“Sorry,” Roger blurted. “Family emergency. Gotta cut this short . . .”
“But,” his client began, because that was the kind he specialized in, self-involved techies phoning it in from their offices or cubes at Quire headquarters, all convinced they’d lucked into the perfect therapeutic arrangement, with a therapist they’d never meet IRL, who was just a Skype call away and could be turned off when things got too heavy.
“Sorry,” Roger said again, feeling a malpractice suit even as he prepared to click off, before clicking off anyway.
Unplugging his F-150’s underhood heater from the garage outlet and checking his mirrors, Roger backed out of the drive, tires squeaking over bone-dry snow, all the while wondering why a terrorist would pick Fairbanks. New York, he could see; LA, sure; hell, Muncie, for Pete’s sake, but Alaska? Did ISIS or whoever have such a surplus of suicide bombers they could piss them away on a part of America many Americans weren’t thoroughly convinced was actually part of their country?
Not that the text said anything about suicide bombers. Or bombs of any sort. It had even waffled on it being terrorism, qualifying it fore (“possible”) and aft (“-related”). Not that any of those quibbles mattered, not when it concerned his daughter.
Joining the chugging fleet of worried parents in all manner of assault vehicles, Roger noticed several official-looking, parkaed individuals in helmets and dark glasses, their bulletproof vests buckled up over a puffy inch or so of down. The FPD’s SWAT team, judging from the huge letters emblazoned across the back of each vest. Who knew Fairbanks had such a thing? That Homeland Security money had to be flowing pretty indiscriminately ever since you-know-who pulled off you-know-what. One of the SWAT team members had a dog that didn’t seem to be taking its job as seriously as the guy holding its leash, deigning to be petted by the students milling around, good-boy-ing it, all chugging in the cold afternoon air.
Roger spotted his daughter in the crowd, hiding behind her hair, which was rimmed with frost from having been sprinkled before being forced to evacuate. Her thin arms were crossed over her chest as she shivered, being among the unlucky ones who hadn’t managed to snag their parkas on the way out the door. Though he couldn’t see her face, he could imagine her expression: it’d be reminiscent of the one she’d tried out after her first period when Roger had had to tell her that no, this wasn’t a one-and-done situation.
But he was wrong. As he opened the passenger door and she hefted herself inside, her hair fell away for a moment, revealing not anxious confusion, ennui-infused dismay, or even plain ol’ exasperation, but—strangely—guilt, amplified by the facial animation they shared.
“What’s up, bedbug?” he asked, knowing what the answer would be.
“Nothing,” Pandora said, following the predictable script.
“Looks like something to me.”
“Looks can be deceiving,” his daughter said—an answer she’d gotten from him on many occasions, seeing as the difference between text and subtext was how he made his living.
“Nice try,” he said, seeing as the difference between text and subtext was crap, given the faces they’d been born with.
“Ditto,” Pandora said back before settling in behind her thawing hair for the long, silent ride back home.
Roger only got a glimpse of her guilty mug before Pandora rang down the curtain, but it was enough to trouble him. What could she possibly feel guilty about when it came to a “possible terrorism-related” situation? Had she seen something but not said something? Or did the shock get her face muscles confused? Pulling into the garage, he prepared to take another stab at finding out what was behind that troubling face. But alas, no. Pandora yanked up the handle, hopped down, slammed the door, and disappeared into the house.
Roger took a parental pause before following her, collecting and categorizing his concerns. But then he discovered evidence of how upset his daughter must be: her phone. He couldn’t miss it in its pirate Hello Kitty case. In her rush to escape, she’d left it behind. Roger picked it up, swiped, and was amazed when he wasn’t asked for credentials of some kind—an iris scan, at the very least. But no. It opened onto her home screen, where it seemed she had two email messages waiting.
He could feel the charges of emotional abuse coming even as he tapped the icon. But what else was he supposed to do? He needed to get to the bottom of this before the FPD SWAT team paid them a visit.
The first email was from a compounding pharmacy and the second from a chemical supply company. Both pleaded with his daughter to rate her recent transactions with them, or to let them know if she was dissatisfied in any way. “Please like us on Facebook,” they begged, following the usual supplicant boilerplate, “and preach about us on Quire!”
Roger switched off the phone and pocketed it. He plugged in his truck’s heater and then entered the house he’d shared with his only child ever since they abandoned California, where she’d been born and her mother had died. He took a breath and steadied his voice and face.
“Oh, daughter,” he called. “Oh, daughter dear . . .”
4
First things first: George’s mother should have found a better babysitter. Not that Uncle Jack was a kiddie diddler or anything, just a bachelor who had his own place and the bad luck to be in the recreational marijuana business before it was legal in California. He also had nearly zero understanding of what to do with a young child left in his care. Summing up, this is what Uncle Jack knew about kids: there was something in their brains that drew them to jangling keys. He figured it had something to do with the combination of sound and shiny. And this was something else he knew: when it came to sound and shiny, you couldn’t beat the star gate sequence from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Uncle Jack himself had experienced the sequence’s mesmerizing effects many times, often while stoned. Accused of violating the drug dealer’s first rule—don’t get high on your own supply—Uncle Jack would plead, “Quality control.” And the quality of his product was excellent, if he did say so himself.
So yeah: a drug dealer and user. George’s mom was not going down in the history of exemplary childcare decision makers anytime soon.
After fishing the disk out of its clamshell and sliding it into the player, Jack parked the child next to him on the couch and sparked up a bong, the skunk smell and gentle bubbling pacifying George while his uncle blip-blip-blipped through the menu to cue up the sequence in question. Jack assumed his nephew, a toddler, wouldn’t sit still for the so-called boring parts. So they started watching the movie at its most mind-boggling, endorphin-stimulating point, and once it was done—once the sole surviving astronaut found himself in a Louis XVI hotel room—he was prepared to jump back to start those Kubrickian keys jangling again.
But then a strange thing happened—or didn’t happen.
George didn’t fuss. He didn’t move, in fact. Looking down at his nephew’s eyes through his own glassy pair, Uncle Jack saw two tiny versions of the bigger screen in front of them, Cinerama rectangles of nearly pure white and, underneath them, George’s mouth, an O of awe with little-kid drool leaking out.
“So, like, you’re cool with letting the narrative flow?” he asked. George continued to stare, which Jack took as meaning, “Flow on, dude.”