“How’s it going?” She looks in. The desktop computer’s screensaver is luminous with the pale aquarium colors of the Zapruder film clip. JFK’s motorcade coming through Dealey Plaza in a repeated gif, a mood enhancer, the way lava lamps used to smooth out the vibe for seductions, only in Graham’s room the mood is paranoia.

Her arrival stirs Sailor. He must’ve been totally sacked out; usually his nose is at the door when she comes home. He unfolds and frees himself from the nest of cords and cables under Graham’s worktable. Standing on his hind legs, his front paws on her shoulders, giving off a dry, delicious warm-dog aroma, he’s tall enough to be a dancing partner. She acknowledges this by doing a quick mambo step, then gets him down on the floor and sits next to him; then she flips him over like a pancake and scratches his stomach. He appears to be a mix of something red—Irish setter maybe?—and Lab. And whatever else. He’s a glorious mutt.

Cate doesn’t pay as close attention as Graham does to the machinery of government. She reads the Times online every morning, political pieces in The New Yorker. She does get-out-the-vote work for Democratic candidates around elections, and is grateful to have had, at least for the last eight years, someone smart and well-intentioned in the White House. Maybe she’s been on cruise control because of that. But she understands Graham’s suspicions, and knows what he believes—about lobby-purchased legislators, gerrymandered congressional districts, suppressed votes, backroom deals, enforced inequities, suppressed science, dark money shuffled and laundered endlessly, the planet poisoned, vats of chemical sludge dumped into rivers at night—is true. Where there used to be a few things to seriously worry about, now there are way too many. He is fixated on the death of privacy, the amount of personal information available to whomever is interested in obtaining it, and the really bad uses it might be put to. And how unaware of this exposure most people are. He believes the world is in the golden age of internet naiveté. Philosophically, he’s a disciple of Edward Snowden.