After his birth, a nurse asked for a name—her baby boy’s name—and the one thing Margarita Garza wouldn’t give them was Jorge’s real name, first or last. She’d been spooked by her parents’ revelation re: her immigration status, and while her son’s citizenship wasn’t in question, still, she thought it safer giving him a nice American name on his birth certificate. But what should it be? The TV across from her hospital bed provided the answer. It was tuned to Cartoon Network, which was running a Jetsons marathon. She’d been hearing the opening theme all morning, including its roster of introductions to the show’s main characters. It was the first name on that oft-repeated list that now resonated for the new mother.
“George,” she said, paused, then added, “Jedson.” She didn’t want to be overly obvious about her source material. She needn’t have worried. The nurse looking at the TV over her shoulder had been hearing the same earworm all morning until any connection between it and the real world had blurred beyond caring.
Once the drugs she’d been given to ease the pain of delivery wore off, Margarita wondered what had made her tempt fate by giving her son such a cartoonish pseudonym. But as the days passed, then weeks, then months and years without a knock from immigration, she was sure they were safe. She had no way of knowing that fate was playing the long game.
If our names are our destinies, then George’s alias was aptly chosen. Because even though his mother didn’t know it at the time, her son’s life would be tinged with nostalgia for the future, in the sense of everything old being new again, where history and politics rode the grand pendulum of time, swinging back and forth, left then right . . .
And so, when his life was ruined, it was the result of an old racism that would become new again, later, when George was a teenager. At the time of his uncle’s arrest and his mother’s subsequent deportation, so-called “good immigrants” were rarely kicked out, and separating immigrant parents from their American-born children was rarer still. But the immigration judge who got the case was two generations away from her own family’s having sought asylum in the US. In a classic case of I-got-mine-now-get-lost, the judge—a future Supreme Court contender—had decided to burnish her anti-immigration credentials using George and his mother. The fact that there was a drug element involved made the case all but irresistible, while the inclusion of a five-year-old child proved that even though the judge was a woman, her heart didn’t bleed. And so while his mother was sent back to a country that she had little memory of, Uncle Jack was handed the equivalent of a death sentence by being incarcerated along with members of the same cartel that had once been his supplier. And Jorge a.k.a. George was sent to live with strangers, his only remaining family, Gamma and Pop Pop Garza, long dead thanks to a faulty carbon monoxide detector.
By the time he’d gone through three sets of fosters, George had stopped believing in property. Because along with learning about the arbitrary and impermanent nature of laws, he also discovered that under those laws, he was little more than property himself, hence the use of owner-related terms like, say, custody. As far as he was concerned, it was “the state” that turned him into a socialist by sentencing him to a world of group homes, time-share parents, and possessions that weren’t even rent-to-own, but rent-to-keep-on-renting, his life another hand-me-down from a string of fosters working a side hustle to make ends meet.
It was this, along with his lingering fondness for a homicidal supercomputer, that made George the vigilante hacker he became. Believing that information wanted to be free and that the whole idea of “intellectual property” was something to be resisted and subverted, he set about doing exactly that. Run a hundred-dollar textbook through a high-speed scanner and post it online free? Sure, why not? Steal some rich guy’s Voltaire and recycle it into the local economy as a down payment on the whole income inequality thing? Ditto, especially after he got what he really wanted from the hack, which was a smile, sure, but also a look at some proprietary source code that might benefit from being set free.
5
Presented with the evidence from her phone, Pandora confessed—or her face did, followed by actual words from her brain to fill in the gaps. She’d shown Roger what they’d done to her, googling the words face girl, viral, and GIF.
“So I’ve been living with an internet celebrity,” he said. “I had no idea.”
And it was true. Though he made his living online, he’d vowed not to live there when he wasn’t with a client. “It’s too easy to get abducted by aliens in cyberspace,” he’d say, meaning it was a good way to lose time.
“So you see I had to, right?” Pandora said.
“I see why you wanted to,” Roger said back. “But you know what I always say when you need to make a decision, right?”
Pandora did. She’d been deciding things ever since she could, and her father had been dispensing the same pearl of wisdom all that time. Granted, as pearls of wisdom went, it wasn’t half-bad—except for its always being thrown in her face whenever she’d decided poorly.
“Before you do something questionable,” Roger continued, as he had countless times before, “ask yourself, ‘What if everybody did what I’m about to do?’”
Exempli gratia, Pandora thought on her father’s behalf, what if everybody set fire to a bunch of urinals?
I guess that would mean, she thought on her own behalf, guys would have to wait as long as girls to take a leak.
She didn’t say any of that, of course. Not in real life. Had they been having this conversation online, she’d have posted it without giving it a second thought. Learning to second-think things was one of the reasons Roger had sent her to high school in the first place. Or as he put it at the time, “It’s harder to tell someone to f-off face-to-face than it is on Facebook.” He’d conveniently left out important facts about the face she’d be facing people with as part of that particular conversation.
“Guess I wasn’t thinking,” Pandora said now, using her best sitcom-kid voice. “I feel like such a knucklehead . . .” She imagined the wa-wa sitcom soundtrack.
But Roger wasn’t in the mood. His daughter had caused her school to be evacuated and the SWAT team (such as it was) to be mobilized. He struggled to come up with a media-friendly allusion to sum up the seriousness of the situation.
“I know how it went,” he said. “You got an idea in your head; wondered, ‘What if . . .’; but then you got so caught up with whether it could be done that you never stopped to think about whether it should be done.”
“Isn’t that . . . ?”
“Jeff Goldblum? Jurassic Park?” Roger said. “Yes. A paraphrase, but apt, I think.”
“What if I promise not to resurrect any extinct species?” Pandora said.
“You’re not joking your way out of this one.” Pausing for gravitas, Roger cupped his mouth in contemplation before taking his hand away to reveal an evil eureka smile, letting her know how much he loved how much she was going to hate this. But then he kept standing there, smiling, forcing her to ask.
“Well,” she finally said, breaking.
“When was the last time you visited your grandmother?” he asked.