James Sallis - Ghost of a Flea

“Most people did.”

“You among them, I hope.”

She turned her head abruptly to meet my eyes. Glasses swung at the end of their cord as breasts swayed and came to rest inside a bone-colored silk jumper. One hand, veins close to the surface, crept into view atop the desk. Signals everywhere.

“Here, I’ll show you.”

I followed her through mazes that would put Charlie and Algernon at their collective best to shame, trying hard not to focus on skirt, buttocks and taut calves before me. We came to rest, like the head of Orpheus, in the snag of an L-shaped desk lodged north-by-northwest, smack against a coral reef of bookshelves. Desktop all but bare, memos tacked up in perfect rows, half an inch between them on the horizontal, two on the vertical. But when I pulled open the top drawer, there it was, barely contained: the world’s chaos.

“Her mother’s daughter,” I said.

I’d rummaged through half a dozen unmarked folders and envelopes stuffed with bits of inscribed paper when Ms. LeBlanc leaned against my shoulder to pose another nonquestion: “You’re looking for something specific.”

I was, and, all things considered, didn’t mind her knowing, though I wasn’t sure how far onto that particular bridge I wanted to walk just yet. She forestalled my having to decide.

“The job entails a bit more than answering phones and being able to plow one’s way through the morass of grant applications, Lewis. My degree is in law. When I found I was unable to practice, that I couldn’t in good conscience accommodate myself to the system-a child of the Sixties after all, though mostly I was absent from and oblivious of the era’s great events, being too busy with my studies to take much notice-I began casting about for alternatives. This is what I came up with.”

“You’re lucky.”

She nodded. “Most of us never find a place we fit. And I’m good at this. Good enough to suspect that Alouette has been receiving threats, for instance.”

“Oh.”

“And to assume that’s what you’re looking for.”

“How did you know?”

“I didn’t. Only suspected it.”

“But you never talked to her about it.”

“She never talked about it with me. It was her place to bring it up, not mine. Threats are a commonplace in our world, with what we do. We receive them all the time, in every kind of package-overt, implied, physical, psychological. Face to face in the heat of confrontations. Over phones at three in the morning. Downstream from bureaucrats in suits and cell phones and upstream from clients lugging their few precious worldy goods about in plastic bags or shopping carts.”

“You thought the threats were routine, then. Not serious.”

Now I was doing it. Nonquestions.

“In their way they all are. I do think Alouette failed to take them seriously.” Valerie LeBlanc leaned back onto the window ledge, which canted her hips forward, pushing belly and thighs tight against the front of her skirt. She did this with the air of someone wholly unaware of her body, the effects it engendered. “Part of it’s that she doesn’t take herself seriously, you know.”

“She works hard.”

“Harder than almost anyone else around here. But that also serves to direct her away from herself. Sound like anyone you know?”

“Sounds like everyone I know. Pardon me, miss, but your Sixties are showing.”

“They usually do, however careful I am to tuck them in. Nineteen-ninety-six, the year he died, my father was still ranting about murderous, inhuman Japs. Talk about holding grudges. And people say Americans have no sense of history! So maybe I’m doomed to the same? Stuck in place like all those people with lacquered hair and leisure suits on the religious channel, flat and lifeless as pressed flowers. History’s torpedoes streaming towards me in silence.” She pushed off the window ledge. “Come on, let’s peek.”

I followed back through the maze to her desk. “Mind you,” she said, “peeking’s nowhere near as exciting as it used to be.”

“Things get that way at our age.”

She sat before her computer. “They don’t have to.” Fingers rippled on the keyboard as though with a will of their own, the very figure of the socialist agenda, each finger acting independently though in concert, courting the common good.

“At some level, always, we’re just looking for the secret stuff. Not much difference there between Molly Bloom and Sally Raphael.”

Fingers went on as she spoke. I thought of H. G. Wells’s Martians stilting towards London, soldiers in blue peering down from the hills over Vicksburg, young men in Sopwith Camels who cast an eye on life, on death, flew on.

“This whole thing,” she said, nodding towards the computer, “is a morass, an ethical slough. I can punch in and find out instantly who’s left messages on my machine, cruise business prospects and keep up with friends, have the world’s news at my fingertips. But I can also, with the flick of that same finger, call up a list of sex offenders and their current addresses. These are people, mind you, who’ve served their time, paid their debt. People who, according to every tenet of a Constitution we go on and on claiming to be so proud of, are fundamentally protected.”

Menus and directories bloomed on the screen, gave way to others, in a constant wash.

“Most days I bemoan that loudly. Decry, despise and disavow it.” She stopped, fingers still, and read what she had, then clacked a few more keys. Columns of icons and keywords filled the screen. “Here’s a file Alouette had tucked away in a private folder. Swept under the rug, as it were. Correspondence, mostly. And mostly electronic, from the look of it.”

“Can I get a-”

But she’d already pushed the eject button, and was handing me a disk.

“Thanks.”

“You’re welcome. I hope it helps.” She smiled. “Hate to invade someone’s privacy for nothing. Maybe you’ll let me know?”

Valerie LeBlanc replaced her glasses. Mission accomplished, good deeds done. No one would take her for the hero she was, now. Back to the workaday world.

Three hours and spare change later, I was sitting at a rear table in Tender Buttons, a converted drugstore where the food is great if profoundly idiosyncratic even by New Orleans standards. Service, on the other hand, might best be described as postmodern: sketchy, nonsequential and difficult to follow, forever self-conscious and oddly parodic as though in some indecipherable way alluding to other things entirely, say yakraising or kazoo artistry.

Many of the entries from Alouette’s computer, lacking referents or perspective, proved utterly indecipherable. Others had to do with various projects at work and appeared to be of no more than utilitarian interest. There was a file of personal letters and e-mail messages, another of (I think) references to newspaper and magazine articles. But the one that caught my attention had been identified simply as GOK-Alouette’s code, I recognized, for an intellectual shrug, God Only Knows-and I sat thinking about it as the waiter brought my catfish au beurre noir and grit cakes studded with bits of bright habanero pepper, side of white asparagus, and vanished to reappear at irregular intervals, bursting suddenly upon the scene to linger there like a declaimed quote, or shuttling up all but unnoticed, superfluous as a footnote.

The GOK file was a hodgepodge of lists, passages from novels and self-help books, advertising slogans, obituaries, cross sections of classified ads, altogether the most eclectic jumble of disparate things heaped up in a single place that I’d ever come across, a tour through America’s waste lots and past its false, ruined faces, a landfill of used-up words, expended cartridges of old thoughts clattering to the floor. One list comprised science-fiction titles.