Watchlist (33 page)

Back at his apartment, Anderson heated up the days-old pasta he'd been not much looking forward to. He wasn't much of a cook, and in his freelance days he'd been forced to enjoy his own cooking more than he would have liked to. The pasta was left over from a restaurant that Anderson had been to one night the week before, after work. He'd left the office, gone to the restaurant, thought about nothing, sat with no one, and before he knew it it was ten o'clock and he brought the rest of the meal home to his quiet apartment, where he had immediately fallen asleep.

Pasta devoured, Anderson checked the locks on his door and changed into a sleeping T-shirt and clean boxers. He settled himself into the armchair beside his bed, and rather than cracking the desperate old copy of Dostoevsky that had been darkening his bedside, he reached for a copy of
The New Yorker
that he'd picked up on a whim one subway ride. It was neither new nor old. This was the perfect age for a
New Yorker
, he considered. He had always felt an aspirational tug to read
The New Yorker
,
to sit somewhere and read the magazine from beginning to end. Including the dance reviews that he might not have paid any attention to otherwise. He could envision himself doing this someday, some weekend when he was married to a Zoe-like figure and he was the editorial director of a fresh new imprint, maybe e-only at that stage in the game. He would page through the magazine, knowing all the writers, many personally. Anderson opened the magazine, and made it all the way through the Talk of the Town, skipping the economics column (naturally), and starting the short story. But it was a light first-person piece that had the problem that many first-person pieces had in recent years, in Anderson's opinion, that they mattered only to the first-person in the story and their creators themselves. They didn't have the elegance, the everyman quality, of third-person narration. In the middle of the story Anderson lost interest for good, and closed the magazine.

Usually Anderson tried to go to sleep without checking email. He'd come to understand that it messes with your natural sleep patterns, that it opens some pathways that healthy sleep depends on having closed. But tonight Anderson pulled his laptop off the shelf where he kept it next to his bed, and signed into his Gmail account. There were the usual promotions from Amazon and BookBub, and news alerts from a local news website he'd signed up for long, long ago. Nothing of interest. Perturbed, Anderson pulled up a new tab to get into his office email system, which was something he
very
much tried to avoid on a regular basis. He gave them enough hours of the day. He typed in his ironic password—DownAndOutInNYC—and the colorful green design of the FicShare page appeared before him. There was an all-staff email from Griff about some new e-reading app he'd seen on the train that night. Nikil had responded, “Interesting.” Zoe had sent out the daily schedule for the upcoming day. But nothing particularly intriguing. Anderson even checked his spam folder.

There's no other way to put it: Anderson felt a little down. As usual, there was nothing special in his life. This was nothing new. He found his surprises in literature, not real life. Even his reading choices confirmed it—he looked, dilettante-like, for amusement, rather than deep vertical mastery of any particular author or period. It was why he'd drifted out of graduate school to New York City in the first place. Anderson looked at the clock on the upper right-hand corner of the screen—it was 1:00 a.m. Easy to get down on yourself at a time like that.

Anderson closed down the laptop, slid it back on its shelf, took a lingering look at the forlorn-looking Dostoevsky, and shut off the lights.

H
E WAS AWOKEN
with a rap on his window. He had been in the middle of a dream in which he and Anita were staring at a computer monitor, forearms bumping, and Zoe had her hands on their shoulders, staring disapprovingly. This was all par for the course for Anderson. Anita reached for the computer screen and tapped it with her fingernails. Again and again. Finally Zoe reached forward and did the same, but harder this time, so that in his dreamworld the screen Anderson was looking at shivered and broke. He woke up. There was someone tapping on his fire escape.

He got out of bed. With the lights off, he had a pretty good view of the outside, once he pulled the curtains apart. Leaning against the fire-escape railing, hand poised to knock once again, there was a woman. She was dressed in slacks and a button-down shirt, which seemed to Anderson improbable for a cat burglar or nighttime strangler. Her posture prefigured not danger or anxiety but almost normality, even out there on the fire escape. The woman nodded at him, gesturing the window up. He unlocked it and lifted.

Higher, the woman said, in a friendly but impatient way. He pushed it as high as it would go, and the woman ducked her head underneath. He gave her a hand as she hopped down next to his bed.

Shut that, the woman said, and keep the lights off. Wait, she said, as Anderson opened his mouth to begin with one of various pressing questions. The woman took a cell phone out of her pocket—it looked like an iPhone but a bit heavier-duty. She brought it to life with a few touches of her meaty fingers and a beam extended from it. She swung it 360 degrees around the room. Then she consulted with its glowing screen and, satisfied, returned the phone to her pocket. Okay, she said. Then she froze again. No. Her eyes had lighted on a plastic cup that Anderson had carelessly left on his bedside table, gifted from some takeout place down the street. The woman peered at it, sizing up the angle from it to the window, and in one motion reached it, snatched it from its perch, and crumpled it to a loud nothing of grainy plastic in her hands.

Jesus, yelped Anderson. Microphone, the woman explained. Or, it could be anyway. All they'd need is a laser pointer and a clear view from across the way. The woman scowled out the window from whence she'd come, as if these laser demons had been right behind her. I have to say I'm a little confused, said Anderson. Don't you have P2P, the woman said indignantly. The blank look on Anderson's face would have told her what she needed to know. It's a security system, sighed the woman. Anonymous peer-to-peer secure communication. I thought everybody knew about that these days. Anderson, however, didn't.

Can we turn a light on, Anderson asked. The woman responded by retrieving her cell phone from her pocket and tapping a few times. The ceiling light, and also Anderson's reading lamp, flickered on. Anderson eased himself back onto his bed. This is all quite a lot to take, Anderson said.

He closed his eyes for a moment. When he opened them, the woman was still there, indeed, was peering down at him concernedly. It gave him a good chance to take the measure of her. She wasn't exactly beautiful, which is another way of saying that she matched Anderson. She had thick limbs like he did, a wide, angular face that in some lights could seem strange or intriguing. She seemed to have the beginnings of a paunch around the waist, just like Anderson had begun developing recently. He would say it had been the switch from earning his money hand-to-mouth to FicShare's custom of leaving Nutri-Grain bars all around the office desks. But really it was his lack of self-control.

I'm the new hire, the woman said, with an air of explaining the obvious. Or, former, she added. Svetlana, she said, waving her hand in an awkward but pleasant hello. Great bookshelf, she said, I love Malory too. Anderson, Anderson said stiffly, a little behind.

Let's get going, she said, gesturing toward the doorway. It's fine, it's not bugged after all. Anderson stayed where he was, although she didn't look back to see if he was following. She didn't seem to be the type of person who successfully waited for answers or orders. Only at the doorway did she turn around.

What, she said, do I have to make the whole speech now? Aren't you even a little bit curious? Look, I promise to have you back in bed in an hour, if that's what you want to do. Her eyes twinkled a little.

Anderson considered. If he was in danger he probably would have felt it already. There would be plenty of time later for regrets. It wasn't like he had to be at work early in the morning. Svetlana, sensing what the small movements that Anderson was committing were pointing toward, opened the door soundlessly. Anderson gathered his keys and wallet—Svetlana wagged a finger when she saw him reaching for his cell phone, which he dropped—and, on a whim, traded the phone for the copy of Dostoevsky lying to the side. Anderson carried the book against his wrist, and the weight of it, the half-fresh paperback pages, felt comforting as he ventured into the unknown.

O
UTSIDE, ON THE
corner of the block of Anderson's apartment, a white car was waiting. This furthered Anderson's sense that he wasn't in danger, immediate anyway, and besides, Svetlana was the one driving. She pulled a slim ring of keys out of her pocket as they approached. Anderson opened the back door. I'm not a taxi driver, she said, indignantly. Or a cop. She grinned.

The car bounced along the recently unpaved streets of Brooklyn—Anderson's neighborhood (not Anderson exactly, but his immediate peers) had been pressuring the city government to re-level their relatively bucolic street, as if there weren't enough problems elsewhere. Someone with a sense of humor in City Hall must have given the okay to get started, but not permission to finish. The hot exposed street was sticky and vaguely sewage-smelling in the summer days. But soon they reached the Manhattan Bridge, by the good offices of wide Flatbush Avenue. As they crossed the great river, Svetlana began to fill Anderson in.

FicShare is a dangerous entity, Svetlana started. It's not alone in its danger, but that doesn't make it innocent either. She had a stirring, sugary voice. Maybe it began in an innocent, positive way, she said—maybe the idea really did come from a library. That was partially why I went through the interview process, Svetlana said, gunning the gas to get through a red light off the bridge, to hear Nikil and James in their own words. She looked over at Anderson. It's seductive, as I'm sure you know. I can see them thinking about it while sitting on some leafy steps outside an actual library, wherever they went to college. Anderson knew it was Stanford (he'd seen their resumes too), but he didn't mention this to his confident driver.

I don't think I need to play out the numbers for you, Svetlana said. Sure, maybe this gives a relatively underprivileged kid the opportunity to read a few more books—that's assuming they've gotten their hands on an e-reader in the first place, and haven't heard of a public library system, which does this for free anyway. And maybe it spreads awareness of an author, and someone, somewhere, actually buys the book, physical or digital, that supports their bottom line. But you know the real drill. The only people who will actually use FicShare are people like us, people like Griff. It sounds sexy and hip and like a new way forward, in lots of ways. But people will start feeling good about
thinking
about all the reading they can do and they won't actually do any of it. And all there'll be will be VC funding and some nice offices, Svetlana said. Another reason to be glued to our device. Anderson was pleased, among all this, that Griff's proclivities traveled before him. And so it'll be one more trap, snaring us in the digital space, Svetlana said.

They coasted through the streets of Chinatown. The people I work for, Svetlana said, don't want this to continue. It doesn't matter who they are, or how many of us it takes. There is a silent majority of us. A person wakes up in the morning and discovers—well, nothing particularly earth-shattering, just that they can't continue with it any longer. Not with life, although that's a part of it, but everything—the constant connection. Pinterest, Facebook. The fact that the first thing this person reaches for every morning is their cell phone because it has become their alarm clock, and then, because they've reached for it, they start checking things, before their bleary eyes have even adjusted to another morning—email, work email, various sites, Snapchats. In this way this person or persons feels that they are missing the advent of sunlight, the nape of their lover's neck; the puffy-cheeked entry into daily existence. They sometimes forget to go to the bathroom first thing, as they had usually done, sometime in the distant past. They can hardly remember their old daily routines. Anderson did, in fact, know what the woman was talking about. He agreed, in a sort of begrudging way.

I'm bringing you to meet some people, Svetlana said. They'll have some requests to make of you. They're fellow souls, you'll see. You'll feel right at home with them—she nodded at the paperback Anderson was carrying, like a talisman or spirit pole. We've taught ourselves to survive in this world, Svetlana said, but we want to change it. We want to pause it, is a way of thinking about it, she said. Suddenly there were the lights of Broadway, the empty but half-lit stores of the street's southern section, mannequins gesticulating in the moonlight, and before Anderson had much more time to process anything they had arrived, back at Bar Kaminuk where he'd started his then-uneventful night.

Svetlana parked in a bus stop and they left the car. Don't worry, she said, there won't be any cops coming by. She moved confidently and methodically, Anderson noted, like a former athlete, or someone who had cottoned to manual labor late in life but well. The lights were off in the bar except for one, all the way in the back, and Svetlana and Anderson eased their way through the quiet door. Inside, the bartender was sitting more or less where Anderson had left him, still reading something or other, and next to the bartender stood Zoe.

Hello Anderson, the bartender said with a smirk. Zoe! said Anderson. Are you involved in this, he said, and she gave a small nod without changing her expression. Svetlana reached over the bar to shake the bartender's hand, and nodded at Zoe. Svetlana took her heavy-duty cell phone out of her pocket and waved it around once more—it beeped when she got to the bartender, and the bartender pulled his own phone out of his pocket and apologized. He got up and Anderson watched him go to the refrigerator behind the bar, where he tossed his phone in and closed it. Svetlana took a seat on the stool next to Zoe, and Anderson remained standing, as if at an interview.