That remained his attitude for the next dozen years of the boy’s life. Someday, the man knew, a lot of his business would rest on this miserable creature; in the meantime, he alternated between ignoring it and teaching it the discipline and skills it would need if it grew to manhood. Mostly, he was happy enough for it to keep out of his way.
Jamie sometimes wondered what would have become of him had he been born before the days of computers. The mere thought was enough to give him the cold sweats, as if he had conjured up a nightmare creature, gripping an ice pick in its paw, that loomed over his head and threatened to put out his eyes and his ears at the same time. He could not imagine living without the screen that linked him to—everything. To the soothing rhythms of the game worlds with their crisp boundaries and electronic gore; to the Web where he harassed and teased; to the chat rooms where, every so often, he felt the honest touch of other minds. Of course, when he did that, he usually dropped out of the room. He didn’t mind chatting with other gamers, but the heart-to-heart stuff made him uncomfortable. Plenty of time for relationships when he was older, he figured. For now, mastery was more than enough.
For some unknown and not-to-be-considered reason, computer equipment was the one thing Father did not begrudge him. It was funny, because Father was no techno-whiz. In fact, it never seemed to occur to Father that the computer was a way out for the boy, the one place in his entire life where he was free from the heavy paternal hand. Jamie knew with bone-deep instinct that when it finally dawned on Father that the computer was far more than a glorified encyclopedia-cum-typewriter for schoolwork, on that day the plug would be pulled, and Jamie would be isolated for good. But in the meantime, somehow Jamie always had as much power at his command as a boy could want. More than some professional programmers, in fact. Hardware, software, phone lines, DSL, satellite connections, you name it, it dropped into Jamie’s lap. He could barely wait until he was old enough to quit school, which was a complete waste of time and a constant horror socially. He only knew three kids he might, sometimes, privately acknowledge as friends, and one of those was gay, one was fat, and one was a girl. God help him if he hung out with any of them publicly. Mostly he talked with them online.
The one thing that made life bearable was his ability to get by without a whole lot of sleep. Other kids his age seemed to sleep all the time, which cut severely into their nighttime gaming hours, but Jamie’s otherwise unsatisfactory little frame chugged along quite happily on five or six hours’ sleep a night, less when something good was happening.
This inevitably meant that most of the online friendships he had forged were with older people, college kids mostly, and he had learned to talk the talk. He doubted any of them guessed that Masterman or RageDaemon or any of his other characters disguised a runty kid. He was great at shooting the breeze, could shoot back jokes about sex and drugs with the best of them.
The only people he wasn’t sure what to do with were the creeps. They would first appear on one of the games or a chat room, but it wouldn’t be long before they were trying to get you aside for a personal talk. The first few times Jamie had realized what was happening, he had shut them off in disgust, and been left feeling creepy himself. After a while, he got to spot them early, and confront them. This had the effect of making them slink away into less threatening territory, but left Jamie wishing he had someone to crow to about the victory. Last month he’d had a really good time hunting one of the creeps down, hounding his steps online and even hacking in to a couple of accounts and finding out who the guy actually was, then sending him (this, Jamie thought, was real genius) fawning but anonymous letters, with explicit language and a couple of pictures he’d picked up from a porno site—at the creep’s work address. The guy had gone silent right after that; Jamie kept checking for his name online, wondering if he’d been arrested yet.
It had been shortly after his tenth birthday (uncelebrated in any traditional sense of the word, although it had not gone unremarked in the O’Connell household) that Jamie had realized the Web could be manipulated. Oh, he’d known for a long time that the names populating the Internet were just people, with all the undependability and quirkiness of their fleshly counterparts, but not until he turned ten did it dawn on him that even a weak little kid like himself could become a force within the vast electronic realm of the Internet.
That was when he began to reach out, as the saying went, to touch someone, and pretended to be an authority on some bit of stupidity one of the chat rooms was discussing, he couldn’t even remember now what it was. But it had been fun, composing an opinion that sounded good and fooled the other jerks blathering away, had made him feel superior, even powerful. The day one of his invented “facts”—a technical-sounding piece about how the government was causing hurricanes over Cuba to become more devastating—came full circle and was deposited, scarcely changed, into one of his mailboxes, was a day of revelation and triumph. At home he was less than a piece of toilet paper stuck to his father’s shoe; on the Web, he was an Authority.
On his eleventh birthday (an anniversary still too recent for Jamie to think of with any equanimity) the boy had been hit by (among other things) a revelation. The Web was good for a joke, but it could also be used as a tool. Or rather, the people on it could be used and manipulated to get himself out of this increasingly hazardous place.
Because the truth was, Jamie loved his father, but he also knew that if he didn’t get away, one of these days Father was going to kill him.
Chapter 18
Allen knew none of this about the boy, not for a long time. The first of Alice’s forwarded emails read simply:
my mother’s dead. my father hurts me
soemtimes I want to die too
deadboy
The fourteen words touched Allen’s senses like water on a dry sponge, expanding them, leaving them thirsty for more. A boy, Alice had said—taking the signature at face value, or was she seeing behind the lines on the screen? Allen, too, heard nuances: rage twisted into self-contempt, the writer’s disgust for his own weaknesses. deadboy was a personality with these first three declarative sentences, but how much of that was Allen’s experience, and how much a projection of himself? The message had come, according to Alice, from a public library in San Jose, California, using a Yahoo account with the name deadboy. The letter had originally been sent in early March, but it floated around for eleven days, washing in and out on the electronic tides like a note in a bottle (and, Allen thought, no doubt causing a flurry of responses, ranging from the sympathetic replies of eager pedophiles to abusive notes from pull-the-wings-off-flies cynics) until eventually it was forwarded to a woman widely known as an advocate for children’s rights. She sent it on to Alice, phoning her about it the next day. Alice had already sent deadboy her own equally brief reply:
You sound like you have a plate full of trouble.
Do you want help?
A., mother of two
When the woman called, Alice had yet to receive an answer. If none came in four or five days, she told her friend, she would try again, using another address and taking a different tack from the maternal, which they both knew might only have served to frighten the boy off.
However, three days later an answer came:
you cant do anything. Its my problem.
db
Allen, reading Alice’s reply, couldn’t fault it. Give the woman her due: Prickly as she might be with adults, particularly adult males, she was great with kids. She sent a matter-of-fact paragraph, the bottom line of which was that despite what the boy knew about life, there were adults who were in a position to help kids, and although she did not expect deadboy to trust her, he seemed bright enough to be able to use her. Eventually she would need to ask his name, but for now, maybe he could just tell her what was going on?
A week went by before the boy responded. Allen could imagine Alice’s growing anxiety, her imaginary images of the correspondence discovered, of a violent episode that left him unable to ge
t to the library, of the thousand things an angry adult could do to a child. But he did answer.
why should I trust you?
db
She wrote:
You shouldn’t, not yet. I could be a 40-year-old man just getting kicks. Tell me whatever you’re comfortable with.
A.
He shot back:
what the hell, *I* could be a 40 yr old pervret. tell me about yr kids
db
Allen, reading this nearly a month after it had appeared on Alice’s screen, laughed aloud. The kid was quick, all right—plus, he had a sense of humor, a rarity among the abused. And to top it off, the first thing he’d done was turn the conversation around on Alice. Smiling with admiration, Allen read on.
My daughter teaches history in Oregon. My son was killed by his father fifteen years ago. This may explain my interest in your email.
A.
whats your daugther’s name?
db
Sorry, can’t tell you that.
A.
I think yr bullshiting me. you never had a son
db
(Actually, Allen knew, this was true: Alice’s dead child had been a girl, twin to the surviving daughter whose injuries had not only left her well qualified for her job teaching in a school for the blind, but had also plunged her mother into the peculiar life of a professional kidnapper. A certain amount of obfuscation was necessary.)
I’m glad you’re skeptical about what people tell you over the Internet [Alice wrote back] and you’re right, there’s no way I can prove anything this way. But that’s not the point. I thought you had a problem you wanted some help with?
A.
I never said that
db
No you didn’t. So, DO you have a problem you want help with, or were you just bullshitting me about your father hurting you and your mother being dead?
A.
Allen winced when he read this, and wondered where Alice was going with this. It didn’t do to get confrontational with a kid, not when it was so easy for him to just vanish. But somehow she’d known this would not drive him off. After a delay of four days (two of which were a weekend, on which days the boy never wrote), an answer from deadboy came.
I told you, nodoby can help me, its my problem
db
Alice shot back:
You wouldn’t try to build a house without a hammer and saw, would you? You wouldn’t get on a plane without a trained pilot, would you? I help people who need help. It’s what I do. Use me.
A.
At this point in his reading, Allen got up from the terminal and went to make himself some coffee, more as a means of defusing his apprehension than because he needed any more caffeine. Was Alice losing it? Alice the cool, Alice the analytical, putting down there on an email for the world to read (her computer email might be securely encrypted, but the boy’s in the library was most certainly not) the stark fact that she helped people, such as young boys who needed to disappear. His immediate impulse was to pack his things and leave town before she slipped so badly that she slipped him straight into a jail cell.
He’d glimpsed this vulnerability in her once or twice before, whenever mention of suicide came up. This, he imagined, was because her dead daughter had only indirectly been killed by Alice’s ex-husband; the girl had, in the end, finished the man’s job herself.
Apprehension not in the least assuaged by his actions in the kitchen, he went back to the study. There he found that, indeed, Alice’s risk of exposure had done the trick, that the boy seemed to relax under the idea that he was in control of his fate, that Alice was nothing more than a tool for him to use. Over the course of the next two weeks, their dialogue slowly spiraled in on the facts, the kid’s town (on the outskirts of San Jose) and what he liked in school (math mostly, and he secretly enjoyed chess club although it was only for geeks), that his mother’s parents lived in Chicago although he hadn’t been allowed to talk to them since his mother had died when he was seven, and that he was only allowed to bike to the library because it was on his way home, and the housekeeper thought he was doing research for a school project.
It was here that Alice had turned the file over to Allen. Allen slept on it, and the next morning picked up the phone to book a seat on the next available flight to San Jose.
He arrived in San Jose shortly after noon on the first Friday in May. He hired a car at the airport and drove west a few miles on the freeway; the exit he took set him down in a sprawl of suburban development, cheap houses from the Sixties alternating with clots of Eighties apartments and brand-new condominiums. He had maps, a lot of good maps, and found the library without difficulty. Pulling the rental car into the back of the parking lot, he put on a respectable but well-used mechanic’s jacket with the name “Bill” embroidered over the pocket, massaged a thin layer of grime under and around his nails, ran his hands through his hair to rumple it, slid on the heavy glasses he’d brought, and touched his bushy moustache to make sure the glue was holding. He then locked the car and went inside.
He found the auto repair section and pulled out a couple of technical manuals, setting them down on a table with a clear view of the main door and the computer lab, then began making notes with a chewed pencil stub on some creased pieces of paper he took from his jeans pocket. He looked like a mechanic with an engine problem knotty enough to send him to the library, and he did work his way through the electrical section of the first book with some attention: A person never knew when he’d have to disable a 1995 Honda.
At two-thirty the first kids started to appear, high-school students with a short day and young children accompanied by the parents who had picked them up from school. The middle-school students didn’t start coming until after three. Allen leaned back in his chair, crooked glasses propped on the end of his nose, and continued reading until he spotted his first solitary boy at three-twenty.
Color in the kid’s cheeks hinted that he’d come on his bike rather than a car, and the way he walked straight past all the tables showed that he wasn’t here to meet someone.
But even without these slim clues, even if Allen hadn’t been looking for him, even if he hadn’t arrived just at the time during deadboy was usually online, Allen would have known at a glance that this was a kid who knew what fists felt like. He couldn’t always tell—some kids had such powerful repression mechanisms, they managed to forget the abuse themselves between episodes. But deadboy—and Allen was pretty sure this was him—was one of those who tried to make himself small.
He wasn’t very large to begin with. In one of his emails, he’d claimed he was twelve, and although at first glance the boy looked more like ten, a closer look revealed the first gawky signs of approaching adolescence. His dark hair had needed cutting a week ago, his thin cheeks and surprisingly full lips had been reddened by the wind, providing contrast to the nearly black eyes framed with long lashes. The boy’s narrow shoulders were inside a jacket that was a bit too light for the weather and a bit too short in the sleeves, but which when new had cost someone a few dollars. He was unexpectedly beautiful, in the way boys are before the muscle- and hair-building hormones of puberty shape them into men. The beauty would be a problem, Allen thought. It was easier when a kid had a chunky body and a face like the hind end of a pig: Nobody seeing the photograph of such a child would automatically think, Pedophile, and call to mind the middle-aged man they’d noticed hanging around. Hell, watching this boy made Allen feel like a pedophile, eyeing his target over the top of a car repair manual.
The boy eased his heavy backpack onto one of the tables and walked over to the nearest shelf. He made a show of choosing a book from the American History section, leaning up against the shelves to survey the room out from under his eyelids, in much the same way that Allen was watching him. Then on the dot of three-thirty he walked back to the table, dropped the book next to his pack, and went to the glassed-in room with its bank of computers. There he nodded in response to the greeting of a gray-h
aired woman who was tidying up and setting out stacks of scrap paper. He signed in to the book on the desk near the door, and sat down at a monitor. In moments, the boy was blind to the world.
Allen figured that the library allotted its computers in one-hour time slots, which gave him plenty of time to check out the kid. Ten minutes into the hour, Allen closed his manual, folded the notes into his back pocket, and returned the two repair manuals to the shelf. The magazine stacks were on the opposite side of the room, so he walked in that direction. As he passed the table, he glanced down at the book the kid had taken as decoy, then stopped dead, peered around as if hoping to spot the patron whose volume this was, then shrugged and pulled the book over. He thumbed through the index, paged back through it to page 279 and read a paragraph about the New Deal before abandoning the book, taking care to shove it back more or less where he’d found it. Over in the magazine stacks, he pulled out his scraps of paper to write down what he’d read on the ID tag hanging from the kid’s backpack—no name, but something almost as informative: a phone number.
He wandered over to the New Fiction display, picking out a thick volume to cover his surveillance through the lab windows. The boy seemed to be writing a paper, his fingers moving rapidly over the keys, but slowing laboriously when time came to squint at the screen and make corrections on what he’d written. It took him half an hour to write his two pages, and when he’d retrieved his assignment from the printer and his disk from the machine, he settled down with evident relief, and logged on. His fingers flew, now that spelling and punctuation didn’t matter; Allen wished he had some way of tracing what the kid was saying and who he was saying it to, but short of taking up a position behind his back or staring through the crowded library with a pair of binoculars, he didn’t see how he’d manage.
Before the hour was up, Allen retreated into the gardening and cooking section, sampling a number of cookbooks before he spotted the kid coming out of the computer center. He moved straight for his backpack to swing it over his shoulder before heading rapidly for the exit, solitary all the way. Allen let him go. Better to risk losing the kid than to show himself too early.