Free Googleplex by James Renner Page A

fall,
when they came alive in brilliant reds and burnt oranges. There was
an owl that lived somewhere back there. Late at night it screamed
at the house and it sounded like a girl crying.
    Occasionally something knocked loudly from behind the
wall in Alan and Trish’s bedroom, from the place where the wall
abutted the bathroom. Somewhere behind that wall was an old pipe
that called out for attention.
     
    There was nothing wrong with the house but there was
definitely something wrong with the neighbors.
    A pair of doctors, Brooke and Erin Seiberling, lived
in the colonial to one side, a great white thing with red awnings
that had belonged to a former mayor. Brooke and Erin worked odd
hours at Akron General and drove matching Mini Coopers. Two months
after moving into the neighborhood, Trish had baked an ironic bunt
cake and they had walked it over to the Seiberlings’ one day when
both the Minis were in the driveway. Brooke and Erin had invited
them in, sure. They had cut up the cakes and served it with coffee.
But neither Brooke nor Erin would make eye contact with them and
they sat on the edge of the sofa as if ready to jump up and run out
of the room. When Alan thought to ask after Gregory Heslop and
whether he’d had any family, Erin had chocked on a piece of cake.
Then Brooke had remembered a supper they were supposed to have with
his folks that evening and so they’d said goodbye and walked home.
A half-hour later both Mini Coopers pulled out of the driveway next
door and did not return for four days.
    On the other side were the Kormuschoffs. Barb and
Tony. When Alan and Trish had walked over one evening with a bottle
of wine and knocked loudly on the front door, no one answered. even
though they could clearly hear a television somewhere inside, the
sound drifting through the mail slot in the brick wall. Tony
stopped mowing his own lawn after that. He hired a kid from a
landscaping company to come out to the house once a week to take
care of the strip of lawn out front. Trish was convinced he’d hired
the kid just so he wouldn’t be caught outside one day and be forced
into a conversation with them.
    “That’s crazy,” Alan said. “Crazy paranoid.”
    On Halloween they put out a huge bowl of candy bars.
Not those mini Snickers, but full-sized Musketeers and Baby Ruths.
It was a silly way to ingratiate themselves with the neighborhood.
But most parents wouldn’t let their kids stop. They waved awkwardly
from the street or simply ignored Alan and Trish as they escorted
their little vampires and cheerleaders from the Seiberlings’ to the
Kormuschoffs’.
    Trish and Alan still had friends from Kent where
they’d lived near the university for a number of years, and so, in
order to feel less lonely in their home, they began to host
frequent dinners and game nights with their old chums. It was
during one of these social dinners, over a game of Scrabble, that
somebody suggested they look up the house on Google Earth.
     
    “Fucking Google,” hissed Sara DeLaine, a
nervously-thin woman who’d roomed with Trish freshman year. Her
interjection was in response to Trish’s big score, won by snaking
“Googolplex” off the top of “Grist.” “They monitor everything now.
Medical records. Criminal history. Your email. Our house is on
Google Earth for anyone to see. It’s Big Brother.”
    “Yeah, but it’s not the government,” said Alan.
    “It’s a CIA front, dummy.”
    “I don’t know why they’d care about me, though. I
guess I’m just not worried.”
    Sara rolled her eyes. She was sitting on the sofa,
her legs tucked up under her like a goddamn cat, nursing one of the
six red stripes she and her common-law husband had brought with
them. “No one ever cares about their civil liberties being taken
away until it affects them directly.”
    Trish leaned forward in her chair, drawing attention
away from the loose argument. “So what happened?” she asked. “When
you looked up your house?”
    “Right,”