Page 17 of The Oligarch's Daughter

“No, a sort of lean-to. We used to visit Dad at this shack he lived in. Totally off the grid. He’d become a survivalist. No running water, no electricity, of course no telephone.”

“So was he really crazy?”

“Boy, that’s hard to say. It was like he was too brilliant to live in the world. He’d issue manifestos, just like—remember the Unabomber from a few decades ago, Ted Kaczynski? You’re too young. But like him. My dad is like the Unabomber without the bombs.”

She didn’t seem to remember the Unabomber.

“My father believed that privacy was disappearing. Thought technology was a more powerful force than our desire for freedom.”

“Huh.”

“Dad would say you can no longer remain anonymous unless you opt out of society altogether. You’re born, you get a Social Security number or an ID number, you carry around a tracking device called a cell phone, you leave an enormous digital footprint every day. Surveillance cameras record nearly our every movement, our faces in facial recognition software. We have little boxes in the home that are constantly listening to us. And there’s nothing to be done about it—the genie is out of the bottle. There’s no such thing as privacy anymore. All you can do is drop out. Opt out. So, that’s what he did. He dropped out.”

“He had a point, don’t you think?”

“Yeah. Maybe. But he wouldn’t listen to anyone else. And when my mom found a lump in her breast, she . . . Well, she died of cancer when I was a teenager.”

He looked up and was surprised to see that Tatyana had tears in her eyes.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

“So am I,” he said quietly. He found himself lost in thought for a moment, remembering his mother’s last days, in Bellingham, when her body was ravaged with cancer. He remembered her when his father left, after days of loud arguments. She sat on the landing of the staircase weeping inconsolably, though Paul tried to console her, putting his arms around her. He tried to think of happier images, remembered her making dinner, usually meatloaf or Shake ’N Bake chicken, with paint-spattered hands. His childhood was blotted out by his father’s rages and his mother’s meek attempts to mollify him.

They were both silent for a long time. “Would you mind,” she said, “if I took your picture?”

“Now?”

“If it’s okay.”

“Naked?”

“I like your body, but I don’t want to do Mapplethorpe.” She got out of bed and retrieved a camera from a side table, a serious-looking Canon digital with a big lens. “Can you turn to your side?”

“With or without the sheet?” Paul asked.

“The sheet over your lower half.”

He turned in the bed and pulled the sheet down to around his waist. “Like this?”

“Shh,” she said.

He heard the shutter click multiple times. She tugged at the sheet, pulled it down a little, but not all the way. The shutter clicked some more.

“There,” she said. “Thank you.”

“Is my butt going into your gallery show?” Paul asked.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she said.

10

Paul Brightman was sixteen years old when he lost his mother. He learned this news from his father, who was still living in a hut in the woods but temporarily staying at the house in Bellingham. Even though he mostly wasn’t there, his influence over Paul’s mother remained strong. When she discovered a lump, he convinced her not to go to the hospital. He hated industrialized medicine. When you’re a hammer, he said, everything’s a nail. He had his natural cures. Snakeroot and saw palmetto and aloe vera and ginkgo and garlic. Meanwhile, her tumor got bigger and bigger, until it was too late.

Paul had last seen his mother the night before she died, at home, before Stan Brightman reluctantly called for an ambulance. She’d looked terrible—her white hair sticking up wildly from her skull, her eyes dark and sunken, her thin mouth a rictus of pain. She didn’t look like Marjorie Brightman any longer. To Paul, she appeared already dead, even though he’d never seen a dead body before. That was what death looked like, he was sure.

At around nine in the evening, Paul had gone into her bedroom and found her mumbling, calling out faintly in pain, “Help me!” To his father, he said, “She needs to go to the hospital, now!”

“They’re just going to kill her,” Stan had said. He had a full beard and was unwashed and smelled bad.

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