Hard Rain

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."
    "You don't have to worry," he said. "I'm not stupid, you know."
    "Everybody in love is stupid," I told him. "It's part of the
    condition."
    I saw him blush 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, although 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 ass that would have been."
    Harry, like anyone else who values privacy, takes extreme pains to
    ensure that there is 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 career in America was taking
    off. I knew because I was watching.
    He reached into a back pants pocket and pulled out a folded piece of
    paper. "Here," he said, handing it to me.
    I took it and paused for a moment before unfolding it, not caring what
    he would make of my hesitation. When I looked, I saw that it was
    written in confident, graceful longhand Japanese, an echo, perhaps, of
    girlhood calligraphy lessons, and a reflection of the personality
    behind the pen.
    Haruyoshi-san,
    It is still cold in New York, and I am counting the days to Spring. I
    imagine that soon enough, the cherry blossoms will be blooming in Tokyo
    and I am sure they will be beautiful.
    I trust that you, too, have heard