Jonathan Raban - Surveillance - A Novel

“You sound like the counselor.”

“‘Poor Finn’ is what I’m thinking. I wonder what drove him to it.”

“I think he misses his dad — I saw him writing an e-mail once. But now he’s famous. ”

“So you said. Now, I thought for dinner I’d make some really special macaroni and cheese.”

“Cool.”

At five o’clock sharp, Alida, never normally a newshound, asked to watch the news. Finn was indeed famous, though not by name. He was “an eleven-year-old Seattle boy,” and the school, thankfully, wasn’t mentioned. Experts talked about the mechanics of the “vulnerability.” Then came the child psychologists.

Do you know what your child is doing on the Internet? Etc., etc. A solemn fellow in a bow tie advised parents to ensure that their kid’s computer was permanently located in a “family room,” where they could constantly “monitor” the screen.

“Parents today often fail to understand the growing computer literacy of the upcoming generation. Children as young as seven and eight are now performing complex operations far beyond the comprehension of moms and dads. Parents have a great deal of catching up to do. You have to ask yourself, ‘Do I understand what Junior’s doing here?’ And if you don’t, get Junior to explain it to you. If you’re not immediately satisfied with the explanation, you need to seek outside help. Do you have a tech-savvy friend? Who’s the IT teacher at your child’s school? This Freak virus is a wake-up call to parents everywhere.”

Pernicious nonsense, in Lucy’s view. Whenever she went into Alida’s room, Alida automatically closed the laptop on which she was instant-messaging with her friends, and Lucy respected that: just because she was a kid didn’t mean she had no right to privacy. What a lousy example to set, to snoop on your own child’s every move. Finn Janeway’s astonishing escapade was being used as an excuse for universal parental paranoia. And as for Mr. Bow Tie’s talk of “Junior,” that showed how hopelessly out of touch he was.

“Right,” she said. “Rabbit — laptop into the family room, screen facing me. And when you’re I.M.-ing, I need you to read me every word.”

Alida sniggered.

“Can you and Gail write HTML?”

“Nah, we leave all that stuff to Finn. Even the twelfth-graders go to Finn. You have to pay him with muffins.”

“I have a feeling Finn’s seen his last muffin, which won’t do him any harm at all. Better by a long shot than seven years in the pokey.”

“You really think he won’t go to jail?”

“I’m positive, Rabbit. He won’t be allowed near a computer, he’ll have to go muffinless, but he won’t go to jail. It was just a kid’s prank that went too far — way, way too far. And if I ever catch you writing a virus I’ll kill you with my bare hands.”

“I’m cool with that,” Alida said, idly watching the weatherman gesture at his map.

“Now I need some help with dinner.”

The recipe, cut from a newspaper, had grown yellow but untried on the fridge door, where it shared a magnet with a sheaf of cards from take-out delivery joints. It began with the intimidating injunction to “Make a roux ” and called for chopped ham, chopped green peppers, grated nutmeg, jalapeños, skinned and deseeded tomatoes, ricotta, and cheddar. It promised “tender elbows of pasta nestling in a complex and colorful cheese sauce.” Minna Vanags would no doubt have found it as easy as boiling an egg, but to Lucy it looked like the Everest of haute cuisine.

She set Alida to grating cheese. After the hysteria of the Finn affair, she needed to be returned to Earth. Alida babbled as she grated, while Lucy feigned a wise and airy cool about the whole business, though the pretense grew increasingly hard to maintain as her own hysteria about the recipe mounted. With every move she made, she foresaw the threat of Chinese takeout in the offing. Congealed lumps appeared in the roux ; she fiercely mashed them out with a wooden spoon. Deseeding tomatoes was beyond her, so she substituted canned. Jalapeños, she thought, might be more than Alida’s palate could take, so she sprinkled the now-bubbling mixture with a dusting of cayenne instead. The water for the pasta — she had straight macaroni, not “elbows”—refused to come to a boil on time. The kitchen counter turned into a slovenly chaos of spilled tomato juice, nutmeg, pepper cores, seeds, and cheese that Alida had managed to grate almost everywhere except on the designated plate. Lucy scalded a knuckle when she tried to take a taste, said “Fuck!” then “Excuse me!” then “Fuck!” again when the wooden spoon slid unaided from the counter to the floor.

Alida was still going on about Finn and his famous Trojan horse, but Lucy had ceased to listen. She thought wistfully of all the varieties of macaroni and cheese that came frozen in containers, to which all you needed to do was prick the cellophane top and shove them in the microwave. With such drama around the stovetop, who needed news? Most of all, Lucy feared duplicating one of her mother’s culinary atrocities, and swore she’d stick to Stouffer’s in the future.

Eventually, the whole pinkish, greenish slumgullion made it into a casserole dish, was sprinkled with more cheese, and was placed under the broiler, with the timer set for fifteen minutes. Lucy rewarded herself with an extra-large glass of Oregon pinot noir.

The knock on the door came just when the timer started beeping.

“Oh, Jesus — Alida! Get the door, will you?”

It was the landlord. Bowing, smiling, he had a tape measure in one hand and a book in the other. Lucy, hair in her eyes, holding the heavy casserole in burned and greasy oven gloves, grimaced at him.

“Home cooking!” Mr. Lee said.

“S-S-S-Sorry, we’re just about to eat.”

“Came to measure up.” He pointed back at the door. “Video monitor.”

“What?”

“Like I told you — video monitor for security.”

“Oh, that.” She put the casserole on a mat on the table.

“Bring you the book.” He placed it beside the casserole. It was a small book, grown fat and soggy with rereading: Who Moved My Cheese?

“That’s funny. I was just making m-m-macaroni and cheese.”

“Lots of good tips — you’ll see.”

“Well…thank you.” She wished he’d get on with his measuring, though the last thing she wanted was a video monitor. The landlord appeared to be using her as a guinea pig for his projects: the lock on Tad’s door had remained unchanged. Why was her apartment being singled out for these experiments? And why did he always have to show up at such inconvenient hours? “Mr. Lee, do you mind if we just g-g-get on and eat?”

“No, no — smells good!” He didn’t budge from the table, just stood there, smiling expectantly.

Lucy gave up. “Alida? You’d better set another place for Mr. Lee.”

Alida was happy to welcome the landlord to the table, treating him as a fresh pair of ears to which she could tell her astounding news. She’d been deeply disappointed to find that Tad wasn’t home when they’d returned to the Acropolis, and now she had the captive audience she craved.

“You heard about the Freak virus?”

“Oh, yeah. My bank got hit — call me this morning.”

“You know who started it? It was a boy in my class ! Finn—”

“Alida, I don’t think—”

“Finn Janeway! The FBI came to our school! He got arrested ! They took him away, in two cars.”

“Janeway? Finn? ” Mr. Lee’s overslung eyelids seemed for a moment to be working overtime. “He do all this with his home computer?”

“I think so — or maybe from the computer lab at school.”