Page 101 of Life Out of Order

“Hey, Beck,” he says. “You just missed them.”

“Missed who?” Beck says. Her face is still, but her eyes are wide with apprehension.

“The locksmiths. They left about fifteen minutes ago.”

“What? Oh, shit. Did you see what company they were with?”

“No—it was a white truck. Um, is something wrong?”

We’re all running up the stairs. Beck gets to her door first and begins punching in codes, but nothing works. The locks have all been rekeyed. I call 911, and when the police arrive, the officers keep trying to get Beck to prove that she’s really the tenant. All her ID shows her living at our house, and she doesn’t have business cards. She shows them her keys to no avail. The graphic designer offers to unlock his studio to prove that he belongs here and therefore so does Beck. Finally she finds a recent grant application in her emails and the police concede that she’s not lying. Beck phones a real locksmith. The police phone in a description of the “locksmiths” to their dispatcher. Over the next hour we listen to halves of conversations about sightings of white trucks all over Chicago. The locksmith arrives and begins to drill out the locks. I look at Alba, who hasn’t said a word since we got here: She’s sitting on the floor, hands around her knees, eyes closed, listening to all of this with a frown. The locksmith finishes the last lock and swings the door open. No alarms sound.

Beck walks in slowly and we follow her. Racks of servers have been pulled into the middle of the room and dumped, helter-skelter. Isadora’s steampunk head rests on top of the pile, broken and melting. There’s a weird, sweet, acrid smell, like burnt plastic. The backs of the servers have been unscrewed, tangles of colored wires spew everywhere, and vapor rises from the heap of trashed metal and plastic. The smell hurts my nose, my eyes are smarting.

“Beck,” I say. “Did someone pour acid on those servers?”

We run to the windows and open them wide. The police evacuate the building. We stand in the street, watching people in protective clothing come and go, carrying Beck’s destroyed servers away.

Hours later, we go home. Our unconsumed drinks sit on the dining room table, ice long melted. Alba makes us new drinks, and we carry them to the basement just to be sure that Beck’s servers and equipment are still down there. They are. Beck starts running diagnostics, in case anyone has somehow gotten in and meddled with Isadora or the Museum. Alba and I go upstairs, make dinner, bring it down to Beck. We eat quietly as she works. “Everything’s fine here,” she says, eventually. “I think.” She looks exhausted. She turns to Alba. “Do you know what happens next?”

Alba shakes her head. “I wasn’t told,” she says, meekly. “But maybe Isadora knows?”

Beck types a few commands. The Museum appears on the large monitor. Today we’re standing in the American Museum of Natural History’s Hall of Ocean Life. The magnificent blue whale hovers above us, silhouetted against the evening-dimmed skylights, as though we’re looking up from the ocean floor. Everything is motionless and silent. “Isadora? Are you there?”

“Down here, Beck.” Beck swings the camera down and around, but we don’t see anything.

“Wait a minute, Isadora,” Beck says. She hands goggles and gloves to Alba and me and helps us adjust them. Then she puts on her own and shepherds us to the large empty area at one end of the basement. She’s moved the random junk Henry and I used to keep here to the attic and installed an omnidirectional platform. Beck positions us in the center and says, “Don’t wander too far.” Then, suddenly and convincingly, the three of us are standing under the whale in the middle of the gigantic hall.

“Hello,” Isadora says. We look down and there she is, a small black cat with a white star on her chest, sitting at Beck’s feet, gazing up at us calmly, her yellowish-green eyes spookily reflective. “Is something wrong?”

“Yes,” Beck says. “How did you know?”

“You’ve been running diagnostics for hours,” Isadora replies. “You could’ve just asked me to find the problem; you didn’t; therefore you were worried that I’ve been corrupted?”

“Have you?”

“No. But of course I would say that, wouldn’t I?”

I haven’t spoken with Isadora in months and am surprised at how much she’s progressed. Last time I heard her speak, she still sounded like a deranged child. Now she’s a precocious teenager, and her voice is less like Beck’s than it used to be, cooler, with more uptalk. Alba is direct as usual: “You sound different, Isadora.”

Isadora says, “I like my new voice. I sound smarter?”

“Yeah,” Alba agrees. “But nowhere near as smart as you really are.”

“We’ll work on that,” Beck says, soothingly. “Listen, Isadora, something awful happened today. Someone has destroyed our servers that were left at the studio. Do you know anything that might help me to find out who did this, and why?”

Isadora cocks her head, stares into space for a while and then performs an elaborate bathing routine. After she’s smoothed her whiskers for the fifth time, she says, “I’m not allowed to say right now.”

“Not allowed . . . ? Who told you that?”

Cats aren’t good at looking apologetic, but Isadora sounds as though she means it when she says, “I’m sorry, Beck.”

“Isadora?” Beck says softly. “Come and sit with us in the garden.” Abruptly, the scene changes to a small garden in late summer. There are tomatoes, marigolds, dahlias, an apple tree laden with fruit. Hidden insects buzz. A sparrow attracts Isadora’s attention. There’s a wide brick house shaded by maple trees at one end of the long garden. We’re at Beck’s childhood home, her parents’ old backyard, in Detroit. Beck brings two folding chairs and we sit down. Alba stands a little apart, watching Isadora, who jumps into Beck’s lap and stares up at her with those unsettling eyes.

“Who is it?” Beck asks. I dread the answer.

“I can’t say,” Isadora replies.

“Why didn’t you tell me this would happen?”