She half stood — then roused the computer, testing its promise of satisfaction behind each next click. At the top left of the screen appeared a flag, a Facebook friend request. Because of her pseudonym, such requests came only from lurking weirdos. She clicked it, intending to decline.
Except she recognized this name: Duncan McGrory.
Tooly walked away from the computer, down the closest aisle, tapping nervously on books as she went. It had been years since her last contact with Duncan. How had he found her? Mouth dry, she stood with her finger over the mouse button. Read his name again. She clicked yes.
Within moments, he had messaged her: “Desperately trying to reach you. Can we talk about your father???”
She clenched her clammy hands, wiped them on her shirt. Her father? Whom could he mean?
1988
“DON’T.”
“Don’t what?”
Before Paul had walked in, Tooly was jumping on her bed, watching the view of Bangkok fly up and down through the window. Upon hearing him, she bent her knees and grasped the covers in a breathless crouch, feet flexing on the quivering mattress. “I’m not wearing any shoes,” she said in her defense.
“Don’t be argumentative about everything.”
She took a ballet leap off the bed and crashed to the floor, tumbling across the cool tiles, landing on her belly, then rolling onto her back to show that she was unhurt.
“People live below us. Stop that.”
Paul was particularly tense that morning, expected at the U.S. Embassy in less than an hour to start his latest contract. He was an information-technology specialist for Ritcomm, a private company hired by the State Department to upgrade diplomatic communications overseas. The larger American embassies, such as here in Bangkok, had mainframe computers with telecom links to Washington, allowing them to check the latest “bad-guy list” whenever a foreign national sought to visit America. But many smaller U.S. outposts had never been linked to the network, and were obliged to consult ancient documents on microfiche. Paul was overseeing upgrades around the world, traveling to each dinky consulate, where he conducted a site survey, installed the Wang VS able to open up a 3270 emulation, ran BNC cables to every desk terminal. Finally, the staffers could connect at 9.6 bps via the phone line, type in a name, date of birth, place of birth, and wait for a hit.
Each of his assignments lasted about a year, during which he based himself at a hub like Bangkok and traveled throughout the region, doing his best to avoid time at the suffocating embassies. Diplomats there often styled themselves a ruling class, treating support staff like servants. Paul might be assigned to fix a faulty dot matrix, for instance, or told to exorcise gremlins from the ambassador’s monitor. On embassy days, he tried to vanish among the swarms of staff and visitors — just another guy slouching out of the cafeteria with a Styrofoam box for lunch. He avoided others’ company by choice, although this was not the only reason he made himself unknown.
Tooly watched him hobbling around in one black Velcro shoe, his polo shirt tucked into pleated khakis. He sniffed — air-conditioning congested his sinuses — then swallowed, Adam’s apple rippling, neck dotted with razor-burn blossoms. “Where’s my other shoe?” His anxiety pervaded the apartment, and her. The disquiet of others was an undiscovered force alongside gravity that, rather than pulling downward, emanated outward from its source. Unfortunately, she was excessively attuned to his nervous pulses. She joined the hunt and discovered his lost shoe under the couch. Disastrously late now, he grabbed for floppy disks and printouts. At the door, he stopped. “Oh, no.”
“What?”
“Where are you today, Tooly?”
“What?”
“What are you supposed to be doing? I can’t just leave you here.”
“Isn’t there a housekeeper coming?”
“Not till Thursday.” Paul always endeavored to keep them prepared, yet the narrowness of his attention caused lapses. He was a man who could grind at a programming conundrum for thirty hours and resolve it elegantly, then look up to find all else in decay. “Goddamn!”
“I don’t mind staying on my own.”
“I mind,” he said.
“Can I jump on the bed?”
He checked the time. No choice but to leave her there. He came near to an apology, then locked her inside.
This new apartment was large and modern, constructed in the late 1970s, ceilings low, furniture sparse. The windows hummed with AC units, which blew up the skirts of the curtains. In Paul’s room, open suitcases lay on the bed. His computer, a high-performance DEC workstation, was always shipped ahead. She was forbidden to touch it alone, yet did so now, turning the dial on the cube monitor and flicking the I/O switch, floppy-drive light flickering. Within minutes, a green cursor fast-blinked on the black screen.
He had taught her a program once, and she typed it in now, then hit Return. The words “Hello world!” flashed onscreen. Tooly imagined that the machine was alive, and typed back “hello.” But the cursor blinked dumbly. She was only talking to herself.
She left everything exactly as before and ventured into his en-suite bathroom, closed the toilet lid, and climbed up. Tooly parted her unbrushed hair as if it were curtains and peered between, voicing imagined dialogues with acquaintances from previous cities: stewardesses, travelers, and other forms of grown-up. In the mirror, she inspected herself, ears protruding, forefinger fish-hooked in her mouth. All her clothing was rolled up at the hems. She was supposed to grow into it, but remained little. In every class photo, Tooly was at the front — next to whichever resentful boy genetics had consigned to a similarly low altitude.
It didn’t feel as if that reflection in the mirror was really her.
She slid open the mosquito-screen door to the back balcony. The morning sun glared through smog. Beyond the apartment complex stood rusty corrugated shacks and banana trees where birds chirped. She fetched Paul’s binoculars, sneaking them off a high shelf, popped the eye caps, and wiped the lenses on her T-shirt, the glass squeak-squeak-squeaking. With a finger raised (“Careful!”), she returned to the balcony.
Tooly deplored birding, among the dullest activities ever conceived by adults. Animals were endearing when they were crude versions of people, but birds weren’t human at all. Paul said birds had evolved from dinosaurs, which was hard to believe, given that dinosaurs were notably interesting. Nevertheless, she looked everywhere for birds. On the occasions that she spotted one, the sighting pleased Paul, and she wished for that rare effect. Generally, she seemed to irritate him.
“Which do you like best,” she’d once asked him, “birds or people?”
“Oh, birds,” he responded emphatically, adding softly, “Definitely birds.”
Back inside, she clasped in each fist a corner of her T-shirt, stood under the ceiling fan, the propeller chopping air. She remained motionless, her heart rate increasing until she sprang forward, sprinting through the living room, leaping onto her bed, landing on her knees, then bounding off again — through the kitchen, into the empty maid’s quarters, squealing till she remembered that she oughtn’t. She jammed a handful of shirt into her mouth, fabric dampening as she galloped around, sucking breaths through her nose. On the front balcony, she halted, looking down onto their lane, where construction workers toiled, bicyclists queued before a food stall, a street tailor hunched over his pedal-operated sewing machine. All those people down there and she up here — how strange that there were different places, events happening at that moment, and she wasn’t in them. There were people she’d once known doing things on the other side of the world at that instant.