“Oh yes, privacy,” Gladys said, her eye roll making noise. “During the war, the government read our mail and it wasn’t any big scandal.”
“Which war was this?” Pandora asked.
“The last one that mattered, after the one that was supposed to end any others.” She paused. “And then we found that, no, we needed to start numbering them.”
“World War II?” Pandora guessed.
Her grandmother nodded.
“I had two brothers who served,” she said. “Only one came back. And every letter we wrote each other went through the government censor. All we’d get were photographs of the pages with parts blacked out—‘redacted’ is what they call it now. They called the photographs V-mail—‘V for Victory.’”
“Did you ever get the originals back?”
Gladys shook her head.
Pandora was amazed—and appalled. “What happened to them?”
Gladys shrugged. “Burned, shredded, stored? I don’t know. And God help you if your loved one’s handwriting was already cramped, because the photographs we got were about the size of a postcard. Some words I couldn’t read, even if they hadn’t been blocked out.”
“That’s awful,” Pandora said. “It’s like Big Brother.”
“That book came out after the war, so nobody knew enough to complain.” She paused. “Not that anybody would have. Privacy, shmivacy. Our country had been attacked. Loose lips sink ships. And every break we took . . .”
Gladys stopped suddenly.
“What is it, Gram?”
The old woman shook her head, then mimed pulling a zipper across her lips.
“We’re not at war now,” Pandora pointed out.
“Oh no? Last I counted, there were at least two.”
Pandora let her head sink. She was being tutored in current affairs by someone whose short-term memory was shorter—diagnostically and demonstrably—than even that of the news media, busily flitting after every twittering twit that caught its attention.
“Why do you hide that pretty face?” Gladys asked, as if for the first time.
But instead of correcting her, Pandora decided to document the moment for later reference, should they ever have this conversation again—which they no doubt would. And so she slid around to Gladys’s side of the booth and asked the old woman to skootch over. She rested her face on her grandmother’s shoulder, raised her phone, and framed the two of them.
“Say cheese,” Pandora said.
“Limburger.” Gladys smiled—an old joke for an old gal, she’d later claim, the next time she used it. For the moment, though, she stared in wonder at the immediacy with which she was seeing the moment documented, no mailers, no chemicals, no waiting.
“It’s not such a bad face,” Gladys said, as if she wasn’t only selling it to Pandora, but to herself as well. Looking over the top of her glasses to get even closer to the screen, she took hold of the phone as if it were a mirror. “Not bad at all,” she repeated, rearranging wisps of white with her free hand. “I think I’ll keep it.”
“Is there any other option?” Pandora asked, a smartass still being punished.
“A lady,” the older one said, “always has options.” She paused in her fussing, grimaced, and let it go. “So long as she keeps her legs closed, and her mind open.”
Pandora laughed in spite of herself, marking the precise moment she began falling in love with her father’s mother.
12
The door to the Quire executive suite had closed behind them with the hermetic gasp of an airlock when George’s escort removed his dark glasses, loosened his tie, and yanked out his earpiece with an audible pop. Working a finger around his vacated ear hole, he spent a few seconds mouthing Os as if equalizing the pressure inside his skull after a long flight.
“Deep, cleansing breath,” he announced, rising on tiptoes as he inhaled, squatting on the exhale, and then settling back to his previous, intimidating height. “I think V.T. likes you,” he said, making it sound like a blind date’s excuse for an overly affectionate Doberman. “Whad’ya do anyway? Get a PhD in neural nets from MIT before turning, what”—he squinted at George, estimating, then up-talking—“fifteen?”
“I borrowed his car,” George deadpanned.
“I’m sure there’s a story there,” his escort said, “I’d be better off not knowing.”
The two walked in semisilence, the only sounds the squeak of George’s sneakers and the tip-tap of his escort’s dress shoes. Finally: “So whad’ya wanna see first?” his escort asked.
“My”—guessing—“work cube?”
The other consulted his phone. “Office,” he said. He looked at George again, an unmistakable expression of awe on his face, followed by an intimacy-forcing hand on the shoulder. “So whatcha doin’ for lunch, noob?”
Along the way to George’s office, they passed a face he recognized from the pier where he’d called him Dad while wirelessly infecting his phone. His extravagant suit coat was one of many items he had stuffed into a moving box, along with a framed family photo featuring two kids, one of each, bookended by the jacket and his spouse. They were grouped like a section of the Golden Gate Bridge, George mentally plotting the swoop of suspension cable through the data points of their heads. The smiling face in the photo was a few years younger than the real-life one reddened by either the weight of his workplace knickknacks or the humiliation of being escorted out of the building with them. George looked back, feeling sorry for the guy and wanting to say something, but then they turned the corner and there it was, yanking his eyes back around like a junkyard magnet: his office.
The space had been freshly vacated; that was clear from the dust-blasted outlines of the framed diplomas and/or personal photos that had until recently hung on the walls. Atop the two-drawer cabinet next to the desk, an Olympic logo of water stains, surface tension still holding a last damp ring in place. On the desk itself, a box labeled “Trash” full of cable spaghetti, sporting connectors that had gone extinct with the introduction of USB, then mini-USB, then USB-C. A webbed Aeron chair lay on its back, one caster still spinning, while in the corner of the room, George noticed a pile of fake plastic poop that turned out not to be fake after all. That last memento cured the newbie of any sympathy he may have felt for the weak link he’d apparently replaced in this corporate nature documentary.
“If this is what the interns get,” he joked, “I can’t wait until management takes me seriously.”
“Oh, they’re taking you plenty serious,” his escort assured. Pause. “You know that little visit with V.T. today?”
“Yeah?”
“First time I ever met the man in person.”
“That a fact?”
“Fact.”
“How long—” George began.
“Sixteen years,” his escort said, not letting him finish.
“Wow, that’s as long as—”
“Right,” his guide said, more than ready to move on.
The QHQ campus had all the trappings of a successful tech company with more money than it knew what to do with, trying to lure talent away from a half dozen other competitors, equally profligate in their attempts to poach the aforementioned talent. These perks included, in no particular order: snack bars, game rooms, cafeterias, gyms, climbing walls, massage stations, turbo sleep pods, chipping stations, security substations—all of them plural—followed by the offices of the in-house intellectual property lawyers divided into those suing to protect in-house IP versus those defending against suits from the outside, followed by the assorted day cares for children, elder parents, animal companions, and trophy spouses. As one of the company’s latest talent acquisitions, George found himself nodding with a mix of embarrassment and trepidation as they followed the facility’s intranavigation system giving his tour guide instructions through the earpiece he’d reinserted for the purpose.