In the late sixties, in Vietnam demonstrations, he’d seen men in nondescript brown suits — J. Edgar Hoover’s ubiquitous spies — taking pictures of the marchers, and with nearly forty years of protest and activism behind him, Tad was certain that somewhere along the way he must have picked up an FBI file. Even though he had drawn a 7 in the lottery, he escaped Vietnam by being “psychologically unfit,” their term for being a raving homo — a role he’d played with great conviction for the draft board. And in 1999, he’d gotten into trouble with Equity for marching with Michael, as they jointly held up a banner that proclaimed, SEATTLE ACTORS EQUITY AGAINST NIKE AND GLOBAL EXPLOITATION, during the WTO protests. A stern letter had come from New York threatening him with expulsion from the union after that.
In his time, Tad had demonstrated in favor of women’s rights, gay rights, and undocumented migrant workers’ rights, and against detention without trial, the sacking of Archibald Cox, the funding of the Contras, the invasion of Grenada, oil drilling in Alaska…too many causes to remember. He’d carried placards for Che, Fidel, Huey Newton, and Daniel Ortega, and had recently tried to stage a rally in support of Hugo Chavez, though he’d found too few takers to make it worthwhile. Lucy had said, “Hugo who?”
Of course they were keeping tabs on him. How could they not?
Data mining was Tad’s current obsession. Someone, somewhere, was watching as he tramped from site to site in cyberspace. The Patriot Act gave the federal government unlimited power to snoop on private citizens, and a daily visitor to Al-Jazeera must surely have aroused the interest of whoever was monitoring that site. Tapping out e-mail, Tad sensed that his messages were being scanned by an anonymous eavesdropper. Paranoia? Hardly. Internet service providers were required by law to render up complete records of their clients’ every digital move if they were sent a “national security letter” by the FBI.
Was he the subject of such a letter? The ISPs were sworn to secrecy on the matter, on penalty of a lengthy jail term, so you’d never know for certain that you’d been watched — until they knocked at your door.
First they’d used the system to catch pedophiles downloading kiddie porn from the web. Now they were trawling for political dissidents, terrorist “sympathizers,” which is to say any screwball foolish enough to get up the nose of the administration.
“Lucky your first name’s not Ahmad or Osama,” Lucy had said, with that annoying laugh of hers. “Don’t you think they’d have their hands rather full if they were chasing down every actor with lefty stickers on his car?”
But Lucy didn’t understand. They were using a net with a mesh so fine that almost anybody might be caught in it. “Either you are with us or against us.” So if you thought it important to read the Arab point of view on the situation in the Mideast, you were a likely traitor to the U.S. — especially if the FBI’d had you in its sights since 1969.
Such thoughts gave spice to Tad’s nighttime travels by mouse. Visiting Hizb-ut-Tahrir.org and Khilafah.com, he was making a lone citizen’s covert protest from deep in the grassroots against an intolerable and abusive government. Let them knock on his door. In his most expansive fantasies, he imagined Lucy, skeptical no longer, writing about it for The New Yorker, and his radical congressman, Jim McDermott, raising his case on the floor of the House. Were he ever to be offered the part of political martyr, he’d give good weight.
Tonight, though, he was doing a little data mining of his own, trawling through cyberspace for the new landlord. According to Google, there were Charles O. Lees living in Wisconsin, Michigan, Mississippi, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Florida, but none in the Seattle area. He moused over to the Post-Intelligencer site. Nothing for “Charles O. Lee,” so he tried “Charles Lee” and “Charles + Lee.”
Mr. Lee had been clever at keeping his name out of the papers, but you’d think a parking lot magnate would’ve left some kind of public trail. The only name that fit was that of a social worker, Charles Ong Lee of Shoreline, who’d died in a one-car crash on Aurora Avenue in November 1999. The report was very short: Mr. Lee, driving a white Honda Civic, had spun out on the wet and leafy pavement, hit a utility pole, and died instantly; alcohol was not thought to be involved.
The one detail that gave Tad pause was the man’s age — twenty-five, which, had he lived, would make him roughly as old as the landlord was now. Could Mr. Lee conceivably be guilty of identity theft? Probably not, but the possibility, however faint, was so tantalizing that Tad copied the story and e-mailed it to himself as the first item in the file he meant to build on Charles O. Lee. Sometime in the next few days, he’d try chatting up an attendant at one of the Excellent Parking lots. Tad had no doubt that Lee’s arrival on the scene meant either eviction or a rent hike so astronomical they’d all have to move. Certainly he was in no position to fork out three grand a month for what he thought of as an attic and Lee would grandly advertise as a “penthouse.” He’d been living in the Acropolis for more than twenty years, and it enshrined his and Michael’s happiness together. The prospect of being booted out by the insufferable Lee, railing against “scumbags” and “lowlifes” and “toerags,” was beyond enraging; it called for a manning of the barricades.
He glanced at the Trotsky quote, in Michael’s handwriting, on a strip of yellowing paper pasted above the top of his computer screen. “Americans think in terms of continents: it simplifies the study of geography, and, what is most important, provides ample room for robbery.”
A LUMINOUS thin haze hung over Elliott Bay as Lucy, at her window, watched what appeared to be a kind of maritime Noh play. Twice, a ferry had steamed into the bay from the direction of Bainbridge Island. Twice, a go-fast cigarette-type boat had approached it, settled alongside, and emitted a rather feeble puff of smoke. Twice, Coast Guard helicopters and patrol vessels had closed in on the supposedly stricken ferry, only to retreat to where they’d come from so the mock attack could begin again. There was something both comical and alarming in the unreality of this exercise, which had “fiction” written all over it. Though it was costing the taxpayers millions, nobody could possibly mistake it for the real thing.
Reality was hard to fake, as Lucy had noticed when she watched Alida, aged three, master the TV remote. It took her only a split second to recognize and dismiss a talk show, documentary, or news program in her searches for the soaps and sitcoms that held her uncomprehendingly enthralled. Still toddling, Alida knew that fiction was lit differently than fact, and in a single moving image could distinguish one from the other with deadshot accuracy.
The facile imitation of life now in progress on the bay wouldn’t fool a six-month-old. “First responders,” as they liked to call them, were being trained not for breaking news but for taking part in an episode of Law and Order or Desperate Housewives, and in the event of real horror they’d turn out to be about as much use as the cast of some crappy sitcom. Come to think of it, Tad and his friends from the Rep and ACT, accustomed as they were to stage emergencies and off-the-cuff improvisations, would almost certainly have done a better job than the Department of Homeland Security.
Tiring of the show, she set about packing their bags for the weekend. Her only real work would be talking with Augie over dinner, which brought up the difficult question of the tape recorder. First she packed it, then she unpacked it. Taping your host in his own home, Lucy decided, would be a serious breach of basic good manners. For this piece, she’d rely on memory and her notebook.