I WAS BEING AIMED

I WAS BEING AIMED

"A man who has been shaped by another man for a purpose he was not told about does not learn of the shaping from the shaper. He learns of it, if he learns of it at all, from the specific moment in his own life when he understands that the tool he has become was not a tool of his own making."

Dr. James Okafor arrived at San Francisco International Airport on Friday afternoon at one-fifty-six on a United flight from Albany, in a brown corduroy jacket he had owned since 1994 and a pair of walking shoes he had bought in Boston in 2011, carrying a leather satchel that had been given to him by his father the year his father had died, and in the satchel, in an inside pocket he had sewn himself, was Appendix B.

The appendix was forty-seven pages. It was bound in a file folder that had been manila once and was now the color of a manila folder that had been kept in the back of a desk drawer for sixteen years, which was most of a generation by the rate at which colors faded in Okafor's office, and the folder had, on the front of it in James's own handwriting from 2003, the word APPENDIX and nothing else.

He had not taken the folder out of the desk drawer in his office since 2009, which was the last time he had re-read it, and the re-reading in 2009 had been the last time he had allowed himself to look at it, and he had allowed himself to look at it in 2009 because he had been trying to decide whether to destroy it, and he had decided not to destroy it, and he had put it back in the drawer and had not thought about it again until the Friday night in February of 2019 when he had read an email from a woman in San Francisco four times and had decided that the woman was the person he had been keeping the appendix for without having known that he was keeping it for anyone.

On the flight he had not read it. He had read a novel instead, by a Kenyan writer he liked, about a family in Mombasa in the 1970s. He had read the novel because reading the novel was the thing he could do on the plane that was not reading the appendix, and not reading the appendix on the plane had been a decision he had made before boarding, because the appendix was a document that was going to be read in a particular place for the first time in ten years, and that place was not a plane.

He took a taxi from the airport to the Mission. The taxi driver was a man in his fifties named Omar who had been driving in San Francisco for twenty-one years and who did not try to make conversation, which James was grateful for. He had been rehearsing this meeting for most of a week. He was twenty minutes away from it now.

The taxi stopped at three-eleven in front of Maya's building. James paid Omar in cash and added a twenty-percent tip and thanked him in the voice James used with people whose day had just been, briefly, the day of a stranger who needed them, and Omar nodded and drove away. James stood on the sidewalk for a second looking up at the building, which was a four-story stucco walk-up with fire escapes on the front of the second and third floors and a row of three green trash bins by the steps. He registered the trash bins. He walked up the steps and pressed the buzzer for 3B.

Maya buzzed him in at three-twelve.

Before Okafor's taxi had cleared the corner at Valencia, Declan had gotten a text from a number he did not save in his phone but recognized. He'd set his phone face-down on the counter without saying anything.

Maya had been watching through the window. She'd seen him do it.

"Who," she said.

"I'd rather tell you after." He turned from the counter. "Actually, no. Brenner."

She looked at him.

"I know," he said.

Stuart Brenner was a logistics consultant who did contract work for a Bay Area shipping firm with significant federal exposure and a second office in Arlington that nobody talked about. Declan had found him six weeks ago on the edge of a Lumen vendor chain and had been spending the last three of those weeks deciding whether Brenner was an asset or a flag. He'd leaned toward asset. His reasoning was that Brenner's Arlington connection was commercial, peripheral, and pre-dated the signal anomaly by at least four years. The text, if Declan's read was right, was going to be Brenner asking for a meet, which was the thing an asset did when an asset had something.

Maya had read Brenner differently for most of those three weeks, though she'd stopped saying so at the point where saying so had started to feel like she was just being argumentative about Declan's work. Her read was that Brenner's Arlington adjacency was too old and too clean. A commercial connection that old either rotated out or got absorbed. It didn't sit for four years in the same shape without someone deciding to keep it there. She'd placed this in the corner of the room where she kept the things she wasn't sure of but wasn't ready to discard. It had been sitting there since the second week of February.

She hadn't said this to Declan in about nine days.

"What does he want," she said.

"He's got access to a Lumen internal communication thread. He says it's from 2017 and he found it through the same vendor chain I found him through." Declan paused. "He can get us the thread tonight. Before close of business on the West Coast."

"He wants to meet at six," Declan said. "Which is while we're going to be in the middle of this."

She looked at the clock on the microwave. Three-oh-eight. Okafor was twenty minutes out when she'd last tracked the taxi. Less now.

"Tell him yes," she said.

Declan didn't move.

"We can't have him sit on it," she said. "If the thread is what he says it is, six is the window. We tell him yes, you go at six-fifteen, you're back by eight."

"I'd rather not leave you and James alone until we know what the appendix is."

"I'll be fine. Tell him yes."

Declan picked up the phone. He typed. He set it down again.

"I want to say one thing," he said.

"Then say it."

"Brenner is not a flag."

She didn't answer.

"I know you've been sitting on a different read," he said. "I'm not asking you to revise it. I'm just naming it, before we go into this meeting, because I don't want to come back tonight and find out you've been running a parallel track on him while I'm gone."

"I haven't been running a parallel track."

"Okay."

"I haven't."

"Okay, Maya."

She looked out the window. The taxi was not yet visible from this angle.

She placed Brenner back in the corner where she'd been keeping him. It was still there. The read she'd assigned him three weeks ago was still there. Nothing had changed in the interval between the text arriving and her telling Declan yes. Declan's confidence was not new information. The six-o'clock window was not new information. She had run a roughly sixty-five percent probability that Brenner's Arlington adjacency was being maintained, not inherited, and the probability had not moved, and she had told Declan yes anyway. Revision would have meant new information. This was something else.

She heard the buzzer.

She went to the window and looked down, and there was Okafor on the sidewalk below in his brown corduroy jacket looking up at the building, and she pressed the button to let him in without looking away from him, and she went to the door, and she stood at the top of the last flight of stairs and waited for him to come up.

She was still thinking about Brenner when she heard the footsteps on the second-floor landing. The problem was not that she'd been wrong. She might not be wrong. The problem was she could no longer tell the difference between a read she'd revised and a read she'd just stopped defending, and if Declan came back tonight with the Lumen thread and it was clean, she was not going to know whether she'd been right to let him go or whether she'd gotten lucky, and the two things were not the same thing.

She smoothed her face. She heard the third-floor landing.

She did not touch the Brenner corner again. There was nothing to touch. She had already acted.

She opened the apartment door as he was coming up the last flight of stairs. She had been watching for him through the window from three-oh-five, because the window in the front of her apartment looked down over the street and because Okafor had texted from the airport baggage claim at two-forty-six to tell her he had landed and was in a taxi. She had watched the taxi pull up. She had watched him get out. She had watched him stand on the sidewalk looking up.

She had not told Declan that she was watching. Declan was in the kitchen making coffee.

When she opened the door and looked at Okafor for the first time in her life in person, she did the small physical thing a person did when the person was meeting someone she had been carrying in her head as an idea for three weeks and the idea turned out to be a person with a particular face and a particular brown corduroy jacket and a particular height, which was the thing of having her image of the idea adjust in real time to match the person standing in front of her. Okafor had the kind of face Maya had not been able to predict from his email voice. His face was more tired than she had expected, and more kind than she had expected, and it was not the kindness of a man who was performing kindness, which was the kindness Maya had been afraid of on the plane ride over. He was also, in a way she had not let herself name in the days of preparing for this meeting, the first older Black man she had ever stood at a doorway about to sit across a kitchen table from for a conversation about anything she was actually carrying. The professional life she had built had not, in eight years, produced the chair she was about to offer him.

"Dr. Okafor," she said.

"Maya."

He put out his hand, and she took it, and they shook hands in the doorway with the formality of two people who had both decided, separately, before meeting, that the formality was going to be the first thing they offered each other, because the formality was the form of respect their professions shared, and the professions were the ground they already had between them.

"Please come in," she said.

He came in.

Declan came out of the kitchen with a mug of coffee. Declan had not been watching through the window. Declan had stayed in the kitchen so that Maya would have the door-opening to herself. Maya had been the one carrying this meeting in her head the longest. The door-opening belonged to her.

"Professor," Declan said.

"Mr. Marsh."

"Declan is fine."

"James."

They shook hands in the middle of Maya's living room. The three of them stood for a second looking at each other the way three strangers who were going to be, for the rest of their lives, not strangers, looked at each other on the first afternoon they were ever together in one place. Maya gestured toward the kitchen table.

"Come sit," she said. "Coffee or tea."

"Tea, please."

James took the satchel off his shoulder and put it on the floor next to his chair. He sat. He looked around the kitchen. The kitchen was small and clean and had one plant on the windowsill which was a peace lily, and James noted the peace lily.

Maya put a mug of tea in front of him and sat down across from him. Declan sat to his left, at the head of the table. The three of them were now at the table. The table was where Maya had done most of the work of the last three weeks. James could see that in the wear on it, in the rings and the pencil marks. It was a good table. Not a conference-room table. He was glad of that.

"Before I say anything else," James said, "I want to thank you both for trusting me enough to have me in this room. You don't know me. I have published in obscure journals for most of my career. I have spent twenty-eight years teaching undergraduates. I am not the kind of expert you should have had to call, and I am sorry that I am. Now. The appendix."

He reached down into the satchel and took out the folder.

He put it on the table. He did not open it.

"Before I show you the appendix," he said, "I am going to tell you how I came to write it. Because the appendix is not the thing you need the most, right now. The thing you need the most is the context for the appendix, which is the context of my own life, which is a thing I have not told anyone in the form I am about to tell you. I am going to tell you because you need to know it, and also because I understood, on the flight, that I have been carrying it for long enough that the carrying has started to have a cost, and the cost is going to be paid by my telling you, and the paying is going to be a relief. I am telling you that last part because I want you to know that I am getting something out of this conversation that is not information, and that the something is something I need, and that you should not feel as if I am offering you information as a gift. The gift, if there is one, is going the other way."

Maya did not speak. Declan did not speak.

"I started thinking about what became the 2003 paper," James said, "in 1989. I was thirty-two years old. I had finished my postdoc at Stanford the year before and had taken a junior position at a small university in upstate New York, which was where I am still employed thirty years later, and in the winter of 1988 into 1989 I had started to work on a question that had been in my head since graduate school, which was the question of whether a computational system could be built to influence human emotional response through the structural properties of language rather than through the semantic content of language. I had not, in 1989, believed the question had a clean answer. I had been working on it anyway, because the working on it had been the most interesting thinking I had done since my dissertation, and a junior professor who has an interesting thinking project is a junior professor who sleeps well at night. I was sleeping well at night in 1989."

He stopped. He took a sip of the tea. The tea was good. He put the mug down. Outside the window it had started to rain.

"In the summer of 1989," he said, "I met a woman."

Maya sat very still.

"I met her at a conference in San Diego. She was not an academic. She was there with someone who was. We met in the specific way two people met at a conference when both of them had been steered by the people around them to the same small balcony outside the main hall at eleven-forty on a Tuesday night, and neither of them knew why the steering had happened until afterward. She was thirty-one. She was funny in a way I had not expected a stranger to be funny. We spent about four hours on the balcony before either of us realized it was two in the morning, and then we spent another hour walking along the harbor because neither of us wanted to be the first person to say goodnight, and we exchanged addresses, and she went back to California and I went back to upstate New York, and I wrote her a letter on a Wednesday four days later. She wrote back. I wrote again. She wrote back. For the next eight months, we wrote each other letters about once a week. We did not see each other again in person for the whole thirteen months, because neither of us traveled easily in that period of our lives, and also because the letters were, by the third month, the thing, and seeing each other was not going to have been a better version of the thing."

"What did you write about," Maya said.

James looked at her. He had not expected the question. The question was the kind of question a person asked when she was not yet ready to ask the question that mattered, and he understood that, and answered carefully.

"In the early letters, books. The book I was reading. The book she was reading. We had different reading habits, she was reading novels and I was reading scientific papers and the occasional novel, and the early letters were a slow conversation about whether the difference mattered."

He stopped.

"After the third letter, the letters became something else. I do not remember what we wrote about. I remember the shape of the letters and not the content. The shape was the conversation. The content was the surface."

"Okay," Maya said.

Maya's hand was on the table.

Declan was watching Maya's hand without looking at it. He had gone still in the way he went still when a thing fit together too neatly, when the shape of a story arrived already finished. Maya saw it. She did not look at him. She knew what the stillness was, and she set it aside, because the coincidence was either true or it was not and the appendix on the table did not care which.

"Her name was Nora," James said. "Her last name was not the last name she is using now. She had a two-year-old daughter whom I knew about from the first letter, because she mentioned the daughter in the first letter without explaining her, the way a woman mentioned her child to a man she wanted to be honest with from the first word. The daughter's name was Maya. I have never forgotten the name. I have not said the name out loud in almost thirty years."

He stopped.

He looked at Maya.

"I did not know, until this morning on the flight, that the Maya Voss who had written to me about embedding spaces was the Maya whose name had been in Nora's first letter. I worked it out over Nevada. The flight attendant was bringing me coffee. I had been thinking about a phrase you used in your email. The phrase was Appendix B of that paper is referenced in the methodology but is not included in the published version. The grammatical shape of that sentence is a shape Nora used in letters when she was writing about something that mattered to her. I noticed the shape. I did not immediately understand why I had noticed it. Then I did.

"The flight attendant handed me the coffee. I said thank you. I do not think I looked at her. She asked me if I was all right. I said yes. I was not all right. I had just understood that the woman I had written to for eight months in 1989 and 1990, and had then lost, was the mother of the woman I was flying to San Francisco to meet."

Nobody spoke.

The kitchen was very quiet.

Maya was looking at James across the table with the specific look of a person whose entire interior had just been asked to carry a new piece of information that did not fit into any of the existing rooms, and the room she used for these situations was going to have to be built out, by her, in the next several seconds, in order to accommodate what she was being told. She was building it out. The building took about three seconds.

"She stopped writing," Maya said.

"Yes."

"In March of 1990."

"March fifteenth, 1990. Her last letter was postmarked from Seattle. I wrote her a response and the response came back three weeks later marked no such address. I wrote a second letter, which also came back. I wrote a third, which did not come back but was never answered. I stopped writing. I did not try to find her, because I understood that the no-answer was a decision she had made, and that a woman who had made that decision was not a woman I was going to force a conversation with through whatever means I had, and I had means."

"You knew her last name," Maya said.

"At that time, yes."

"It's not the one she's using now."

"No."

A second went by. James looked at his hands and then back at Maya.

"I could have called people. I did not call people. I decided that if she wanted to find me again she knew where I was. She did not find me again. I spent the next several years thinking about her occasionally, and then the thinking became less frequent, and by the time I wrote the 2003 paper the thinking was something I did maybe twice a year, and by the time I put the appendix in the drawer in 2009 the thinking was something I did maybe once a year, and by the time you emailed me two weeks ago I had not thought about her in about fourteen months, and the last thought about her had been on the anniversary of the San Diego conference in 2017, on a Tuesday night in July, when I had been walking back to my apartment from the grocery store and had passed a woman on the sidewalk who had, for half a second, had the quality of posture Nora had had on the balcony, and I had not stopped walking, because the woman on the sidewalk was not Nora and was never going to be Nora, but I had thought about Nora for the rest of the walk home, and then I had made dinner and watched a baseball game and gone to bed."

He stopped.

"I am sorry," he said. "That is more than you needed to know. I am telling you because I want you to understand that the appendix in this folder was, although I did not know it while I was writing it, a document written by a man who had already met your mother and had been shaped by the meeting in ways he was not aware of. I wrote the 2003 paper for an imaginary reader who might, one day, see what I was seeing. I wrote Appendix B for a reader I could not have named, because the reader did not yet exist. You are the reader. You are the reader in every sense I can parse. You are her daughter, which I did not know when I was writing, and you are also the reader who was going to find the thing running in the world and come to me with it, which I also did not know. I am telling you this because I understood, on the flight, that I was being aimed. My whole career. I did not know it while it was happening. I am sixteen hours past the understanding and I am not. I do not know what I. I do not know what I feel. I know I want you to know that I know, because you should not be in a room with a man who has been carrying a thing like this for sixteen hours without knowing he is carrying it. That is not fair to you."

Maya was crying.

She was crying silently. The tears were on her face but she was not moving and she was not looking away from James and she was not asking him to stop. Declan, to her left, did not reach for her. He kept his own face still and kept the room around her the shape it had been in when the telling had begun.

James waited.

After a moment Maya wiped her face with the back of her hand and said, "I never knew about you."

"I assumed."

"She never told me. She never mentioned you."

"No. She would not have. She was not the kind of woman who told a child about a man she had chosen not to keep. I understood that about her when the third letter came back. I did not hold it against her. I am not holding it against her now."

"I'm going to call her."

"Yes."

"Tonight. After we finish."

"Yes."

"Not before."

"No. Before would be wrong. The work first. Then the call. That is the order I would have chosen if you had asked me, and you did not ask me, but I want you to know that you are making the right choice."

Maya nodded.

She placed the information about James in the room, in the part where she kept the things about her mother that had arrived without warning. That part already held the rhythm her mother had taught her in the kitchen before she could walk, and the years of drills her mother had never explained. James went in beside them. The new information fit.

"The appendix," Maya said.

James opened the folder.

Everett Marsh had written a letter to his son Gregory on the fourteenth of June in 1997, four weeks after the afternoon in the music room in Manassas. He had written the letter at the desk in his study in the house in Sussex, on a sheet of the heavy writing paper he had used since 1978 for the small number of letters in his life that had been written by hand on paper and had been, by specific design, not typed. He had written the letter in a single draft, in fountain pen, which was the instrument he used for letters he did not expect to revise, because he did not want to revise them, because the revising was the thing that would have given him the chance to soften what he was saying, and the softening was the thing he could not afford to do with this particular letter.

The letter had been two pages long.

The first page had said practical things. It had said that Everett was well, that Everett's health was steady, that the roses in the garden had come in early that year, that he had been reading a new biography of John Dee by a woman in Oxford and had found it intelligent. The first page had been the first page of many letters Everett had written to Gregory over the years, and Gregory, who was thirty-nine in 1997 and was living in London and practicing as a solicitor and was, in the way of English sons of English fathers, slightly more estranged from his own father than either of them would have said out loud, would have read the first page with the half-attention a son read a father's roses in.

The second page was the paragraph.

The paragraph had been two hundred and forty-four words long and had described, in the most careful prose Everett had ever written, what had happened to him in the music room in Manassas in May of 1997. He had not named the house. He had not named any of the other six people in the room. He had not named the organization whose members had arranged the meeting. He had described only what he had felt and what he had understood, and he had used the word door four times, and the word thing three times, and the word presence once, and he had, in the paragraph's final sentence, written: I have understood for about three weeks that what I experienced in that room is the operational edge of a project that has been under construction, in the specific form I saw, since before I was born, and that the project is going to cost us what it costs us, and that the cost is going to be paid, and that the question is who is going to be in the room when the door is opened wide, and I am writing to you because I have been deciding what to do about the question, and I have decided that I am going to spend the remainder of my life preparing a boy I love for the specific possibility that he will be in the room, and that he will make a choice I cannot make for him, because I will not be alive when the choice is made. You have a son. He is twelve. I am going to spend the rest of my life on him. I am writing to tell you this because I am not going to explain it to him in words, and I am not going to explain it to you in any detail beyond this letter, and if you ever wonder, in the years to come, why your father spent so much time with your boy, this letter is the answer, and I am asking you not to read the letter again, because re-reading it will make you carry what I am carrying, and I am carrying it so that you do not have to.

Gregory had read the paragraph once.

He had not read it again.

He had put the letter back in its envelope. He had taken the envelope to the attic of the house in Sussex, which had been his own childhood home and which he now visited two or three times a year, on the weekend after the Manassas letter arrived, because the letter had arrived at his London flat on a Tuesday and he had driven to Sussex on the following Saturday to put the letter somewhere Everett could not ask him about it, and he had put the letter in a biscuit tin that had been in the attic since approximately 1963, in a corner of the attic behind the trunks of his mother's old clothes, and he had closed the tin, and he had come down from the attic, and he had gone downstairs, and he had eaten lunch with his father at the kitchen table, and during lunch his father had said did you get my letter, Gregory, and Gregory had said yes, father, I got it, and Everett had said good, and neither of them had mentioned the letter again, and Gregory had driven back to London that evening and had not spoken of the letter to anyone for the remaining eleven years of his life.

Gregory had died of a heart condition in February of 2008, at his desk at the Inns of Court, at the age of fifty, and the heart condition had not been diagnosed before it killed him, and it had killed him in about eight seconds, and Declan had been twenty-three years old and in his final year at Oxford, and Declan had come down to London on the train on the afternoon he was told, and he had sat with his grandfather in the hospital family room for three hours not saying very much, and Everett, at sixty-nine, had been the one who had put an arm around Declan's shoulder and held him there for a long time, and had said, very quietly, at one point, I am so sorry, my dear boy, in a voice Declan had never heard his grandfather use before, and that had been the last time anyone had touched Declan physically in a way Declan had allowed himself to register as comfort for almost three years.

Everett had outlived his son by nearly four years. He had died in November of 2011 of an aortic dissection, in his own bed in the house in Sussex, alone, in his sleep, and the alone-in-his-sleep had been the way Everett had wanted to die, and the organization had, at the funeral, sent a single small wreath of white roses without a card, and the wreath had been the only wreath at the funeral that Declan had not been able to match to a sender, and Declan had, at twenty-six, looked at the wreath for a long time and had filed the non-matching away in the drawer in his head, and had not thought about the wreath again until a Tuesday morning in February of 2019 when he had sat at his desk at five-oh-four and had run a query in a grantmaking database, and the wreath had come back into his head in the three seconds after he had closed the database window, because the wreath had been, he now understood, the first and only direct communication from the organization to Everett's funeral, and the communication had been the small message we see the boy, and the seeing of the boy had begun in 1997 and had been continuous since then, and Declan had been aware of the seeing for most of his adult life without being able to locate the source of the awareness, and the source had been the wreath.

Back at the kitchen table in the Mission in February of 2019, James Okafor opened the folder and took out the forty-seven pages of Appendix B and set them on the table. Declan looked at the top page. Maya looked at the top page.

The top page was a title page. The title page read, in James's handwriting from 2003:

APPENDIX B — COGNITIVE HARMONICS: THE SECOND CONSTRUCT A theoretical account of cumulative displacement of cognitive attention at the population level, below the threshold of individual awareness, by Dr. James Okafor, August 2003.

Below the title, in smaller handwriting, there was a dedication.

The dedication read:

For N. V., wherever you are. I did not understand what I was writing until I wrote it. I am writing it now because some day someone is going to need it, and I will not know who that person is until she arrives. If she arrives. Thank you for the eight months of letters.

Maya looked at the dedication for a long time.

She did not say anything.

James, across the table, looked at his own hands. James looked at his hands for the next forty seconds. Declan, to Maya's left, was also looking at his own hands.

At the end of the forty seconds Maya looked up.

She looked at James across the table and said the thing that was adjacent to the phrase but was hers.

"The whole time," she said. "From the beginning. From before I was born."

"Yes," James said.

"My whole life."

"Yes."

"Since my mother taught me to listen to a rhythm in our kitchen when I was fifteen months old."

"Yes."

Maya was quiet for a moment.

"I am not angry about it," she said. "I am noting that I am not angry."

She stopped. The not-anger was information she had not had this morning. She was having it now.

"My mother aimed me. You aimed me. I ended up here." She stopped. "I would rather be a person who was aimed and can do something."

She looked at them both.

"Thank you," James said.

"Don't thank me. I am thanking you. Both of you. Now let's read the appendix."

James reached down into the satchel a second time. When he brought his hand back up he was holding a single folded sheet of paper. The paper was yellowed at the edges, hand-written in his small careful handwriting, folded twice, the fold creases soft from many years in his pocket. He slid the sheet across the table to Maya.

"This is a page I have been carrying for sixteen years," he said. "It is the summary I wrote for myself the week I finished Appendix B. I have not shown it to another human being. The page is not the appendix. The page is what I thought the appendix was for when I wrote it. I was wrong about what the appendix was for, but I was right about the questions the appendix was asking, and the questions are the thing I want you to start with, because the appendix itself is going to be hard to read in one sitting and the questions will give you a way to hold it while you read it. Read the page tonight. Read the appendix in the days after. Come back to me with what you do not understand. I am going to be here. I am going to be your teacher in this, if you will let me. I have been waiting a long time to be the teacher of a specific student and I did not know I was waiting until this afternoon."

Maya looked at the folded page.

She did not say anything. She took the page and placed it on the table beside the Appendix B title page.

She pulled the first page of Appendix B toward her and began to read.

[End of Chapter 10]