Jonathan Raban: Surveillance: A Novel

He now had Gail’s site up on the screen, with a picture taken by her dad last weekend at her house over in Bellevue: Gail was smiling (she’d taken her retainer out for the photo) with her dog Sirius lying at her feet, his tongue hanging out like he’d just run a marathon.

“Sirius is so cute,” Alida said.

Finn surprised them both when he said, “You want a link on that dog?” He sounded almost interested.

Gail said, “D’you have a dog, Finn?”

“Not anymore.” A long string of code unfurled across the screen. “I’m more into horses now.”

“You go horse riding?” The idea of the Geek on horseback was so totally hilarious that Alida didn’t dare catch Gail’s eye.

“Nah,” Finn said, with his whiffling, sniggery laugh.

“Oh, horse racing, like Seabiscuit.”

“I really liked that movie,” Alida said.

“This host sucks.” Finn was hammering at a key with an impatient forefinger. “It’s a POS.”

“What?”

“Piece Of Shit. I could move you to WebspiderZ — they’re cool.”

“Don’t you dare!”

Finn had worked that trick on Pia — moved her site to WebspiderZ, where you couldn’t do anything without knowing code. So for a week or two Pia had become a slave to Finn’s peculiar moods and whims, then she’d gone back to FreeWebs, where she had to start over from scratch. Like Pia said, on WebspiderZ, Finn was the spider and you were the fly.

He heaved his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “Just my two cents. There’s a bunch of neat stuff you can do on Webspider Z.”

Parents were generally indulgent toward him. Gail’s mom called him Poor Finn, like Poor was his given name. According to the mothers, his dad was a foreigner who’d gone away to Europe and wasn’t coming back, so Finn had gotten some kind of eating disorder, which was why he was always pigging out on candy and muffins. To Alida, who didn’t even know who her dad was, this seemed less than a stellar reason for cutting Finn a mile of slack, but she enjoyed the grown-upness that came with thinking of the Geek as an unhappy kid whose extraordinary brattiness might not be entirely his own fault. “Going through a difficult phase” was how the parents put it, and Alida liked the ring of superior maturity in the words.

When the link to Sirius came up on the screen, she said “Good job, Finn,” as if she were a teacher and Finn her student.

“Cool,” Gail said.

“Oh yeah, this is like rocket science,” Finn said, but sounded gratified in spite of himself. “That dog — if you’ve got video of him, I could stream it for you.”

“You could?” Nobody Gail and Alida knew had streaming video on her website.

Finn talked megabytes and bandwidth, not to Gail but mumbling confidentially to the screen and keyboard. Seeing his back as he bobbed and squirmed in his seat you’d think he was wrestling with an octopus, the double roll of fat around his midriff rippling inside his black T-shirt, his tangled bush of hair jerking back and forth in hip-hop time. In class he was the motionless hulk at his all-boys table, but plugged into a computer he had this frantic, cartoonish animation.

“Finn, what happened to your dog?” Alida said. “Did he like die?”

His back froze in mid-squirm. “Nah. She just got advertised.”

“Advertised?”

“There’s a no-pets rule in the building, so she had to get put in the paper.”

“You mean somebody bought her?”

“Nope. She was free. Some woman got her. In North Bend.” He made it sound like North Bend was on Mars. More slowly than usual, he wrote on the screen, . “She was called Sugar,” he said.

Gail caught Alida’s eye. It was partly the way he said it, but the thought of the Geek with a dog named Sugar was kind of hilarious, and Gail’s whole body was trembling with the effort of suppressing a fit of the giggles. Cheeks bulging, staring bug-eyed at Alida, she put the back of her hand to her mouth to keep the laughter from bursting out.

Covering for her friend, Alida said, a little too loudly, “That’s really, really sad.”

“Duh!” Finn said. “Who gives a shit? It was only a stupid dog.”

Later, daydreaming through Social Studies while Mrs. Milliband went on about maps, Alida thought about her secret algebra project. People were always saying x when what they really meant was y. Everybody did it, usually to be polite — like the dozen times a day you had to say, “Cool,” out of politeness when something wasn’t cool at all. Sometimes the words people spoke were exactly like problems in algebra. Finn talking about his lost dog, for instance. Or even Alida herself, pretending to Gail that she had a crush on Eric because Gail said she had a crush on Blake.

Math was Alida’s favorite subject, and this semester she was seriously into algebra — tantalizing puzzles in which you used Elimination, Substitution, and Intersection to make unknown quantities reveal their true identities. Back in fourth grade, she’d been a whiz at story problems: John had five times as many apples as Mary, or Ben and Sara were working the snack bar at the school summer fair and selling hot dogs for $1.35 and sodas for 85¢, and Alida always had her hand up first, rapping furiously at the air even before the solution had precisely formulated itself in her head, confident that the right answer would come to her lips in time. She feared the world of the playground, where the rules kept on changing from one day to the next, but among numbers she felt gifted and secure. Each day now she saved her math homework until last, the better to enjoy her escape into this magical place where everything fit as snugly as a well-shot basketball dropping through the hoop. Working her way down a page of equations, she was engrossed and happy, letting numbers talk to her, watching k, and x, and y, and b, and c come out from behind their teasing disguises.

6 — 2 y = 7 y + 13 made immediate and satisfying sense, but what Alida really wanted was a system of human algebra. It’d be incredibly cool if you could figure people out like that, isolating their variables on just one side of the equation, adding positives to negatives to make zeros, until the problem disentangled into one clear statement: this means that.

When Susy walked to the bus stop at 3 mph, she missed the bus by 2 minutes, but when she ran to the stop at 6 mph, she arrived with 1 minute to spare. How far is the bus stop from Susy’s home? The simplest equations needed a whole bunch of hard data, like all the stopwatch and tape-measure stuff they’d managed to collect on Susy. Alida was working on that. She’d already opened a secret file on her mother, who was pretty crazy a lot of the time, and in less than two weeks had filled nearly twenty pages of a locked diary with scraps of significant info — like exactly how much wine her mom drank, and when; what she said when she got mad; when her period came; which route she took to school each day. Alida was logging every visitor to the apartment, the books her mom read, her conversations on the phone. Her mom could hardly go to the bathroom now without Alida registering the event. She was still way short of building any actual equations, but felt that with each new addition to the diary she was getting slightly closer to turning her mom into a soluble problem.

She could speak to nobody about the algebra project, for Alida knew that she was unhappily unique in finding other people’s talk and behavior so weird and difficult to read. Gail was never mystified by her parents — or by anybody else, so far as Alida could tell. All her friends instinctively understood things that Alida had to puzzle out. She might be smart at math, but she was dumb at human beings, and much acting and pretense went into hiding her peculiar stupidity from the rest of the world. Laughing at jokes that made no sense to her, having crushes on boys she didn’t even like, searching people’s faces for cues as to whether she ought to say x or y, Love it or Hate it, Alida usually succeeded in passing herself off as a normal kid: she alone knew the shameful effort that went into her daily performances, and the risk she ran of being unmasked as a pathetic fake.