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sniffing. Maggie was talking to him—he could see from inside, see her lips moving—probably trying to coax him into lifting his leg. But Gerome was ignoring her. If he didn’t want to pee, he wasn’t going to. No amount of baby talk was going to change that.
    Who was that woman out there? And what was the possibility that he’d actually spend his life with her? His whole life? Think about it: what were the actual odds? There were statistics on these sorts of things. If he wanted, he could probably walk down the hall to Sociology and get the exact and most-up-to-date numbers on his chances of staying married. Mark’s guess? The odds were against them. The odds probably said that they had another four, maybe five years together. Which was about how many years Gerome had left. But then, if that were the case, if that’s how he really felt, then why’d he marry her at all? And hadn’t they survived the first seven—okay, maybe not this most recent one, but the six before that and the three before marriage—hadn’t they survived those years in style, with class? She hadn’t cheated. Neither had he. He’d never even thought about it.
    Okay, sure, fine, yes. There was Elizabeth, his former research assistant. But they hadn’t touched. Not once! Plus, she’d dropped out of the program last spring. Academia, she told him, wasn’t for her. And over the summer she’d moved to California, so it’s not as though they could have messed around even if they wanted to. But, fine—all things on the table?—there had been some e-mails, and those didn’t look good for anyone.
    In the past, he’d made a point of checking his work correspondence only once a week. He even had a little caveat about it on his syllabus:
Contrary to popular belief, professors do not, in fact, sit at their computers all day long waiting for the next student missive. If you e-mail me, it should be important. If you e-mail me, you should expect to wait at least one week before hearing back.
Every Friday he went to campus specifically to check e-mail and catch up on student communication. It usually took four or five hours to sort through and respond, but he preferred losing one large block of time once a week to losing minnow-bite moments here and there every day. Imagine how quickly a day—a life!—could be subsumed by those moments if you let it. The thought made him itch.
    But then, last fall, he’d gotten that first e-mail from Elizabeth: “If I called you devilishly handsome, would you mind? And if I told you that I think about you, what then?”
    It was Elizabeth who’d first brought his attention to the group of online activists who called themselves Anonymous. She’d suggested it as the final chapter for his book, not that he was anywhere close to being finished. But the chapters were outlined, and Elizabeth, he suspected rightly, had said his history would be incomplete if it failed to address the
future
of anonymity. He’d been too myopic in his research, focusing almost entirely on pretenses that led to death—stonings, masked hangmen, firing squads, kill buttons on death row. He’d been looking down and back instead of up and out. It meant so much more research. It meant creating a new timeline and giving into a delayed deadline. It meant delving into a world of materials that existed entirely online. The irony didn’t elude him; his colleagues would chide him—“The luddite takes on the Internet,” they’d say when they caught wind—but Elizabeth was right. It wasn’t just Anonymous. It was Occupy. It was crowdsourcing. There was anonymity in inclusiveness, a “we” instead of an “I” that meant an end to ownership and the possibility of meaningful blame.
Anyone
was starting to feel very much like
everyone.
But Mark wasn’t there yet; wasn’t yet ready to draw the necessary