“Hi.”
“Standard call. You good.”
“I’m good.”
“Address still the same.”
“Yes.”
“Anyone been around. Anything weird. Anyone you have noticed.”
“No.”
“Cohort going okay.”
“Yes.”
“Anyone in your life I should know about.”
I pause. I pause for a half-second. The pause is the kind of pause that is shorter than a sentence and longer than nothing. Mendez hears it. Mendez hears everything. Mendez has been doing this for fifteen years and he has heard ten thousand pauses and he knows what a pause is.
“Reed.”
“No.”
“You sure.”
“Yes. I’m sure.”
“Okay.”
He says okay the way Mendez says okay when he has decided not to push. He has heard the pause and he has decided not to push. “Same time, two months,” he says.
“Okay.”
“Reed.”
“Yeah.”
“You know what I’m going to say.”
“Yeah.”
“If there’s anyone, you tell me. We figure it out. We can figure it out. What we cannot figure out is what we do not know.”
“I know.”
“Okay.”
He hangs up.
I sit at the desk. The laptop is open, the response paper that’s due in four days on the screen. The sentence I added in October —the archive holds what it cannot say— is in the middle of the third page. I haven’t deleted it. I’ve been working around it. I sit at the desk. I don’t move. I lied to Mendez. I’ve been lying to Mendez for a month and I haven’t let myself look at it. I have been telling myself the program does not need to know everything, my life is my life and the program does not own all of it. The program does own all of it. That is the sentence I have been not saying. The program owns all of it because the program is what is keeping me alive. What is keeping me alive dictates what I can have. What I can have does not include a man whose name is on a public roster at the same school as mine. A man I have been with twice a week for a month. A man who knows my cover name and could say it to the wrong person and put it all at risk.
I could say I have someone to Mendez right now. I could call back. I could.
If I call back, Mendez is going to ask who. How long. Whether the someone knows. The someone knows. The someone knows everything. The someone knew the old me before he knew the new me. The someone is, by every measure the program uses, a vulnerability. If I call back, the program is going to start considering whether to move me. If I call back, the someone, Griffin, becomes a thing the program is now tracking. The program does not track people without consequences. The consequences are downstream of me lying for a month. The consequences are going to be Griffin’s consequences too. I do not call back. I sit at the desk.
I am supposed to see him at seven. I see him at seven. I walk to his apartment the way I have been walking to his apartment for a month. I do not check over my shoulder, which is a thingI haven’t been doing for two weeks now, and I’m someone who notices what I have stopped doing. I have stopped checking over my shoulder. For two years I have been checking over my shoulder. I stopped without noticing. I noticed last week, walking home from his apartment, and thoughthuh, and didn’t do anything with it. I am thinking about it again now, walking to his apartment. I am becoming a person who does not check, who is not on alert, who has dropped his guard. That is what the program told me, two years ago in the briefing, was the thing that would get me killed.
