not a conspiracy. But this man was followed by another — a younger, shorter man who, when he was cascaded with the glare of streetlight, appeared to be sporting ornamental braids. This second man, whose garb was an athletic warm-up outfit, he too was admitted into Maureen Jones’s residence. Not fifteen minutes passed before a third appeared, a grizzled older fellow with a mane of impressive dreadlocks. This man must have been an elder statesman of the movement. Although Ellie Knight-Cameron did not have night-vision goggles or any other sophisticated surveillance items, she believed nonetheless that she saw this third man make some kind of eccentric hand gesture that proved him worthy of admittance.
Finally, a woman was allowed into Jones’s house. The situation was no different from those described above except that now a woman was involved. In no single case could Ellie see who was opening the door and admitting these strangers. Yet she could see that people were in fact entering the Jones residence. They would sidle up to the front door, knock once, perform the jazz hands gesture, the door would swing back, and the stranger would then slip into the house.
What exactly did Maureen Jones’s organization believe in? Ellie reviewed. She paged through the suggestions in order. She had saved them, of course, and here they were, in her lap, like artifacts of antiquity:
(A) If they’re going to close lanes on the parkway, they ought to actually repair the goddamned road. (B) You ought to throw this fucking coffee machine out the window and run over it with a car. (C) Worldwide revolution now. Throw off your chains. (D) All of you should be lined up and shot.
Considered in this way, there was a menacing progression to the Kolodny & Kolodny suggestions. In the first suggestion, the government was being called into question, the ability of the government to govern, to make decisions for the public good. In the second, the office itself was being castigated, as well as its daily diet of events: coffee breaks, luncheons, and so forth. In the third suggestion, Ellie thought, the conspiracy was calling upon the disgruntled populace to overthrow the existing order. And in the fourth, armed struggle began.
In the last moment before the necessity for action propelled her, Ellie had a disturbing thought. Wasn’t it possible that a person or persons in the office was colluding with Maureen Jones? Why hadn’t she considered it before? Any number of alliances could figure in this conspiratorial model, alliances comprised of employees present and past: Maureen and Angie, Maureen and Dolly, Maureen and Bonnie, Maureen and Astrid, Maureen and Neil Rubinstein, or even Maureen and Duane himself. Wasn’t Duane’s surname uncomfortably close to the world collude? And if two of the K&K family, why not three of them? What about Maureen and Angie and Dolly? Were there occasions when the three of them had appeared to be whispering conspiratorially? And if three, why not four? With four people, you know, they’d have a lock on office communications.
In the stillness of the street, Ellie felt flushed, confused, ashamed, abandoned by the commonplaces of the day. The reliable items of her adopted landscape, the material things before her — the sickly ginkgo trees of the block, stray cats, a rumbling garbage truck — were not as they appeared. There was a menace to objects and situations that were anything but menacing. She knew at once the likelihood of calamity, as would any good employee of K&K: great vengeful floods, tornadoes, explosions, acts of God. In the desert landscape of this Knight-Cameron fever, men and women lurched thirstily, disaffiliated from their inamoratas. She had never been as alone as this, as condemned. Maybe Eric was right, and she had not learned to read the client, the him or her who was not trying to take from Ellie what little she had, what modicum of serenity she had carved out for herself, thousands of miles from home. Maybe everyone was not trying to take her few possessions and run her out into the street; maybe every man she encountered was not trying to insult her person; maybe the bulk of those she encountered in the dark years of the war on terror were also innocents, people who were just trying to make an honest living and put by a little cash in case of dire accident. She blamed Duane and she blamed Chris Grady. Someone had to be blamed. Because injustice persisted well after the avengers of injustice were rendered impotent by exhaustion, scandal, prescription abuse, and appearances on the talk-show circuit.
In the end, it was this notion of injustice that enabled her to climb from her Dodge Omni. Injustice, and impatience, and a self-destructive need to finish a project even if it was a bad idea. She reeled onto the streets of Stamford, blushing horribly, knees weak, to charge with malicious crimes those persons who would threaten her peaceable office life. Those who would oppress the wage-earners of the new world order. Into the light weaved Ellie Knight-Cameron, lover of minor league baseball and the tango, delusional thinker, energetic misreader of signs and symbols, bound to collide, if not collude, with the mystery of all mysteries, which is the total absence of mystery in a market economy.
In due course, despite misgivings, she reached the front door of the Jones residence. And having girded herself, she was ready to knock. It was some kind of cheap hollow-core door, the sort you expect from a bankrupt home renovation chain, or from a stage set. Ellie Knight-Cameron knocked on it with the force of a patriot.
Merriment was taking place inside. She could hear merriment within. Was it possible that people could find pleasure in causing others hurt and dismay? Because Ellie was hurt and dismayed, and she intended to get satisfaction. It was as if they were laughing about it all. Ellie knocked again, and she heard the giddy excitement in the room diminish for a moment.
Would she be able to go through with it? Would she be able to face with equanimity the perils of revelation? Would there be guns? Should she call the authorities? Before she could change her mind, which she was dying to do, the door swung back, and there was a cry, an éclat, and the cry was enormous, enough to trouble the curtains nearby, up and down the block. And the cry was the word SURPRISE! “Surprise!” they called. “Surprise! Surprise!”
The inside of the Jones residence, she saw, was modest, as modest as the exterior, and it was neatly appointed, and there were streamers leading from the tops of the lamp shades to the curtain rods above, and then again from one of the chairs all the way over to the windowsill, and there was a little dog, a yapper, and even the dog had a ribbon around its neck, and there were some children, toddlers, wearing conical hats, and there were a lot of black faces, African American faces, and all of these faces had evidently been enjoying themselves or at least they were enjoying themselves until they got a good look at Ellie Knight-Cameron. Then something imperceptible vanished from their expressions. Because Ellie Knight-Cameron was not who they thought would be coming through the door when they shouted surprise.