“You’re the one who unleashed it on the world.”
She leaned against him, in close quarters because the car seat took up a lot of space. Emilia had already closed her eyes, her sweaty head craned at a bad angle. The car bumped along the quiet streets and headed over the bridge. Almost immediately when they crossed into Brooklyn there was construction. There was always construction. Their brownstone was in Carroll Gardens; they had lived there since the book sale, which was followed immediately by international sales. Cory and Greer had money, suddenly, and it shocked them both and made them both uncomfortable. They had been about to renovate the brownstone when Cory had the idea that they should leave it alone; it was already livable enough, and maybe what they should do with their money instead was give a large monthly stipend to Cory’s mother and Greer’s parents, who could really use it. And once they did that, it was easy and natural to give away more of their money to people they weren’t related to. Neither of them knew how long the money would last; it wouldn’t self-replenish forever. Greer had had one bestseller; she wasn’t the manager of a hedge fund, and maybe there would never be another bestseller, but at least they had done what they could.
SoulFinder, when it was finally released, had not become a financial success, though it still occupied a small, respected place in the world of indie video games, more of a sleeper than anything else. The people who had played it were passionate about it. Cory’s next game was being planned now, and the same investor had already committed. Cory had thought about going into microfinance all these years after he was supposed to, but the process had changed and he wasn’t up to speed on any of that, and money was always tricky, and he worried that he might screw it up. He hadn’t professionally “landed,” and who knew if he would, but it wasn’t an emergency that he hadn’t. Cory was working, and engaged by work; and he also did a lot around the house, cooking homemade fish fingers for Emilia and vegetarian dishes for Greer, and being in charge of the master schedule. He had it in his mind that he would teach Emilia Portuguese. He had even bought her a DVD of Portuguese children’s songs and rhymes. And while the DVD made him think of his mother, up in Fall River now and doing very well, it also made him think of his father, in Lisbon; or maybe he had been thinking of his father to begin with, and that was why he had bought the DVD online. Cory had said that he wanted to go to Portugal at some point to see his father, despite what he had done. To see him and then take the family sightseeing, though the trip would wait until Emilia was old enough to get something out of it.
At home after the party they dropped Emilia into her crib, and she didn’t stir. There would be no need tonight for stories, or water, or the motorized light fixture that threw dancing shapes on the ceiling, or more stories, or more water. Greer saw, on her phone, that Zee had texted from Chicago. “I sent you a link,” Zee wrote. “Call me. I want to experience your reaction in real time.”
So Greer sat in the den and called Zee on the phone; the two of them sat before their separate laptops, and Greer clicked on the link that led to a video, taken on a shaky cell phone. The setting was vaguely tropical. First a balding, thickish man opened the door of a garden apartment. As soon as the door opened, a bucket of wet garbage was flung in his face, and the camera swerved hard to show the garbage thrower, a young woman who began to scream. “You piece of garbage, you deserve a lot worse than this,” she shouted, and the man, covered in garbage in the doorway of his own home, seemed shocked at first, and said, “Whoa, whoa, what the fuck,” but then within seconds he was laughing and exuberant. “That’s right,” he said to her, peeling garbage from the side of his face. “Keep throwing it at me, this is assault, keep it coming.”
Greer paused the video, froze it in place. “Wait, why am I watching this?” she asked.
“Put it on full-screen,” said Zee.
So Greer made the image fill the screen of her laptop, and then she came close to it so that her face was nearly pressed against his paused face. She studied the blandness, the lazy smile, the wide-spaced eyes, all of it somehow familiar, but still only mildly. When you thought about it, everything seemed familiar. Every story had its antecedents, and every person. The laughing, garbage-covered man and the woman in her fury, captured together on a residential street someplace where the weather was warm. They were familiar at first only in their familiarity, for you already knew this kind of story: the furious woman and the shrugging, indifferent man. Such stories were ancient; Greer had heard them told at Loci and on the road with Outside Voices, but she also knew of them from well before that. From reading Greek plays, from growing up as a girl. A critical piece of information was returning from a great and exhausting distance. Greer let it come toward her; she patiently waited for its arrival, observing the frozen face. Then she remembered.
“Tinzler?” she said, her voice made thin with awe.
“Yes.”
“Darren Tinzler? No. Where did you find this? What is it?”
“Someone sent it to Chloe Shanahan and she sent it to me,” said Zee. “Darren Tinzler runs a revenge porn website called BitchYouDeserveThis.com. He publishes footage and photos of women with a link to their Facebook profiles, and he makes them pay a huge fee to take them down. The fees go to some law firm in Chicago that doesn’t really exist. And this woman tried to sue but she couldn’t because his identity was hidden. And anyway the laws still suck. So she tracked him down, and she went to his door and threw garbage at him while her friend filmed the whole thing. The plan was that they would post it online, thinking that they would shame him, ruin him. But get this: Darren Tinzler retweeted it. He couldn’t be shamed or ruined. He just thought it was hilarious.”
They were both stoppered into silence, considering all this. Greer and Zee had worn Darren Tinzler’s face on their T-shirts thirteen years earlier, had stared at him and his far-apart eyes. He looked similar now, except the face was wider, and the hair was mostly gone, and so was the baseball cap. Their T-shirt campaign had done nothing, and in the ladies’ room that night at college, Faith had warned them that if they hounded Darren Tinzler, “sympathy will redound to him,” but maybe she hadn’t been right. Maybe if they’d stayed with it, Greer thought, he would’ve eventually been asked to leave school, and he might have had a record that would’ve chased him for years. Maybe he would have been monitored and watched instead of going unchecked over time, doing whatever he liked.
“It’s like we kept trying to use the same rules,” Greer said, “and these people kept saying to us, ‘Don’t you get it? I will not live by your rules.’” She took a breath. “They always get to set the terms. I mean, they just come in and set them. They don’t ask, they just do it. It’s still true. I don’t want to keep repeating this forever. I don’t want to keep having to live in the buildings they make. And in the circles they draw. I know I’m being overly descriptive, but you get my point.”
“You could call your next book The Circles They Draw.”
“I don’t mean any of this in a bullshit way. I don’t mean it to just be words, or clever. I don’t know if we’ll ever figure out the Outside Voices Foundation, or even what it will be. It definitely can’t just be feeling good about ourselves even in adversity.”
“I don’t know. Foundations? Is that the answer? Look at Loci.”
“No, it couldn’t be like Loci,” said Greer. “That whole money thing. The climate is different now. And you could come help me figure it out.”