Chapter 20: What the Product Does to People

The report came in a landscaping invoice.

That was Dario's system — mundane paperwork, ordinary numbers, the kind of thing that accumulated in a file drawer without anyone looking at it twice. Marcus had recognized the elegance immediately. The invoice was for seasonal maintenance at a commercial property on Rio Bravo Boulevard: forty hours of labor, materials, equipment rental. The real information was in the line items, encoded in quantities and unit costs according to a key they had established in the botanical garden parking lot six weeks ago, Dario writing it on the back of a seed catalog page that Marcus later burned over the kitchen sink.

Marcus received the invoice on a Thursday afternoon, tucked into a manila envelope that had been slid under the windshield wiper of his truck in the school parking lot sometime between his second and third period class. He did not open it in the parking lot. He put it in his briefcase, taught the remaining three periods, attended a brief and pointless faculty meeting about standardized testing rubrics, drove his four-minute-longer route home, and made coffee before he sat down at the kitchen table and opened it.