“I’ll think about it.”
“You will?”
“Sure. And maybe you can advise me on the best way to go about it. I can’t remember. How did taking an idiotic moral stand work out for you?”
2002, Paris
Z sits in his boss’s office across from his boss’s empty chair, while that same boss stands behind him, twisting a plastic rod and pivoting the slats to the venetian blinds closed in front of his glass wall, alerting everyone on the floor to yet another secret-business tête-à-tête.
If there were an action dumber, and more obvious, than the one Z’s boss was engaged in, and in which he habitually engaged every time they needed to talk discreetly, Z would have liked to hear it.
The man he works for at the Parisian satellite of their global information technology concern is also his handler at his other job, with its alternate objectives and hole-and-corner realm. Together, they run this covert operation from inside the company, a situation facilitated by a sympathetic Zionistic soul among the higher-ups.
When his boss takes his seat, Z apologizes for the urgent nature of his request to meet, and the personal nature of the e-mail he sent the night before, but he wanted to loop his boss in just as soon as he himself was aware, and, well, it seems he is going to need an unscheduled leave.
Z wants to fly to the States to help his mother die or, you know, not die, he says. That is, he very much hopes she’ll not die, but he also guesses she probably will.
“Riddled through,” is the phrase Z lands on.
“I am so, so sorry,” his boss says, with blunted affect.
“It’s important to me—to her—that I be there.”
“Of course.”
“I should tell you, I went and bought a ticket, already, this morning.”
“Yes,” his boss says. “I know.”
“You know?”
“We know. It came up. The ticket purchase.”
“Yes,” Z says. “I’d imagined it would,” Z says, really not having imagined this at all.
The pretext itself—his mother’s cancer, and his sudden need to race home to attend to her—he thought he’d set up expertly when he’d installed it as a contingency, years before. He had assumed, if he did ever need to employ it, that it wouldn’t have been to extricate himself from a situation involving his genuinely well-meant treason.
On one of Z’s early trips home to America to legally and preposterously change his name (an easy way to reboot an expat existence), he’d spent a jet-lagged morning in court waiting among a group of crazies who believed themselves to be a Petal or a Poppy, a Sunshine-Daydream or a Batman-James.
He’d driven back to his house, successful and fully exhausted, to find his dear mother waiting in the kitchen, wanting to know how his meeting had gone.
Her understanding was that he was visiting on business (which, in some ways, he was), and, as relates to his made-up meeting, he’d said, thank you very much, it had gone just fine.
He removed his tie, and kissed her on the head, and went to the den. Once he was camped out on the sectional, the remote control in hand, he told her through the doorway, and as nonchalantly as he could, that—and it was very important to his work, she should know—he was entrusting her with a critical e-mail-related task.
So startling was this that his mother momentarily paused from offering him the fruit he never accepted and with which she continuously, unceasingly, plied him. She sauntered into the space between her son and the TV, with a nice bowl of nectarines, and tried to sound nonchalant herself.
To be entrusted by her genius of a computer-expert son with any sort of responsibility like that was a highlight of her cyber-life.
“How can I help?” she’d said, as if it were no big deal at all.
Z praised her ability to check the weather on weather.com and to print out the digital pictures she received. He let her know he was full of confidence and told her that what he was asking was simple, besides. Simple, but still important.
He had a new e-mail account, he’d said, and he was listing her address as the default. She was never to write to him there. Never to tell anyone it even existed. But, if she ever did receive an alert about it, all she had to do was let him know.
It was an assignment that made her nervous just to hear.
“You can do it!” he’d said to his mother. “You’re a pro.”
He’d told her, almost as an afterthought, that she wasn’t to waste time calling the number on which they shared their weekly catch-up, as there was a special, emergency number for such an occurrence. A number, like the e-mail address, that she was never, ever to use.
“Then how do I call you on it, if I’m never supposed to use it?”
“Except,” he said, once again, “in this special case.”
He did complicate it one step further. “I know this sounds kooky,” he said. “But I’ll also need you to make that call from somewhere else, when you do.”
Not wanting to blow her chance at being a support, his mother had readily agreed.
And look at that? There he was, at news of the university bombing, stepping out of his office, returning to his apartment on Rue Domat, and knocking on a neighbor’s door to tell them his Internet connection was down.
If he could, if it wouldn’t be too much trouble, he’d said in his terrible French.
Then, in seconds, he’d logged on to that virgin account, changed his password, and logged back out. No e-mail sent, no contact made, an action as clean as clean could be.
He’d gone back to the apartment, and, from one of his hiding places, produced the never-used SIM that he always kept topped up with credit, and slipped it into the backup handset always kept charged to receive it.
He’d gone down into his building’s lovely courtyard and waited for it to ring.
His mother, God bless her, it wasn’t even thirty minutes before she was on the line, and—as he’d instructed—without calling his regular phone.
“Are you okay, honey?”
“I’m fine,” he’d said.
“Someone changed your password. Do you know that? They wrote me, the Internet people, to tell me that someone had changed a password.”
“It’s okay, Mom. I changed it.”
“I almost didn’t go on this morning—I do every morning, but today I have things to do. I was about to run out and now I’m so glad I checked. Should I forward the note to you?”
“No, Mother. Don’t send it. And I’m so glad you checked too. And thanks for remembering to call this number first.”
“I had it in my address book. I wrote it on the inside cover, ‘Call special phone.’ I tried the Erlbaums, but they weren’t home, so I came to call from the JCC. They’re letting me sit in the director’s office. I said to bill me the long distance, but I bet they won’t. They love me here.”
“Perfect.”
“And you’re good? Is Paris hot? It gets so hot there in summer.”
“It’s cool today.”
“Good. I worry about the heat. People die there in the summers.”
“Old people, Mom.”
“Like me!”