Locked Out

At two in the morning I was sitting in my armchair with a cup of cold Earl Grey, watching the rain run down the window, when my laptop made a sound.

It was a small sound. It was the soft double chime of a new message. I had grown used to ignoring it. In the three days since the memo, my inbox had filled with the debris of a ruined career: a note from the university, regretfully postponing a lecture; a bank manager in Wilmington who wished to know if my services were still available; a stranger who had read about me online and wished me to know that I was an agent of the state. I had stopped looking. I sat with my feet on the radiator and my coat over my knees and a cup in my hand, and I let the machine chime.

It chimed again.

I looked at the clock. It was two-oh-four.

I set the cup on the floor. I got up, stiffly, and crossed the room, and sat down at the desk. The screen threw a pale blue square onto the wall. There were two new messages. The first was an advertisement for a pharmaceutical company. The second had no sender, and no subject. It had a line of text, and underneath it a web address, a long bewildering string of letters and numbers that ended in a country code I did not recognize.

The line of text said:

You have been missed.

I should not have clicked it.

I knew that. I knew it in the part of me that had stood in a belfry and heard a door slam. But I had been sitting in the dark for three days, with nothing in my hands, and the habit of a lifetime is stronger than the wisdom of a night. I put the cursor on the address.

I clicked.

…

The page was white.

It had no banner, no logo, no menu. It was a plain rectangular window in the middle of a blank field, and in the window was a picture, and on the right-hand side a narrow column of text scrolled slowly upward. In the corner of the screen was a small number. I read it, and it did not mean anything to me. 101,482.

The picture was a room.

I knew it at once. I had seen it before, in a dream, in a nightmare, in a place at the back of my mind where I keep the things I cannot say. It was a large, dark, low-ceilinged cellar, with walls of bare brick, lit from beneath by a cold greenish glow. And in the middle of the cellar, taking up nearly the whole of the frame, was a box of glass.

It was enormous. It stood on a steel base. It was eight feet on a side and as high as a tall man could reach, made of thick clear panes sealed at the edges with a gray rubber gasket. At its top I could see a grille and a dull steel pipe running to the ceiling. At its foot, a drain.

In the left corner of the screen, in white digits on black, a small gauge showed a number. 20.1.

On the steel floor of the box, face down, lay a man.

…

He did not move for some time.

I sat with my hands on the desk, and watched him not move, and listened to the hum of the machine. The chat scrolled by on the right. I did not read it. The numbers in the corner rose. 103,016. 104,330.

Then his fingers twitched.

He drew his arms up, slowly, and lifted his head. His face was white, and wet, and smeared with something dark. His hair was matted. His fine silk shirt was torn at the collar and hung open to the waist. He raised himself on his elbows and looked around the box with the dazed, puzzled, uncomprehending stare of a man who has woken in a stranger's bed. He saw the walls. He saw the glass. He saw that it was glass on every side, and he turned his head, very slowly, from left to right, and I watched the knowledge arrive.

It was Dominic Hargrove.

He scrambled to his feet.

He ran at the wall. He beat on it with both fists, and then with his open hands, and then with the flat of his forearm. I could see the muscles stand out in his neck, and his mouth open and close, open and close, round and black and shouting. There was no sound. The stream had no sound from the box. He might have been a fish in a tank. He might have been the picture of a man in a film with the volume turned down, and I sat and watched him scream and thought: he is screaming a name.

I knew whose.

I looked at the gauge. 19.4.

…

I rang Leo.

I did it with a hand that seemed to belong to somebody else. The number was in my phone, and it rang once, twice, three times, and went to a recorded voice. You've reached Leo Maddox. Leave a message. I rang again. I rang a third time. I said into the machine, in a voice I did not recognize, "Leo, it's Atticus. It's two in the morning. He has Hargrove. Please pick up."

I rang Vera.

There was no ring. There was a flat gray silence, and then a woman's voice, brisk and recorded: The person you are calling is not available. She had turned it off.

I rang Ryder. The call went to voicemail.

I rang the number of the Major Crimes duty desk, and a young officer answered with a yawn, and I said that I was Dr. Atticus Vaughn, and I needed to speak to the duty commander on a matter of life and death, and there was a silence on the line. Then the young man said, in a quiet, careful voice, that he was sorry, but Dr. Vaughn was no longer authorized to contact the department.

"Please," I said. "A man is going to die."

"I'm sorry, sir."

"Just give me the—"

The line went dead.

I put the phone down. My hand shook so hard that it rattled on the desk. I sat for a moment with my head in my hands, and I thought: I am a civilian. I have no badge. I have no number. I have no one to call. And behind me, on the screen, the gauge ticked down.

17.2.

…

There was a box under the video.

I had not noticed it. It was a small gray rectangle, with a cursor blinking in it, and the words Say something. I put my hands on the keys. They were wet. I typed, and my fingers made mistakes, and I corrected them. Stop.

I sent it.

It appeared in the column, among a thousand other lines. I watched it scroll upward, small and plain and ignored.

Stop, I wrote again. I'm here.

The reply came in forty seconds.

It was not from a user. It was in a different color, a pale ghostly white, and it appeared at the foot of the column without a name. I saw it arrive, one letter at a time, as if someone were typing it in a room. It said:

Where were you, Doctor?

I stared at it.

I'm here, I wrote. Please. Let him out. He is a person. You are not this.

Where were you?

The cursor blinked.

I called, I wrote. I was shut out. I had no way of—

I stopped. I deleted it. I wrote, instead: Tell me where you are. I will come. I will come alone.

A pause. A long one. Somewhere in the cellar a man was beating his hands on glass, and a number was dropping, and I sat with my fingers poised over the keys and my breath caught in my chest.

Ask your Commissioner, said the white text, why the clock is running.

…

I do not know how long I watched.

I know that at some point the gauge read 14.0, and that Dominic Hargrove had stopped beating on the glass. He stood in the middle of the box with his arms hanging, looking down at his own hands. His chest heaved. His mouth gaped. He turned his head toward the camera, and for the first time I saw his face full on.

I had seen it in a photograph. I had seen it in a leather chair. I had seen it smile.

It did not smile now. It was gray, and stiff, and quite empty. It was the face of a child. He looked at the lens, and his lips moved, and I could read them.

Please.

He said it again.

Please.

I put my hand on the screen.

I do not know why. It is a ridiculous thing to do. The glass was cool and smooth under my palm, and I felt, through it, the faint dry warmth of the machine. I pressed my fingers against the picture of a man's face, and held them there, as one holds a hand at a bedside.

The gauge read 11.2.

He sank to his knees. He put both hands to his throat. His mouth opened, wide, and then wider, a dreadful gape, as a fish gapes on the bank. His shoulders heaved. I saw the ribs working under the torn silk. I could not look. I could not look away. A small tremor passed through his body, and then another, and the muscles of his arms began to jerk, in a slow terrible rhythm, like a puppet on a string.

10.1.

In the column on the right, the comments had begun to fly.

I read them. I could not help it. They came faster than the eye could follow, a roaring torrent of white on black, thousands of voices on thousands of lines. LET HIM. FINALLY. this is what justice looks like. WHITE NIGHT. how many did he screw over. good. good. good. A hundred thousand people, and not one of them had rung the police.

I counted. It is what I do.

101,482. 104,330. 112,908. 118,511.

Not one.

…

At eight percent he lay down.

He did it quite gently. He curled onto his side on the steel floor, with his knees drawn up and his hand under his cheek, like a child in a bed. His eyes were open. They looked at the glass, and at the green light beyond it, and at nothing. I thought he was looking at me.

The gauge ticked.

5.3. 3.8. 2.1.

I did not speak. I do not think I could have. I knelt in front of that small bright window with both hands pressed to the desk, in a room that smelled of cold tea and rain, and I watched a man die. I could not have done more if I had been in the cellar. I could have done no less. He was thirty-three years old. He had a mother. He had a house on a hill and a smile that had been loved by a city. And fifteen years ago, on a Friday in October, he had picked up a lantern and said, in a high flat voice, it's not our fault.

The number went to zero.

It sat there for a moment in the corner of the screen, small and white and perfectly clear.

0.0.

Then the picture went black.

…

I do not know how long I sat there.

The chat was still running. The screen had gone dark, but the column on the right continued, a narrow strip of white text on black, scrolling endlessly upward in the dark. The viewers had not gone. They were typing. They were cheering, and weeping, and quarrelling, and sending one another little pictures of white masks and hearts.

At the foot of the column a new line appeared. It was in the pale ghostly color. It appeared letter by letter, slowly, as a man writes who is in no hurry.

The jury has spoken.

I looked at it for a long time.

Then I shut the lid of the laptop, and the room went dark, and the rain went on falling on the glass.