With her pen she stabs down a period that tears the page and says, “You’re no help,” and hangs up. She plugs the pen in her mouth and gnaws on it. The plastic is already scored from her teeth. Dozens of yellow legal tablets surround her, wrinkled and torn and coffee-stained and stitched with her handwriting, much of it a coded shorthand illegible to anyone but her. Their leaning piles are decorated with empty coffee cups and chip bags and crumpled blobs of cellophane dusted with muffin crumbs. She has tacked to the foam walls of the cubicle a photograph of her standing alone before Multnomah Falls and a film noir calendar with every square darkened with reminders about meetings and deadlines.
She is pale. So is everyone else in Portland, but she is particularly light-skinned and freckled, which makes the black bags beneath her eyes all the more obvious. Her gingery hair she keeps knotted into a braid that might be called churchy or grandmotherly but that she thinks of as classic. Men, usually men in bars who have drunk too much to know better, have called her face everything from elfin to pointy to fawnish. She didn’t let any of them stick their tongues in her mouth, though they tried. She has lost track of her latest coffee—one of twenty she might drink in a day—and spits out the dregs of two cold cups before finding the one that goes down lukewarm.
She pushes out of her chair and leans over her cubicle and asks the Metro intern—an acne-scarred kid named Josh, a com-jo major at Portland State—to do some digging. “Undertown, Inc. Get me whatever you can on them.”
“Ever heard of Google?” he says. His voice still has a crackly pubescence to it.
He knows she hates using computers. Everybody knows and nobody will shut up about it. They all think it’s the most hilarious thing in world history. Calling her a Luddite. Asking her if she’s updated her stone tablet with the latest software. “Do what you’re told. That’s what interns are supposed to do.”
“Fine.”
A minute later, he has the company website up on the monitor. “Under construction,” it reads.
“Exactly,” she says. “Under construction. Nothing else?”
“That’s all. No phone. No email. I also searched the domain name—to see who’s paying for the site—but whoever it is, they dropped the extra fee that buys anonymity.”
“Why would they do that?” she says.
“Because they’re shy?”
“You’re no help either.”
She calls City Hall and asks a favor of the clerk in Records. Promises to buy him lunch so long as he digs out the file on the Rue Apartments, gets her the contact info for the buyer, Undertown, Inc. She waits with the phone clamped against her shoulder until he rattles off an email and a number with an area code she doesn’t recognize. “No billing address?” she says, and he says, “Nope. Paid for through an anonymous escrow account.”
“What’s with these fuckers?” she says, and he says, “Excuse me?”
“Nothing. Thanks,” she yells to the phone when it’s already halfway to the cradle. Then she pesters Josh to get her intel on the email—[email protected]—and phone number. He takes a look at the slip of paper and says he can’t.
“Can’t? Can’t? What’s with this can’t?”
“Hushmail is an encrypted service, and if you’re serious about privacy, you’re probably using TOR, a network within a network that bounces all traffic through multiple servers making it impossible to figure out who you are, where you’re from.”
“Wait—what? English please.”
He says, “Cavewoman translation: it’s secret email.”
“Why would you want secret email?”
“Because you’ve got secrets?”
“Okay,” she says. “Then look up the phone.”
“I can’t.”
“Again,” she says, “this can’t. I don’t like it.”
He taps the area code, 473. “It’s fake. The one most scammers use. That’s not a real place. It’s the area code to nowhere. Probably a Blackphone. Or else they’re using encryption software.”
“How do you know all this crap?”
He throws up his arms and lets them fall. “I don’t know. I’m friends with nerds. I wasn’t born during the Civil War. Et cetera.”
“Who are these nerd friends?”
“Okay, friend. Singular. A hacker buddy of mine. He’s deep into this kind of stuff.”
She tells Josh he can go, but not far. She might need him. She lets her hand sit a moment on the phone before lifting the receiver, checking the dial tone, dialing.
The first time someone answers, there is no Hello, no How can I help you? “To whom am I speaking?” That’s what the man on the other end of the line says. He speaks in a baritone broken by an accent that makes his mouth sound full of glass. Eastern European, she guesses, but what does she know? She’s a reporter. She’s an expert on nothing because she knows a little of everything.
She is rarely at a loss for words. But something about the voice—its deep, almost otherworldly register—unsettles her. She clicks her pen a few times before telling him her name, her position, asking if he might be willing to spend a few minutes talking to her about Undertown for an article she’s writing about the Pearl District, the urban renaissance in Portland.
There is a gust of breath. Then a click followed by a dial tone that fills her ear like a siren.
She hangs up the phone and tries again. The ringing goes on for two minutes and never changes over to voicemail. She tries again, and again, and again, until her ear grows hot with the phone mashed against it.
From a good height, she drops the phone into the cradle. The clattery dong of it makes a few people pop up in the cubicles around her. She gives them the finger, and they drop down again. She clicks her pen a few more times, then tucks it in her pocket, grabs her purse, drains her coffee, and starts for the door.
The cubicles are arranged like a gray-combed hive, and she navigates their alleys. Computer screens flash in her passing. She spots one of the Arts reporters contorting her body into a yoga stretch, a Sports columnist watching two televisions at once. Many of the desks are unoccupied, empty except for a balled-up sheet of paper, a broken keyboard. Every year they lose more ads, more subscribers, and every year their staff shrinks, so that one person scrambles to cover the work of six.
Out of the corner of her eye, she spots him. Brandon, her editor. Everyone else wears jeans and fleece, but he slinks into the office every day in an Oxford pinstripe with a tie noosed around his neck. “Where you going? Lela?”
“Out.”
She races along a long line of file cabinets. One of the Sports clerks turns the corner. He carries a tall pile of Hot Lips Pizza boxes. She flattens against the cabinets and dodges past him and through a warm cloud of pepperoni.
Brandon gets slowed down by the clerk, but catches up before she reaches the hallway, the bank of elevators. “What are you chasing?”
“A story.”
“This for tomorrow?”
“Definitely not, but it might be hot.”
“What’s it about?”
“Can’t tell. Too early. Bad luck to share.”
“I still need copy for Sunday.”
“The fall farmers’ market and the Willamette 10K. You’ll get it.”
“I better.”