Here She Lies

were out the door and in anothertaxi on our way to Twelfth Night, an Internet cafe on Twelfth Street and Seventh Avenue — the third one Bobby had called and the first one that was open all night.
    The street outside was so quiet, it was a surprise to find the cafe as full as it was. About twenty men and women sat alone at tables with their laptop screens glowing in the barely lit space. Some typed furiously, others pecked, and a few sat staring at their screens. Everyone here was alone, busily absorbed in their personal space, surrounded by crushed newspapers, open books and chunky white mugs dripping coffee, tea, cocoa down their sides. Except for the two young men behind the counter — one skinny and spike-haired, the other shaved bald with a massive beard gathered in a frontal ponytail — Bobby and I were the only two people who were in any way together.
    Most had brought their own laptops, but there were also five computers bolted down on a shelf against one wall. Three of these were available. We went to the counter to rent one.
    “How much time?” Spike-head smiled and all the implied toughness of his hairdo melted away; he was just a kid, probably barely legal. His tight-fitting T-shirt read JOEY where a breast pocket might have been.
    Bobby opened his wallet and produced a twenty-dollar bill. “I’m not sure. Can we just pay by the half hour?”
    “We don’t do cash after midnight. Credit cards only.” The man-boy pointed to the brick wall behind him, where a handwritten sign repeated his words verbatim.“We got robbed like three times after midnight this year alone.”
    Bobby and I looked at each other. Between us we had no plastic: zero credit cards, zero debit cards, not even a check (though they probably didn’t do checks either, especially from out of state). Then I remembered that I still had Julie’s credit card and driver’s license. I pulled them out of my purse’s interior pocket and handed them over. “Here you go, Joey. And will you put two coffees on that, please?”
    “Name’s not Joey.” He looked at me like I was insane to have thought so.
    Bobby forced back a smile and I saw us fifteen years later, agreeing with whatever illogic our teenage daughter insisted on. Then I saw other children pop up around us. We had to get through this so we could reach that time.
    Not-Joey swiped the credit card through the machine and while we waited he compared Julie’s driver’s license photo to my face. When I signed the chit he checked the signatures against each other. Then he handed back the cards along with my receipt.
    “Thanks.” I zipped the cards back into my purse.
    He checked a notebook, then wrote something on a slip of paper, which he handed to Bobby. “You’re on Number Five. This is your password. The computer will time you, but when you’re done you gotta log out or you’ll keep on paying. I’ve seen it happen.”
    “That would be bad,” Bobby politely agreed, sliding me a cynical glance. The kid had no idea.
    “You gonna print?”
    “Don’t know.”
    “Printing costs extra. It’s by the page.” He pointed behind him to another sign reading PRINTING CHARGED BY THE PAGE. “If you print, we’ll add it on after.”
    “Thanks,” Bobby said.
    We carried our coffees to the far end of the counter closest to the window overlooking a semidark middle-of-the-night Greenwich Village street. All around us our sleepless noncompanions clicked away and ignored each other. I logged us on and our flat screen sprang to life. Bobby and I were alone in that cafe, in our own little bubble, as we set about searching for answers.
    “Here we go,” he whispered.
    “I love you, Bobby, for all of this.”
    He smiled tentatively, as if he wasn’t sure I’d really said that, then pulled a paperback copy of Identity Theft in a New World out of his jacket pocket and thumbed to a glossary in the back. After a moment of looking he typed the address for Equifax into the browser’s window. The Equifax home page appeared. One of their products was a “3-in-1” combination of reports from all three of the major credit-rating agencies: Equifax, Trans-Union and Experian.
    “That’s what we want.” Bobby clicked on it and a new menu appeared.
    He was a little slow navigating the cursor through all the steps, so I took over. We used Julie’s credit card to order a report that promised to show activity on all of Bobby’s and my accounts as recently as yesterday. In less than a