I suppose deep down, I feel like it’s my fault—that I deserve it and what happened to my daughter must have been because of something I did. That’s probably just me being stupid, but it’s how I feel. Thanks for asking though...
Subject: Re: Re:
Sent: Fri May 20, 2017 10:23 pm
From: Rob
Recipient: naws09
Well, of course it’s you being stupid. :) Of course of course of course it wasn’t your fault and you should never torture yourself like that. The problem is, though: I can say that, I can advise that, because objectively, as you and I both know, that’s sound advice. But knowing it’s a bullshit feeling still doesn’t stop me from feeling the same sometimes, especially in those dark times, when it’s so hard to see the light, to even imagine the light. So you’re wrong to feel like that, but I understand you feeling like that, if that makes sense. (And, I know I don’t know you, but I’m sure you were a wonderful mother.)
Subject: Re: Re:
Sent: Fri May 20, 2017 11:45 pm
From: naws09
Recipient: Rob
Thank you. You see, this is what I’m talking about. You’re good with the advice. You should definitely help out on Newly Diagnosed. Really. :)
I wanted to ask you, by the way, and please don’t take this the wrong way, but why did you go to Dr. Sladkovsky? There are so many parents on Newly Diagnosed going down these awful paths of alternative treatments (much worse than Dr. Sladkovsky) and I would like to help them, dissuade them, but I never really know what to say. Well, it’s late now. Good night.
I sit upstairs in my little office drinking coffee. I have been trying to work today, but I cannot stop thinking about Anna. I still have not heard from her. I did write to her again in more detail, apologizing and begging for her forgiveness. I do not expect a response. I know I deserve nothing from her.
I long for her, though, and I think a part of me was always longing for her. The Anna who, with such glee, made me go to the all-night Star Wars marathon at the Ritzy. The Anna who fell asleep in my lap on Brighton beach. And then the time we played squash. Those wonderful Bobby Charlton shorts. The look on her face when the animals closed in.
I could watch Anna for hours, the minuscule changes she could make to the expressions on her face. How she would very slightly stick out her lower lip when she was contemplating something, a cartoon version of The Thinker. Or how her eyes would dart to the ground after she said something she was not sure of—a moment of modesty, insecurity—and then she would look up again and continue, somehow fortified by the slight movement of her head.
I want to look at some photos of her, but I have deleted them all. They had been everywhere, once. Digital flotsam, dormant in the memories of half-forgotten devices. Badly framed photographs, videos taken too late. But then one night, not long after I had moved to Cornwall, after I had had too much to drink, I deleted them. I remember the phone’s question: Are you sure you want to delete?
I suddenly have frantic need to see those photos of Anna once again. I download some hard-drive recovery software that claims it can retrieve files that were deleted years ago, but it doesn’t work. My drive has been written and rewritten so many times, the digital imprint is long gone.
And then I remember. My backups. Old habits die hard, and I have always backed up, fastidiously once a week, connecting my computer to an external hard drive.
I open up the backup software and scroll through all the old versions of my computer on the laptop that Anna and I used to share. I choose one, from a few months after Jack died, and hear the fan start to kick in as the drive begins to restore.
I go downstairs to have some lunch and when I return, the restore is finished. I start looking through the directories, and then I find what I am looking for. Anna on the beach, her sun hat casting a shadow over her face; Anna in a Cambridge pub, poking out her tongue; Anna looking exhausted and flushed, a tiny newborn Jack held closely to her breast.
She was so beautiful, never entirely comfortable being photographed, always with a little smile as if she knew something you didn’t but wasn’t going to tell you.
As I am looking through the photos, I see some pictures of Josh that I must have downloaded and put on my desktop in the last few days in Hampstead. I flick through them: Josh wearing his Manchester Utd uniform; Josh at a birthday party; that video Nev had sent of him wearing his Robin mask; the picture of him sitting on a rock. Despite everything I now knew about Dr. Sladkovsky, it still didn’t make any sense. Nev and Josh were not bots. They were not the creation of a Czech intern working in Dr. Sladkovsky’s marketing department. They were real. I had spoken to them, seen pictures of them in flesh and blood.
I know I have to find them, to find out if Josh really died. In recent weeks, I have dug around, trying to track Nev down, and there is one more thing I have been meaning to try. I open up a penetration-testing program I have in Linux and test the URL of Nev’s blog.
wpscan—URL [nevbarnes.wordpress.com]
The program looks for weaknesses, backdoors, spewing out lines of code. Nev is using an old version of WordPress, unpatched and riddled with vulnerabilities. I search for his user profiles, but they are hidden and password protected.
I guess that “Nev” is his username and try to find the password by brute force.
wpscan—URL [nevbarnes.wordpress.com] wordlist [root/desktop/Nev]<27<1
More lines of code and then a ticker, a little hourglass, as the script tries to crack his password with thousands
