Jonathan Raban: Surveillance: A Novel

She knew the route. Years ago she’d spent a weekend at the Owens’ tiny cottage on Useless Bay. Alida was still in diapers then. It had been like vacationing inside a Ralph Lauren catalog — wood furniture scraped bare, cabin trunks, cushions, antique fishing stuff hanging on the walls. Not really her thing at all, but Alida had loved it.

Turning right on Sunlight Beach Road, she was shocked by the view. What she remembered as a long row of weatherbeaten shacks, each with its narrow, sandy, crab-trap-littered lawn and scrap of beachfront, was now an architectural freak show. One or two cottages were still left, but not the Owens’—which must have stood somewhere inside the pink-brick French château that looked as if it had escaped from a wine-bottle label. Lucy remembered them telling her they’d sold the place to a Microsoft VP before moving to Denver, but he must’ve bought at least three other lots in order to build that pile. Beside it, a surviving cottage had lost all its funky chic and now looked like a derelict privy. Beyond the château stood a gross chromium and glass affair, partly enclosed in tubular pipes, with goggling circular windows like the eyes of a giant science-fiction beetle. Then another forlorn cottage, then an adobe Spanish mission. And so it went. The late-1990s rich had taken over Useless Bay since Lucy had last been here, and their weekend mansions made their presence look like some famous imperial conquest — but this empire was already fading, with half the buildings up for sale and finding no takers, to judge by real estate agents’ signs that winter gales had blown askew and gulls were whiting out with guano.

She’d written the number of the Vanags place on a Post-It gummed to the dash — and here it was, 2041, in huge bronze figures on a rough-cut granite boulder, as if the house were a condo block, though it was actually smaller and less pretentious than its neighbors: a white clapboard New England colonial farmhouse with green shutters flanking the windows, a spread of fresh gravel out front, and a three-car garage.

Between 2041 and the Alpine ski lodge at 2049, Lucy saw a blinding sliver of sea, or sand, or shining mud: she wasn’t sure which because there was so little of it. The new houses, built out to the last inch of their lots so as to grab the widest sea view possible, were practically joined at the hip, like folk dancers in national costumes doing a sort of Franco-Italian-Hispanic-American-Swiss reel. She willed herself to keep thinking like this as she fought off the lurking image of the car balled up like aluminum foil, and the broken people inside.

Tilting the rearview down, she half expected to find a madwoman reflected in the mirror, but the face that looked back was almost indecently normal; its hair in knots from the wind, color in its cheeks, the face reflected nothing at all of what it had seen.

She set the parking brake, did what little she could with the hairbrush from her bag, and went paddling uncomfortably through Vanags’ gravel, which wasn’t designed to be walked on in flip-flops. She’d already rung the bell when she realized her notebook was still in the car.

“DON’T YOU JUST love him?” Alida asked her friend Gail as they walked from Math to Spanish. “He’s so-o-o über -cute.”

They were discussing the new boyfriend of their favorite girl singer, Jessica King, who’d broken up with Dustin Kavanagh and was now going out with Steve Kunz, drummer for the goth band Deadly Nightshade. It was all over the news.

“Cute? You really think he’s cute ?”

“He’s got tattoos all over his arms, and he paints his fingernails bright purple. Isn’t that like the essence of cute?” Alida was still experimenting with irony. Saying the opposite of what you meant was cool when it worked, but she had to put a lot of labor into keeping it going, and often, like right now, people just didn’t get it. She supposed being ironical was like learning to ski — you had to fall, clumsily and often, before you got the hang of it.

Gail squinched her face in disgust. “I think he’s…well, like kind of gross.”

“He’s the grossest,” Alida said, glad to get back to the plain talking. “That weirdo beard.”

“The lip ring. Yuck.”

“He’s really old.”

“His nose is way too big.”

“I don’t know what she sees in him. I mean, after Dustin.”

“It must be something we don’t know about. Maybe it’s like he really loves her and wants to make her happy, you know?”

But Alida was too distracted to care much about Jessica’s happiness. In Math, she’d found two new pimples welling up beneath the skin of her forehead, just below her hairline. The last Social Studies project was “The Making of Mountains,” about continental plates colliding, crumpling, and erupting over hot plumes and mantles beneath the earth’s surface. Something similar was happening inside Alida, with volcano-pimples like Rainier and St. Helens. For the last three nights she’d gone to sleep with her entire face slathered in Clearasil — she’d gotten halfway through the tube already, and her pillowcase was stiff with it — but the zits were back on the attack.

Too much other stuff was going on, too. Lately, she’d taken to hunting out the biggest, baggiest T-shirts she could find, to hide what was taking place on her chest. Breasts she could live with, but the fatty pudges that were starting to bulge down there were an embarrassment, and Gail’s chest was still lean as a boy’s. In the Adult XL Maui T-shirt that she’d borrowed from her mom, Alida, shoulders hunched, shrank from the intrusive gaze of strangers — she didn’t even want her mom to see. She was growing out her bangs. Soon she’d be able to hide, mysteriously, behind a safe curtain of hair through which she could look out, but other people couldn’t look in. This thought made her smile.

Gail pointed to the angled barrel of the spy camera that had just recently gone up over the double doors to the gym — one of the many that had appeared around school since the winter break. Gail gave it a cheesy grin, then stuck her tongue out at the lens. Alida tipped her head to avoid the camera’s violet cyclops stare.

“Are they listening to us, too?”

“You bet they are,” Alida said. “Every word. They hide microphones inside the walls, and in the lights and bathrooms and stuff. They’re the Watchers.”

Gail giggled and said softly, “Shit!”, then, “Fuck! You think they could hear that in the office?”

“They’re not in the office. They’re underground, in a secret cellar somewhere downtown. Men in raincoats, with sunglasses. Any time they catch someone goofing off, they report back.”

“Back where?”

“Just back. To their like headquarters.”

“Finn says they’re making a movie about the school. Like a documentary. He called it a ‘fly on the wall.’”

“Oh, yeah, that’d be a really, really great movie, with Finn in it and all. I can’t wait.”

“Finn weirds me out.”

“Me, too. Did you get the muffin for him?”

“’Course I did. I got three.”

They stopped short of the hubbub coming from Señora Benson’s room.

“You know what?” Alida said. “It could be a ploy. I mean, she could be hanging out with Steve just to make Dustin mad.”

From behind them came Señora Benson, a vast, dramatic figure in her swirling red-and-black-striped poncho. “Shoo! Shoo! Shoo!” she said, brushing the girls into the classroom.

“ Buenos dias, muchachos y señoritas! ” She spoke in a deafening singsong, upsy-downsy voice, like there were a thousand kids, not seventeen, in the class.

“ Buenos dias, Señora Benson. ”