A Lonely Resurrection

more like a civilian, he would be less useful, and possibly even dangerous, to me. His increasing transparency to the wider world might offer an enemy a window into my otherwise hidden existence. Of course, if someone connected Harry to me, they might come after him, too. And despite what I’d tried to teach him over the years, I knew that, out in the open, Harry wouldn’t have the means to protect himself.
    “Is she your first girlfriend?” I asked, my tone gentle.
    “I told you, she’s not really my girlfriend,” he said, ducking the question.
    “If she’s occupying enough of your attention to keep you in bed until the sun sets, I feel safe using the word as shorthand.”
    He looked at me, cornered.
    “Is she?” I asked again.
    He looked away. “I guess so.”
    I hadn’t meant to embarrass him. “Harry, I only ask because, when you’re young, you sometimes think you can have it both ways. If you’re just having fun, you don’t need to tell her anything. You shouldn’t tell her anything. But if the attachment gets deeper, you’ll need to do some hard thinking. About how close you want to get with her, about how important your hobbies are. Because you can’t live with one foot in daylight and the other in shadows. Believe me on this. It can’t be done. Not long-term.”
    “I’m not stupid, you know.”
    “Everybody in love is stupid. It’s part of the condition.”
    He blushed again, at my use of the word and the assumption behind it. But I didn’t care how he referred to these new feelings in his own mind. I know what it’s like to live walled off, isolated, and then suddenly, unbelievably, to have that pretty girl you’d longed for returning the feeling. It changes your priorities. Hell, it changes your damn values.
    I smiled bitterly, thinking of Midori.
    Then, as if reading my mind, he said, “There’s something I’ve been meaning to tell you. But I wanted to do it in person.”
    “Sounds serious.”
    “A few months ago I got a letter. From Midori.”
    I finished off the Lagavulin before answering. If the letter had arrived that long ago, a few moments more for me to figure out how I wanted to respond weren’t going to make a difference.
    “She knew where to reach you. . .” I started, though I had already figured it out.
    He shrugged. “She knew because we brought her over to my apartment to handle the musical aspects of that lattice encryption.”
    I noticed that, even now, Harry felt compelled to carve out Midori’s precise role in that operation to clarify that he had been fully capable of handling the encryption itself. He was sensitive about these things. “Right,” I said.
    “She didn’t know my last name. The envelope was only addressed to Haruyoshi. Thank God, otherwise I would have had to move, and what a pain in the neck that would have been.”
    Harry, like anyone else who values privacy, takes extreme pains to ensure there’s no connection anywhere—not on utility bills, not on cable TV subscriptions, not even on lease documents—between his name and the place where he lives. This kind of disassociation requires some labor, involving the establishment of revocable trusts, LLCs, and other blind legal entities, and it can all be blown in a heartbeat if your Aunt Keiko visits you at your home, notes your address, and decides to send you, say, flowers to thank you. The flower shop puts your name and address into its database, which it then sells to marketing outfits, which in turn sell the information to everyone else, and your true residence is now available to anyone with even rudimentary hacking or social engineering skills. The only way to regain your privacy is to move again and repeat the exercise.
    If what was sent to you was just an ordinary letter, of course, the only person who might make the connection is the postman. It’s up to the individual to decide whether that would be an acceptable risk. For me, it wouldn’t be. Probably not for Harry, either. But if only his first name had appeared on the envelope, he would be all right.
    “Where was the letter from?” I asked him.
    “New York. She’s living there, I guess.”
    New York. Where Tatsu had sent her, after telling her I was dead, to protect her from suspicion that she might still have the computer disk her father had stolen from Yamaoto, a disk containing enough evidence of Japan’s vast network of corruption to bring down the government. The move made sense for her, I supposed. Her