Jonathan Raban - Surveillance - A Novel

“Yakima?”

“Yakima’s the western headquarters of the NSA, the No Such Agency. I’ve seen the NSA setup there, at least the domes and dishes. It looks like a farm of humongous white mushrooms. It’s the ECHELON system. You send an e-mail, you make a phone call, ECHELON’s looking out for keywords. They use a program called Dictionary, a global search engine that does continuous roving wiretaps, going through millions of messages at a time. If you’re buying fertilizer in bulk, or want to take flying lessons for jetliners, you can count on your message landing up on somebody’s desk in Yakima. And if you say ‘jihad,’ they’ll be right inside your room before you can hang up the phone.”

Alida froze the picture on the screen to go to the bathroom. Tad said, “Look…” then stopped himself. “Let’s leave it till later.”

Lucy, thinking of the bored marshal on the ferry, said, “I think you overrate their competence. I mean, if their technology were that clever, wouldn’t you expect them to be a little better at their job? Read the 9/11 Report — it’s not about masters of espionage, it’s about a bunch of doofuses chasing one another’s tails.”

Alida, returning, said, “What are you talking about?”

“Doofuses and mushroom farming,” Lucy said, pouring herself a third glass.

“Cool.” Alida clicked the remote to liberate The Incredibles.

“We used to spy on the Russians, on their military and politicians, but now we’ve turned all that equipment — plus a whole lot more — on ourselves, on ordinary American civilians. You realize what we’re looking at here? This is the machinery of tyranny.”

That word again. “Oh, Tad, we’ve got an army. Armies are machines of tyranny. So are police forces. It’s not the machinery that makes tyranny, it’s how it’s used and who’s using it. Look, if your mushroom things can detect a terrorist attack before it happens, which I have to say they don’t seem too hot at, then I’m all for them. I mean it’s not as if the mushrooms belong to Joseph Stalin.”

“No? I wouldn’t bet the farm on that.”

“I wish I could get you in the same room as August Vanags. You’d make a great double act.”

“Vanags!” Tad glanced across at Alida, who was lost in her movie. “He’s just like all those Euro-types, like Kissinger and Brzezinski. They come over here from the old country, then they try running things like they were scheming away back home in rat-ridden Vienna, or wherever.”

“Actually, I think he’s the most American American I’ve ever met.”

“Actually,” Tad lowered his voice to a confidential mutter, “I think he’s what our charming landlord would call a scumbag son-of-a-bitch.”

“Which reminds me,” Lucy said in as airy a tone as she could muster. “I forgot to thank you for the tulips.”

AS SOON AS The Incredibles ended, Alida was sent to bed. Her mom came in for a snuggle, but Alida pretended to be asleep. She now stood at the door in her baggy Hotel Honolulu T-shirt, ear pressed to the wood, though there was hardly any need for that since the voices on the other side were rising steadily in pitch.

“I was there,” her mom was saying.

“Maybe I see it more clearly than you do because I wasn’t there.”

“It wasn’t like that.”

“You heard what she said. It’s not something you can argue about — it’s plain as daylight. All that bullshit about sharks? The guy’s a raving sadist.”

“Oh, Tad, you’re making your usual goddamn mountain out of your usual goddamn molehill. I mean, why the hell would he want to do that?”

“I don’t know. Because he’s a power freak? Because of something in his fouled-up European pathology? Because frightening kids is the nearest he can get to fucking them? You tell me. You’re his new friend.”

“They went kayaking. They saw a dogfish. End of story.”

“You’re totally deluding yourself. He took her out there for one reason: to scare her shitless.”

“It’s not true!” Alida flung the door open and stormed into the living room. “It’s not true!” Her whole body shaking with fury, she stood her ground, glaring at Tad. “He so did not. ” She felt her lower lip trembling, out of her control. “I love Augie.”

In helpless tears now, she found herself in Tad’s arms, gagging on her sobs like she was throwing up.

“Ali, Ali, Ali.” He was stroking her hair.

“It’s not true.”

“Okay, okay, so I was wrong.”

But she didn’t believe him: Tad was saying that just to humor her, he didn’t sound like he really believed that he was wrong, and even in his arms she felt the nub of anger still burning inside her. She had the sudden sense that in the last minute she’d arrived at some new place in her life — somewhere colder, grayer, more inhospitable than anywhere she’d ever been before.

Hands gripping her shoulders, Tad held her at a distance, but she couldn’t meet his eyes. She was staring straight ahead, into his white shirtfront, now all mussed up by the imprint of her face, a blurry mask of snot, tears, and flesh-tinted Clearasil.

STORIES. For years, Lucy had been telling stories about the absent father in Alida’s life. She had sworn to herself that she would always try to tell the truth, but she allowed herself to ration, stretch, and gloss that truth as circumstance dictated.

Turning three, Alida had asked, “Do I have a dad?”

This, Lucy decided, was really two questions. The answer to the first, about a biological father, would obviously have to be yes. But a dad was something different. Dads read bedtime stories, took out the garbage, dabbed shaving foam on their kids’ cheeks. In this sense, she reasoned, Alida obviously didn’t have a dad, so the answer was a firm negative.

“No, honey, there’s just you and me.”

Alida seemed content with the idea of her immaculate conception until one day, riding home from preschool, she said that they’d been discussing dads in the Rainbow Room. “I said my dad was dead,” she said, sounding rather pleased with herself, and went on to talk about the kites they’d made. Good solution, Lucy thought, and there was no further mention of Alida’s paternity for several months.

Then it was, “Who was my dad?”

Tricky, this one, but Lucy was grateful for Alida’s use of the past tense.

“Well,” Lucy said, playing for time. “I really, really wanted to have a baby. I wanted to have you. But I needed someone to help me, so I found this guy.”

“Like a doctor?”

“Yes. Exactly like a doctor. And he helped me to have you.”

“Did you have to pay him money?”

“No, he did it for free,” Lucy said, remembering the bar tab, the Painted Table dinner, the nightcaps from the minibar in his suite. Alida’s conception must have cost him — or rather, his law firm — a couple hundred bucks at least.

“Did it take long?”

“Oh, no, just a few seconds. Like getting a shot.”

“I hate shots,” Alida said, and moved on.

Another year passed before she asked the hardest question so far: “Where is my dad?” which moved him firmly out of the past and into the present and gave him a potential location in actual space. Lucy had to avoid saying “I don’t know,” which would encourage Alida to imagine a mystery that might be solved by a quest, so she said, “He just flew in and out; he was only in Seattle for two days.”

She’d flubbed on that one, but Alida’s curiosity was so shallow and fleeting that almost any response, so long as it wasn’t “He’s in Tucson, Arizona,” would’ve allowed her to change the subject, which she did. Whatever dad-shaped hole there might have been in Alida’s world was filled so amply, so lovingly, by Tad that recent years had passed without a single question. When Father’s Day came around, Tad got the cards, the lopsided bits of pottery, the clumsily sewn hearts filled with potpourri. The accident of his name helped: he was so very nearly Dad in every sense.