“But it doesn’t tell you where.”
“It can.” He hit Control-M and markers came up: Tokyo Stock Exchange, NASDAQ, Crude Oil DPB. “But remember, what it’s measuring isn’t the change but the rate of change. I don’t care what the level of the Dow is, or even how much it went up or down, but how much it went up or down relative to, a, the overall size or value of the data set and, b, its previous movement. A steady increase, as long as it continues to change at the same rate, won’t show up at all. But if the increase slows, right, even if the change is now zero, the change in the rate of change will be what we see. You got it?”
“Like it measures acceleration and deceleration, not speed.”
“Exactly. I mean, it doesn’t so much tell the future as show turbulence in complex systems, which I think might offer a key to understanding the systems themselves. Part of the problem is that so far the systems are user-defined. I mean, if I had enough computing power, I could feed thousands and thousands of real-time data streams into the thing and you’d get a global picture. Another problem is real-time data—most good data is private or secret. What you’re seeing now is very narrow. It’s like taking a poll of five hundred people; it just doesn’t tell you much. Whereas if you polled five hundred thousand, you’d have some real numbers.”
“Huh.”
“Yeah. So there it is.”
“Trippy.” Aaron pulled out his thumb drive. “My turn.”
“Okay.” Matt closed down the program and plugged in Aaron’s drive.
“Iraq Pix,” Aaron said. “Camp Crawford.”
The fire crackled between them.
“What was that with you and Aaron?” Wendy asked, turning to Dahlia.
“Just messing with him,” Dahlia said.
“Dolly working her mojo,” Mel said.
“I ain’t got no mojo.”
“Dirty Dahlia,” Wendy laughed. “I’d be jealous if I didn’t know you were so stuck on Matt.”
“Sure,” Dahlia said. “Like a tar baby.”
The first picture was of a dusty, tan-colored building looming against a bruised sky. Barbed wire coiled on the wall tops.
“We did a bunch of stuff in Iraq,” Aaron said, “including working at several different internment camps. This is Camp Crawford. We called it the Pit. It was north of Baghdad, not far from Taji, and it was specifically for insurgents and intel targets. It’s not like Cropper, on BIAP, which was high-value, or Abu G, which had a bunch of different shit. We were supposed to get hard cases from other assets in the north and northwest, a lot of hadjis from Fallujah and Tikrit and Baqubah, a lot of Sunni triangle shit.”
“Hadjis?”
“Iraqis. You get real racist over there.”
“Do you?”
“Anyway, Camp Crawford. Click forward.”
He did and the next pic was a bunch of soldiers, some in brown t-shirts and some in black, all wearing desert boots and brown camouflage pants, making gang symbols or flipping the bird, men and women both. Aaron was in there, leaner, more muscular, squatting with a rifle.
“These are the dudes I worked with. There’s Sergeant Dickersen, and that’s Grimes and Woolsley and Peanut and Garber. That’s Staff Sergeant Cortázar and Lieutenant Viers. The guys in black t-shirts—see, brown t-shirts, that’s the Army standard. The Air Force wear black t-shirts, but these guys aren’t Air Force. They’re OGA. Bill and Pete and Dick and Gary.”
“OGA?”
“Other governmental agencies. That dude there, the hadji-looking one, he’s our terp, Wathiq.”
“The thing with Aaron,” Wendy said, “I think he had a hard time in Iraq.”
“What do you mean a hard time?”
“I don’t know. He won’t talk about it. He says he just wants to put it behind him. But he’s really tense now, and I think… I think something happened.”
“You think he has PTSD?” Rachel asked.
“I don’t know how you know. He says he doesn’t.”
“Has he gone for counseling?”
“I don’t know. He just got back. He just showed up.”
“What’s the deal with you two?” Dahlia asked.
“I don’t really know,” Wendy said. “We started dating in Tucson, like, almost two years ago. I was finishing my MFA then, and he was still working on his bachelor’s, but he’s only a year younger than me… and we’d been dating for like six months but hadn’t discussed it as anything serious when he got called up, and then we started having these really super intense discussions about the future. I just couldn’t make the promises I think he wanted me to. I think he had this romantic idea I’d wait for him, pining away with a yellow ribbon, but I can’t live my life like that. And I didn’t even know if we were right for each other anyway. It’d just been a thing. So we basically made a tentative agreement that we’d keep writing and then check back when he got home. He thought the war would be over quick and he’d be sitting in the desert twiddling his thumbs the whole time like in that book Jarhead. So we wrote each other letters while he was in training, but then once he got to Iraq, it stopped. A couple emails, then nothing… until he called me from the airport in Atlanta, a year later. I couldn’t believe it. I thought I’d let it go. I thought I’d moved on. When I heard his voice on the phone, though, I sort of fell apart.”
“What did you think when he quit writing?” Rachel asked.
“Honestly? I thought he was dead. I mean, I read the lists for a few months and didn’t see his name, but how could I know? It was the not knowing that made it so bad. Finally I just closed off the part of myself that cared.”
“Jesus.”
“Didn’t you call his parents or somebody?”
“He’s always been a loner. He never really talked about his parents much. I know his dad used to live somewhere near Tucson, and I’m not even sure where his mom’s at. He had some friends in college, the guys in his band and his stoner buddies, but they didn’t know any more than I did.”
The next picture showed a young Iraqi woman smiling uneasily at the camera, looking at something outside the picture’s frame. She wore loose orange prisoner pants and a Pantera shirt and her hair was streaked with blonde, dark roots growing out over platinum stripes. She couldn’t have been older than nineteen or twenty.
“That’s Connie,” Aaron said. “We called her Connie. She was in for theft, I think, but she was nice and spoke some English, so she got a lot of freedom. Click forward.”
The next picture was of Connie pulling her shirt up over her breasts, tugging the waist of her orange pants down to the top of her pubic hair.
“Two dolla. Some dudes paid five for the whole nude, but I dig how this one’s flirty, like she’s not showing you everything yet. She did other stuff, too, on the DL, but I wouldn’t touch that cooze with a ten-foot pole.”