pictures. I didn’t know the answer. All I could do was say what hadn’t happened. I denied taking the pictures, denied all knowledge of how they’d ended up on my machine. Denied it loud, denied it long. There was nowhere else that the conversation could go—nowhere, at least, without the fade down and back up of sleep.
Her anger had burned down to embers by the time she went to bed, but her eyes looked hollow. There was no parting shot before she went upstairs. She merely looked at me as if wondering what she was seeing, and then went. Maybe I should have gone up with her, but it didn’t seem like the right course.
Instead I went and floated around the pool for a while. I was thinking about the photographs, mainly, and eventually found myself opening doors that hadn’t occurred to me earlier—preoccupied as I had been with the clear and present danger, with dealing with the emotional firefight in front of me.
There was another thing to consider, I realized, something I hadn’t mentioned to Steph. Partly because I hadn’t noticed it at first, but then, once I had, because I didn’t know what it meant, and there was enough incomprehensibility between us. I hadn’t thrown the pictures of Karren away, though that might have seemed an obvious thing to do (“Look! See! I throw them away! Ugh!”). Steph had insisted that I should. She’d even tried to do it herself, shoving me aside and skating her fingers across the track pad during one of the more heated portions of the discussion. I’d used her own tactics back at her, asking what the point would be when I could have stashed copies on the net or on the memory card of this alleged camera that I didn’t own. I’d argued that I needed them to try to get to the bottom of where they’d come from. It was just after preventing her attempt to throw them away that I’d noticed this final thing—the fact that finally got me to climb out of the pool, cold and tired and confused.
I got out to check the folder on the computer once again, to make sure I’d seen what I thought I’d seen.
W hen I opened the door to our bedroom, the lights were out. I could hear Steph breathing in the darkness, however, and it didn’t sound to me like she was asleep.
She said nothing as I carefully slipped into bed. I didn’t say anything, either. I lay there on my back, thinking about what I’d confirmed. The pictures of Karren were all in a folder together on my laptop’s desktop. I keep as tidy a virtual desktop as I do in the real world, and knew I hadn’t created this folder. Someone else had, somehow, before filling it with these photographs.
The folder had been called MODIFIED .
CHAPTER TWELVE
H unter returns, eventually. This time the man in the chair knows he’s coming. He hears the clatter of a distant door being opened and re-secured. It sounds like something temporary, a piece of hardwood with a padlock on it.
He hears the measured tread of footsteps approaching along the concrete of the floor below. These cease, beneath where he is sitting, to be replaced by a difficult-to-interpret sequence of noises that culminate in Hunter pulling himself up onto the half floor of this level. He does this with disconcerting ease, like a man hoisting himself out of the shallow end of a swimming pool. The man in the chair cannot know how much of this strength and agility comes from exercises Hunter performed, day in, day out, in his cell; alongside regimens in the yard and further programs during the twice-a-week free-weights sessions prisoners were allowed if they wanted. When he’s up, he dusts his hands off. He appears to ignore the other man, walking over to one of the tarps, pulling it aside, and looking out.
“Beautiful day,” he says. “You possibly found it kind of warm, though, maybe.”
The man in the chair says nothing. Hunter has been back before, he knows. The man woke from a fractured drowse not long after dawn to see that a cool bottle of spring water had
Her anger had burned down to embers by the time she went to bed, but her eyes looked hollow. There was no parting shot before she went upstairs. She merely looked at me as if wondering what she was seeing, and then went. Maybe I should have gone up with her, but it didn’t seem like the right course.
Instead I went and floated around the pool for a while. I was thinking about the photographs, mainly, and eventually found myself opening doors that hadn’t occurred to me earlier—preoccupied as I had been with the clear and present danger, with dealing with the emotional firefight in front of me.
There was another thing to consider, I realized, something I hadn’t mentioned to Steph. Partly because I hadn’t noticed it at first, but then, once I had, because I didn’t know what it meant, and there was enough incomprehensibility between us. I hadn’t thrown the pictures of Karren away, though that might have seemed an obvious thing to do (“Look! See! I throw them away! Ugh!”). Steph had insisted that I should. She’d even tried to do it herself, shoving me aside and skating her fingers across the track pad during one of the more heated portions of the discussion. I’d used her own tactics back at her, asking what the point would be when I could have stashed copies on the net or on the memory card of this alleged camera that I didn’t own. I’d argued that I needed them to try to get to the bottom of where they’d come from. It was just after preventing her attempt to throw them away that I’d noticed this final thing—the fact that finally got me to climb out of the pool, cold and tired and confused.
I got out to check the folder on the computer once again, to make sure I’d seen what I thought I’d seen.
W hen I opened the door to our bedroom, the lights were out. I could hear Steph breathing in the darkness, however, and it didn’t sound to me like she was asleep.
She said nothing as I carefully slipped into bed. I didn’t say anything, either. I lay there on my back, thinking about what I’d confirmed. The pictures of Karren were all in a folder together on my laptop’s desktop. I keep as tidy a virtual desktop as I do in the real world, and knew I hadn’t created this folder. Someone else had, somehow, before filling it with these photographs.
The folder had been called MODIFIED .
CHAPTER TWELVE
H unter returns, eventually. This time the man in the chair knows he’s coming. He hears the clatter of a distant door being opened and re-secured. It sounds like something temporary, a piece of hardwood with a padlock on it.
He hears the measured tread of footsteps approaching along the concrete of the floor below. These cease, beneath where he is sitting, to be replaced by a difficult-to-interpret sequence of noises that culminate in Hunter pulling himself up onto the half floor of this level. He does this with disconcerting ease, like a man hoisting himself out of the shallow end of a swimming pool. The man in the chair cannot know how much of this strength and agility comes from exercises Hunter performed, day in, day out, in his cell; alongside regimens in the yard and further programs during the twice-a-week free-weights sessions prisoners were allowed if they wanted. When he’s up, he dusts his hands off. He appears to ignore the other man, walking over to one of the tarps, pulling it aside, and looking out.
“Beautiful day,” he says. “You possibly found it kind of warm, though, maybe.”
The man in the chair says nothing. Hunter has been back before, he knows. The man woke from a fractured drowse not long after dawn to see that a cool bottle of spring water had
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