considered this affectlessly. “It may interest you to know that I’ve read through Stephen’s email and social-media correspondence with the German woman. It’s entirely innocent, if somewhat tediously ideological. I’d hate to think of losing your intelligent company over a matter as small as that.”
“Wow,” Pip said. “I was about to say I was going to sort of miss you, and now you tell me that not only do you eavesdrop, you read our email.”
“Just Stephen’s,” Dreyfuss said. “We share the computer, and he never logs out. I believe this constitutes ‘plain sight,’ in legal parlance.”
“Well, for your information, Annagret is the least of my worries now.”
“Interestingly, many of her messages to Stephen concern you. She’s evidently very distressed that you don’t want to be friends with her. I find your position eminently reasonable, perhaps even strongly advisable. Yes: advisable. But you might care to know that as far as the German woman is concerned, you are the person of interest in this house. Not our Stephen. Nor, it goes without saying, Ramón or Marie. Nor even, if I examine the facts with rigorous logic, I myself.”
Pip was putting on her bike helmet. “OK, great,” she said. “Good to know.”
“There was something not right about those Germans.”
At an anonymous Starbuck’s on Piedmont Avenue, while consuming scones and a latte, she wrote and then agonized over and finally found the courage to send an email to Stephen, who had no text capability, since phone plans cost money. That Dreyfuss would read the email didn’t much matter to her; it was like knowing that a dog or a computer “knew” things about her.
I apologize for what I did. Please tell me when you won’t be home this week, so I can get my stuff.
Sending this message made her loss more real, and she attempted to fantasize about how things might have gone in his bedroom if he’d been unable to resist her, but her imagination instead kept summoning up what had actually happened; and weeping in a public café was a bad idea.
Two tables over, a white-bearded chai-drinker type was looking at her. When she surprised him by looking back, his eyes dropped down guiltily to his tablet device. Why hadn’t Stephen looked at her like this? Was that so much to ask?
It seemed like a father was exactly what you needed: of all of Stephen’s cruelties in the bedroom, this had been the worst. And yet there was clearly something wrong with her, and clearly the more appropriate object of her anger was her missing father. She narrowed her eyes and stared at the chai drinker. When he looked at her again, she gave him a phony grimace, a mean smile, to which he responded with a courtly nod and then angled his body away from her.
She texted her friend Samantha and asked if she could crash with her. Of her remaining friends, Samantha was the most self-involved and thus the least likely to ask embarrassing questions. Samantha was also a cook, with equipment in her kitchen, and Pip hadn’t forgotten that she owed her mother a not-birthday cake on Friday.
She still had three hours to kill before her late workday started. This would have been a low-risk time to leave a message for her mother, since her mother was always too deep in her Endeavor in the early morning to pick up the phone, but Pip couldn’t do it. She watched the people lining up for pastries and coffee drinks, nice racially diverse Oakland people freshly showered and able to afford a daily bought breakfast. Oh, to have a job you liked, a mate you trusted, a child who loved you, a purpose in life. And it occurred to her that a purpose in life was what Annagret had offered her. Annagret had wanted her. Annagret had wanted her. She was ashamed to recall how crazily she’d latched on to the idea that there was anything between Annagret and Stephen. It must have been the beer she’d drunk.
She picked up her device and assembled all the emails that Annagret had sent her in the past four months. The earliest was headed please forgive me. As she read the message, savoring its pleading tone and its compliments to her intelligence and character, Pip found herself obeying the subject header and forgiving Annagret, with an alacrity that was perhaps itself a bit crazy. And yet maybe not so crazy, because Annagret not only liked her but had been right—right about Stephen, about men, about everything. And had not given up on her; had sent her twenty emails, the most recent just a week ago. Nobody else in her life would have been that persistent.
She opened a message headed wonderful news, from two months ago.
Dearest Pip, I know you must be still angry with me and maybe not even reading my emails, but I must tell you some very good news: You are APPROVED for an internship with the Sunlight Project! I hope you will take advantage of this superfun and awarding opportunity. I’m still thinking all the time of what you said about the private information you wanted—well this is your chance for that. TSP will pay your room and meals in the most interesting part of the world, in addition a small monthly stipendium, and often it can lend assistance with money for your air travel. You can read the attached letter and factsheet for more details. I only want you to know that I gave you the HIGHEST recommendation with every sincerity. And it looks like Andreas and the others still trust my determinations! ;) I’m very excited for you and hope you will consider. I’m only sorry, if you go, I won’t be there with you. But maybe, if you’re still angry with me, this will make you more interested to go? ;) With hugs, Annagret PS: here is Andreas’s email: [email protected] You can write to him personally with questions.
Reading this, Pip felt obscurely disappointed. It was like a questionnaire with no wrong answers: if an internship was this easy to get, how much could it be worth? And no sooner had she started to change her mind about Annagret than Annagret tried to fob her off on yet another man, albeit a rather famous and cherissmetic man. Peevishly, and without stopping to think, she put a fingertip on Wolf’s email address and fired off a message to him:
Dear Andreas Wolf, what’s your deal? A person named Annagret who I hardly know tells me I can be a paid intern with your project. Is this like a sex opportunity for you, or what? Do you guys have a keg of Kool-Aid? The whole thing frankly sounds deeply creepy to me. I don’t care very much about the work you’re doing down there, in the jungle or whatever, but Annagret doesn’t seem to think it even matters if I do. Which really makes me wonder. Yours, Pip Tyler, Oakland, California, USA
As soon as she hit the Send button, she had a spasm of remorse; her interval between action and remorse was diminishing so rapidly that soon she might be all remorse, unable to act at all; which might not be such a bad thing.
By way of penance, she opened a search engine and did some belated research on Wolf and his project. Given the multitude of haters on the Internet, it was impressive how few hostile comments about Wolf she was able to find if she disregarded the carpings of die-hard Julian Assange defenders and the statements of governments and corporations with an obvious self-interest in calling Wolf a criminal. Otherwise, in terms of universal admiration, he was right up there with Aung San Suu Kyi and Bruce Springsteen; a search of his name plus the word purity yielded a quarter million matches.
Wolf’s motto, and his project’s battle cry, was Sunlight is the best disinfectant. Born in East Germany in 1960, he’d distinguished himself in the 1980s as a daring and sensational critic of the Communist regime. After the Berlin Wall came down, he’d led the crusade to preserve the enormous East German secret-police archives and open them to the public; here again he was hated only by former police informants whose post-reunification reputations had been tarnished by the exposure of their pasts to sunlight. Wolf had founded the Sunlight Project in 2000, focusing first on assorted German malfeasances but soon broadening his scope to social injustice and toxic secrets worldwide. Several hundred thousand Web images showed him to be a very good-looking
