Projections, page 15
But this time, with the rustling of the leaves, unsettling intimations had come, borne high and kitelike on the same ghost wind—and there was a feeling of openness, of vulnerability, that was not entirely positive. She abruptly decided to take a month off, which was unprecedented for someone with her caseload. The team muttered, including her supervisor, but Winnie had built serious credibility, even a kind of celebrity, winning allowance after allowance, constructing patent estates from chaos—wielding her mind like a weapon trained in both law and engineering, unique in its ability to grapple with interlocking artificial-intelligence intellectual property families. Her team of lawyers and staff had filed seventeen hundred patents—counting all the divisionals and continuations—for their major client last year alone. But now she needed a month of leave; there were pressing issues to address. She was exposed.
The first issue was Oscar, who lived in the townhouse next door. He had installed a satellite dish on the roof over his deck—and seemed to be preparing to download her thoughts. Winnie needed someone to pay him a visit, dismantle the dish, and take him into custody; her homeowner’s association security would have been natural to call in, but they were probably allied with him. Same with the police. She needed to find a do-it-yourself solution, to take care of herself, as she always had.
A trick occurred to her, a temporary countermeasure against the satellite dish—just a quick kludge, but with a chance of really working. She dug out a heavy black knit cap, the one with the reflective Raiders logo she got in college, which she hadn’t worn since her Berkeley days. She put it on and pulled it down tight over her ears. Right away, everything seemed more contained. It was a bit surprising that it worked that well, with just the silvery logo of a football team as an electromagnetic field insulator, but there was no doubt—the satellite signal felt less likely to get in, or her own thoughts to leak out. The hat’s tightness helped to shape the air around her head, to separate and clarify borders.
This vulnerability was correctable, then, and a more permanent solution dwelt in engineering. There were structural changes she could make inside the bedroom wall to reinforce that border with a conductive material—installing a true modern Faraday cage as a shield against the satellite dish signal. She started working on the wall, and her home tool kit gradually expanded with a few short drives to the hardware store across town for some more specialized items—a crowbar, a little chicken wire, some sheet metal, a voltmeter.
But other developments in this strange new season were more disturbing, and harder to address. Outside her expertise. More biological. At the center of it all was Erin, assistant to Larry the senior partner, younger than Winnie and five months along. Erin had become pregnant clearly to taunt her, targeting Winnie for living alone and not having children. It was unprofessional of her, and embarrassing for Winnie, and a little frightening considering Erin’s proximity to power in the firm.
Here, there was no clear engineering solution to address the offensive behavior. Winnie had to get to Larry himself. Larry was the only one who could discipline Erin, and he needed to be informed and challenged to act. So over a weekend Winnie planned an incursion into the upper reaches of her own law firm—the C-class floor, with all the chiefs and captains. She mapped out her access plan and rehearsed the conversation with Larry—mostly in her head at first, not using her computer or the Internet, as it could be assumed Erin had hacked everything of hers, and had long since obtained access to her emails.
A lot of her planning became sketching on paper, elaborate reconstructions of desk orientations and restroom placements from memory, but then she got restless, needing to move her body, to do something physical, and so Winnie went back to her satellite dish countermeasures for several days—removing drywall, peeling the insulation back from her east-facing wall to see what lay behind it, and beginning to arrange the new metallic shielding.
Then came new, darker undernotes to the change in season, and some were frankly frightening. Over the second weekend of her leave, she became aware of the grim and gray-lipped ones—information vampires. Stocky, thick, and strong as ox hearts, lurking in the shadows behind the dumpsters, they started draining her energy and thoughts, tapping directly into her. And with this she moved beyond, into some new phase. This new season was not just wind shimmering her leaves. No longer just gentle phantom fingers softly stroking, now it felt more like glumpy digits pinching coarsely, aggressively, for her cells like grains—her brainpan a helpless, squat saltcellar.
And then, finally, a new voice emerged on Sunday, from within her head—mid-pitched, ambiguously sexed—intermittently repeating the word disconnect. The voice felt familiar in some way, with a quality she recognized from adolescence, when she once heard her own thoughts at that pitch, except now much louder and clearer. It was alien yet deep within her somehow, a shout between her temples.
On Monday morning, Winnie decided it was Erin, and knew that she had endured enough. She steeled herself, stepped out of her townhouse, and climbed into her car. The drive itself went smoothly, past the shadowy parking lot dumpsters without incident, though there was a surprising sharpness of the stop sign as she turned onto El Camino Real, standing out in a way that mattered. The acuity with which she felt its eight edges commanded attention—but a horn blared behind her. Startled, she drove on.
Winnie arrived ten minutes later at her law firm’s oak-scattered Page Mill Road campus. She disembarked carefully. In the parking lot, near her car, a flattened screw lay on the concrete. She knew, as soon as she saw it, that they had placed it there as a sign: they knew she was coming and intended to screw her.
The day abruptly darkened—the atmosphere now ominous—and she nearly turned around and headed back to her car. An unsettling thought came to her: the screw revealed their deep access to her plans, since they knew she would be there, and therefore they had so much more—her personal life, her private records, her healthcare even. And she had gone through a miscarriage just a few days ago…though as she thought about that, her blood rising, Winnie felt her grip on her own experience loosen. She became not completely, not 100 percent certain there had been a miscarriage. She could not picture the experience or any details; suddenly, it was a little hard to remember what actually had happened…as if that inner wind whipping up to a tornado had stripped her branches nearly bare, and her memories were now mostly lost to that gray-fingered twister, swirling down from a glooming cloud that was heavy and pregnant with rain.
Winnie paused, trembling, standing over the screw, pressing her temples to process it all, to focus herself, to consider all the ramifications and uncertainties. A paralegal she knew distantly—Dennis, something like that, datable she had thought once—walked past on his way to the main building. He sent an odd look her way, searching. She turned away, put her sunglasses back on, and tugged her Raiders cap down tight.
Before others, anyone—lawyers, admins, paralegals—can complicate things, you have to go in now, she told herself, speaking the words clearly and distinctly in her mind as if lecturing. You will not back down and run. That little screw message is just from Erin. Larry can be turned; Larry will be on your side.
She steadied herself and stepped deliberately inside, keeping as far from the walls as possible; with a tense smile she showed her badge to the security guard at the desk, then walked to the elevators and rode up to Larry’s fourth-floor domain. She made a pass by his suite; careful to avoid eye contact, she was still able to mark Erin at the admin desk, looking for trouble. Winnie’s first tactical mission had been perfectly accomplished—identifying what Erin was wearing, that formless yellow dress. Then she headed to the bathroom, entered a stall, closed the door, and waited, positioning her line of sight so she could watch through the crack in the stall door for Erin to come in, knowing it could not be long.
She waited almost an hour, but eventually a flash of yellow flickered in. Winnie calmly stood up, opening the door to her stall just after Erin’s closed. She walked straight to the bathroom door, exited left, pulled her hat down tight, and strode back to the office suite.
She’d worked with Larry on a couple of the firm’s thorny international cases, but only at a distance. They were two different kinds of human being—diplomat and introvert, schmoozer and quant—and yet today he’d recognize her, and realize the urgency once she began to speak. She walked past Erin’s empty desk, knocked on Larry’s closed door, and walked in. He looked up from his laptop and made eye contact. She sat down, confidently, in a chair before his desk.
There followed a great deal of confusion. It could hardly have gone worse, and it seemed the next moment she was sitting in a cluttered side room in the human resources offices, waiting for an ambulance, with what must have been the entire firm security team, perspiring in blazers, watching her.
She had been forceful but scrupulously polite with Larry, factually laying out the situation—describing how Erin’s pregnancy was an unprofessional gesture planned to humiliate her, providing details of the email hacking that had transpired since, even telling him about the screw and how terrifying it was to see—but she had also maintained, she thought, a reasonable and calm tone. She had kept her face expressionless, solid as concrete—careful to not upset him with emotion or gestures—but it all had seemed to spin sideways after a few minutes. Larry was on the phone, then the first blazer came, then firm hands on her elbows. With her vision darkening in humiliation, she had been marched out right in front of Erin. Winnie made sure to give no route in, keeping her face a mask, with no eye contact—and off they went, to this windowless room she had never known existed.
The ambulance came a few minutes later. Two men in purple latex gloves appeared with paperwork and a scattering of tubes and wires. She was relieved to see them, and desperate to get out of the little room. The EMTs were both thin and densely muscular like climbers—and courteous, as they conducted a quick physical exam and asked about her psychiatric history. She told them the truth: there was no mental illness in her family. But AJ, her older brother, was different from the rest, with a way of saying odd, muddled, arresting things. He had never found his path—but he also never really got the chance. Winnie told the EMTs how AJ had been found on a downtown plaza, collapsed alone near a bus stop on a blazing hot day, already dead.
It had been an AVM—arteriovenous malformation—an artery misdirected, its thickly muscled walls jetting high-pressure blood directly into a delicate vein that evolution had designed for another job: only for collecting puddles of spent blood, weakly exuding from the brain. A doctor had said the malformation might have been a sign of a broader problem, a connective tissue disease—but nobody ever knew for sure, just that at least one AVM had always been there, hidden from view deep inside his brain, struggling for years to cope with the ferocious and incessant pounding of the carotid pulse, its diaphanous membrane stretched thin until the moment came to burst.
She did also mention her possible miscarriage from a few days ago—she was still unsure about it, with the memory poised between real and unreal. They seemed irritated by that uncertainty, which she understood; she was bothered too. She was certain about her distant cancer, the words so familiar and fraught, lancinating even now—cutaneous large T cell lymphoma with central nervous system involvement. She recounted the clinical course expertly. How it had started with double vision and headaches…and how since they had found some cancer cells in her cerebrospinal fluid, the methotrexate had been infused directly there, into the spinal canal itself, at the level of her lower back. How she had been completely cured, now going on twelve years cancer-free.
She had some scrapes on her knuckles from the wall teardown she was doing at home, but she explained that only briefly since they didn’t seem to care much about her renovations. She noticed the EMTs persisted for some time in asking about drugs, in every which way, perhaps trying to trap her, but getting the same answer again and again—no drugs, never even a cigarette, just an occasional glass of wine. In the ambulance, things finally got quieter, and she had a little more time to think about it all—a frustrating interlocking puzzle of possibilities.
Most likely her thoughts had been tapped, her plans picked up and sent ahead to Larry and his team by data vampires. Meanwhile she noticed the paramedics were calling ahead—to the hospital, they said, but more likely to the grim and gray-lipped ones. “On a fifty one fifty” they kept saying—50-1-50, or 50-150, or 51-50, which was it? The code must matter. Was it used to trigger, or accelerate, a download? Normally she could crack this kind of thing. Winnie pulled her hat down more tightly, and tried to drift back in time, just a few weeks, to how it all started, to feel that first exhilarating breath of fresh September air.
Later in the emergency room, the nurses and doctors asked all the same questions as the purple-gloved gentlemen. They pretended to type her identical responses on various tablets, apparently never bothering to talk to each other, in between rounds of prodding and poking with stethoscopes, blood draw needles, and reflex hammers.
They didn’t care about her renovations either, but were very interested in the story of AJ—oddly far more than the paramedics had been. It got hard for Winnie to talk about him by the fourth or fifth time. As she gave shorter versions of his story every time, longer versions came to her, within her. There were increasingly lengthy pauses—she would stop midsentence, even midword—as images came sweeping through. Imagined scenes of his final moments, alone without a sister there to hold him, with nobody who loved him to cradle his muddled head.
AJ—the lost child, lost long before he died. School was as hard for him as it was perfectly suited to Winnie and Nelson, right down to their precision handwriting and their love of logic and engineering. But for AJ, even odd jobs had never quite worked out, whether in car shops or bakeries. Every venture seemed to end with befuddled bad luck, poor judgment, or dumbfounding accidents—though he stayed gentle all the way, until he fell that blazing summer day. She flew back east for the funeral, and a wrenching bark of a sob burst from her own body, a sound she had never spoken or known, when she saw that familiar crease in his forehead smoothed out, at rest, at last.
She lay curled on her side, on the gurney in Room Eight, and became lost in imagining AJ’s final moments, reliving his run from the bakery to the bank, the run she and Nelson had reconstructed from scraps of paper in his pocket and clues from his co-workers, the agitated dash that turned out to be his last desperate attempt to support an independent life. The doctors had said the stress of that day, the running, the heat, and the worry, all had probably brought his blood pressure up, and the AVM had finally ruptured. Just a frailty waiting quietly, a small thing knocked loose by a day in which all the things that made his life hard had come together at once.
They could still poke and bleed and scan, but Winnie was done. Day turned to evening, dry sandwiches and juice boxes appeared and disappeared…and then a long stretch of nothing.
* * *
•
A knock came at her door, and a doctor walked in, with disheveled brown hair and coffee-stained blue scrubs under his white coat. He introduced himself, seeming to be sort of a mumbler—or maybe he was just tired. Winnie didn’t quite catch his half-swallowed name, but psychiatrist: that word she heard.
Winnie sat up and swung her legs over the side of the gurney. He shook her hand, and sat in the chair near the door, saying, “I’ve seen all the paperwork from the ER team, and I’ve spoken with the ER docs. But if it’s all right, I’d like to hear from you, in your own words, how you ended up here today.” Winnie looked him over carefully, and then she rested her gaze in his eyes, taking a moment to think about his angles, and hers, before responding.
At the end of the day, she needed help, and had found no allies yet. Best to tell him something, if not everything. “Information vampires,” she said. He needed to know. He wrote it down, and looked right back at her. “All right,” he said, “tell me about that.”
So she did—well, most of it. Not every detail, just the hard facts as anyone would see them. The information vampires were tapping into her brain, draining her thoughts; that all was clear enough and she could be logical and calm in describing it, with a surfeit of evidence that she could tick through. First her neighbor had installed a dish antenna on his roof two weeks ago to gain better access to her thoughts, but she had a shielding countermeasure that was in process. She had stopped going to work since people at work were accessing her, hacking in, trying to decode her thoughts and feelings. She told him about the screw in the parking lot too, so he would understand how powerful her enemies were, and why she had to disconnect and protect herself.
Winnie briefly mentioned the disconnect voice—how it was frightening but also reasonable, speaking a word she might have thought herself, voicing an idea that she wanted, but maybe something an enemy of hers wanted too. She explained that the word was spoken audibly inside, with all the qualities of sound. Someone, probably Erin, was accessing her mind—but why, she did not really know.
After a while he began to ask his own questions, in a pattern different from that of either the paramedics or the other ER doctors. When he asked about the Raiders cap she was wearing—pulled down to her eyebrows—she told him plainly, “That’s to protect my thoughts.” When he pointed to her gurney and asked why she had pulled it away from the wall into the center of the room, she answered simply, “Because I don’t know what’s on the other side.” He circled back to her renovations, which none of the other doctors had shown any interest in, asking her for the first time about the wall she was tearing down and why.
