Spark: A Novel

  “He sent you the files.”

  “That’s rig ht.”

  “But you don’t own this information.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Then why did you give it to Thomas Slater’s Web site?”

  “Because Jafar got killed in Paris. The Pradhani Group hired an assassin … probably some Mafia guy … to shoot everybody. Look, I realize you’re just doing your job, Underwood. But these people are really evil. Do you understand that?”

  “Let’s stay with the facts,” I said. “Why did you put the flash drive in the music box?”

  “That was my insurance in case something bad happened to me. The music box was a Christmas gift from my uncle when I was fourteen years old. Roland would leave surprises in it if I was sad or having problems in school. Then he’d tell me that ‘home is where the heart is.’ ”

  Emily returned to the kitchen area. She opened the refrigerator and discovered rows of bottled water. “Where’s your food, Underwood? You do eat food, right? I’m hungry.”

  “I don’t consume things that decay inside me.”

  “Are you some kind of weird vegetarian?”

  “Sit down and I’ll serve you something.”

  Emily watched me take a bottle of ComPlete and my only glass out of the cupboard. I placed them both in the middle of the table.

  “What’s this?”

  “ComPlete. It’s a sole-source nutrition drink.”

  “Isn’t this for old ladies and cancer patients? What about some crackers and peanut butter? Or an apple?”

  “This is the only food I consume.”

  She tore off the plastic seal and poured the white liquid into the glass. It was very strange to have this Human Unit in my private space. I could feel the warmth of her body over by the refrigerator.

  “I’ll drink this crap, but you’ve got to sit down at the table. I don’t like you standing there, staring at me.”

  “There’s a folding chair in the closet.”

  “Perfect. Go get it.”

  I went to the closet, returned with the chair, and sat beside her at the table. “Here’s to you, Jacob.” Emily raised the glass and took her first sip. “This tastes like vanilla chalk dust. But good chalk dust. Nutritious chalk dust.” She finished off the drink and slammed the glass down on the table.

  “Another bottle?”

  “Sure. Why not? Let’s go crazy tonight.” She grinned when I took out a second bottle of ComPlete. “So what are we going to do while we’re waiting for the lawyers to call? Do you have a deck of cards?”

  “No.”

  “A television?”

  “No.”

  “What do you do when you’re not tracking down wayward bank employees?”

  I decided not to tell her about the nail and the cord and walking in a perfect circle. “Sometimes I watch a documentary about a service dog named Baxter.”

  “Sounds great! I love dogs. Let’s watch it together.”

  I didn’t want her to keep asking questions, so I turned on my computer and told Edward to play A Boy for Baxter.

  I don’t really own anything except for my clothes and a few pieces of furniture, but I have become attached to this movie. Over the last three years, I had watched the film hundreds of times and memorized all the dialogue. It felt like I owned the story.

  All that changed when I saw the movie through her eyes. Emily liked Max Velden, the trainer who carried dog biscuits in one shirt pocket and bite-size chocolate bars for humans in the other pocket. She hated Dr. Potterfield, the autism expert who was constantly lecturing the two parents about everything they did wrong. At the end of the story, when Baxter was hit by a car, Emily’s eyes glistened and I wondered if she was going to cry. “Not fair,” she whispered. “Not fair at all.” When the dog got up on three legs and limped across the backyard patio, Emily blew her nose with a paper towel and drank a glass of water.

  “That was a great movie, Jacob! Thanks for showing it to me.”

  “I’ve watched it a few times.…”

  “So who are you? Gordon or Baxter?”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I hope you don’t take this wrong, but I think you’re kind of like Baxter. When we were drinking chocolate at the Vickerson workshop, you didn’t really say anything, but you were watching us, evaluating.” She laughed. “You would have been a great German shepherd.”

  “I’m—I’m Gordon.”

  “You’re autistic? Really?”

  I looked down at the floor. “No. That’s not it.”

  Dr. Rutherford said that I needed to form relationships with other people. But I knew that was a bad idea.

  Other people are confusing.

  Other people make simple events complicated.

  Other people attach invisible lines to your Shell, and then you can’t move freely.

  “I was injured in an accident, and it transformed me. I don’t perceive emotions. When I look at someone’s face, I can’t read the message there.”

  “And Baxter could help you?”

  “Yes. Definitely.”

  “How do you deal with people if you don’t have a service dog?”

  “I’ve scanned and downloaded images of forty-eight different emotions. They’re photographs of a nineteenth-century French actor named Jean LeMarc.” I took out my phone. “Laura … show emotion file.”

  In the first photograph, Jean LeMarc was smiling. His eyes were wide and upturned lines appeared at the corners of his mouth.

  “Happiness,” Emily said.

  “That’s right.”

  “This is fun. Show me each photo and I’ll see if I can pick the right emotion.”

  Sadness.

  Pleasure.

  Disgust.

  After she gave me the right answer, I would lower my phone below the edge of the table. I’d find an emotion, then raise my hand and present the new photograph.

  Fear.

  Surprise.

  Desire.

  Emily laughed and demanded clues for a few of the images, but I wouldn’t answer her questions. She had problems identifying melancholy and ennui.

  “That’s not ennui. He just looks tired.”

  “You show me the right expression.”

  Emily pressed the palm of her hand against her cheek, gazed up at the ceiling, and sighed loudly. “No. That’s not it. Maybe you have to be French to feel ennui.”

  I presented the last emotion, and she studied it for several minutes.

  “Happiness.”

  “You already said ‘happiness.’ ”

  “Joy.”

  “Correct.” I switched off the phone.

  “When I was a child, I was told that the righteous would have an eternity of joy with the angels up in heaven. But I didn’t believe that. Not even a little bit. Joy catches you by surprise. You’re just living your life and then … bam!”

  She touched my arm and I jerked away from her. In that instant, all the warmth of the room vanished and it was cold—once again.

  “Never do that.”

  “Okay. I’m sorry.”

  “Rule number one is to tell people that I don’t like to be touched.”

  “I—I can see that. I apologize.”

  “You have a phone call,” Laura said.

  I got up from the table, walked over to the windows, and Miss Holquist whispered into my ears, “I want you to solve our problem … completely. Lorcan will come to your apartment tomorrow morning. He’ll pick up the empty container and take it away. Do you understand what you’re supposed to do?”

  “Yes.”

  “Good work, Underwood. I’m giving you a bonus.”

  I switched off the headset and realized that Emily was watching me.

  “Was that your boss?”

  “Yes.”

  “So what’s the decision?”

  “It’s late. Miss Holquist wasn’t able to contact the bank’s legal staff. You’ll spend the night here and she’ll contact us tomorrow
morning.”

  “So I’m a prisoner.” She said the last word with a great deal of force.

  “You are at this location until Miss Holquist calls us in the morning. I would say that you’re waiting. I’m waiting, too.”

  “I don’t want to be here. Do you understand that?”

  Emily began pacing again, moving so quickly that I thought she was going to slam into the wall. Her behavior reminded me of a scene in A Boy for Baxter when Gordon paced around a living room with wild energy. Baxter sensed that Gordon might start smashing things, but he didn’t approach the child. He just sat on a throw rug in his dog way—calm, but alert—and gradually he became the center point of the room.

  I walked over to the bed, sat on the floor, and leaned against the wall. I didn’t say anything, but I continued watching Emily. After a while she stopped pacing and sat on the edge of the bed.

  “I want to explain a few things,” she said.

  “That’s not necessary.”

  “Just listen. Okay? You need to see the whole picture. The information Jafar sent me proved that the Pradhani family have been hiding income and avoiding taxes. That’s not a big secret in India. Lots of rich people do that. But the bank is angry because they don’t want people to know that their international division helps tax cheats and arms dealers. When you walk into the BDG building, the lobby looks clean and ordered and beautiful. But it’s really just a bunch of thieves helping other thieves protect their money. Thomas Slater says that modern authority is based on a system of lies that are accepted by the general population. If you pull away the curtain and show the reality of power, people are motivated to question the fictions that govern their own lives.”

  “Is that why you joined the bank? To expose everyone?”

  “Not at all. I joined the bank because I wanted to make money. I don’t like to take shit from people, and having money seemed like the way to avoid that. During my first year at BDG, I just focused on learning the job, then I realized that I was following orders like a nubot. The same thing happened when I was a little girl. I grew up in Bledsoe, New Hampshire. It’s a town that had four stoplights and two of them were broken. Both my mother and my father were disciples of the Pure Holiness Church. Ever heard of it?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s a little bit Christian, and mostly a cult. Everyone in the church believes that the visible world was created by Satan. The only way you can break free of the Evil is by acts of daily purification. The church had all these rules. You couldn’t drink alcohol, eat pork, use an umbrella, and … oh yeah … you could only take cold showers and baths because cold water had more purity than warm water.”

  “And you believed this?”

  “No. Something was always wrong with me. Maybe I got dropped on my head when I was a baby. I remember sitting in church at the age of nine, listening to a sermon about infant damnation and thinking: Forget it. This is crazy. And that meant trouble because the church ruled our lives. I was homeschooled with my two sisters and we went to church services three nights a week. Because sexual desire was created by Satan, Reverend Wilkerson said that everyone needed to get married as young as possible. My father had a husband picked out for me when I was thirteen, but I ran away from home and called my uncle Roland from a pay phone. Roland is a wonderful man. He went to court and became my legal guardian. My parents think that I’m a Daughter of Satan, but sometimes they call up and ask for money.”

  “And when did you decide to work for the bank?”

  “Joining BDG was part of a much longer journey. My whole life changed because of a bottle of orange juice. After I graduated from high school, I got a job as a waitress at Waffle Hut and started taking classes at the local community college. But I spent most of my time smoking weed and hanging out with the kind of people who dreamed of getting hit by a car and winning a big insurance settlement. A couple of years melted away and then I walked into the local Stop and Shop. I wanted to buy a bottle of fresh-squeezed orange juice, but I had only eighty-four cents. I thought about stealing the bottle, but that wasn’t going to change how much money was in my pocket. And right then I decided that I wanted to get rich. If you have enough money, you can quit working at Waffle Hut and travel to any place in the world.”

  “So you got a better job?”

  “Not right away. The first thing I did was buy the software program and the computer link for a Guider.”

  “That’s a Shadow program, right?”

  “Guiders work like Shadows, but they’re much more than that. They were first developed for alcoholics and drug addicts, but now they’re used by anybody who wants to change their behavior. First, you pick the sex, age, and personality of your Guider, and then you tell them your goal. Gradually, the program learns more and more about you and the Guider starts to give you advice. I named my Guider ‘Claire.’ She was programmed to be a little bit older than me—like a big sister.”

  “And what did she tell you to do?”

  “My first goal was to go back to college and graduate with really good grades. At first, Claire just asked a lot of questions with this calm voice.”

  I nodded. “Both of my Shadows are calm.”

  “When I transferred to the University of Vermont and started taking classes again, Claire stopped asking questions and began telling me what to do. She was connected to my phone, so she always knew my location. If I went to a bar or tried to sleep late, Claire would call me up and tell me that I had to study. I didn’t realize that I had basically rejoined the Pure Holiness Church … only this time, a machine was telling me what to do.

  “After graduation, I got a job as a financial analyst for a bank in Boston and then, two years later, I got into business school. Human friends are usually thinking about their own problems, but Claire was always focused on me. After a while, she would connect to the cash register at the grocery store and tell me if I was buying unhealthy food. She would monitor my bank account so that I wouldn’t waste money.

  “I didn’t have my headset on during my job interviews for the Brooks Danford Group, but when I was hired as an associate, I linked Claire to my work computer and talked to her all day long. That was when she began to get a little bossy. Claire was still focused on making a lot of money and the fastest way to do that was to work twelve hours a day.”

  “Someone at the bank said that you took off your headset.”

  “Yeah. That’s true. An old college friend came down to New York and she took me to an art opening in Brooklyn. I thought we were going to see paintings hanging on walls, but a group of artists had taken over a warehouse and turned it into a carnival with a tunnel of love and booths to win prizes. I was throwing potatoes at a giant rabbit when I met Sean. He was smart and good-looking and a lot more interesting than the assholes who worked at the bank. When we left the art show, I put my headset back on. Sean was telling me about the growlers and Dice Night at Crawley’s while Claire was calling a taxi to take me back to my apartment. Then Sean pulled off my headset and asked: ‘So who’s living your life? You or a machine?’

  “I’m not saying that everything changed at that moment, but two weeks later, I took off the headset. I know that Claire is a software program, but she acted like a jealous ex-boyfriend. Claire was still active somewhere on the grid, and she would send me long e-mails telling me that I was making a mistake. Finally I had to buy a hacker program called Shadow Killer that erased her from the system.”

  “And you were still at the bank?”

  “Yeah, I was working there, getting my paycheck, but I began to see the world in a new way. I spent part of my childhood obeying all these church rules and then I let a computer program boss me around. All I knew is that I wanted to live a free life and make my own decisions. And that was when I met Jafar Desai at the conference in London.”

  Emily pulled off her boots and dropped them onto the floor. “Anyway, that’s my story. So what’s your story?”

  “I don’t have one.”

&n
bsp; “Did you go to college? Were you ever married? You said you were in an accident. What kind of accident?”

  “We exist in the current reality. Everything in the past is unimportant.”

  “So what do you do for fun in the current reality? This loft doesn’t look like a fun place, Jake. Swear to God … you need a couch.”

  “I like to walk through the Financial District at night. In the daytime, I follow the straight line painted on the path that runs beside the Hudson River.”

  “It’s called the Greenway. I like that, too.”

  “But most of all, I like to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge and look up at the cables. They divide the sky into precise sections.”

  “Well, I don’t know about that, but I’ve been on the bridge dozens of times. When I stand at the edge and look out at the harbor it feels like I’m floating above everything. It’s beautiful.”

  “I don’t believe in beautiful.”

  “You think everything’s ugly?”

  “Everything exists. Those values you attach to objects … beauty and ugliness … love and hatred … are just words.”

  “I still think you need a couch.” Emily looked around the room. “Do you have an inflatable mattress or a sleeping bag? It’s been a long day.”

  “Use the bed.”

  “I’m okay on the floor.”

  “I don’t sleep like you do. I close my eyes. Then I open them.”

  Emily flopped down on the mattress and turned onto her side. “I hope you don’t take this the wrong way, Jake … but you’re one of the strangest people I’ve ever met. Okay. Stop. Maybe ‘strange’ is a negative word. You’re different.”

  “Good night, Emily.”

  She was silent for a long moment and then in a soft voice she said, “Good night.”