Norman sat with his legs parted wide and flapped his knees. His lips began to quiver. He said, “I know how to get out of here, but where am I going to go?”
“You’ll be all right. I have faith.”
“When did things start to go wrong for us?”
“February 27, 1995. 5:43 p.m.”
“Has it really been ten years? She must be a little lady by now.”
Thurlow nodded. “I saw her, you know. Just by chance, on the street when I was in D.C. With Esme. She was wearing all green.”
“Oh my God,” Norman said, and so now he knew exactly what had gotten them to this moment.
“Norman, listen. I’ve been making this videotape for her. If you can just hang on for a little longer, I’ll give it to you and then you can go.”
But Norman was done hanging in. He wished Thurlow luck and turned his back on him for good.
11:58:11:29: And so, my little one, I guess that’s it. I am all alone now, as I deserve. I hope, when you’re older, you won’t judge me too harshly. I’ve just been confused and hung up on the wrong questions. Do I think love is an answer to loneliness? Maybe. Sometimes. But I suspect there’s more than one path leading away from estrangement, though for some people, there are no paths at all. But now I see the more important question is: What does it matter when you miss your wife and child? So what if I am the one for whom loneliness is insoluble — so what? I’d rather be lonely with you. I’d rather treat loneliness like the air I breathe, and breathe it with you. Why couldn’t I have figured this out ten years ago? I know I have wrecked my life. I hope to God I have not wrecked yours. I hope, too, that you never have to struggle with this stuff and that you are among the lucky who, in their solitude, still understand themselves to be a part of the universe and beloved by others. Just remember this: There is no lonely course that doesn’t still belong to the plexus of human experience being lived every day.
My darling girl, is there anything else I can tell you? Have I documented every stop along the plummet to this day? Should I buss your toddler socks and press them to my cheek? Will you think on me more kindly if I say I have the dried columbine of your mother’s bridal bouquet in my safe?
I only had you for a year into life, but I still have memories that come upon me all day long. You in turtle pose, a month old, staring at the fuzzy dice I’d bought you myself. You swaddled in a ladybug blankie and wanting out. Your Mohawk hair and your arms thrown overhead as you slept. Your cactus pose. Your Jesus pose. Your seal and ostrich pose. The distended belly. Six rolls of fat per leg. The day it was five. You wobbling on all fours, going nowhere. Your callused little knees once you got going and never stopped.
I know you don’t know me, and that you never did. You’ve grown so much. I was in D.C. a couple weeks ago, and I saw you. You were walking in green rubber boots with a frog face on each side. Soon you will need a new pair. I bet you look just like your mother. I hope you listen to her in all things, even though you are getting smarter all the time. If one day you ever wonder about your dad, please know that you are all he ever thought about from the moment you were born.
V. In which some women bat their eyes, others sit down and write. Guided by voices. The inconsolable child
ESME WAS CONCUSSED AND LOCKED IN A HOTEL BATHROOM. There was dusk out the window, bullfrogs in one ear — no, both — and a bellows whumping through her brain at three-second intervals. She’d been passed out the entire afternoon, and, for the girth of the swell atop her skull, she guessed Jim had whacked her hard. The irony of getting knocked in the head while giving head was not lost on her, though it was also not top on her list of ignominies that needed undoing.
Jim had left her bag but no wallet or phone. No one was likely to come up to this room uninvited. The window was too small to get through, and even if she could, it was eight floors up. The lock had been jacked; she would be in this bathroom until Martin got a clue. Tick-tock.
She rinsed her face and showdowned with the loony in the mirror. By now, she knew, the siege was being broadcast worldwide. The thinking: We need to appear as though we’re doing everything in our power to get our people released and to hold accountable the delinquent who sent them there. We. Ha. There was no we. There was just her and her madness and a break from the certainty that had floated her for years: that she would figure this out, hatch a plan, marshal the weaponry at her disposal against the anomie of love. The anomie of love! Who still pines for the same man nine years later?
One of her pupils was bigger than the other, as though to render the distribution of wherewithal that characterized her inner life. Much passion, no hope. Bold moves, no endgame, though the sequence of events that had gotten her here had been nothing if not a great match ranged across the board.
She sat on the floor. The tile was cool under skin. Even if she got to Cincinnati in time, what could she make happen? A guy who detains four federal employees has no intention of coming out alive. So for starters, her job would be to change intent. What she needed was a rhetoric of persuasion. How to spellbind in five minutes, because that was about all the patience the feds had left for this. Frank Spearman, who tried to talk down Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, wrote out what he was going to say on index cards. So that’s what she would do.
She found a pen in her bag. Checked her watch. She numbered her pages. She wrote:
1. Lo, if I’m reading this out loud, it’s because you still haven’t come out and time is not on your side. But I’m not sure what to say. You think you screwed up? Is that the problem? Let me tell you about screwing up. Maybe it will help.
2. I am an eavesdropper and a snoop. This you know. But what you don’t know is how it all started for me. It started when I was a kid. My dad had been in the Arctic in ’58, so I read everything about the International Geophysical Year and also a Time magazine article about a daring rescue — twenty scientists stuck on Drift Station Alpha as it broke apart, this mile-long ice floe, maybe 150 feet deep, that meandered around the North Pole while guys like my dad took notes on zooplankton and also on what the Russians were saying to each other from one submarine to the next. In ’58, six years after the NSA came to life and eight years after its predecessor failed to predict the Korean War or the PRC’s intervention, no one was messing around. SIGINT, COMINT, ELINT, were the order of the day, and so my dad spent months adrift in the Arctic Ocean, where there is no horizon, no color threshold between earth and sky, just the white-ice pageantry of one lonely day kissing its way into the next.
3. Some families have a swing set in their yard; we had an octoloop. A giant antenna, looked like a stop sign, three-quarter-inch copper pipe and telephone cable with gimbaled support beam through the middle, used to snatch VLF sound waves from the universe. Schumann resonances. Tweeks, whistlers, sferics — the low-frequency din life makes beneath our capacity to hear it. The physicist Schumann, who predicted the resonance of lightning emissions, was not related to the German composer of the same name, but I find it no small coincidence, the one a conjuror of some of the most arresting melodies on earth and the other sensitive to music of the earth’s devising. My dad used to amplify what came through the loop — think fat in a hot skillet — and listen to it like opera while I did my homework on the carpet. Our soundtrack? The world’s underbreath, one breath at a time.
From there it was easy to augment my fixation with voice. Voices in code, voices out loud, voices in whose timbre were hints of regret for everything the speaker hadn’t done or said now that it was too late. Who wouldn’t want to listen to that?