Gregory Katsoulis/Creative Commons
Author Cory Doctorow
This story is part of the Cory Doctorow collection Radicalized, published by Macmillan in 2019. You can find more information on the entire book at the Macmillan website. It is being republished with permission for reasons that will become clear if you read it. Picture above published via Creative Commons.
On Joe Gorman’s thirty-sixth birthday, his wife Lacey called him three times in a row on his cell phone. He was in a meeting with his manager, a vice-president who had rescheduled twice. It had taken ten days and a latte to the VP’s PA to get face time with this guy, so Joe bumped his wife to voicemail three times. She was probably calling to wish him a happy birthday or confirm something about the big dinner they were having at his favorite steak house that night.
“Do you need to get that?” The VP didn’t really bother to hide his irritation.
“Sorry,” Joe said and made a show of switching his phone off and pocketing it. He went back to his proposal: he’d found a logistics outsourcer who could manage all their returns, which was the most stubbornly expensive line on his division’s balance sheet. He’d worked really hard on the proposal and this VP could make or break it. Within a couple minutes, though, the VP’s PA knocked on the door and Joe’s heart sank. Someone more important than him must have clobbered his long-sought time slot. But the PA—Gloria, a stylish middle-aged Black woman who had been with the company for longer than either Joe or the VP—spoke to Joe, not her boss.
“It’s your wife, Joe.”
His guts roiled. He had never been more angry at Lacey in their eight years of marriage. She knew that he had this meeting. It was all he’d talked about, when he’d talked at all, when he wasn’t sitting at the kitchen table with his laptop working on his proposal. Jesus fucking Christ, couldn’t she handle the stupid restaurant reservation or guest list or whatever on her own? She was a grown woman. It was his birthday. Some birthday present.
“Sounds like you need to get that,” the VP said. He sounded jocular but there was also a sardonic eye roll in there that Joe couldn’t miss. “Have Gloria set up another time, OK?”
Gloria gave him a sympathetic look as he hustled out of the office, out into the parking lot, where it was blazing hot and blindingly sunny. He took out his cell phone and unlocked it and called Lacey.
“Lacey, honey—” He only called her honey when he was furious with her.
“Joe—” was all she got out, and then she was sobbing.
His emotions whipsawed. Lacey was not a crier. His mother had been a crier, and he’d dated some girls who felt everything so keenly that tears were never far beneath the surface, but Lacey wasn’t like that at all. He was suddenly scared, the anger roiling around, too, but unattached.
“What is it?”
More sobbing. Then a deep breath. “I saw the doctor.” A long pause. Joe wanted to hang up. More than anything. Because he knew that he was about to go through a door that led out of his life as it was and into a new, worse life. It was a door that only swung one way and once you went through it, you could never go back. There was a split second when he actually almost hung up on Lacey, but of course he didn’t.
It was stage-four breast cancer, metastatic, nodules in her liver, pancreas, and one lung. Lacey had three months to live. Six, if they tried for the most extreme interventions. Lacey had stopped crying after the first two days and had become a laser-focused, stoic self-advocate who had read everything and even found a Dying with Dignity Facebook group that she had become the queen bee of. She’d had all these picture books about kids whose parents were dying, and she read them regularly to Madison, snugging Maddie up on her lap and reading in the same quiet, sing-song storytime cadence she’d always used at storytime, as though she wasn’t preparing their six-year-old for a life without a mother.
The doctor laid out all the ways that her three months could be lengthened to six, and Lacey looked her straight in the eye and said, “If you had what I had, would you try any of those therapies?”
The doctor pursed her lips. “Honestly? No. I don’t think any doctor would.”
“Thank you for your honesty,” is what Lacey said, and Joe knew then she wouldn’t be doing anything else.
Just because you’ve decided to die of cancer, that doesn’t stop everyone you know from consuming your last months on this Earth by sending you links to miracle cures. They deleted these and politely told everyone—even their parents—to cut that shit out, but people can’t help themselves.
Lacey’s mom found the link to adoptive cell transfer therapy.
It wasn’t woo: the US National Cancer Institute was part of the NIH, and they had gotten multiple papers on the therapy published in Nature, with huge numbers of citations. Joe and Lacey read the papers as best as they could, and Lacey talked about them with her dying Facebook friends, and they all decided that maybe this was worth a shot.
The way it worked was, they sequenced the genome of your tumor and looked for traits that your own white blood cells could target, then they sorted out your own white blood cells until they found some that targeted those traits, and grew 100 billion or so of those little soldiers in a lab and injected them into you. It was just a way of speeding up the slow and inefficient process by which your own body tuned its own white blood cell population, giving it a computational boost that could outrace even the fastest-mutating tumor.
Joe and Lacey even found a private doc, right there in Phoenix, who’d do the procedure. He had an appointment at Arizona State University, had published some good papers on the procedure himself, and all he needed was $1.5 million from their health insurer.
You know what happened next. Their insurer told Lacey that it was time for her to die now. If she wanted chemo and radiation and whatever, they’d pay it (reluctantly, and with great bureaucratic intransigence), but “experimental” therapies were not covered. Which, you know, OK, who wants to spend $1.5 mil on some charlatan’s miracle-cure juice cleanse or crystal therapy? But adaptive cell transfer wasn’t crystal healing and the NIH wasn’t the local shaman.
They underwent—Joe underwent—a weird transformation after her last call with the supervisor’s supervisor’s supervisor at their health insurer. Lacey had been so good about it all, finding peace and calm and determining to make her death a good death. She’d dragged Joe out of his anger at cancer and back into his love of her and a mutual understanding that they’d make their last days together good ones, for them and for Madison.
But after the insurer turned them down, the rage came back. Maybe the therapy wouldn’t have worked, but it was a chance, and a realistic one, not a desperate one, a real possibility that his daughter would have a mother and that he would have a wife and best friend to grow old with.
He wanted to sell the house and borrow more money from friends and family and do a GoFundMe, but Lacey wouldn’t hear it. She pointed out that everything they—and all their immediate families—could spare wouldn’t touch that $1.5-mil ticket, and the only thing worse than a family losing its wife and mother was that same family losing its house and savings, too. She was much smarter and much calmer than Joe.
Joe was furious. Joe couldn’t be angry at cancer, but he could be coldly, murderously enraged at an insurance company and the people who worked there. He worked for a blue-chip, Fortune 100 company, and he’d bought the top tier of insurance, and they took more than $1,500 out of his paycheck every month for that coverage, and some faceless, evil fucker had just decided that they wouldn’t even try to save his wife from a painful, grotesque death.
The anger consumed Joe. He never rescheduled that meeting with the VP. He spent all his time writing to the HR department and the CFO, and when he wasn’t doing that, he was literally crying in the toilet.
And all the time, Lacey was getting sicker.
Madison grew scared of Joe, shying away when he got home. They tried switching so he was in charge of tucking her in, telling her a story and singing the requisite three songs. She endured it but it did nothing to reduce her obvious fear around him.
“Babe,” Lacey said, her equivalent to his “Honey,” and Joe knew he was in trouble. “You can’t keep up like this. You’re going to drop dead before I am. Or shoot someone. You need to get help.” Refusing chemo and radiation meant that Lacey hadn’t gotten thin, but the pain had been keeping her up nights and she had a hollow, otherworldly, one-foot-in-the-grave look that he could barely stand.
She took his face in her hands. “I’m not fooling, Joe. You get help. Because if you don’t get help, our baby girl is going to have zero parents, because you are headed for a mental institution, jail, or a courtroom defending your fitness to be a father.” Her eyes burned into his. “I don’t have a lot of strength or time to work on this with you, Joe. I know that normally finding a shrink or whatever would be my job in our division of labor but you are going to have to step up. Am I making myself clear?”
The words made Joe furious, and the fury made Joe sad. He cried some, then said, “You’re right. I will.” She gave him a long, long hug, and he went to the guest room and sat on the bed with his laptop and started googling.
He had eight tabs’ worth of Yelp reviews for local shrinks open when he found the forum. Ostensibly, it was for fathers whose wives were dying of breast cancer (there are enough people dying of enough cancer that the forums had become that specialized) but actually it was for fathers whose wives were dying of treatable breast cancer who had been denied coverage by their insurers.
Joe read for hours, long past the point when his butt went numb and he got a crick in his neck. The words on his screen seemed to come straight out of his own head. They were secret things, things he’d never dared say to any other human, because Lacey was right, they were the kinds of things that you couldn’t say aloud without risking incarceration or involuntary commitment.
Here were men saying those things. And other men who heard them and told them that they understood, that they had felt the same unspeakable feelings and they understood those feelings. Even before he posted his first message to the forum, it had soothed something raw inside him, and maybe someday it could even heal the wounds that had been widening since his thirty-sixth birthday.
He never bothered to find a shrink. He didn’t need one. The fathers of the Fuck Cancer Right In Its Fucking Face forum were all the therapist he needed. The weeks went by and everyone in their house came to understand that Joe’s time in the guest room with his laptop were the reason that he had changed, and no one resented the moments he stole there.
Only an idiot really believes in spontaneous remission, which is doctor for “Your cancer went away and we don’t know why.” Oh, it happens, but so do lightning strikes and lottery jackpots. Spontaneous remission isn’t a plan, it’s an unrealistic daydream.
Some people do get hit by lightning, though. And some people win the lottery.
And Lacey got spontaneous remission.
Three months to live became four, then five, and her doctor started to make the most cautious, preliminary noises about the nodules shrinking, and new tests, and then, one day, the doc summoned Lacey to her office, and Joe went along, because when your doctor wants to discuss test results in person, it’s better not to face that on your own.
The doctor was running late, and that made Lacey and Joe run nervous, the tension stretching. It was an oncology practice, so the waiting room was full of bald, sunk-eyed, dying people and their haunted loved ones, and they were actually in better shape than the people who still looked well, because those people had just been diagnosed and were coming to the doctor to find out what happened next. Those people were wrecks.
The nurse didn’t bother taking Lacey’s vitals, so she and Joe just waited in the exam room on a pair of orange waiting-room chairs, holding hands tightly.
The doctor came in and closed the door and apologized for making them wait and made a joke about it being one of those days and sat in her padded roller chair and squared up some papers on her desk. Then she looked at them both for a long moment, and, unexpectedly, beamed at them.
“Lacey, Joe, I’ve been in practice for fourteen years and I’ve given out a lot of bad news. I don’t mind; it comes with the job. But it gets to you. Even when I have good news, it’s still not happy news: we took out half your organs, removed your breasts, poisoned you, irradiated you, and now, we think, you are better. Sorry.
“But once in a very, very long while—a very long while—a doctor in my job gets to give out good news. This is one of those days.”
She let that sink in. Lacey and Joe stared at each other. There were two words on the tips of their tongues, words they had never dared to utter without a sarcastic eye roll. They said the words now, Lacey starting, Joe joining in, both of them tentative and questioning: “Spontaneous. Remission?”
The doctor beamed at them.
Joe cried before Lacey did. He always was the emotional one. But then Lacey cried. And then the doctor cried, and after Joe and Lacey had hugged for a long, long time, the doctor hugged Lacey, and then Joe, and then all three of them hugged, and Joe had nothing to say except thank you thank you thank you and everyone knew he wasn’t exactly thanking the doctor, but no one was sure who he was thanking. Not even the doctor.
Joe never did stop visiting Fuck Cancer Right In Its Fucking Face, which surprised him. That night, he and Lacey made the slowest, tenderest love in their entire relationship, fucking so slowly that they barely moved. Joe handled Lacey like she was made out of brittle china, and Lacey clung to Joe like he was the only thing keeping her from falling off the world’s tallest building. Afterwards, they clung to each other, then moved apart, fingers twined. Before long, Lacey was sleeping, softly snoring, hogging the blankets, and Joe slipped out of bed and went back to the forum.
There are lots of support forums online and the best ones perform an incredible, nearly magical service for their participants, proving the aphorism that “shared pain is lessened, shared joy is increased,” and making the lives of everyone who contributes to them better.
Fuck Cancer Right In Its Fucking Face was not one of those forums.
Fuck Cancer Right In Its Fucking Face was a forum for very angry people whose loved ones were dying or dead. Some of the denizens of FCRIIFF got better, maybe even partially due to the chance to vent in the forums, but also because they were surrounded by people who loved them and brought them back from the brink, people who shared their grief but had better coping skills.
In a forum for ex-drunks, there’s a big group of elder statespeople who’ve been sober for years and years. They’re a wise, moderating voice, and they are the existence of proof of life after addiction. Whenever someone on the forums went on a bender and was recriminating with themselves, there was a dried-out elder who could tell a story to top theirs, about being put out on the street, losing their kids, losing their limbs, even, and coming back from it.
Fuck Cancer Right In Its Fucking Face did not have those people. The people who got over their furious grief left FCRIIFF, chased away by its rage culture. The people who stayed were really into their anger, clinging to it like a drunk refusing to let go of a bottle.
If your anger took you to a place you couldn’t handle, a place that scared you, the elders of FCRIIFF would help you all right: they’d explain to you that this was the right reaction, the only reaction, and it was never, ever going to get better. This was your life from here on in.
When Lacey was pronounced well, Joe’s anger drained out in an instant. The insurance flunkies who’d sentenced Lacey to die could stew in their juices and look themselves in the mirror every morning, and Joe would have his beautiful, brilliant wife and his amazing, sweet daughter, and that was all that mattered.
But FCRIIFF called to Joe. That first time he logged back in, he understood in a flash that for all that it had helped him— saved him—to see the thoughts from his own endless mental loops on the screen, coming from other people, it would also have destroyed him. If Lacey had died—oh God, just the thought made his guts churn—this would have been his support system, and he would have taken the anchor they threw him and let it pull him right to the bottom of the ocean.
Joe decided he had a duty to FCRIIFF.
He made the decision early on not to talk about his forum time with Lacey. She would probably understand, but she had enough to worry about.
He mostly lurked, anyway. He never picked fights with the Great Old Ones who counseled despair and rage. But he’d private-message the new ones who showed up all twisted in knots and do his best to untwist them. He kept a list of suicide-prevention numbers handy, and he gave a measured, routine twenty dollars to each GoFundMe that was posted to the forum. Even at that modest contribution level, there was one month when the family GoFundMe bill crossed the $500 mark, and Lacey demanded to know what he was doing, and he told a half truth, saying it was for a friend’s cancer fund (but not how many friends’).
Lacey couldn’t be angry over that, but she gave him a stern talking-to about their finances, and he agreed to cap the GoFundMe to $250/month, and she agreed to let him donate $300 in each election cycle to candidates who were pro-universal health care.
He stayed on the forum.
He was ready to quit FCRIFF—which old-timers like him called Fuckriff, or Ruck Fiff when they wanted to sound polite—when LisasDad1990 joined. His first message:
Lisa is six years old. This is what she looks like. I have put her to bed every night since she stopped breast feeding. I used to read her Hand, Hand, Fingers, Thumb and then we graduated to Green Eggs and now we’re reading Harry Potter. That’s right, a six-year-old. She’s SMART.
Last year, Lisa started falling down a lot, bumping into things. Her teachers said she wasn’t concentrating in school and I saw it too. Her mom’s not in the picture. I took her to the doc’s and they said she had a brain tumor. I can go into details later, but it’s not a good brain tumor. It’s not little or cute. It’s an aggressive little fucker, and it’s growing.
Lisa can only see out of one eye now, and she walks with a walker, or I wheel her in her chair.
But the good news is that it’s treatable. Not like 100% but the oncologist says he can whack that bastard straight out of there and blast her with some rads and give her some poison and she’ll live. She’ll always have some problems, but she’s young and she’s full of life and she’ll figure that shit out.
But our insurance? Not so much. I was working for a customs broker when it hit, my first real full time job, with insurance and everything. Paid so much into that insurance.
SO MUCH. But they say that the kind of surgery the doc wants to do, it’s experimental. They say it’s not covered.
Guys, I’m 28 years old, a single dad. My parents haven’t given me a dime since I told them to go fuck themselves and moved out at 17. If my ex had a dollar to spare, it’d go to oxys, before the student-debt collectors could get it.
I have a GoFundMe, but that only works if you know a million people or one millionaire. My kid is the greatest thing in the world, but everyone thinks that about their kid, and from all the evidence so far, I’m the only one who can see it.
The thing is, my daughter Lisa is going to die.
I mean, I can kid myself about it, but that’s what it’s about. My six-year-old kid is going to die even though she doesn’t have to (or at least she has a chance she won’t get to take).
It’s because some random asshole earning half a million dollars in an office at the top of a tower full of random assholes earning less than me decided she should die. He doesn’t know her and he won’t ever know her but he knows that there are so many kids like Lisa that are going to die because of his choices.
I’ve been sad, I’ve been angry, I’ve been worried. I hold Lisa so much that she tells me, dad stop it, but some day I’m going to hold her and she won’t say anything because she’ll be dead. That’s my truth and my life and I live that truth every day.
When Lisa goes, I’m going to go too. I never said that out loud but I’ll write it here because you guys know what I’m going through. I’m dead fucking serious. With Lisa I had everything to live for. Now I got nothing. Can’t even afford to bury her, not after all the out of pockets. Red bills every day, every credit card wants to send a guy around with a bat to break my knees. Maybe I’ll buy a gun and shoot the first one that comes to the door, then stick it in my mouth…
Joe couldn’t stop reading, but he wanted to. It was so raw, and it brought him back to a dark place he thought he’d left behind.
Trembling, he picked out a message with the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a number he’d memorized by now, 1-800-273-8255, and some numb words of comfort. It was the closest he’d ever come to talking about Lacey’s spontaneous remission on Fuckriff, because he couldn’t think of anything else to say and that poor bastard needed some hope.
But he deleted the sentences and hit SEND.
> ONE MESSAGE WAS PUBLISHED AHEAD OF YOURS
Do it [wrote one of the Great Old Ones]. Seriously do it. I’m going to do it, some day, when I’m all used up. Why shouldn’t you? Why should those evil corporate fucks live when my wife is dead? When your kid is going to die?
I was going to buy an AR-15 and do it but fuck that. AR-15s are for people who want to shoot their way out, or people who need to shoot their way in. I don’t need to do that. I’m an old, middle-class white guy. I could walk right in, go right up to the top floor with a nice little fertilizer bomb and take out the whole fucking C-suite. Some “innocents” will die but they’re not all that innocent, are they?
I grew up on a farm in Wyoming and my dad had a book called the Blasters’ Handbook that told you everything you needed to know about blowing shit up on an as-needed basis, like if a horse dropped dead and froze solid and you needed to blast it into manageable chunks.
The Blasters’ Handbook has gone digital and to save you the trouble of searching for it and getting on some kind of watchlist, I’m attaching a copy of it here. You’d be amazed at how easy it is to make something that’ll go boom. Hell, my old man was simple as fuck and he managed it.
All I’m saying is, if you’re going to do something drastic, don’t let it go to waste.
He signed it with his screen name, DeathEater, which Joe had been staring at for years but never really had thought about until just then. Jesus, DeathEater.
Joe hit reply, then stopped himself. What did you say to something like that? Should he call the cops? The guy who started the message board, BigTed, barely ever logged in anymore, but Joe had his email address somewhere from when he’d locked himself out of his account once. He decided that was probably his first port of call, so he pasted DeathEater’s message into an email. Just as he sent it, he had a moment’s twizzle as he thought about what kind of bot might scan that email between him and BigTed, what kind of watchlist he might be putting himself on.
He stayed off the thread, but other Fuckriffers jumped in. Some of them were scolding and moralizing, calling Death-Eater a monster or pretending he’d been kidding and telling him off for a making a joke in such poor taste. Others ran with the “joke,” spinning more and more elaborate scenarios of mass mayhem. Lots of them posted screenshots from the Blasters’ Handbook and talked about ways to improve on the design—wrapping the package in duct-tape, adding washer nuts and ball-bearings for shrapnel.
A very few users talked to LisasDad1990 about his daughter, offering him the kind of comfort Joe had tried for. LisasDad1990 didn’t reply to any of them.
BigTed closed the thread the next day and gave DeathEater a three-day time-out. LisasDad1990 went silent. Joe private-messaged him a couple of times, but mostly he forgot about it.
Madison turned seven. They had ice-cream cake, played games, and finished with a sleepover with her best friend from across the street, Rose, who wet the bed at 12:00 A.M. and woke them both up in floods of humiliated tears. Lacey got Rose cleaned up and Joe sorted out the mattress, putting a trash bag over the wet spot, then putting fresh sheets over that.
Lacey went right back to sleep and so did Rose. Joe couldn’t sleep. He padded to the guest room with his laptop and started Fuckriffing.
She died today [LisasDad1990 wrote].
I’m sorry about all the mess my last message made. I was in a low place. But I want to thank you all for weighing in, even the ones who joked and whatnot. I even laughed at some of that. It kept me going, all of it.
We’re burying her tomorrow.
The timestamp was only six minutes gone. Joe private-messaged him.
> If you need to talk I’m up
He stared at the screen for a long time, waiting for a pop-up, hitting refresh, hoping LisasDad1990 would reply.
Minutes dragged by. He tabbed over to Facebook and skimmed, tabbed back. He looked up the estimated arrival of an Amazon box he’d just remembered he was expecting. He took a quick glance over his Gmail spam folder, which he tried to do every month, before flushing it.
He was about to close his laptop (or possibly about to start doing all this all over again) when a reply popped up.
> Thanks. It’s not a good night. Funeral’s next week. Put it on my last credit card. Gonna be a real sendoff
> That sounds like a worthy thing to use that card for. But how are you holding up
> Put it this way: I don’t plan on paying that credit card bill
Joe’s stomach sank.
> I know I sent you the suicide crisis number before but here it is again. 1-800-273-8255. Or you just text HOME to 741741 and someone will be there. Both are 24/7
> I called that number. It was nice of you to send it to me. I can tell you’re the kind of person who wants everyone to have hope. That’s a nice kind of person to be. Lisa was that kind of person.
A long pause. Joe was about to type something. Then LisasDad1990 started typing again.
> That was all she could talk about. Kid just turned seven and all she could say was Daddy you got to have hope, you are going to be OK. She wanted me to watch Annie, if you can believe it. Stupid Netflix.
That actually made Joe laugh involuntarily. Chuckle, really. He got the feeling that he and LisasDad1990 would probably enjoy each other’s company.
> She was right.
He took a deep breath.
> Look, where are you? Maybe you and I could get together. I’m in Phoenix.
> Not me. I live in Cow’s Asshole, South Carolina. But that’s nice of you.
> How about a phone call? I could crack a beer, you could crack a beer, and we could have a beer together.
> You’re a nice guy, I can tell. Thank you for that. I’ll take a rain check.
Then he did log off.
Joe didn’t think he’d be able to sleep that night, but he was a man, a human being approaching middle age, and human beings need sleep, and so he slept.
The next day was Sunday, his day to cook breakfast. He managed to get all the way through it with Madison and her friend (whose nocturnal embarrassment had been dissipated by a few more hours’ sleep and a set of laundered PJs) without thinking to check the news out of South Carolina or the posts on Fuckriff.
But once Rose’s slightly mortified parents had picked her up and Madison was in her room making slime and watching YouTube, he got out his phone and Google News-searched “south carolina suicide.”
The search results were empty. Of course. LisasDad1990 wouldn’t do it until the funeral was over. Joe had all week to talk him down.
Work was never the same for Joe after Lacey got sick. He never rescheduled that meeting with the VP. He just couldn’t muster the fucks needed to give it his all for on-demand wholesale distribution. People he’d started with left to work for experimental divisions doing partnerships with self-driving forklift companies, or diving into cloud-based self-serve platforms for ecommerce dropshippers, or all that other stuff that helped people get their Squatty Pottys and strobing LED USB chargers delivered to their doors with five nines of reliability.
Joe settled into his cubicle and did exactly the things in his job description and clocked out at 5:00 P.M. every single day. He had a work phone and a personal phone, and he’d had lots of training about the fact that the work phone’s traffic was all logged, even the “secure” traffic, because the company had done something to its operating system so that everything he did with it would be visible to the compliance team. They had to do it, they said, for their insurance. It was important, therefore, that he strictly segregate his personal activities and work-related activities. No one wanted to read his sexts or eavesdrop on his search history when he was coping with an embarrassing itch.
This had been a real struggle with Joe at first, because he was the kind of guy who liked to pull the handle on his work-email slot machine, checking to see whether his boss wanted him to do stuff after hours. That meant that the phone he was most likely to have in his hand at any given moment was that work phone. Sometimes he even forgot to charge his personal phone.
But then, after his company’s HR department told him it wasn’t their job to stop his wife from being murdered by their health insurer, he got demotivated. Now it was his work phone that was usually out of battery.
So at the office, he used his personal phone to check in with LisasDad1990. He’d read FAQs about what to say to suicidal people and he was working his way through the list. LisasDad1990 didn’t always respond, but he responded sometimes, and that meant he was listening and that meant that Joe wasn’t going to give up.
The days ticked by until Lisa’s funeral. LisasDad1990 posted photos from the funeral—sad photos of weeping relatives, his snaggletoothed, ravaged addict ex included. Pics of the tiny casket, the urn of ashes.
The men of Fuckriff were respectful and solemn about these pictures. They had a thing they did when they wanted to perform their solemnity, posting a message with just a single space character, so it looked blank, like words fail me. The photos had a massive trail of these.
But DeathEater’s had another copy of the Blasters’ Handbook attached to it.
LisasDad1990 didn’t answer any more of Joe’s private messages. Joe told himself that he was just wisely taking some time away from Fuckriff’s seductive, toxic environment and taking comfort from real-world friends who were less violence obsessed.
But Joe found himself pulling out his personal phone and searching for “bombing” and “south carolina” almost automatically, any time he let his thoughts wander.
It was the end of May and Madison was graduating from second grade, and the school was making a big deal out of it. Joe had missed the kindergarten and first-grade versions of this ceremony, but he no longer had the burning ambition that made it so hard to ask for half days off for personal time. So he got in his car at lunchtime and drove to the school, stopping to buy a lei and a mylar balloon from a Mexican guy who was walking the line of parents waiting outside the auditorium with a pushcart, admonishing them to “show your kids how proud you are of them and how important their education is to you.” The pitch was pretty naked, but it still skewered Joe in some deep, guilty parenting instinct.
Lacey beat him there and saved him a seat and they held hands while the kids gave speeches about their dreams for the future and sang songs and made tributes to their teachers. The kids were plenty cute in their little dresses and suits, but it got pretty repetitive, and Joe twitched his phone out of his pocket and discreetly ran his search.
Normally, “south carolina bombing” returned a bunch of pages on the Mars Bluff B-47 nuclear incident, when the USAF accidentally nuked the town of Mars Bluff in 1958. Today, the top of the listing was a series of Google News links to a story about an explosion at the Columbia headquarters of BlueCross BlueShield of South Carolina.
The singing onstage and the bored whispering and shifting of the parents around him vanished instantly and totally and his vision tunneled down to his screen. He tapped a link for an AP story, and Lacey hissed at him to put his phone away, and he startled guiltily and looked up, but he couldn’t focus his eyes.
“Going to the bathroom,” he whispered, and made his way down to the aisle, threading between parents’ knees and the seat backs in front of them, stumbling, then into the school hall hung with art and poetry, into the boys’ bathroom with its miniature urinals and the scarred stalls. He stepped into one and read the AP story.
It was light on details, just a breaking news piece, but the facts were devastating: an explosion had gone off at the BlueCross BlueShield headquarters. Police suspected terrorism. There were ten confirmed dead already and the strong presumption that that number would go way up as the rescue teams sorted through the rubble. The pictures of the building were sickening; like a rotten tooth, a huge hole had been blasted through the upper-story walls, spanning three floors. The jerkycam images ganked from Twitter were all smoke and fire, and stumbling, bleeding people in office clothes.
He stood there in the stall for god knew how long, staring at his phone, wishing he had never pulled it out, wishing that this was a senseless mystery for him instead of an event that was not mysterious in the slightest. He should call the cops. He really should just go call the cops.
There was noise from outside the bathroom, crowd sounds, then the door to the boys’ room banged open and kids’ voices filled the room. He pocketed his phone and ran out of the bathroom, barely hearing a smart-alecky kid calling after him to wash his hands.
Lacey walked him to his car after they’d had their pictures taken with Madison and given her her balloons and lei and seen her off with a friend’s mom to go back to their place for a movie and popcorn party.
“What is it?”
He wasn’t going to tell her, of course. Jesus, bad enough he was in this.
“You know that message board—”
She rolled her eyes. She didn’t approve of Fuckriff.
“I know, I know. But there’s a guy there who’s having a really
hard time. His daughter. Same age as Maddy, and I just want to be there for him. They were there for me when I needed it. I’m paying that forward.”
She rolled her eyes again, but pulled him into a long hug. “You are a good man, Joseph Gorman. Just remember, you can’t carry the world on your shoulders, and you have a family who need you, too—don’t spend everything you’ve got on strangers.”
“Thank you, Lacey. I know, it’s good advice. I try to keep it all in perspective, but, you know…”
“I know. Of course I know. That’s why I’m reminding you. You’ve got a big heart, and you need help caring for it. I married into that job.”
“I love you.”
She gave him a longer hug this time, squeezing him fiercely with all the strength that had returned to her body since their miracle. Even as he was noticing this, he was thinking of the phone in his pocket and wondering where he could pull over and get online and read the news reports and log into Fuckriff.
LisasDad1990 posted a video explaining what he was doing, but thankfully he didn’t mention Fuckriff. Even so, everyone on Fuckriff was tense as hell and there was a lot of going back and deleting stuff until the cops announced that LisasDad1990 had used Tor Browser extensively and had left behind no browser breadcrumbs, nor any records at AT&T’s data centers. Inevitably, this set off a whole witch hunt over the “dark web” and everyone wondering where the mystery man from the video had been “radicalized.”
LisasDad1990 was a soft-spoken, slightly heavyset man with sad eyes and a three-day beard. In the video, he spoke in a monotone, staring straight into the camera with red-rimmed eyes. His hair was limp and greasy and the kitchen behind him was in chaos, with empty pharmacy packaging and pizza boxes. In a quiet, calm, gentlemanly Southern voice, he talked about the decision that BlueCross BlueShield had made to deny his daughter’s coverage, and what that had meant. He held up a photo of a smiling little girl, brown pixie-cut, missing tooth, a dusting of freckles on a little upturned nose. He talked about Lisa’s stories, the drawings she’d do to accompany them, the kitten she’d rescued and nursed to health, her inconsolable grief when the cat was hit by a car. He talked about her illness and her bravery, and her pain, and her promise.
He spoke extemporaneously, no notes in evidence, and when he was done, he stopped for a long time, then wiped his eyes with his thumbs, opened and shut his mouth a few times without being able to speak, drew in a deep, shuddering breath, and composed himself.
“So that’s why I’m doing this. It’s not vengeance. I don’t have a vengeful bone in my body. Nothing I do will bring Lisa back, so why would I want revenge?
“This is a public service. There’s another dad just like me and another little girl just like—” Another moment to compose himself. “Just like Lisa. And right now, that dad is talking to someone at Cigna, or Humana, or BlueCross BlueShield, and the person on the phone is telling that dad that his little girl has. To. Die.
“Someone in that building made the decision to kill my little girl, and everyone else in that building went along with it. Not one of them is innocent, and not one of them is afraid. They’re going to be afraid, after this. After today, every one of those people is going to spend the rest of their lives looking over their shoulders for a man like me. Ordinary looking. Harmless. A little sad, maybe.
“Because they must know in their hearts. Them, their lobbyists, the men in Congress who enabled them. They’re parents. They know. Anyone who hurt their precious children, they’d hunt that person down like a dog. The only amazing thing about any of this is that no one has done it yet.
“I’m going to make a prediction right now, that even though I’m the first, I sure as hell will not be the last. There’s more to come. To those fathers and husbands, mothers and wives, grandparents and lovers, the ones who’ll come after me, I want to salute you. We are going to scare them, we’re going to make them so scared that they will never get a night’s sleep again. They will right this wrong, this stain on our country, not because they love your kids as much as you love your kids, but because we will scare them into it.”
He stared into the camera for a while longer, his eyes burning and glittering. Then he nodded to himself, stood up, and walked out of the frame. When he came back a moment later, he had a duct-taped package the size of a pot roast that he carefully lifted and placed into a backpack. He nodded once more, shrugged into the backpack, and clicked the video off.
It occurred to Joe that even though LisasDad1990—his name was Saul, but Joe thought of him as LisasDad1990 still—talked so much about “fear,” no one on TV or in the news mentioned “terrorism.” There were some Twittery types who pointed out that LisasDad1990 had the wrong color skin to be a terrorist and instead he was “not right in his head” or “mentally ill” or even “traumatized.” Not even the families of the people killed in the Columbia explosion used the T-word, though plenty called him a murderer and a monster and worse.
Certainly, none of the Fuckriffers wanted to whisper the T-word.
There was a furious debate that danced around the T-word, about when it was OK to “spout off” and “fantasize” about violence and when that crossed the line. BigTed might have had a view on this, but twenty-four hours after LisasDad1990 killed all those people and himself, BigTed announced that he was going to stop administering Fuckriff and that he had passed the torch to DeathEater, who had the “time and energy” to “give it the attention it deserved.”
Once DeathEater was the lord and master of Fuckriff, the debate ended. DeathEater declared that there was only one way to be a Fuckriffer, and that was to meet grief in all of its guises, including rage, to be authentic and true to yourself.
DeathEater also announced that the majority of the boards on Fuckriff were moving to a Tor Hidden Service that they’d need Tor Browser to read, and set up a complicated protocol to let them claim their existing IDs on the Fuckriff in the Dark, which is what the new service was called.
Joe ignored this for a while. He was even secretly relieved. If all the worst of the worst of the broken Fuckriffers disappeared into the Dark, then he could hang around on the nub that was still visible on the open web, and play fairy godfather and Jiminy Cricket to the people who weren’t beyond help.
But DeathEater was determined to suck as many souls into the dark as he could. Anytime a thread really got going on Fuckriff, he’d close it and announce that it had moved to the Dark. The newbies would follow him there. The third time this happened, Joe realized that DeathEater maintained Fuckriff as a gateway drug to the Dark. The Dark was Fuckriff.
Once he figured that out, Joe was done with Fuckriff. He parked his account and walked away from it.
The second bomber went after a Tennessee Republican state senator who’d voted down the Medicare expansion, despite his campaign promise to make sure that “every Tennessean who wants insurance will get insurance.”
The bomber was named Logan Lents, and his people had been in Tennessee since it became a state in 1796. Though his background was wealthy, he was broke—his parents had lost the family fortune when he was a boy and he’d been a scholarship case at TSU, where six generations of his ancestors had matriculated, and he’d been the president of Phi Beta Sigma, like his father, grandfather, and great-grandfather had been.
Logan Lents was the widower of Patricia Lents, another Tennessean of long and fallen lineage, whose uterine cancer was treatable (according to her OB/GYN) or not (according to Cigna’s insurance underwriters). Patricia lost a baby early in the cancer, which everyone secretly counted as a blessing, what with her illness and all, and when she died a year later, at the age of twenty-six, Logan had been shattered.
Logan bombed Senator William Blount’s office on a fine Saturday, after a day’s worth of constituency meetings during the spring recess. Logan was considerate enough to wait for all the voters and staffers who’d been there for the day’s business to clear out and only killed himself, the senator, and a Tennessee state trooper. Another trooper and a cleaner were maimed, but they survived.
The men of Dark Fuckriff declared it a “surgical” mission and praised its “clean” execution.
Logan’s video was really well done, eloquent in the way of someone from a fine old family who’d once talked his way into the presidency of an exclusive frat. He had that American Brahmin thing, like a southern Kennedy, and it was easy to forget that he was about to blow himself up along with anyone standing nearby to make his point, which was that health care was a human right and that evil men had conspired to take it away from many Americans, which meant that they would die.
The third bomber was DeathEater.
Joe and DeathEater had gotten into much more open hostilities in the weeks after Logan’s death. DeathEater had access to Fuckriff’s logs, so he could see how Joe was sending private messages to everyone DeathEater egged on, and, being the admin and all, he was able to read these messages and see that Joe had turned himself into a shoulder-angel to whisper antidotes to all of DeathEater’s poison.
DeathEater confronted him in a private chat that started out hot but cooled down quickly as DeathEater told his story— adult son dead of a metabolic disorder whose pharmaceutical therapy was deemed “experimental,” wife dead “of heartbreak” within a year, seventy-four years old and coning from Medicare to an HMO that told him that the dialysis he’d been doing for twenty years was “out-of-network” and had referred him to an alternate therapy that left him in constant agony.
> Old white guy in a wheelchair, no one searches that guy
Joe had had versions of this conversation so many times, and usually they came out all right. After all, there had only been two bombs so far, and Joe didn’t think he’d ever talked to Logan.
> All you’re going to do is make a whole bunch of men and women miserable for all their lives, leave a bunch of kids without a mom or dad
> Yup, that’s what I aim to do all right. Seems only fitting considering.
Now what? Two wrongs don’t make a right? This was Dark Fuckriff, not Pinocchio.
> Call me first? If you can’t talk to a real live person and tell them what you’re doing, how can you say you’re sure enough of yourself
> I’ll think about it
> Call me
> I’ll call you
And then Joe’s phone rang, at 6:00 A.M., and he said, “Hello, hello?” until he worked out that the noises in the background were a wheelchair and someone setting up a laptop to record a video straight to camera. The voice was wheezy but strong with emotion.
“I’m going to make a bunch of men and women miserable today, make them grieve for the rest of their lives for the husbands and wives they’re going to lose. A lot of kids will never see their moms and dads again.
“I’m not proud of that. I truly grieve for you. But I have to do this. Enough is enough. The people I’m going to kill today are part of a machine that every day, every year, cost so many of us our wives, husbands, parents, and children. We watch them die bad, slow, painful deaths, and why? Because it’s always someone’s job to watch the money, and no one’s job to keep those people alive, who don’t have to die yet.
“Somewhere along the way, there have to be consequences. There’s plenty of good people working for meth dealers, just trying to scrape by. I expect there are good people who just need to earn a living, who work for human traffickers, too. We arrest those people, send them to jail for the rest of their lives, even though they’re just trying to get by like the rest of us. Why should working for a legal murderer mean you’re innocent? That you get off scot-free?
“If you work for a health insurance company, or their lobbyists, or a senator or congressman who votes against health care for everyone, I want you to be afraid. Scared to leave home. Too scared to sleep. I want you lying awake at night, feeling a rush of fear every time you hear a creak. I want you to have a concealed carry permit, a shotgun by the bed, and still find yourself wondering every morning whether today’s going to be the day.
“If you can’t take that, quit your job. Tell your boss you didn’t sign up to get blown to pieces by some grief-crazed suicide bomber. Eventually, those insurance executives and lobbyists and politicians will have to move on to Plan B. Which is health care for everyone.
“They say violence never solves anything, but to quote The Onion: ‘that’s only true so long as you ignore all of human history.’ Violence is the only way to get some people’s attention. You know which ones I mean.
“Brady, I’m sorry, son. You deserve a better legacy than this. Marla, you too. You both deserve better, but this is all I got. I love you. I’ll see you soon.”
DeathEater clicked on something and the video ended, but he kept talking to Joe, monologuing as he rolled his chair around his cramped home, getting ready to blow himself up.
“Hope you heard all that, Joe. Sorry about leaving a trail pointing at you, but you did ask me to call you. I printed out our chat logs so they’ll see that you were trying to stop me all along.” A scuffle as he picked the phone up, his voice getting louder and clearer. “Thanks for trying, Joe. Tikitiki6538 is going to run things from now on.”
Joe tried to say something to him, but he wasn’t sure if the video was still being recorded, and he knew that someday— soon—he’d have to explain this call to some very serious men from federal law enforcement, and whatever he told them would have to be reconcilable with whatever fragment of his voice was on the recording.
And anyway, DeathEater hung up on him.
Joe dialed 91-, and his finger hovered over the 1. It was 3:00 A.M. in Phoenix, 6:00 A.M. on whatever East Coast city DeathEater lived in (Clearwater, Joe learned later). Lacey and Maddy were fast asleep, the breath of the AC drowning out their soft little snores. He tried to imagine what would happen if he pressed 1, and spoke to a Phoenix 911 operator, explained that someone whose name he didn’t know in a city he couldn’t name was planning a bombing. Another bombing. Tried to imagine the Tempe PD cops who’d come to his door, the conversation they’d have, the conversation he’d have to have with Lacey.
He couldn’t do it.
He looked in on Maddy and adjusted her covers, smoothed her hair, kissed her forehead. Then he climbed in next to Lacey, the smell of her wafting out from under the covers as he crawled between them, and he stared at the ceiling for a long time. He must have fallen asleep eventually because the next thing he knew, the room was filled with sunlight, Lacey and Maddy were arguing about whether Maddy was allowed YouTube before breakfast (she wasn’t) and Joe had his phone in his hand, scrolling through headlines.
DeathEater had wheeled himself into a health insurance conference at a Sheraton, a big trade show that had put on extra security because the people who went were already a little afraid. But DeathEater had booked a room weeks before, and he paid for valet parking and had a bellman help lift him into his chair and hang his pack on the chair back, then wheeled himself in, checked in, and wheeled toward the elevator bank, flashing his room key at the private security guards who were stopping everyone who tried to go past the ballrooms. No one wanted to pat down an old white man with a room key, wearing a gaily colored aloha shirt and a battered straw hat, pale skinny legs sticking out of baggy shorts.
He had timed his arrival for ten minutes before the morning plenary, when all the conference-goers were milling around out front of the big ballroom, drinking coffee and eating muffins and chattering. He wheeled himself dead center of the crowd and—
The death toll was spectacular.
Lacey didn’t know what was wrong with Joe, but she knew something was up.
“No more of that message board, Joseph,” she said sternly.
“Too much screen-time, Daddy,” Maddy said, a perfect impression of her mother, made all the more uncanny by their increasing resemblance and a recent matching mommy-daughter haircut with blue highlights.
He picked up Maddy and gave her a hard squeeze while she squealed and kicked and laughed. “OK, kiddo,” he said, and caught Lacey’s eye. Lacey looked worried. S.
Joe had the school run that morning. Lacey had gone back to work, landing a job at a call center that handled reservation problems for a big hotel chain, and Joe had shifted his hours around so that he could do the drop-off in the morning and Lacey could do the pickup at night. It wasn’t a good career move—there was a direct correlation between being at your desk at 8:00 A.M. and getting a promotion—but since the day of Lacey’s diagnosis, all his passion for a career had leaked out of him and been replaced by an equally urgent sense that his time with his family was a fleeting thing to be savored.
On the drive to school, Maddy wanted to talk about when mommy got sick, which was a topic that came up a lot. Neither Joe nor Lacey were religious, but inevitably, Maddy had a friend at school who wanted her to know that God had saved her mommy and that she should be giving thanks to God. She kept bringing this up and was obviously, visibly anxious that they weren’t doing enough on that score and maybe God would change His mind.
“So you know that I don’t believe in God, right, kiddo?”
He snuck a glance away from the slow-moving traffic and looked at her. She was nodding solemnly.
“I think that Mommy just got really, really, super lucky. Like rolling two sixes in Monopoly, ten times in a row. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be grateful and thankful that we get to have her with us. I wake up every day and I’m thankful. Aren’t you?”
“Yeah.” Her voice was tiny.
“Yeah. So if there is a God, then She or He”—She or He was a phrase Lacey insisted on when they talked about God with Maddy—“knows how you feel.”
He heard her crying in the back seat and pulled the car over. “What is it, baby? Why are you crying?”
She snuffled and he gave her a tissue. “Sometimes I’m not grateful. Sometimes I get mad at her because she won’t let me wear what I want or she says I didn’t brush my teeth right. What if God sees that I’m not grateful and takes her away?”
For the ten millionth time, Joe cursed the little evangelical kid in Maddy’s class who’d put all this crapola inside her innocent, traumatized head.
“Well, kiddo, I’m the wrong guy to answer that one, because you know I don’t believe there is a God. But I don’t expect you not to get upset with Mommy. I get upset with her sometimes, too. That happens even when people love each other. Especially when people love each other! It’s hard work, loving someone. All that matters is that you talk about things when you’re upset and work them out. You know that even when we get really angry with each other it always works out and we always end up loving each other again, right? So what we need to do is just concentrate on getting past the mad part and getting back to the happy part. I’m sure if there is a God, that’s all She or He expects from you.”
Maddy seemed satisfied with that answer, so Joe put the car back into gear and pulled out into traffic. By the time they reached the next set of lights, she was singing the chorus to “Yellow Submarine” over and over and over again, which was always a good sign. He dropped her off in front of the school, and she blew him a kiss and then came back for her forgotten lunch and blew him another one.
Joe drove to work. He tried to focus on thoughts of his daughter and what he could say to her the next time she had questions like this. He tried not to think of the FBI pulling DeathEater’s phone records and conducting forensics on his computer. He tried not to think of fathers in Clearwater, Florida, who’d be explaining to their kids for years to come why a strange, angry old white man in a wheelchair murdered their mother. He failed.
“Are you going to tell me what’s wrong, Joseph, or am I going to have to drag you to couples’ therapy?”
The week since DeathEater’s attack had gone from bad to worse. Every ringing phone, every strange face made him jump and sweat and think about some DHS type, a federal marshal or an FBI agent. He did not log in to Fuckriff, which was hard because it was his customary 2:00 A.M. no-sleep therapy and he was having a lot of 2:00 A.M no-sleep nights.
Lacey asked him several times what was going on, and he made vague noises about work stress, which was laughable, given how little he cared about work. Finally, it had come to this. They were in bed, Maddy was down for the night, and he was lying on his side, trying not to grind his teeth, his mind circling around and around from DeathEater to the FBI to the dead people of Clearwater, and now Lacey.
He rolled over. “I’m sorry, Lace. It’s just some shit in my life that I’m not able to shake off and that I don’t want to dwell on. The last thing I want to do is go over it with you.” And make you an accessory to a crime. “I just want to put it out of my mind.” She gave him a look of pure skepticism. “You’re really doing a shitty job of it, if you don’t mind my saying so. Doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result is the definition of insanity. I love you very much, my husband, but if you can’t figure out how to deal with this on your own and you won’t let me help you and you won’t get help from anyone else, then you and I are going to have a serious fucking problem.”
Lacey didn’t swear often.
“I hear you,” he said. “Give me forty-eight hours? I probably
just need to download that meditation app or go for a run or something.”
“Forty-eight hours, and then you either spill everything to me or I frog-march you to a shrink.”
Joe put on his bravest face.
“Deal.”
Meditation proved impossible. There was no way he could get his thoughts away from the DeathEater video, the words they’d exchanged, the thought of all those families torn apart. But he did go for a run, strapping his phone to his bicep and putting in his earbuds.
It was late fall and hot, but not blazing hot, and he lost himself in the rhythm of his footfalls and the Creedence Clearwater Revival in his earbuds.
The effect of losing himself was near miraculous, weight lifted from his chest and shoulders. Sounds were sharper, smells better. He picked up the pace.
Inevitably, he overdid it. Too much running after too long a hiatus. He stumbled and nearly went down, and when he straightened up his head was whirling and he nearly lost his balance again. He was in a cute pedestrianized shopping area and he found a bench and sat down on it, his legs trembling and his balance whirling.
He put his head in his hands until the whirling stopped, then sat back, sweat coursing down his face and back. His playlist ended and he got his phone out and started prodding for another round of music for a slower jog home, and autopiloted his way to the headlines.
A shooter had targeted Senator Graham—Joe’s own senator— on the steps of the Capital dome. Graham had won an insurgent seat with promises to “consider all options” and “fix the mess” in health care, and had joined the obstructionist block in the Senate, voting the straight ticket with the party leadership as they blocked every proposal, no matter how modest. After his first year in office, he’d canceled all town halls and Politico had done some data journalism showing that he was the hardest senator for a constituent to sit down with either at home or in D.C.
The shooter had winged two D.C. cops and a federal marshal, injured nine bystanders, got a center-mass shot in on the senator’s chief of staff, and took a piece out of the senator’s earlobe with a full-auto AR-15. That was all in eighteen seconds, which is how long it took for the horde of cops present from six agencies to shoot him forty-seven times. The senator was initially reported to be badly injured, but it turned out that he was merely covered in gallons of other people’s blood and in hysterics.
The shooter had uploaded a suicide video to YouTube before leaving his hotel room in Adams-Morgan, and though Google had taken it down within minutes of it hitting Twitter and Facebook, it had already been mirrored to a bunch of overseas servers on smaller platforms and was getting a lot of play on the #YouShouldBeAfraid hashtag, which had started with the second bombing.
Joe read and read, and his trembling wasn’t going away. Did this shooter have a Fuckriff account? Did he live near Joe? When would the Feds show up at his door? The senator’s bloody, terrified face was perfect viral content, and it raced around the net even faster than the suicide video.
The sweat he’d worked up running had turned icy.
The talking heads had spent weeks wondering where the president was amid all these killings. Apart from a few tepid statements of sympathy for the families of the victims, he’d been playing it very low-key. His proxies had praised him for his restraint and his canny refusal to glorify the “sad, sick people” who had committed these atrocities, lest he inspire more people to follow in their footsteps.
But with a shooting on his doorstep, the president could no longer afford silence. He’d been en route home from his Capetown summit on Air Force One when the news broke, and after huddling with his communications team, he’d sat down with the press corps and delivered an unhinged, rambling statement that ranged over America’s “best healthcare in the world,” the evils of “something for nothing culture,” and the ongoing project to “clean up the Obamacare disaster” before getting onto the main attraction: calling the shooter a “terrorist.”
The word rang in Joe’s ears. His earbuds felt sweaty and itchy. He’d been a teenager on 9/11 and his strongest memory from then was this new word, “terrorist,” and its weird resonances, like it described an orc, ravening and remorseless, superhuman and subhuman at once. It was a word to shrivel the balls. He’d heard white people called terrorists before, but only weirdo kids from Berkeley who ran away from home to join jihadi guerrillas in the Middle East.
This was the dropped shoe he’d been waiting for, a moment he could never come back from. He knew that once “terrorist” stuck to you, you couldn’t unstick it. It spread from the person it landed on to the people around them. It even traveled back in time and stuck to people the terrorist used to know. For example, if you happened to spend a lot of time in a message board where terrorism was planned, then you were very likely a terrorist, too. And if that message board was on the dark web? Forget it.
His jog home was curiously lighthearted. He’d been cringing, waiting for this to happen. Now it had happened. The bell had rung and he couldn’t unring it. Nothing he did on Fuckriff, no amount of patient arguing or conspicuous calls for reason would change it. He was, in some weird sense, free. What’s more, it might be his last freedom, because now there would certainly be Feds.
Lacey was doing yoga in front of the TV when he got home. She asked him skeptically if he was OK, and he must have been convincing because she sentenced him to a shower and announced they’d be going to the farmer’s market for Saturday brunch.
It was a sweet Saturday. Even Maddy—who hated the market—had a good time, thanks to Joe’s relaxation of family policy on cakes and cookies. He took enormous pleasure watching her stuff her face on baked goodies and then sprang for a face-painting. Lacey grumbled a little about the indulgences, but she was clearly very happy to see the old Joe coming back.
When Joe woke up at 2:00 A.M. to pee, he autopiloted into the spare room and fired up Tor Browser, heading straight for Fuckriff. All his anxiety about logging in was gone. Here on the other side of the point of no return, there was no reason not to visit his old friends. Things were what they were and nothing he did from now on would make them worse or better.
But Fuckriff was gone: both the light and dark versions were 404, page not found.
And that set him off again.
Because—he realized—the Fuckriffers were his people. They were his community. Some of them scared the shit out of him and some of them made him want to punch a wall, but it was his place in the digital world, a place where a truth he’d come to feel deep in his bones was universally acknowledged. Most Americans knew that the health-care system was fucked up, and they even knew that health industry execs and the politicians they purchased on the cheap were behind it. But the Fuckriffers alone understood how central those two facts were, and how evil they were. Joe didn’t want to kill anyone, but deep inside, he knew that there were plenty of people who warranted killing.
There were two bombings and another shooting the next week. Nice, middle-class white dudes who’d watched their wives and kids die, or who were living under death sentences themselves.
The news was full of stories about the checkpoints being set up outside hospitals and insurance company buildings and politicians’ offices, and then three guys in three cities with no obvious connection to one another went and blew themselves up at three of those checkpoints, blowing up the huge crowds of nice people with good jobs who’d been waiting to clear the scanners so they could earn a living for their families. The bombs went off within minutes of each other and killed more people than all the other attacks combined.
It was clear that there were other Fuckriffs out there. They were in the press, too, and then the president mentioned them— “the dark caves where good people are made evil”—and still the Feds did not come for Joe. It occurred to him that they might have more leads for this epidemic of nice, respectable white dudes blowing shit up than they could follow up, and they might be a long time indeed in coming for him.
“Why are those men killing those people?” Maddy asked over breakfast. Another classmate had been telling her that she shouldn’t go to the doctor because crazy men were killing anyone near a hospital.
“They’re crazy,” Lacey said, shoving a bowl of berries and yogurt under her nose. “Sick in the head.”
“But why?”
“Because some people just go crazy, honey.”
“But why?”
“Joe?” Lacey threw a dishwasher tablet into the machine and headed to the bathroom, scooping up the laundry as she went. “Daddy?”
“How come I get the hard ones?”
“Because you’re so good at them,” Lacey called down from the bathroom.
Joe smiled and that made Maddy smile, but she hadn’t forgotten. “How come, Daddy?”
“Because,” he said, and shook his head. “There are some very bad men who decided that they could be rich if they made it so going to the doctor was very expensive. They made it so expensive that people are dying because they can’t afford it. That’s what nearly happened to Mommy.” Madison’s face clouded over, the way it always did when this subject came up. “So there are other men who’ve had to see their babies and their wives and their friends die, and it makes them go crazy, and so they go and kill people who work for the bad guys who made the doctor so expensive.”
Maddy looked frustrated. “But why?”
He broke it down into smaller pieces, hearing himself use terms like “bad guys” and “good guys” and thinking about how Lacey would not approve of this framing, but that the Fuckriffers surely would.
“I don’t think killing people is good.”
“It’s not, sweetie.”
“You said that the bad guys killed people by not letting them see the doctor, though.”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“So they’re killing people.”
“Yes.”
“So they’re the same as the people who are shooting people.”
“Not really.”
It was time to get dressed and get into the car. Maddy wouldn’t let him put music on during the drive. She wanted to shout more morally fraught questions from the back seat. This was a “teachable moment,” Joe knew, and his responsibility as an adult was to follow Maddy where she wanted to lead.
“Why do the bad guys want to kill people?”
“They don’t want to—” He stopped himself. Keep it simple, stupid. “Because they get rich and they can buy nice houses and cars and vacations if doctors are expensive.”
“Why do the guys with the bombs want to kill people?”
“Because they’re angry at the bad guys.”
A long pause from the back seat. He swung into the school drop-off horseshoe. “All right, kiddo, we’ll pick this up tonight after school.”
Standing on the sidewalk with her lunch and her schoolbag, she tapped on the passenger window and he rolled it down. “I think the bad guys are worse than the guys with the bombs. The guys with the bombs are just punishing the bad guys for killing their kids.”
And a future Fuckriffer is born. Joe tried to imagine the conversations that Maddy’s friends would have with their parents that night, after Maddy got through with them.
The FBI staged coordinated raids on four private homes and two data centers, claiming that they had seized three different message boards where the “deranged killers” had planned their attacks and arrested the owners of those boards.
Joe watched the perp-walks on social media, four white guys in middle age in their pajamas, cuffed hands behind their backs, terrified looks and curious neighbors. The cops had served no- knock warrants on all four, gone in with guns drawn and SWAT backup—but had somehow managed to fail to shoot any of them in the process. Joe took some comfort in that.
Social media exploded with the personal lives of these four guys, who were, to put it mildly, basic as fuck. They had bullshit jobs: jobs that no one, not even them, thought worth doing. One was a management consultant. One was a customer service manager for a call center. One was an ad-tech programmer. One was a marketing specialist for cryptocurrency startups. All shared one trait: they’d watched the slow death of an insured loved one who’d been denied coverage. In an earlier age, they’d have stewed in private misery, become alcoholics, shot themselves. Instead, they’d followed simple online instructions for starting a message board and hosting it on a bulletproof server accessible only via the Tor network. They hadn’t detonated bombs or gone on a shooting spree—they hadn’t even egged on the people who had. But they’d provided a place for it all to happen, had watched it all happen, and hadn’t shut it down. That was enough.
One of them—the management consultant—was a Canadian expat, and his Twitter was full of comparisons between US health care and the Canadian system, and that kicked off a whole other social media storm about Canada and what America could learn from it, and also whether Canadians were secretly terrorists, which was jokey but not entirely. The South Park memes were epic and late-night comedy had a ball with it.
The Canadian Prime Minister weighed in on the subject and said that even though she was a conservative, she understood that there were some places where markets couldn’t do the job, and health care was one of them. It won her a lot of points with her base, and it also played really well with the undecided Canadian voters who generally held the Tories in bad odor, but who were swayed enough by this demonstration of compassionate conservatism that they elected Quebec’s first-ever Conservative provincial government later that month. If there was one thing that would motivate Canadians, it was the sense that American politics were so screwed up that they made Canada shine by comparison.
None of the four got bail.
Maddy had a cold and it took forever to get her to cough herself to sleep. Joe found Lacey sitting up in bed with her bedside light on, reading her phone.
“You remember that message board you used, when I was sick?”
He tried to stay casual as he hung up his robe and slid into bed next to her. “Yeah.”
“It was one of these, right?” She showed him her phone. There’d been a failed bombing, a guy who’d been shot as he approached the armed checkpoint at the end of a Kaiser hospital driveway. He’d blown himself up, and the shrapnel had injured some other people, but none seriously, and at least they’d been close to a hospital. Kaiser had even waived their copays.
“Not exactly,” he lied.
“How do you mean, ‘not exactly,’ exactly?” She sounded pre-pissed, like she wasn’t in a mood to be screwed around with.
“Lace—”
“Don’t, Joe. Just tell me. Those guys who you spent all those hours talking to, are they the ones running around committing mass murder?”
“Honestly?”
She just stared.
“I don’t know.” Which was a lie. “I mean, they could be. They were pissed enough about it. And I don’t know any of their real names—everyone used a screen name. I stopped logging in, and then it shut down, anyway.”
“How’d you know it shut down, if you weren’t logging in anymore?”
Shit. “After some of the killings, I decided to have a look. I was curious, too. But it was gone.”
“Do you think it was one of the ones the FBI shut down?”
“No, it was before that.”
“Good. Because if it was, that would mean that there was a server in an FBI evidence locker with details that pointed back to our home and our family.”
“Yeah. That’s something I’ve been thinking about, too.”
When Lacey finally fell asleep, Joe slipped out of the bedroom and looked up the Arizona ACLU phone number and did his best to memorize it. Just in case.
The FBI arrested forty-two people the following week, acting on leads from the seized servers. Every one of them was planning an act of mass murder, supposedly.
Joe tried not to watch the news reports of the arrests, clicked away from social media doxxings of the guys in custody. He caught Lacey staring worriedly at her phone more and more.
A bipartisan group of senators introduced a Medicare-for-All bill with a lot of fanfare, and half of America cheered them on, while the other half followed Fox News in condemning them as appeasers who had caved in to terrorism.
The next day, a guy took a shot at the senator from the Great State of Maine. He was killed by the Secret Service, and immediately doxxed online. The guy had run for Congress eleven times as the only Republican seeking the nomination in a hardcore Democratic-machine seat in suburban Chicago. Each of his campaigns had featured rants about cartels of Jewish bankers and George Soros. In between The Blues Brothers “I hate Illinois Nazis” memes, there were posts from people who said that this was inevitable and would only get worse and blamed “health-care extremists” for starting it.
Joe stopped sleeping at night. He’d lie in bed, earbuds in, listening to old comedy podcasts, until Lacey dropped off, then he’d go into the basement and jog on the treadmill and lift his old weights, trying to obliterate the whirl of thoughts going around and around his brain. He drank coffee all day at his desk until his guts burned, and nearly killed himself falling asleep at the wheel one night.
Lacey made a doctor’s appointment for him and told him he was calling in sick to work the next day and wouldn’t hear any argument.
The doc listened attentively, if impersonally, then shook his head.
“Sounds like you’re having a hard time, Joe.”
Joe felt tears well up. “Yeah,” he said, barely a whisper.
“How is everyone else in your family?” The doctor looked at his screen. “How’s Lacey?”
Joe had talked extensively with the doc about Lacey’s health, back when everything had been so scary. He remembered the doc commiserating about the bastards at the insurance company who’d turned down her therapy. From the doc’s expression— startlement, mistrust—he’d just remembered it, too.
“Lacey’s great.” He felt the tears slipping down his cheeks, but he didn’t know what they were for. “Full recovery. Her hair’s down to here now.” He touched his shoulders.
The doc handed him a Kleenex box. “That’s great news, really great.” He shifted in his chair. “A miracle, really.”
Joe was really crying now.
The doc tapped at his computer for a while. “Look, I want to refer you for psychiatric care but it looks like you only get twenty-five percent coverage. There’s a woman I really like, she used to be an ER doc and then became a psychiatrist. You’ll really like her, I think. She’s not afraid to prescribe mood stabilizers but they’re not her first choice, either. But she’s not cheap. I know this is a hard question, but do you think you can afford it?”
Joe started to laugh, still crying, then sobbing. The doc looked uncomfortable, then alarmed. Joe didn’t know exactly how much time they had for the appointment, but he was pretty sure he’d run over and there would be other patients waiting. He pulled himself together, blew his nose, and wiped his eyes.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “It’s just…” He waved his hands and dropped some snotty Kleenexes. He picked them up. “My insurance won’t pay for me to go to a shrink to talk about how screwed up my insurance is.”
“Yeah,” the doc said. “Look, we doctors hate this even more than you do. You only have to deal with them when you’re sick. We have to deal with them every damned day. I have two admin people out there whose only job is chasing payment from them.”
“I’d heard about that.”
“You haven’t heard half of it, believe me.” The doc pushed the cart with the computer away, started to rub his eyes, then took his hands away from his face and reached for a pump of hand sanitizer from the wall-mounted receptacle. He looked at Joe. “You’ve been through a lot, Joe. Nearly losing your wife, it’s hard stuff. It’s a miracle that she survived, but it also means that you didn’t get any counseling or care, the kind of thing that would have kicked in automatically if she hadn’t made it. So you’re just hanging out there. I had an insurance rep on the phone yesterday, telling me that I could refer for unlimited psych care for anyone who’s lost someone—they’ve figured out that the cheapest way to keep from having their heads blown off is to remove barriers to psych treatment.” He smiled mirthlessly.
“I’m not a psychiatric professional, Joe, but I’ve seen enough PTSD cases to know one when I see one. You need treatment. For the sake of your family, and for your own sake. I know you want to be the dad your daughter needs.
“There’s a reason there’s so much medical debt in this country: your health is just that important. More important than your credit-card balance or your credit rating or even your mortgage. If I write you a referral to Dr. Haddid, will you find a way to see her? You can try discussing all-cash payments. A lot of doctors offer discounts for cash up front.”
Joe blew his nose. “Yeah,” he said, “thanks.”
Dr. Haddid’s cash rate was $125/hour, plus $75 for the initial consultation. $200 later, Joe knew he’d never be going back to her. He’d frozen in the office, unable to talk, terrified of what might come out. Terrified he might start spouting off like a Fuckriffer of the worst kind, inspire her to call the cops.
Instead, he stopped at a CVS and bought four different kinds of over-the-counter sleeping pills, and drew up a chart on some scrap printer paper from the guest room and kept track, looking for a pill that gave him the most sleep with the least hangover.
What he really wanted was some Ambien, which he’d tried a couple times in college when he was too wound up to sleep and a buddy had helped him out. There were lots of places to get Ambien cheap and prescription-free, using darkweb markets. He even had some cryptocurrency he’d speculated on when it seemed like it wouldn’t ever stop rising. Might as well spend it now before it was completely worthless.
But of course, he couldn’t remember the obscure .onion addresses for the marketplaces, and the only one he knew by heart was Fuckriff’s, and before he could stop himself or even remember that the site had gone down, he was logging in.
The login banner informed him that the site was back up, with all the accounts intact but all the archives securely deleted. It asked him to delete any screengrabs or saved messages he might have stashed away himself, and welcomed him back on behalf of the new manager, someone called Deadzone874755, who he couldn’t ever recall working with.
For the first time in more than a month, he felt relaxed. All the tension drained out of him as he skimmed the boards, laughing at the bullshit sessions and bon mots, reading updates from old friends. Like it or not, these were his people, this was his place. His spiritual home. And if there were fringe elements in his community who did bad things, unconscionable things, well, what of it? No one faulted soldiers for staying in the army just because someone wearing the same uniform shot up a village or waterboarded a prisoner. The camaraderie and understanding he got from the Fuckriffers, the bond of shared experience—it was irreplaceable. He had a right to that, and no one had the right to make him stop. He never egged anyone on to an act of violence. In fact, he’d done everything he could to stop violence.
Not to mention: the cause was just. The most just one. Letting people die because saving their lives would erode profits was a wicked act, and people who endorsed that act were wicked people. Blowing them up or shooting them wasn’t right, but a world in which the wicked went about their days frightened of retribution was a more just one than a world where the wicked held their heads high.
The Department of Justice sent sternly worded memos to five large internet companies asking them to seriously contemplate suppressing the #YouShouldBeAfraid hashtag. They stopped short of demanding this. Later that day, someone dumped a set of leaked emails between the general counsels of the internet companies and a senior DoJ lawyer, who had made this request in private and got told to go pound sand. The consensus was that the DoJ didn’t think they could make a court order stick, but having failed to secure quiet, voluntary cooperation, they were trying to get the public on-side, getting people to blame the platforms for abetting the killings.
It worked, sort of. Joe’s friends were evenly split between people who thought that banning the tag was ridiculous and people who thought that the internet companies were total assholes for not falling into line. People used that tag to talk about the issue and the tactics, to share safety tips and discuss motivations. On the other hand, people used the tag to glorify and publicize mass killings. On the other hand, making a new tag wasn’t exactly rocket surgery: #AfraidShouldBeYes, #YShldBFrd. Of course, the Fuckriffers didn’t care, they got all the #YouShouldBeAfraid talk they needed on their private boards.
BlueCross BlueShield of Minneapolis broke ground on a new building in an industrial park at the end of its own gated cul-de-sac, with high guard towers, automated license plate recognition systems in a one-mile radius, panic rooms on every floor, and a large staff of 24/7 armed guards. Their shareholder disclosures costed this out and amortized the capital over five years, explaining how the running costs would be covered by a combination of a “security surcharge” on all premiums and a tiny per-share dividend hit. After a short bobble when the shorts moved into the market, the share price closed up and some shorts took a big hit.
> They want to prove they’re not afraid
DamFool was the newest Fuckriffer. Fuckriff was a lot harder to find than it used to be, and new recruits were brought in by old hands, vouched for. His son, Tommy, was fourteen years old, track star, accelerated math, Eagle Scout.
Non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma.
Tommy’s cancer had not responded to two rounds of chemo. He was strong and young and vital, and the same youth that gave him the strength to withstand all that terrible medicine also caused his cells to divide with terrible, regular rapidity, even the cancerous ones.
His doc thought that Tommy was a good candidate for chimeric antigen receptor T-cell therapy, a therapy that was experimental by anyone’s lights. But if anyone could survive it, it was Tommy. People who survived that therapy had a good chance of making it three years cancer free, and then the sky was the limit. Tommy was up for it. He even wanted to freeze some sperm in case he decided to have kids later in life. That was the kind of life choice that people who were planning on surviving made.
The insurer—Cigna—had other ideas.
The bottom line: they would not spend three quarters of a million (table stakes, the total could be much higher) to kill Tommy with an experimental therapy. Not even if Tommy was a fighter and an optimist and young and healthy (except for dying of cancer) and wanted to freeze his sperm.
DamFool’s wife was inconsolable. His older son, Rhett, had died of an opioid overdose in his senior year, five years ago, and the two of them had put everything they had into Tommy, throwing themselves into his life and upbringing with a vigor that Tommy seemed to embrace. They’d all been hurt by what happened to Rhett.
For his part, DamFool was barely holding it together. He spent as much time away from Tommy as he could bear to, not wanting to overshadow the boy, and when he wasn’t with Tommy, he was trying to console his wife, who was in no mood for consolation, or trying not to drink all the beer in the fridge. Tommy was in a lot of pain, partly because he resisted the painkillers because they were the same ones that Rhett had been addicted to. It was a bad situation.
The Great Beasts of Fuckriff were grooming DamFool. There were these hit lists that people had made, doxxing health care execs, analysts, investors, lobbyists, as well as lawmakers at the state and national level who’d carried their water. The dumps had home addresses, known travel routes, even architectural drawings from public records departments showing the floor plans of their homes and offices. These lists weren’t hard to come by—they were circulated with glee on the #YouShouldBeAfraid hashtag. The first time Joe saw one of these files, he thought of how chilling it must be to see your home, your family, your picture, your license plate on a list like this. It gave him a lot of satisfaction that he tried not to think about too much.
DamFool lived in Montana and, for such a sparsely populated state, Montana sure had a hell of a lot of high-value targets. Small populations had big old-boy networks, and they made it easy for corruption to spread, favor to favor, friend to friend.
You could see the diffusion pattern in the hit list, which was extensive.
The Great Old Ones were good at this pitch. They were just hinting now, not giving DamFool the hard sell. That would come after Tommy’s demise. Right now, they were just getting him in position. Joe had seen the playbook before. It was his cue to dive in with a highly symbolic and largely ornamental bid to save his soul.
Joe just couldn’t. He’d been reading these op-eds by Black Lives Matter activists about the official neglect that people with sickle cell anemia endured, stories about agonized teenagers being tied to hospital beds and told to stop shouting if they wanted to get untied. The general tenor was that the whites who’d suddenly decided that the health-care system was too sick to live were late to the party, and by the way, let me tell you a little story about the Tuskegee airmen.
Joe found himself imagining what his life would have been like if Lacey had died. If he’d been alone with Maddy, a huge hole in both their hearts. He imagined what life must be like for a parent going through that themselves, watching their kids go through it, watching their nieces and nephews and their friends go through it. He couldn’t imagine it. Couldn’t imagine tolerating it. How could they tolerate it? He wasn’t stupid. He’d heard of white privilege. It was a thing. He got it.
The more he thought about this, though—what if Lacey died, what about all those people who’ve tolerated that and worse, what about everything he could get away with that all those people couldn’t?
When you thought about it that way, he practically had a duty to kill a healthcare executive or two.
Tommy died on July 17.
Maddy was in Wisconsin with Lacey, visiting Lacey’s cousins, whom she had started talking to again after she came back from the cancer, making a conscious choice to put the old rifts with her family behind her.
Without family to give him focus, Joe found himself actually paying attention at work again, answering emails until late at night, then smoothly transitioning into a long session with Fuckriff. Even though Lacey wasn’t around, he still took his laptop into the guest room when it was time for Fuckriff.
DamFool was incoherent with grief at first, then coldly violent, writing the most detailed fantasies of murder and mayhem. Then he disappeared.
Joe had not engaged with him at all, letting the Old Ones egg DamFool on while Joe watched from the sidelines. But once he went quiet, Joe had a crisis of conscience and sent him a string of private messages begging him to call before he did anything stupid.
DamFool didn’t answer Joe’s messages, but the next morning, he was walking fuzzy-headed to the toilet in a pair of boxers, holding his phone and thinking about his first cup of coffee, when he saw something out the window. He stopped and peered at the shape, trying to make sense of what appeared to be a futuristic robot, at least in the brief instant it took him to realize that it was a man in SWAT armor with a visor and a very large gun, which he was swinging around to point at Joe.
Joe opened his mouth to say something—“no” or maybe “what the fuck?”—when he discovered that he was lying on the floor and he couldn’t breathe. He tried to get up, because something was on his chest and he had to get out from under it, but it wasn’t just his lungs that weren’t working—he couldn’t make his legs or arms move, either. It was very noisy all of a sudden, too, and eventually, as he was surrounded by more robot-men in body armor with very, very large guns, he realized that he had been shot in the chest.
The officer who shot Joe was a SWAT veteran with twenty-two years on the Tempe PD, during which time he had shot a total of nineteen suspects, but Joe was the first white person Officer Connor had shot. Joe was also the first one who survived, and there were social media pundits who hypothesized that Connor’s latent white supremacy—the same force that had animated his trigger finger all those times before—had spoiled his aim, sparing Joe’s life. He had been hit “center mass” but had only suffered a collapsed lung and no damage to his heart.
The officer said he’d mistaken Joe’s phone for a gun.
Joe learned this last detail from the FBI agent who questioned him once he was clear of the anesthesia, handcuffed to his recovery bed and coming to his senses. (He learned about the other eighteen shootings later).
The FBI agent had read Joe’s entire series of messages with DamFool and wanted Joe to know that in his, Agent Sebold’s, opinion, Joe had tried to do the right thing. Agent Sebold could tell that he and Joe were on the same team here, both of them trying to help these poor, confused, heartbroken men channel their grief into a less pathological course of action.
Which was why Agent Sebold had come up with the singularly great idea of helping Joe escape any potential criminal liability in exchange for Joe’s cooperation in infiltrating Fuckriff and catching the Great Old Ones. Agent Sebold strongly implied that there were other collaborators already working with him on Fuckriff, but that the Great Old Ones’ wiliness had foiled their efforts. By working with the Bureau, Joe wouldn’t be pioneering the idea of undercovers on the system, but he would be using his unique skills and longstanding access to further his joint mission with the Bureau to save these poor, impressionable men, to say nothing of their victims.
Joe was very groggy. The anesthetic was still in his blood and then there was the fantastic calamity of sensations from his chest cavity, bones, and swollen, stitched skin.
A muffled voice in the back of his mind was chattering intensely at him, telling him he needed to talk to Lacey ASAP because she’d be out of her mind, telling him he should not talk to this cop without a lawyer present.
Joe listened to the cop talking. Agent Sebold was good: calm, reassuring, friendly. He only wanted the same things Joe wanted. He wanted to help Joe. He knew Joe wanted to help, too.
Joe tried to speak but couldn’t. His mouth was gummed shut with thick, dried saliva, his tongue was as thick as his fist. Agent Sebold clearly knew his business: gently, he dipped a large cotton swab in water and swabbed at Joe’s lips, then the front of his teeth. A trickle of the flat, room-temperature water moistened Joe’s tongue. It felt incredible.
“Lawyer,” Joe said. The agent looked angry for a second, then he mastered himself and switched to disappointed. “Sorry,” Joe added. Then, “Lawyer.” It was all he managed before his tongue dried out again. The FBI agent left.
It was ten days before Joe saw a lawyer. In the interim, he was kept in restraints except during doctor visits and physio. These were under guard—stone-faced Phoenix PD cops—and each time one of these officers entered his room, he asked to see a lawyer. It got to be kind of a game. Not a good game.
He didn’t see Lacey. When he asked the cops, the doctors, the nurses, the PT, about her, they acted like they hadn’t heard him. He was pretty sure he could see Lacey whenever he wanted, provided he asked to speak to Agent Sebold first.
He almost broke down every day. But he didn’t.
You know what kept him going? The visit from the guy from hospital billing.
His insurance wasn’t covering his stay. There was an exemption in his policy for “acts of terrorism” and they were invoking it. The hospital’s accounting department wanted to know about his assets. They were the only ones who would talk to him about Lacey, and what they wanted to know was whether she had separate finances from his.
The billing guy seemed like a decent fellow stuck with a shitty job. Joe knew, somehow, that he made less money than Joe. It was the cheap shoes, and the seven-dollar haircut. He was embarrassed and apologetic, but he had a job to do. It wasn’t his fault the system was so totally fucked up. There was nothing that one guy could do about it.
When the billing guy visited for the third time, Joe decided that he’d go to jail for a hundred years before he betrayed Fuckriff and all who sailed in her.
Agent Sebold visited just ahead of the lawyer, looking pissed and harried. The last time, he’d gently persuaded, but this time he wheedled and it tipped Joe off that things weren’t going the way he’d hoped.
The lawyer was an old Chinese American guy who’d been doing pro-bono work with the Arizona ACLU since his college days. He showed up an hour after Agent Sebold left the bedside and introduced himself.
“Your wife is fine. She wanted me to make sure you got that first. She was very adamant. I wouldn’t be here if it wasn’t for her. She did a lot of legwork, convinced the ACLU that this was something we should be paying attention to. There are a hell of a lot of potential clients who fit your profile, and we’ve had to prioritize the cases that could make good law or prevent bad law from being made. You’re in the latter case. No one alleges that you abbeted anyone, even the FBI says you did what you could to stop things. But you knew about serious crimes that were going to happen and you didn’t go to the cops. They say that makes you an accessory to terrorism. There’s an Arizona congressman who called you an ‘enemy combatant.’”
Joe suppressed a groan.
Leonard, his lawyer, patted his hand, frowned at the restraints. “Look, there’s a long process ahead of us. I want to start with some basics: get you out of these cuffs, get your family in to see you, get you released on bail. Then we can talk about how we’re going to keep you out of prison.”
“At least you didn’t mention the death penalty.” Joe was joking. Leonard didn’t smile.
“Was saving that for when you got your strength back,” Leonard said. “It’s not something I’m unduly concerned with, but whenever there’s even a small chance that a court will order an execution, it’s something we have to factor into our planning.” He gave Joe a moment to soak that in. “Now, I want to know everything.” He got out a yellow pad. “Start at the beginning.”
The last verified #YouShouldBeAfraid killing took place a year and a half later, while Joe was in solitary in the Tucson supermax pen, having been transferred after he caught a beating at the Maricopa County pen while waiting for a hearing on Leonard’s appeal on his bail. The Tucson warden took one look at Joe’s beat-up face and taped ribs and ordered him into “protective solitary.” It had been a week.
The killer had been a Jacksonville, Missouri fireman whose BlueCross BlueShield refused to cover treatment for dialysis after an acute kidney injury he experienced on the job when a ceiling joist fell on him. They disagreed with the doctor’s analysis of his condition. His doctor privately told him that he had better scrape together the cash for the dialysis or he could expect a short and unhappy life ahead of him.
The fireman had no wife and no child, which made him different from the others. He’d had elderly parents and he’d gone into deep debt paying for their home care in the years before. Now that they were gone, all he had was his job and his health, neither of which he had anymore.
The insurer reported the fireman to the sheriff, as was standard procedure now when denying a claim like this one, but the sheriff had a lot to do and not many deputies to do it with, and the deputy who was supposed to look in on the fireman had pushed it to a later date twice while he got caught up in more urgent matters.
Firemen know a fair bit about explosives, as it turns out.
Joe got word of the passage of Americare during a rare visit from Lacey. Leonard had advised him against pleading out, saying that the ACLU was hopeful that they could get a good precedent out of his case. But then they met with the prosecutor, who discussed in eye-watering detail what thirty-five years in prison does to a man. Leonard insisted that the thirty-five-year number was total bullshit, that it would require the judge violating the United States Sentencing Commission’s guidelines to such an egregious extent that the appeal would be practically automatic.
But thirty-five years rests heavy on a man’s mind. Joe imagined himself separated from Lacey and Maddy while Maddy grew up and Lacey grew old, stepping out of the prison gates to meet a fifteen-year-old grandchild for the first time.
Joe and Lacey cried a lot, and Maddy got scared, but in the end, the prosecutor was offering five years, paroled in two. He’d already been held for most of a year while the trial dragged and dragged, while other Fuckriffers were arrested, while witnesses turned state’s evidence.
So Joe agreed to another year, maybe four more years, and a felony rap, and a chance to grow old with his family. The warden decided that he’d been the kind of prisoner who tolerated protective solitary well, and so that became a permanent condition, with the effect that visits were all but impossible to arrange. There was one right at the start, then three months, then another.
“They passed Americare,” Lacey said. She looked terrible, exhausted and emotionally wrung out, her rosacea hectic, the way it got when she got stressed. Joe was acutely aware of the paunch he’d watched develop around his waistline, the six days that had passed since his weekly shower.
He wanted to say something like, “It’s been three months and all you want to talk about is Americare,” but he also recognized that safe subjects were few and far between for them, and Maddy’s eyes were red and big as saucers and everyone was just doing their best.
“That’s good news.”
“It didn’t have everything we wanted, but it’s still pretty amazing. No one believed it would pass. No one believed the president would sign it. The lawsuit was dead on arrival, too, even though they got to choose their venue. The Federal Circuit appeals judges took about ten seconds to tell ’em to go fuck themselves. No one seriously believes the Supremes will take the case, and the share prices are—”
“I’ve missed you, Lacey.”
She stopped. Her eyes were bright with tears.
“Are you OK?”
He looked at Maddy. “Yes,” he said. When Maddy looked away, he mouthed “no.” Lacey put her hand on the glass and he did the same, conscious that it was such a cliché, but also feeling the psychosomatic ghost of the warmth of her skin through the thick plexi like a space heater radiating directly into his own palm.
Lacey was crying now. So was he.
“They really passed it, huh?” he said through the snot. “Who says violence doesn’t solve anything?” she said.
Joe’s laugh was so unexpected that he sprayed the glass with a Jackson Pollock of snot, and that set Maddy laughing, and that set Lacey laughing, a dam broken between them.
Only nine more months, assuming good behavior.
