“I don’t think so.”
“Do you remember any of the names now?”
“No. I just remember that my name was on the list. Sorry.”
“Don’t be sorry. That’s totally fine. I mean, why you would think it would mean anything at all …”
“Right. I know, right.”
So he simply told the agents what he’d told Officer Chen on the phone. He didn’t remember the exact date, or any of the other names, but his was on it. Jay Coates. After the termination of the interview, he’d decided that it was going to be okay, that no one would ever find out he’d lied, just as no one had ever found out about that time in high school when he’d told his two best friends that he’d lost his virginity at fencing camp.
But now it was almost a week later, and when he left his forty-four-unit apartment building he was always aware of the nondescript Chevrolet that tailed him to the office park where he worked. And when he returned at night and walked in the early dusk from the parking lot to his building’s entrance, he felt eyes on him. He’d been told to live his life as normally as possible, but to always alert the agent in charge—another man in a gray suit, but without any hair to turn gray—if he planned on doing anything, going anywhere, outside of his normal schedule. But he didn’t. He just went back and forth to work, and he ordered takeout every night. Tonight, he was ordering pizza again, even though he knew he shouldn’t, and he even found himself adding extra cheese to his large pepperoni, and then ordering the two-liter bottle of Dr Pepper. He played Dark Souls II while waiting for his pizza, and then watched a documentary about sharks while he ate.
Going to sleep that night, on several pillows because his acid reflux was back, he thought about a fantasy he used to have, one in which he was the unwitting subject of an experiment. Without his knowing it, scientists had implanted recording devices in his eyes and his ears so that a team could observe an average life—his average life—twenty-four hours a day. They would see the world as he saw it. In this fantasy, he’d imagine the group of observers watching his every move, seeing the way he made his scrambled eggs in the morning, and the way he cleaned his dishes, and the people he put up with at work without ever complaining or acting out. The scientists would take notes, and try to be impartial, but they wouldn’t be able to observe him without coming to admire his simple life, his intelligence and goodness, and they would also recognize how no one around him seemed to care. They’d recognize that he never got credit for anything. People just took him for granted, or were rude, or dismissive. Sometimes, he would let the fantasy keep running so that he would imagine one of the scientists quitting her job, quitting her profession, so that she could come and be with him. It would make a cool book, he used to think, and maybe even a better movie, and he thought about writing it himself, but knew that he probably never would.
But now that he actually was being watched by anonymous police officers in gray cars, he wasn’t sure how much he liked it. He wondered if they were looking at his browsing history as well, and for that reason, ever since telling the woman on the phone that he was on a list, he’d stopped going to certain websites. And he missed them. Lying in bed now, with his eyes closed, he conjured up the image of Evie Aurora, a cam girl who had always been happy to see him, back in the good old days before he ever got that phone call from the FBI.
4
SATURDAY, OCTOBER 1, 10:30 A.M.
Jay Coates, the Jay Coates that lived in Los Angeles, California, was preparing for his weekly talk with his mother by doing a couple of tai chi moves while staring out of his apartment window at the smoggy sky.
His phone rang right on cue. 10:30 his time, 12:30 hers.
“Hi, Mom,” he said.
“Hi, darling. I haven’t caught you at a bad time, have I?”
“Nope. I was expecting your call.”
“Oh, good. I just finished my lunch.”
“What did you have?” Jay said, and then finished his moves with the phone in his hand as he heard her say something about a tomato salad.
“Are you there, darling? I think you’re breaking up.”
“I’m here.”
“Oh, good. Tell me about you. Did you get that commercial you were going for?”
“They wanted me for it, but I turned it down. I mean, it would have been okay money, but that’s not what I came out here to do, you know?” He went on to tell her about a fantastic play he was going to be in, and when she asked if she could come out and see it, he told her it was only being performed for industry insiders. He wasn’t sure she bought it, but she moved on. It was hard to lie about having acting success, since acting was a public performance. Sometimes he told her that he wrote screenplays as well, and that he’d sold a few, although who knew when they’d go into production. She always wanted to know if he’d written a part for himself, like Matt and Ben did in Good Will Hunting, and he’d told her that he wasn’t that egotistical. His mother had grown up in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and she acted as though she were somehow related to Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, talking about them constantly.