“No.”
“I wanted it to be like a real village, where everyone has their own house. So you don’t have friends, like Facebook: you have neighbors. That could just mean a bunch of people share your hobby. Or it could mean a virtual tribe, with its own values, its own rules for deciding who could and couldn’t be a member. That’s the way I envisioned it.”
“Well, that’s still more or less how it works, isn’t it?”
“Yeah. Only the way Evan set it up, there’s a difference. It doesn’t affect most people, the guys who are into macramé or basket-weaving. But there’s a couple million, maybe more now, closed communities, and that’s where it impacts.”
“The dark communities?”
He nodded. “There’s all kind of stuff goes on there that no one else ever gets to hear about. A lot of it’s probably pretty harmless, just industry-standard crazy, you know, weird passwords and funny handshakes, and every second Wednesday of the month you get to wear one red sock and one blue, so the other crazies can recognize you. But there’s some are plain downright bad. And Evan protects them. They’re autonomous associations, he says. Which means they have the right to be their own gatekeepers. If they break the law, then it’s for the law to take action. What he doesn’t say is, they may be their own gatekeepers, but he has the master key. So any time he wants to, he can see what’s going on in all of them. And some of them are groups he created himself. Like guerrilla cells. Ready to go to his defense if he’s attacked.” He paused. “Same old, same old, you know? He has to know everything. He has to be inside everybody’s heads. Because that’s the only way he can be safe.”
“Guerrilla cells? What, people who’d break into someone’s emails, you mean? Looking for things to discredit them?”
He nodded. “You wonder why I texted you, instead of replying to your email? That’s why. Every message I send, every message I receive. So I got your number from the Voss woman. I have a whole bunch of phones, different SIMs. He’s probably tracking those as well, but that’ll be harder for him.” He squinted up at the sky. “Plus he has a couple satellites up there can show him what I’m doing, right here, right now. If I leave, he knows exactly where I’m headed. So I don’t leave any more. I never go anyplace.” He laughed. “It’s like living in a goldfish bowl. Except goldfish get to see the people watching them.”
“You think he’s watching us now?”
He shrugged. “He could be. But that’s all it takes, isn’t it? It’s enough to make you feel you’re transparent. He knows you’re here, you can absolutely count on that.”
“God.”
He laughed. “I feel your pain. If it’s any consolation, it doesn’t seem to be helping him any. He’s been doing some pretty crazy stuff lately. Like what he said about Hazel Voss. And last I heard, nobody even knew where he was. He’d gone AWOL.”
“Where did you see that?”
“I don’t know. Some news feed. Couple days back.” He laughed. “Maybe he knows you’re on to him. And he’s running scared.”
His walkie-talkie buzzed suddenly. I could hear the music of a woman’s voice at the other end, but not the words.
“Hold on,” he said. “I’ll check.” He turned to me. “You want coffee?”
“Yes, please.”
“Thanks, honey. Yeah, that’d be great.”
As he switched the handset off I said,
“Do you think he has contacts in the police?”
“Evan? Why do you ask that?”
I told him about my experience that morning.
“Hoo,” he said. “I don’t know. Could just have been some loser from the sticks trying to show what a swinging dick he is. You know, by picking up an illegal alien. A place like Riddick, they see illegal aliens crawling out the woodwork and hiding in trash-cans.”
I lifted my tie so that it caught the light.
“Yeah, that looks pretty alien to me,” he said. “Hm. Maybe Evan’s actively started to recruit cops now. After buying up every newspaper and TV station he can get his hands on, it’d be kind of a logical next step, wouldn’t it? A way to get even more power.” He leaned forward and began riffling through the grass with his finger, as if he might find the answer there. “What I really don’t get is, when I first talked to him about Global Village, he hated the idea. Why the fuck would you want to do something like that? he said. I remember that, because it was the only time I ever heard him use a profanity. That sounds just like Coyote Fork, he said. People getting to choose their own community. And it’s a nightmare. A frigging freak show. And that’s when he told me about his dad and the bucket of water.”
“Perhaps he was just trying to put you off the scent. So you wouldn’t suspect he was planning to nick the idea himself.”
He shook his head. “I don’t think it was that. He was really mad about it. But then, after I left Stanford, went to New York, something happened.” He paused, as if he’d suddenly reached the limit of what he could say. “How come you’re so interested, anyway? Seems like a kind of a jump. From Norman churches to Evan Bone.”
I’d started to convince myself that he wasn’t going to ask: that, in his eyes, my having come to him via Ginny Voss was enough of a bona fide. Now, suddenly, I realized that Ginny Voss had brought me as far as she could. If I wanted more, it would have to be on my own merits. So how much should I tell him? I couldn’t imagine his being sympathetic to Anne’s views. On the other hand, without her, the story was bloodless. In the end, I took a chance and gave him everything apart from my strange encounter in the Global Village car park, which I thought might put me in the one-red-sock-and-one-blue category.
“So we’re talking revenge?” he said, when I had finished.
I rolled the word around in my mouth. It tasted like undercooked meat.
“That’s not quite how I’d put it,” I said.
“How would you put it?”
His voice had hardened. He was starting to barricade himself against me.
“I don’t know.”
“Well,” he said, “you and your friend been pissed on, right? Treated like worthless pieces of shit. So the one thing you want to do before you die is make the guy that did that to you regret it. That’s natural. It’d be weird if you didn’t. You want him to say, Phoo-ee, did I ever underestimate that Robert and Anne. Biggest mistake of my life. If I hadn’t done that, I’d still be numero uno. Everyone would admire me. But the way things are right now, I wish I’d never been born.”
“I suppose there’s an element of that. But—”
“An element of that. Man, do you sound fancy-dancy.”
“If that was meant to be an English accent, you need to give it a bit more practice.”
He laughed. “I’m sorry, I just went and took a flying leap over the line again, didn’t I? Listen, I’m not criticizing you, man. Believe me, I’ve been there. I know those feelings. I had them the last fifteen years. They nearly killed me.” He waved towards the sea. “I have all this, more money than I know what to do with, a beautiful woman too. Well, the beautiful woman came later. She was the start of the good karma. But for the longest time it was like I didn’t even notice any of that. I was, you know”—clenching his fists, tortoising his neck down into