Big If Read online

  She stopped for gas at a landscaped Mobil on the pike in Rye. She pumped it at self-serve, standing by her car, a primer-painted Bug with the ugly mustard plates of the Garden State, a gym bag and a basketball in the backseat. She wore rope sandals and a sundress and her cool Israeli shades. Her duty weapon, a Glock nine, was in her purse. The purse hung from her shoulder (a new habit—keep the gun nearby; if you lost it you were in for lengthy bureaucratic water torture, a zillion lost vacation days, and a letter from the ASAC to your file). She tapped her foot, pumped her gas, blew a bubble with her gum, pushed her shades back up her nose. The sun was hot. Traffic passed, generating breeze.

  She saw two guys in a jeep with a jet ski on a trailer. The guys were putting air in the tires of the jeep. They were college boys, tank-topped, ball-capped, zinc sunblock on their noses. She saw them check her out, the sidelong glance, the nudge, babe in shades at two o’clock, or whatever was the lingo at their frat. She wasn’t that much older than the guys, but she felt ancient, pumping gas.

  She paid in cash and drove away. Vi didn’t see herself as pretty or not pretty, though she knew that most people would have said that she was reasonably pretty. She was small and strong, an honest tomboy blond, many kinds of blond, in fact, depending on the time of year—dingy in the winter months, like a head of roadside snow, shocking corn silk in July. She had unusual gray eyes, bright and deeply gray, which made her look in winter, with the paleness in her face, a bit like Death’s kid sister, the one who’s always tagging along and whining for a turn, getting on Death’s nerves. In the summer, with a tan on and the corn silk in her hair, the gray eyes made her kind of beautiful. It was a funny thing, her father always said, that the sun, so busy with its cosmic projects, would stop to touch his daughter in this way.

  She was crying now, snot flowing out her nose. She took the exit down the hill into C.E. She had come to see her mother and her brother, to deal with the arrangements, half family and half finance, which always crop up when a father dies.

  She couldn’t go home crying. She drove around the rotary, past the brief commercial strip, Starbucks, Ben & Jerry’s, the Easy Reader Bookstore (Deepak Chopra in the window), thank God they haven’t closed down Monsey’s Luncheonette. She parked along the chain-link fence at the cracked and sunbaked courts behind the purple sticker beach. Purple sticker meant town residents only. She didn’t have a sticker but she had a fairly impressive Secret Service placard for her dash and a couple of the younger village cops were former high school boyfriends, guys she knew from sports. She figured she could park here long enough to get herself together.

  Late morning on a Saturday. The beach beyond the fence was white. The families on the sand were townies, even whiter, dads with hairy backs, moms with cellulite, shrieking kids with blow-up water wings. The harbor was a cup between two rocky points. The ocean was a blue slap to the eyes. How she loved this coastline in July.

  She wiped her eyes to see it clearly. She grabbed the basketball from the backseat of the Bug and walked around the fence to the foul line. Even in a messy state, she had the rolling, open-challenge walk of a woman who had once been very good at something physical. She was pretty good at racquet sports—squash in college, tennis with her father growing up (he played a stiff, stay-at-home, rally-from-the-baseline game; she beat him once at fourteen and after fifteen never lost), paddleball in New York (the agents in Manhattan played a lot of paddleball). She was a strong swimmer, a double-diamond skier, a high school soccer striker, an effortless ten-handicap in golf, but her top sport—growing up, in college, all along—was basketball. She had played in the summer as a kid, pickup games right here, three on three all afternoon, shifting groups of shirts and skins. She was always shirts and the only girl. She didn’t have the size to post up or go down the lane, but she had quick hands, stamina, and an intercontinental jumper. She played CYO and rec league, summer nights and fall. She played for Effing High and later UNH. Her lack of height and leap caught up to her in college, where she rode the bench, coming in for garbage time, New Hampshire down by thirty-five to mighty UConn. Vi went for 0–1, picked up two assists, and hard-fouled this obnoxious power forward, and none of it meant anything.

  She had joined the Service after UNH, seeking something difficult and pure. She went through basic agent’s school at Glynco, Georgia, which was supposed to be like boot camp, calisthenics in the dawn, running by platoons while the DIs scream at you, sit-ups till you throw up, that whole aesthetic. The other recruits at Glynco were a mix of law school dropouts, recent Army dischargees, the kids of Secret Service dads, and backwoods deputies who wanted to be feds. They had PT every morning, classes until lunch, PT and more classes until five, evening meal and study hall until lights-out in the dorm. Everybody would be aching from the day, but Vi would bounce a basketball over to the gym and shoot around alone, trying to burn off enough energy to sleep. Vi graduated seventh in a class of twenty-seven, and was sent to New York station for a Crim Division tour.

  Vi stood on the court behind the beach, the basketball tucked under her arm.

  She kicked her sandals off, laid her shades in one of them. She juked left, took a shot, head-faked, took a fall-away, sundress flying, bare feet slapping on the asphalt. She clanged three balls and aired the rest—her timing was for shit. She walked to center court, a white circle faded by the sun. The court was hot where it was black, but cool enough to stand on in the circle.

  It was time to face Evelyn and Jens. Vi bounced the ball, hard dribbling. It was comforting, the timing and the smooth against her palm, again, again, the sound that everybody knows, basketball on asphalt, a rubberized cry, sprain, sprain, sprain.

  It was hard for Vi to think of Jens as an adult, as a husband and a father, yet there he was on the lawn with his wife, Peta Boyle, and their son, Kai Boyle-Asplund.

  “Vi,” said Jens as he hugged his sister on the lawn.

  “Vi,” said Peta as they hugged. “I am so so sorry.”

  Jens had married Peta Boyle, the rich mortician’s daughter, in the granite parish on the rotary downtown, a good match everybody thought. Jens, though a talented computer scientist, was scattered and erratic. Peta, an ambitious village realtor, was sturdy, warm, and sensible; she remembered birthdays, cried at sappy movies, and knew how to change the spark plugs in her car. The wedding had been Catholic to placate Peta’s family. Jens was a nothing, religiously, not even a systematic atheist, and Peta, a realtor at Moss Properties in Portsmouth, went to mass at Easter for the choir. Because they didn’t care, Jens and Peta had been willing to be married by a priest—if this would keep the peace, why not? Their son, Kai, had been baptized for the same reason. Do you reject Satan? Yes, said Jens for Kai. Salt on the tongue, cross of oil on the forehead, water in the baby’s eyes—Jens sent Vi a funny e-mail later about how weird it was.

  Vi went in the house with Jens, Peta, and their son. In the front hall, she saw her father’s tennis shoes parked under the radiator, smelled his pipe smoke in the drapes, the Wild Cherry Borkum Riff—it was the only wild thing about her dad.

  She spent a weekend in New Hampshire that July, beetles zzzzzing in the trees, marshes blooming almost purple, Vi sitting Yankee-style shiva in the kitchen with her mother. The house seemed crowded the whole time. Jens was bustling around, being strong for everyone, annoying Vi no end. Peta did the cooking, coffee, sandwiches, lasagna, which, at least, was useful. The dogs were in, the dogs were out, the dogs were getting at the food. Kai teetered through the living room, or played with pots at Peta’s feet, then fell asleep upstairs on what had been Jens’ bed. Boyle the mortician, Peta’s somber father and Walter’s closest friend, was around the house, making arrangements for cremation, pursuant to the will. Other people stopped by or called, friends and neighbors, former neighbors, a rep from The Connecticut, Mullen from the arson squad (who ate a sandwich from the platter and told Vi that no one could read scorch marks like her father). In the kitchen, Evelyn kept telling the story of the morning Wa
lter died—how she got up, saw him lying there, head under the pillow, how she let him sleep, assumed he was asleep, how she ran her errands, came home before lunch, saw him in the pillows, how she touched his shoulder, what she knew. Then the phone would ring, or someone else would stop by, and she would start telling it again.

  Vi took frequent walks to get some air. Early Sunday morning, she took a long run through the sandy trails of the state forest. When she got back, Jens was in the basement, going through old boxes, Walter’s archives from The Connecticut. Jens went through the boxes slowly, file after file, reading them and tossing them into a large garbage bag.

  He said, “It’s therapeutic. Want to help?”

  Vi didn’t want to help, but she sat on the stairs and talked to Jens about his work as a software engineer. He wrote patches and utilities for a start-up in West Portsmouth called BigIf, a massive multiplayer war game on the Web.

  Jens opened a folder—pictures of assorted fatal auto accidents from 1968 or so, smashed-up Cadillacs, big dented Impalas. “These are great,” said Jens. “Everyone looks drugged up but the troopers.” He tossed the file in the bag. “We’re going public soon. BigIf is, I mean.”

  Vi shot water from a bottle down her throat. “That’s a good thing, right?”

  “That’s a great thing, Vi. I’ll cash out and be comfortable for life. Have you played it, the game?”

  Vi had logged on to BigIf one night in New York out of loyalty to Jens. The game—or the parts of it Vi saw—looked like a giant livid desert with little cartoon people moving through it. The cartoons represented humans, teenaged paid subscribers, coming in by modem from around the world. They moved in silent, shuffling processions or milled around a deep smoking crater. There were also monsters in the desert, man-sized rats, feral dogs, vicious, spitting cats, which popped up like the targets at a shooting gallery. When a monster appeared, the cartoons ran in a herky-jerky panic, a slow stampede across the screen. Some players stood their ground and died, others fought and killed the monsters in a gory spectacle. Or this, at least, was what Vi saw in the first twenty seconds.

  “I didn’t get to see too much,” she said. “A rat ate me.”

  Jens said, “Hamster. That monster model’s name is Hamsterman. He’s not a rat. I would never write a rat.”

  “Did you write the hamster?”

  “I wrote his software, sure, his decision trees. That’s my department—monster logic.”

  Vi remembered Jens at thirteen, emerging in pale triumph from the beaker storage closet, bearing his first program, JENSISNUMBER1, and later, after Dartmouth, the fellowship at Harvard, and a Ph.D. abandoned, several jobs in AI and robotics, each one a fresh start for Jens, each one the real deal (he said at the time). He lived as a grad student all those years, owning nothing more than a racing bike, a Frisbee, a backpack full of books, and a laundry load’s worth of clothes. Then he married Peta Boyle. He decided, they decided, to get pregnant, buy a condo, to go corporate and succeed, and now Jens wrote monster logic at BigIf. There was a whiff of sellout and lost promise about Vi’s brother. The sad thing was he smelled it too.

  Vi said, “Are you happy doing that?”

  “The technology is cool, state of the art. Our main software shell is eighteen million lines of beautiful cold code. It’s the Finnegans Wake of software, Vi, except it’s longer and more complicated than Finnegans Wake, and I wrote a good part of it. I used to think I was a genius, now I know I am. Smile, little sister, that’s a joke.”

  “I didn’t like your game,” said Vi.

  “Really, why? Because it’s violent, cheesy, and appalling? That’s just what you see. If you could see the source code, the logic of the monsters, you’d see that it was beautiful. Am I happy? When I’m creating a cool application, a sweet design, I’m happy because I don’t have to think about What It All Means. I left that to Walter, my self-appointed conscience. You should’ve heard him on the subject of the game. ‘BigIf is immoral, Jens—worse, it’s amoral.’ Nice distinction, Dad. Am I happy? I’ll be happy when we go IPO. I’ll be happy when I’m comfortable for life. Hey, check it out—”

  An envelope had fallen from one of the files. In the envelope was a dollar bill, one of Walter’s specials. The bill said, IN US WE TRUST.

  Jens held it to the light. “Incredible,” he said. “And to think”—he looked at Vi—“the man was a Republican.”

  Vi reached for the bill in Jens’ hand.

  “It’s just a dollar, Vi. Do you need gas money, is that it? Jesus, don’t they pay you in the Secret Service?”

  Vi said, “I want it.”

  “Why?”

  She took the bill from him. She said, “I just do.”

  Walter Asplund’s will included instructions for cremation and a scattering at sea, a location specified by longitude and latitude, minutes and degrees. Boyle the mortician handled the cremation, delivering the urn to Jens and Vi.

  They hired a pilot and a plane at the county airport, Monday morning. They flew out to the designated square of open ocean, a few miles off the coast. Jens opened the side window in the Piper Cub, brought the urn up from between his knees. Vi helped him tip it empty. They pushed the urn out too and watched it tumble to the blue.

  That fall in Manhattan, Vi played basketball on Monday nights, a lawyers’ league basically, the 2-3 up to Chelsea and the Y, law firm against law firm, the lady DAs, the U.S. Attorneys. There was always lots of cheating and cheap fouls, lots of trash talk, lots of ringers (black girls from Christ the King in Queens, willowy and deadly, hired by the hired guns). There was no Secret Service team, so Vi played for Customs.

  She was living in Hoboken, two bedrooms over a karate school, next to a bar called the Blarney Castle. Her roommate in Hoboken was her teammate from the Y, a Customs agent named Dawn Imperiali, another rookie out-of-towner (Dawn came from Dearborn, Michigan). They got up early, took the Hudson ferry to the World Financial Center, then walked up to Federal Plaza, unless Dawn had airport duty and had to drive out to JFK.

  Vi spent three years in New York station, before and after Walter’s death. She learned to love the early ferry in the summer, the Hudson peaceful in the heat, the walk up Broadway to Fed Plaza. She’d come in from a long surveillance, a day in a sedan, tailing John Doe Russians out to Nassau. She wore blue jeans and crosstrainers, a sleeveless cotton blouse with little roses on it, and a five-buck Yankee hat from a Chinese pushcart guy. She carried a black nylon briefcase (walkie-talkie, Glock, 40x binox, and a garlic bagel she had forgotten to eat).

  Fed Plaza was a mass of slab and glass on lower Broadway. Every agency had an outpost at the Plaz, FBI, ATF, DEA, IRS, and the volume people-movers, Labor, Housing, Immigration, Social Security. On any weekday the broad lobby of the Plaz was full of wounded humans, the slag of the economy, single mothers, washer-women, refugees ashore, clients of the state who rarely went to office buildings and didn’t understand how to navigate the signage. The signs were mounted overhead, airport-style pictograms with arrows, pay phones to the left, rest rooms to the right, Information straight ahead. The symbol for Information was a ? The arrow meaning straight ahead pointed straight up.

  Whenever Vi crossed the lobby, coming in or going out, she was accosted by the old, the alien, the lame. They were almost always women, asking for directions in semi-English or through their sometimes beautiful and also thuggish sons, dragged along as translators—

  “Where is Room 2000?”

  “Try the second floor.”

  “Where is Mr. Crenshaw?”

  “What agency is he?”

  A shrug. “He is Crenshaw.”

  “Yes, but who’s he with? Welfare? Immigration? What’s the nature of your problem?”

  —a dangerously open-ended question, which the clients could answer only by recounting the entire sequence of events which had brought them to this lobby, going back to the asbestos in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, Sinatra and the war, or a journey in an open boat from Haiti, the story always
turning on some dumbfounding blunder or coincidence involving four changes of address, garbled doctor’s orders, and a disconnected phone, which was why they never got the Notice of Hearing and Termination, or the Second or the Third, or any of the notices, until they got the Final Notice, a form postcard from somebody named Herbert Crenshaw, Hearing Officer, who only heard the Final Notice people. The clients showed Vi the postcard, thumbed and folded, or totally pristine, as if they had carried it in plastic all these weeks as a true communication from the Mister Crenshaw man.

  Vi listened as the women gulped from respirators or paused to let their sons catch up with the translation. They finished the history of the Final Notice, insisting that Vi listen to all of it, because if she only heard one part and not the rest, the part she heard would make no sense. They would finish and the sons would finish translating.

  The mothers looked at Vi expectantly. “Please where is the Crenshaw?”

  When Vi was new to New York, she did her best to help. She’d be going out on routine threats, a warrant, or a vehicle surveillance, leaving with other agents from the counter-counterfeiting squad. These agents were largely interchangeable, buck rookies, past fuckups, middle managers. Her group supervisor, a GS-9 named Rocky Panofsky, organized the annual all-law-enforcement charity golf outing at the Fresh Kills Country Club Marina, Service versus FBI, DEA, and Customs, and everybody tried to beat the prosecutors. Rocky spent the year organizing a smooth and perfect afternoon of golf and gag awards, then went into a month-long funk of purposelessness, then roused himself and started organizing the outing for the coming year. Rocky and the other grunts would wait for Vi, who waited for the mother to gulp from a respirator, or the mother waited for her bored thug-angel son to translate some crucial bridge of information. If Vi stopped to help, other people saw her fielding queries and stopped to ask their questions too. Lines formed in front of Vi, as Rocky tapped his foot—