* * *
0001: The package has been received. You have officially completed your first assignment. Welcome to the collective. Your loyalty has been proven. But not permanently. It will be expected of you, always.
0417: Thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.
0001: You will be receiving another assignment within the next twelve hours. It may or may not involve interacting in person with another member. If so, are you willing?
0417: Yes.
0001: This is the next level of your involvement. I caution you not to exchange too much personal information. Speak to each other only enough to effectively complete the given assignment. This is necessary, for both your safety and the safety of the collective. Do you understand?
0417: Yes.
0001: It is in motion, then.
0417: Can I ask one question?
0001: Yes.
0417: What is going to happen with the knife I sent to Vermont?
0001 has left the private chat.
IT’S BEEN SIX days since I sent the package to Vermont, and four days since 0001 messaged me, making my membership in the collective official. I still don’t know what happened with the knife—probably nothing. But I don’t care. Ever since I completed that first assignment, I’ve been sleeping better than I have in years. My appetite has improved. I’m able to drive long distances without my mind going to dark places, and I worry less in general.
I’ve been enjoying my design work, too. In just a few hours, I finished all of Glynne’s suggested tweaks to her site, and she loved the results so much that she insisted on paying me generously. I even managed a lunch with Denise, who mentioned the glow in my cheeks and asked if maybe I’m dating again. Quite a transformation in such a short time, and I know the reason: I no longer feel powerless. As 0001 said during my most recent conversation with her, There’s a reason why the poor and disenfranchised find direction in the military. There’s safety in numbers, yes. But more important, there is power.
So even though I may not be contributing to the real-life murders of the unjustly unpunished, these strange assignments make me feel as though I am. And that, I now understand, is what gives them meaning.
Three days ago I bought two old-fashioned Lux kitchen timers, one white, one pale blue, at a busy indoor flea market in Tannersville and placed them in the mailbox of an abandoned pre-kindergarten in Lenox, Massachusetts. Two days ago I purchased a flip phone from a convenience store in Nyack, called a Florida phone number with it, read a series of letters, numbers, and symbols into the voicemail, then disposed of the phone at a public dump in Ramapo.
And then, last night, I finally came in contact with another member of the collective. She was a pale young woman with damp hair and big, frightened eyes, and I met her at two in the morning in the parking lot of a dilapidated mall in Bridgeport, Connecticut. My task was to drive her, in my own car, to the New Birmingham rest stop on the New York Thruway—a drive that took close to two hours. But I was too worried about following 0001’s rules to ask for the woman’s name or even her Kaya screen name, and so we spent most of the ride without speaking, the only sounds in my car the rasp of her breathing, her chattering teeth. I wanted to ask what she was doing with wet hair on such a bitter cold night, but she seemed so fragile to me, the way her small hands gripped the seat, her left knee bouncing furiously. Rules aside, asking her anything felt invasive and wrong.
Just before she got out of my car, she placed a hand on my shoulder. “Sister,” she said. She left before I could respond, hurrying through the rest stop’s nearly empty parking lot to another waiting car, its headlights blinding me before it disappeared into the night.
I’m thinking about her face now, the terror in it, and then her voice, the steely resolve in that final moment when she called me sister. Her wet hair, the smell of her sweat. How real it all seemed—as though she wasn’t just pretending, as though she’d evened a score by committing some awful act she’d never thought herself capable of and, having crossed that line, was now stronger than she’d ever imagined possible.