“Oh, dear,” Tad said to Lucy. “I’d so hoped we could share. My weekend has been such a succession of humiliations, I can’t tell you. I’ve been spending all today in the time-out corner.”
“Why the gay voice?” Alida said as she went to hug him.
Tad laughed. “Because I’m being a self-hating old fag is why. How was it, Ali? You have an okay time?”
“It was good.”
“Alida went kayaking,” Lucy said.
“You fall in? The only time I went kayaking, I spent the entire time falling in.”
“No, but I got really freaked out by the sharks.”
“Oh yeah, those famous Puget Sound sharks.”
“No, really. This shark — it was this big.” She stretched her arms out as far as they’d go. “It went right under my kayak. Augie saw another. He said there were usually hundreds of them. They’re called dogfish, but they’re really sharks, and cousins of the Great White. They hunt in packs, like wild dogs, and they can give you a real bad bite.”
Tad flashed Lucy a What the fuck? look, then said, “How far out was this?”
“Oh, not far.”
“And he told you there were hundreds to a pack, and they’d attack you?”
“He said if they felt threatened.”
To Lucy, Tad said, “You weren’t there?”
“No, I was back at the house, but—”
“He was messing with your head, Ali.”
Lucy heard this as the exposed tip of an iceberg of anger, but luckily Alida didn’t seem to catch it. She said, “The one I saw, it was like this brown color, and it was so close. I mean, I could have like touched it with my paddle.”
“Dogfish,” Tad said, “are totally harmless. They’d no more attack you than a guppy or a goldfish would.”
“But Augie’s like this big expert on nature.”
Tad let the subject drop, but the sharks cast a long inhibiting shadow over dinner.
Alida excused herself early from the table, which was unusual for evenings when Tad was there, asking if she could watch The Incredibles on the DVD player.
“Sometimes I hate journalism,” Lucy said. “Especially profiles. The more friendly you get with a subject, the more you feel like a spook.”
“We’re all spooks now. Look at the way people Google prospective dates. Everybody’s trying to spy on everybody else. At least you know you’re a spook, which is something. Most people are in denial.” He stared gloomily at his untouched glass of white wine. “You ever played with Google Earth? I zoomed in on the Acropolis and you could see everything — the chimneys, the water tank, the skylight in the hall, the place where the tar paper’s ripped on the roof, both our cars in the street, the guys in the alley, the manhole covers…everything. What this means? You’re thinking of dating a guy, you enter his address on Google Earth, and you can check out his house, how he keeps his yard, whether he should take out a loan to redo his roof. You can practically see into his bedroom and go through his underwear drawer. Everybody does it. And if we can do that, just think what the boys in Yakima can do.”
“Yakima?”
“Yakima’s the western headquarters of the NSA, the No Such Agency. I’ve seen the NSA setup there, at least the domes and dishes. It looks like a farm of humongous white mushrooms. It’s the ECHELON system. You send an e-mail, you make a phone call, ECHELON’s looking out for keywords. They use a program called Dictionary, a global search engine that does continuous roving wiretaps, going through millions of messages at a time. If you’re buying fertilizer in bulk, or want to take flying lessons for jetliners, you can count on your message landing up on somebody’s desk in Yakima. And if you say ‘jihad,’ they’ll be right inside your room before you can hang up the phone.”
Alida froze the picture on the screen to go to the bathroom. Tad said, “Look…” then stopped himself. “Let’s leave it till later.”
Lucy, thinking of the bored marshal on the ferry, said, “I think you overrate their competence. I mean, if their technology were that clever, wouldn’t you expect them to be a little better at their job? Read the 9/11 Report — it’s not about masters of espionage, it’s about a bunch of doofuses chasing one another’s tails.”
Alida, returning, said, “What are you talking about?”
“Doofuses and mushroom farming,” Lucy said, pouring herself a third glass.
“Cool.” Alida clicked the remote to liberate The Incredibles.
“We used to spy on the Russians, on their military and politicians, but now we’ve turned all that equipment — plus a whole lot more — on ourselves, on ordinary American civilians. You realize what we’re looking at here? This is the machinery of tyranny.”
That word again. “Oh, Tad, we’ve got an army. Armies are machines of tyranny. So are police forces. It’s not the machinery that makes tyranny, it’s how it’s used and who’s using it. Look, if your mushroom things can detect a terrorist attack before it happens, which I have to say they don’t seem too hot at, then I’m all for them. I mean it’s not as if the mushrooms belong to Joseph Stalin.”
“No? I wouldn’t bet the farm on that.”
“I wish I could get you in the same room as August Vanags. You’d make a great double act.”
“Vanags!” Tad glanced across at Alida, who was lost in her movie. “He’s just like all those Euro-types, like Kissinger and Brzezinski. They come over here from the old country, then they try running things like they were scheming away back home in rat-ridden Vienna, or wherever.”
“Actually, I think he’s the most American American I’ve ever met.”
“Actually,” Tad lowered his voice to a confidential mutter, “I think he’s what our charming landlord would call a scumbag son-of-a-bitch.”
“Which reminds me,” Lucy said in as airy a tone as she could muster. “I forgot to thank you for the tulips.”
AS SOON AS The Incredibles ended, Alida was sent to bed. Her mom came in for a snuggle, but Alida pretended to be asleep. She now stood at the door in her baggy Hotel Honolulu T-shirt, ear pressed to the wood, though there was hardly any need for that since the voices on the other side were rising steadily in pitch.
“I was there,” her mom was saying.
“Maybe I see it more clearly than you do because I wasn’t there.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“You heard what she said. It’s not something you can argue about — it’s plain as daylight. All that bullshit about sharks? The guy’s a raving sadist.”
“Oh, Tad, you’re making your usual goddamn mountain out of your usual goddamn molehill. I mean, why the hell would he want to do that?”
“I don’t know. Because he’s a power freak? Because of something in his fouled-up European pathology? Because frightening kids is the nearest he can get to fucking them? You tell me. You’re his new friend.”
“They went kayaking. They saw a dogfish. End of story.”
“You’re totally deluding yourself. He took her out there for one reason: to scare her shitless.”
“It’s not true!” Alida flung the door open and stormed into the living room. “It’s not true!” Her whole body shaking with fury, she stood her ground, glaring at Tad. “He so did not.” She felt her lower lip trembling, out of her control. “I love Augie.”