David Shafer - Whiskey Tango Foxtrot

When Sarah returned, Leila was in an alcove of atlases, traveling the world, an empanada pressed to her forehead.

“Are you all right?” said Sarah.

“Never better,” said Leila.

“You’re probably just getting used to the effect.”

“The effect?”

“Don’t worry — the trippy feeling will wear off soon. Then it’s just a new way of being.”

“I wasn’t really worried,” said Leila.

“Fair enough. Some people don’t really like the connectivity part. You’ll see that you can make as much or as little use of it as you need to. It’s going to feel like you can speak a new language — but it’s not a language you speak; you just kind of transmit it and receive it. It’s dormant in all of us, though it comes out stronger in some people than in others. We call it the Common Language, but no one has a clue how to use it yet, really, or what to do with it. You’d better eat hamburgers while you still can, though, because the Talk to the Animals people are fierce excited about the Common Language.”

“But can I go back to the way I was before?”

“No”—Leila had known this would be Sarah’s answer—“you can never go back. But Lola, I’m saying to you right now, hand on heart, that I’ve never wanted to go back. Not once. I’ve never wished for that smaller world. I lost nothing of myself when I joined with others. In a weird way, I see now that I always wanted this, that I’d always known it was possible. Anyway, get your skates on, missus. We need to get you to the airport.”

Back in Dermot’s car, lunging through Phibsborough, Leila asked Sarah, “Don’t you need me to get machines to remote parts of the world or whatever?”

“Yeah, don’t be worrying about that,” said Sarah. Her window-side hair was getting severely tousled by the late, dark summer air. “We’re generating a new task for you.”

“But we’re still doing a deal, right? You’ll clear my dad if I do something for you?”

“We’ll do our best,” said Sarah. “But does it still feel to you like we’re doing a deal here? Because it shouldn’t feel like that anymore.”

It didn’t feel like that anymore. They were offering her a chance to be part of something grander than herself. These were her people now. She would put her shoulder to the wheel.

“You should have asked me straight out, though,” Leila said. “About the eye test. You should have said there’s no going back.”

“There’s no going back from anything, Lola. You learn something true, it sticks with you.”

They were stopped at a light, Dermot’s black car puttering. Leila noticed precisely the way traffic signals were mounted over Dublin intersections. This information belonged to her forever, as if she were storing it on an external hard drive. Was this another part of what Sarah called the effect?

“That’s Bertie Ahern’s boozer,” said Dermot, from the front. He was pointing at a pub off their left flank. He drove like a jockey, his left hand rarely off the stick. Her dad drove that way. Cyrus Majnoun’s number-one favorite thing about America? Drive-in restaurants. The man nearly wet his pants at the prospect. Had their father been in charge of meal planning in the Majnoun household, Roxana and Dylan and Leila would all have grown obese. “Look: we are kings and queens,” he would say to his children as they sat in the family Tercel beneath ten thousand lumens, burgers on trays cantilevered from their rolled-down windows.

“But when will I know what it is I’m supposed to do?” she said to Sarah.

“Roman’s working out the details. I’ll get onto him now.” She slipped her phone against her Leila-side ear.

A few minutes later, they rolled down a steep driveway and were admitted via another swiftly operated mechanical door into a bright warehouse arrayed with neat aisles of metal shelving twenty feet tall. Like the last scene in Raiders of the Lost Ark . Dermot rolled to a stop beside what appeared to be a staged living room: a cardboard TV before a coffee table and a leather sofa.

Leila got out of the car. “Are we in Ikea?”

“It’s a new arrangement,” said Sarah. “At night, Ikeas are Dear Diary dormitories.”

“Whatever,” said Leila.

“They’re ideal. They’re right beside the airport, they can sleep eighty comfortably, and if you’re hungry, there’s the meatballs. Kidding. Don’t eat those meatballs. They come in on pallets.”

“Absolutely. It’s a good idea. It’s just — you know — not widely known.”

Sarah led Leila upstairs and through the circuitous showroom; they took the shortcut between Media Storage and Children’s, walked against the arrows toward Bedroom. Leila shrugged a Hey-there at a trio of pajama-clad, toothbrush-holding Asian dudes. They Hey-there -shrugged back.

Sarah brought her to one of those little pretend apartments meant to show how an untethered urbanite might live in five hundred square feet: all you needed was squared magazines, three shirts, and a colander. Leila knew that that was a marketing deceit; she was relatively untethered, and she had more crap than would fit in this place. Plus, she and Rich had broken up in an Ikea — the one in Elizabeth, New Jersey — so the environment was not emotionally unladen for her.

But there was something funny about this demo apartment. She looked closer. It was real! The sink was plumbed — she turned on the cold tap and splashed herself — and there were sheets on the bed. She tugged at the string of the blinds and found behind them a real window, a view of a grimy annex of the airport beyond it. She turned and saw her green North Face duffel at the foot of the Malm bed with the Kvist bedding. Sarah stood at the door to the real pretend apartment.

“Are you staying here with me?” said Leila.

“No. Feargal and I have to clean down the Parish house.”

Leila opened her duffel, put her hands on her own things. Her bag had not been tampered with — she always rigged a tube of moisturizer in a way that would tell her if it had been. (Once, in Sierra Leone, she had faced a skinny customs man who was wearing her sunglasses while examining her passport.) “That sounds dangerous. What if those dudes come back? What if they do here what they did in London and Berlin?”

“Don’t mind that. It’s different here.”

“Here Ireland? What’s Ireland got?”

“Twisty roads and an abhorrence of tyranny,” said Sarah.

“So you guys will just melt back into the countryside?”

“Pretty much. Feargal and I just have to make sure no one leaves any hardware lying around.”

“Like those eye-test machines?”

Sarah nodded.

“What was that, Sarah?”

Sarah sat down at the little table in the little kitchen. “Here, I know it’s a lot to take in. Come here to me and I’ll tell you what I know about the eye test.”

Leila stopped fussing with her bag and sat beside Sarah.

“First of all, you know that sensate keenness you’re probably still feeling? Well, that’s more of a secondary effect; it’s not actually what the eye test was designed to do. The eye test was designed to give a secure unique identifier to each human subject looking at that screen.”

“It gave me a number.”

“Or maybe it made up a number to represent some immutable and unique quality of you. But either way, everyone gets fifteen digits, and no two Diarists have come out with the same number. Not yet, anyways.”

Leila counted in her head, looking up the way you do. “Mine’s not fifteen digits.”

“Sorry, it’s fifteen places . There are two zeros that precede your thirteen numbers. They’re silent. I’ve got four silent zeros. Don’t worry about it.”