“Do you mind if I ask what you’re doing?” Zoe asked.
I looked up from the funnel of concentric circles sliding across the screen of my sleeping laptop. “Sorry?”
“You’ve been staring at that screensaver for a long time,” she said, her eyes almost visible through her tinted lenses thanks to the strong sunlight coming through the kitchen window. “I thought you might have gone somewhere.”
“Somewhere?”
“In your mind.”
“I was thinking about my work.”
“Oh. Okay.”
I returned my eyes to the screen, then looked at her again. “How long is a long time?”
“Well…” She poured herself a cup of coffee and dumped in three spoons of sugar. “I’ve been in and out all afternoon and you’ve hardly moved. I was starting to wonder if there was… I don’t know. Someone else.”
I stroked the trackpad to wake my computer, then opened my word processor and scrolled through a list of document files. Zoe lingered in the kitchen with her coffee until I looked up at her again.
“Sorry,” she said. “It’s just… if there was someone else, you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?”
“There’s no one else.”
Looking less than reassured, Zoe shuffled away and left me to my work. When I heard her start typing in the next room, I minimized my word processor and opened a browser. Ever since the incident in the restaurant, I’d been haunting adult webcams, asking anyone who would listen if they remembered the website with the coloured doors, and more specifically, a redhead with a certain tattoo. Without exception, the performers either ignored me or ejected me from their chatrooms, and this afternoon was no different. I logged onto site after site, interrogating performers and users until my first lead finally came, not from the petite blonde gyrating on my screen, but from a fellow user who went by the name John Ayes.
You trying to find Jasmine?
I looked up from my screen, listening to the soft clacking of Zoe’s keyboard.
Yes, I wrote back. A long pause followed.
I know where she is.
Online?
Real world.
An urgent, whirring rhythm started up in my head. Where?
Not so fast. I want something in return.
What?
Email would be more secure. Your address?
I gave him an anonymous email address I’d previously set up and he disappeared from the room. I navigated to my inbox, but found no new messages waiting. I refreshed. Nothing changed. For the rest of the night, I sat in front of the laptop, compulsively refreshing my inbox, until Zoe poked her head in around two in the morning, “Coming to bed?”
The walls swam when I looked up at her. “Not just yet.”
“Work’s going well?”
“Uh-huh.”
She left the room, defeated. I hit the refresh button. Once she’d fallen asleep, I migrated out to the living room with my laptop, not wanting to take my eyes off the screen for a moment. I must have eventually fallen asleep, as I woke on the loveseat with a stiff neck, morning sun in the windows, my hibernating laptop on the coffee table. I touched the trackpad, adrenaline jolting me fully awake as I saw a new, unopened message at the top of my screen. I opened it and found three short lines of text:
Café Brew Ha Ha @ 9:30 AM.
$500 for full contact information.
Look for the red shirt and white hat.
I checked the time on the laptop. Nine-fifteen. As far as I knew, there was only one Café Brew Ha Ha in the city, a short walk from Zoe’s apartment. Zoe was snoring softly in the bedroom, a bottle of sleeping pills on the nightstand beside her. I grabbed my wallet and keys from the coffee table and hurried down to the elevator. A small boy was standing beside the closed door, having already pushed the down button. He couldn’t have been older than five, but seemed perfectly comfortable with no adult supervision. The door opened and we climbed on together, riding down to the lobby in silence, him watching me with interest, as if expecting me to do something exciting. At the main level, I jumped off and jogged down the street to an ATM. My daily limit was five hundred dollars. I withdrew it all, then jammed the wad of twenties into my pocket and sprinted the last few blocks to the café. A chime sounded as I staggered through the door, breathing hard. The place was deserted. I ordered a coffee from the kid behind the counter and sat down at a table to wait. No red shirt appeared. No white hat. A full hour went by and not a single person walked through the door. I gave up and left the café, certain I was going to find a second, mocking email in my inbox when I got back. Down the street, I saw the little boy from the elevator on the crowded sidewalk, still alone, looking like he knew exactly where he was going.
I headed in the opposite direction as him, back to our building, where I let myself in and stopped. A police officer stood waiting in the lobby. I nearly lifted my hands, thinking he’d come about Kim’s window or the stolen film or something far worse that I couldn’t remember doing, but he hardly glanced at me, occupied with a frantic woman who was sobbing to anyone that passed: “My son! Have you seen my son?” I excused my way through the small crowd that had gathered, saying nothing about the boy I’d seen on the street. He hadn’t been in any danger. He hadn’t looked scared. For all I knew, he had a perfectly good reason for wanting to get away from the woman. By the time I reached the elevator, I’d almost convinced myself that I was doing something noble by not telling her where he was. Three other tenants climbed on with me and the door closed. “Scary,” one of them said and I nodded vaguely, watching the broken display above the door flicker. At the sixteenth floor, I stepped off, and hurried down the hall to Zoe’s apartment (I still couldn’t think of it as our apartment), throwing the deadbolt behind me and locking the chain for good measure.
Zoe hadn’t moved, still in bed, one arm flung out to the side, as if receiving an injection. No message had come from John Ayes. I’d just started writing him an angry email, when a quiet knock broke my train of thought. I looked at the door. The knock came again, a little louder.
“Hello?” a man called from the hall,
Zoe didn’t have a spyhole, but the voice sounded authoritative—polite but insistent. Assuming it had something to do with the missing boy, I undid the locks, inwardly rehearsing what I was going to say. If pressed, I would have to admit that we’d ridden down to the lobby together, but no one could have possibly known that I’d spotted him later on the street.