Purity (10 page)

She picked up her device and assembled all the emails that Annagret had sent her in the past four months. The earliest was headed
please forgive me
. As she read the message, savoring its pleading tone and its compliments to her intelligence and character, Pip found herself obeying the subject header and forgiving Annagret, with an alacrity that was perhaps itself a bit crazy. And yet maybe not so crazy, because Annagret not only liked her but had been
right
—right about Stephen, about men, about everything. And had not given up on her; had sent her twenty emails, the most recent just a week ago. Nobody else in her life would have been that persistent.

She opened a message headed
wonderful news
, from two months ago.

Dearest Pip, I know you must be still angry with me and maybe not even reading my emails, but I must tell you some very good news: You are APPROVED for an internship with the Sunlight Project! I hope you will take advantage of this superfun and awarding opportunity. I'm still thinking all the time of what you said about the private information you wanted—well this is your chance for that. TSP will pay your room and meals in the most interesting part of the world, in addition a small monthly stipendium, and often it can lend assistance with money for your air travel. You can read the attached letter and factsheet for more details. I only want you to know that I gave you the HIGHEST recommendation with every sincerity. And it looks like Andreas and the others still trust my determinations!;) I'm very excited for you and hope you will consider. I'm only sorry, if you go, I won't be there with you. But maybe, if you're still angry with me, this will make you more interested to go?;) With hugs, Annagret

PS: here is Andreas's email:
[email protected]
You can write to him personally with questions.

Reading this, Pip felt obscurely disappointed. It was like a questionnaire with no wrong answers: if an internship was this easy to get, how much could it be worth? And no sooner had she started to change her mind about Annagret than Annagret tried to fob her off on yet another man, albeit a rather famous and cher
iss
metic man. Peevishly, and without stopping to think, she put a fingertip on Wolf's email address and fired off a message to him:

Dear Andreas Wolf, what's your deal? A person named Annagret who I hardly know tells me I can be a paid intern with your project. Is this like a sex opportunity for you, or what? Do you guys have a keg of Kool-Aid? The whole thing frankly sounds deeply creepy to me. I don't care very much about the work you're doing down there, in the jungle or whatever, but Annagret doesn't seem to think it even matters if I do. Which really makes me wonder. Yours, Pip Tyler, Oakland, California, USA

As soon as she hit the Send button, she had a spasm of remorse; her interval between action and remorse was diminishing so rapidly that soon she might be all remorse, unable to act at all; which might not be such a bad thing.

By way of penance, she opened a search engine and did some belated research on Wolf and his project. Given the multitude of haters on the Internet, it was impressive how few hostile comments about Wolf she was able to find if she disregarded the carpings of die-hard Julian Assange defenders and the statements of governments and corporations with an obvious self-interest in calling Wolf a criminal. Otherwise, in terms of universal admiration, he was right up there with Aung San Suu Kyi and Bruce Springsteen; a search of his name plus the word
purity
yielded a quarter million matches.

Wolf's motto, and his project's battle cry, was
Sunlight is the best disinfectant
. Born in East Germany in 1960, he'd distinguished himself in the 1980s as a daring and sensational critic of the Communist regime. After the Berlin Wall came down, he'd led the crusade to preserve the enormous East German secret-police archives and open them to the public; here again he was hated only by former police informants whose post-reunification reputations had been tarnished by the exposure of their pasts to sunlight. Wolf had founded the Sunlight Project in 2000, focusing first on assorted German malfeasances but soon broadening his scope to social injustice and toxic secrets worldwide. Several hundred thousand Web images showed him to be a very good-looking man, but he'd apparently never married or had children. He'd fled prosecution in Germany in 2006 and Europe generally in 2010, receiving asylum first in Belize and more recently in Bolivia, whose populist president, Evo Morales, was a fan. The only thing Wolf kept secret was the identity of his major financial backers (thereby prompting a terabyte or two of heated online chatter about his “inconsistency”), and the only even vaguely unseemly thing about him was the intensity of his rivalry with Assange. Wolf had tauntingly denigrated Assange's methods and personal life, while Assange had contented himself with pretending that Wolf did not exist. Wolf liked to contrast WikiLeaks—in his words, “a neutral and unfiltered platform”—with the work of his more “purpose-driven” Sunlight Project, and to make a moral distinction between his
benign and openly admitted motive
in protecting his backers' privacy and the
malignant concealed motives
of the parties whose secrets he exposed.

Pip was struck by how many of the exposures had to do with the oppression of women: not just big issues like rape as a war crime and wage inequalities as a deliberate policy but stuff as small as the luridly sexist emails of a bank manager in Tennessee. Rare was the interview or press release in which Wolf's militant feminism went unmentioned. She understood better how Annagret could prefer the company of women and still admire Wolf.

The high seriousness and sheer volume of the online information about Wolf deepened her remorse about the email she'd sent him. He: authentic risk-taking hero and friend of presidents. She: snarky little twerp. Not until she was about to leave for work could she bring herself to check for new messages. And here they were already, Stephen and Wolf, one after the other.

Apology accepted, incident on its way to being forgotten. There's no reason for you to move out. You're a great housemate, and we'll have Ramon three evenings a week—Marie and I worked it out yesterday. S.

A drawback of email was that you could only delete it once: couldn't crumple it up, fling it to the floor, stomp on it, rip it to shreds, and burn it. Was there anything crueler, from the person who'd rejected you, than compassionate forbearance? Her anger momentarily chased away her remorse and shame. She
wanted
the “incident” to be remembered! She wanted his complete attention! She fired back:

With all this forgetting, I guess you forgot my question too: when will you not be home?

Despite having got up four hours early, she was now on the verge of being late to work, but while her blood was up and her remorse was at bay she went ahead and read Wolf's message.

Dear Pip Tyler,

Your email is LOL—I could use many more like it. And of course you have questions, we would be disappointed if you didn't. But, no, I am not a white-slaver, and our beverage of choice here is bottled beer. Also, we have more outstanding hackers and lawyers and theorists than I know what to do with. What we
frankly
(your funny word) never have enough of is laypeople of high intelligence and independent character who can help us to see the world as it is, and help the world to see us as we are. I have known and trusted Annagret for many years and never heard her more enthusiastic about an applicant. We would be delighted if you come and visit our operation. If you don't like us, you can enjoy our beautiful surroundings as a vacation and then go home. But I think you'll like us. Our dirty little secret is that we're having lots of fun down here.

Send me more questions, the more LOL the better.

Yours,

Andreas

After everything she'd been reading about Wolf, she couldn't believe she'd gotten such a long email from him, and so quickly. She reread it twice before getting on her bike and heading downhill, propelled by gravity and by the thrill of imagining that she really was an extraordinary person, and that this was the true reason her life was such a mess, and that Annagret had been the first to recognize it, and that even if Wolf turned out to be the world's cleverest debaucher and Annagret his sexually traumatized procuress, and even if she, Pip, fell victim to Wolf herself, she would still be getting her revenge on Stephen; because, whatever else Wolf was, he wasn't
weak
.

She still had five minutes to kill when she reached the office. She stopped in the bike room and typed out the reply she'd been composing in her head.

Dear Mr. Wolf, Thank you for the nice note and suspiciously speedy response. If I were trying to lure an innocent young person to Bolivia for purposes of sex slavery and/or cultish subservience, I would have written the exact same note. In fact … come to think of it … how do I know the note wasn't written by a cultishly subservient sex-slave assistant of yours? Somebody of high intelligence and formerly independent character? We have a verification problem here! Yours, Pip T.

Hoping this would make him LOL again, she went upstairs to her cubicle. Beside her computer was a sticky note from one of her outreach colleagues (
Found this—
☺
Janet
) and a printout of a recipe: “White Whole Wheat Cake with Vegan Cream Cheese Frosting and Olallie-berries.” She dropped into her chair with a heavy sigh. As if she didn't have enough to feel bad about already, she had to regret thinking ill of her colleagues.

On the plus side, she seemed to have begun a flirtatious correspondence with somebody world-famous. She'd always considered herself immune to celebrity—had even, to some extent, resented it, for reasons hazily akin to her resentment of people with siblings. Her feeling was:
what makes you so much worthier of attention than me?
When a college friend of hers had landed a Hollywood job and started bragging about the famous actors he was meeting, she'd quietly severed communications with him. But now she saw that what mattered about celebrity was that other people were
not
immune to it: that they might be impressed with her connection to it, and that this might give her somewhat more than the zero power she currently felt she had. In a pleasantly seduced frame of mind, she waded back into her Rancho Ancho call sheet and deliberately refrained from checking her device, so as to prolong the anticipation.

At her dinner break she found Wolf's reply.

I am seeing why Annagret likes you. My note would have reached you even faster if it hadn't had to travel through four times the usual number of servers. Nowadays there is really only one habit of highly effective people: Don't fall behind with email. Unfortunately, for security reasons, I can't offer to video chat with you. More important, our Project needs risktakers with good judgement. You will have to judge for yourself the risk of trusting my emails. You may of course use every available internet tool to help you judge, and I can assure you, if you jump, we are here to catch you with open arms. But it is finally yours to decide whether to believe me. A.

She noted with pleasure that he'd already dispensed with a salutation, and she did the same intimate thing in her reply.

But trust goes both ways, right? Shouldn't you also have to trust
me
? Maybe we should each tell the other some little thing we're ashamed of. I'll even go first. My real name is Purity. I'm so ashamed of it I always hold on tight to my wallet when I take it out with friends, because sometimes people grab wallets to make fun of people's driver's license pictures, and my name is on the license.

How about that, Mr. Purity? Now it's your turn.

Too giddy with temerity to eat, she marched down the hall to Igor's office. He was packing his briefcase, his day already done. He frowned when he saw her.

“Yeah, I know,” she said. “I haven't washed my hair in three days.”

“Your stomach's better? You're not contagious?”

She plopped herself down in a guest chair. “So listen. Igor. Your twenty questions.”

“Let's forget that,” he said quickly.

“The thing you wanted from me, that I was supposed to guess. What was it?”

“Pip, I'm sorry. I'm taking my sons to the A's game. This is not a good time.”

“I was just kidding about the lawsuit.”

“Are you really feeling all right? You don't seem like yourself.”

“Are you going to answer the question?”

Igor's look of fear was reminiscent of Stephen's two nights earlier. “If you need more time off, you can take it. Take the rest of the week if you want.”

“Actually, I'm thinking of taking the rest of my life off.”

“It was a stupid joke, the twenty questions. I apologize. But my sons are waiting for me.”

Sons: even worse than siblings!

“Your sons can wait five minutes,” she said.

“We'll talk first thing in the morning.”

“You said you liked me, although you don't know why. You said you wanted to see me succeed.”

“Both things completely true.”

“But you can't take five minutes to tell me why I shouldn't quit?”

“I can take the whole morning, tomorrow. But right now—”

“Right now you don't have time to flirt.”

Igor sighed, looked at his watch, and sat down in the other guest chair. “Don't quit tonight,” he said.

“I think I'm going to quit tonight.”

“Is it the flirting? I don't have to do that. I thought you enjoyed it.”

Pip frowned. “So there wasn't actually anything you wanted from me.”