“You don’t know?”
“Eli, The Broken Seal is at the top of my list of things that I try not to think about if I can help it,” she said. “Did he say something about me?”
He ignored her question. “I just can’t believe you don’t know. If I were you—”
“You’re not me.”
Eli took a deep breath, like he was about to bungee jump for the first time. “Dude. If my dad released the most important leak in human history, no, the most important discovery in human history—”
She snorted and started to respond, but he cut her off.
“I’d be all over it,” he said. “You’re an inch away from some of the most important stuff that’s ever happened on this planet. I would be on it. Every hour, on the hour. I’d know what’s up.”
“You are on it, Eli. And that’s why the sky gods gave you to me. So just tell me what you know or leave me alone.”
“Did you ever read it?” he asked. “The Fremda Memo?”
That caught her off guard. “What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“It has everything to do with why the feds might be following you!” he said. “It has everything to do with these cover-ups!”
She was by now alone with him in a long, empty hallway, and her fear had chipped her patience down to the marrow. “I’d better go.”
“I don’t get you, Sabino,” he said, not even giving her the chance to turn to leave. “This is a big deal. Let’s ignore the biggest discovery in human history that is being hidden from us as we speak. What about the civil liberties aspect? Don’t we have a right to know? And those disappearances—five people that we know of disappear for a few days, when they come back, none of them have any memory of where they were. And all of them have brain damage. All of them. One guy has complete and total amnesia of his entire life. He can’t even talk. So if some government guys are tailing you, the world needs to know. This is infring—”
“No!” It came out as a shout. “Dude, the last thing I want is anything to do with him! Can you appreciate that?”
He smiled and shook his head. “You’re amazing. You don’t care. You don’t care what Ortega is trying to do or what he’s uncovered. You’re too caught up in your anti-daddy agenda.”
Cora just stood there, mouth agape. Eli shifted uncomfortably, seeming to glean he’d crossed a line, but then doubled down. “Why do you hate him so much anyway?”
“I’m going to step away,” she managed, turning before he could respond and darting inside the women’s room, shoving the doorstop behind the closed door just in case. She half expected him to try to force his way in, but by some unseen mercy, he did not.
She ambled into the stall farthest from the door, leaving the doorstop in place, giving not one fuck if there was anyone out there who might actually need to use the restroom. She fell onto the toilet, pants still on, rested her elbows on her knees, and stared at the dirty tile of the bathroom floor. There were so many black hairline cracks in the tile she could read shapes into them like a Rorschach test. A whimsical cartoon T. rex. A volcano erupting into pyroclastic flow. A broken fan belt.
She’d been staring at the floor for a few minutes before she realized how hard her heart was beating, and then the thump of her pulse in her head was all she could hear. It was stupid of her to even ask Eli what he knew. Stupid to think that people like Eli even saw her as anything but a brick in the castle Nils built. Nils was only getting more famous, and this was getting worse. So, so much worse.
It took her nearly twenty minutes before she got off the toilet, the cacophonous thumping in her head only just starting to quiet. By that point, at least five frustrated parties had tried and failed to get into the bathroom, and she knew she had to leave or risk being discovered. She didn’t bother going to lunch. Eli might still be in the cafeteria, and besides, she wasn’t hungry.
She made a beeline for the elevator and took it back up to the fourteenth floor, where she found an internet-accessible computer that was not occupied. She pulled up Nils’s website through a proxy, steeling herself for whatever he had written. She found it immediately, and the title alone made her put off reading it for another minute—“These Disparate Lives.” Ugh. Ugh. Ugh. Once again shooting for a Pulitzer for achievement in pretentiousness.
Leaks on The Broken Seal always came with a bright red header labeled LEAK, but “These Disparate Lives” did not, meaning it was probably one of Nils’s op-eds. Sometimes they ran in mainstream publications like The New York Times, but just as often, he preferred to keep it in-house so as not to be edited by The Man. He released his articles two or three times a week, mostly polemics on the state of free speech, transparency, his hatred of Bush, or how evil the mainstream media and government were for trying to silence him. She was hoping for something along this line. The worst thing it could be was personal.
Which, of course, it was.
Hello, Friends and Strangers,
Drink with me, or celebrate as your personal tradition dictates. Today marks the one-month anniversary of the leak that has come to be known as the “Fremda Memo,” and we have not yet been brought down. In fact, next month will be our four-year anniversary, and, defying all odds, our little dog and pony show still stands. But with any increase of attention, regardless of the moral rightness of an endeavor, comes controversy.
The word of the day coming from the White House this morning: “thief.” Others have built on this narrative—is The Broken Seal an organization of thieves?
Why steal secrets that are not yours to share?
To which I would counter, can one actually steal a secret?
Anyone who’s worked with free speech advocacy, regardless of their hopes for society, has a personal reason for doing so. Do I have a personal motivation? In brief, I do. Three of them, in fact. My children.
Cora stopped breathing. Nils mentioning them in a public forum was the thing she’d been living in fear of for at least two years, but she hadn’t expected it to take this form. The form that implied that they were still on good terms, that he was doing them a favor.
She noticed one of the white-collars watching her, a fortysomething woman with more pictures of cats than her children in her cubicle. The woman’s look could be one of generic mom-judginess, or it could be one of recognition. Did she know who Cora was? Was it just fringe conspiracy crazies who had read “These Disparate Lives,” or had this been the national news that Demi had flipped away from in favor of Fergie?
It should go without saying that I don’t do this for myself but for the pursuit of a world that will allow them to live their lives without fear from one’s government, media, or society for speaking the truth. My children are all in school in California, right near where the Ampersand Event occurred. And I’m not allowed to see them, nor even allowed to set foot in my own country.
This was, perhaps, an inevitability, but if I do have one hope for myself, it will be that I might one day reconcile these two disparate lives. That I may continue to do this work, and be with my children again. I hope I inspire them, as they do me. I hope one day they may be inspired to take up arms and join me.