by James Grady
“You,” he said to the younger man who shared his codename, “you and your cyber team the CIA detailed to Homeland Sec’, office in a different part of this same city, went out for morning coffee, you went to the bathroom and everyone died. Silenced machinegun, yes?”
“Does that how matter?”
“Not now.”
“This now isn’t contact procedure as set by the Agency and Homeland. Why this?”
“Because we need you.”
“Who the hell are ‘we’?”
Old Condor told him about the V.
At the jukebox, stoned Merle pushed buttons. Over the years he’d worked Quarry House, Paul had heard all the hard to replace jukebox CD’s, recognized within three guitar chords coming over the bar’s speakers that Merle had chosen the CD called “Silver Poets—Vol. 7,” John Fogerty wanting to know who’ll stop the rain?
“What do you want?” said Paul.
“For you to be who you are,” said Old Condor.
Leaned forward. His brow wrinkled like was truly concerned: “How are you?”
“You mean your spy here hasn’t given you a full download?”
Faye’s soft voice: “I told him this was the right thing, the right time, now or never.”
“Believe me,” said Old Condor. “I know how rough surviving the massacre was. Then being on the run. Chased by everybody. But I can barely imagine the courage it took for you to pull the trigger on the traitor who lay on top of you, who slid her mouth around your gun barrel and dared you. You were right. She’d have beaten you every other move you could have done. Killed you. You pulling that trigger saved that Delta Force raid from being a horrorshow.”
“Yeah. And it only took the Agency two months of interrogations and investigations and isolations to believe me. Another three months to let me go.”
“But they did their best for you then. Therapy. Sent you to Texas to learn hand-to-hand combat to help you fight off your paranoia. Set you up with a settlement, let you …”
The old man smiled: “Let you fly away, Condor.”
“Don’t call me that. That’s who you are.”
“We are. Who we got made. Who we choose to be. Who we can’t escape. And I know that’s true for you, too, because of Texas.”
“What?”
“You went back six months ago. A refresher course on hand to hand combat. How to drop someone trying to kill you. Like you were expecting to need it again. Like that need was still inside of you. Like you knew this day would have to come. Like you were preparing for it. Wanted it, even. Not paranoia: a sense of purpose that mattered.”
“Why the hell would I have—would I want a ‘purpose’ like that?”
Old Condor told him about the Russians.
The jukebox played Faye’s next selection, a song by Richard Thompson who rocked wanting to ride some wall of death one more time. Faye swayed in front of the jukebox, her arms floating the waves of wonder, her face gone to bliss beyond this underground dive bar, a golden soul lost in forever like she was an actor in a surreal noir movie like Blue Velvet.
A trio of customers filled the arch into the back room, saw a silver-haired woman wearing sparkling gold waving her hands and weirdo dancing. The trio turned back to find a table in the main room or barstools in front of Molly. Nobody wants to mix it up with old and crazy.
Is Merle’s dancing a target zone access strategy? wondered Paul.
Took Old Condor all that Richard Thompson song and the next one—Johnny River’s Secret Agent Man—to tell his tale of the Russians.
A Nobel Prize For Literature winner announced they’re selling postcards of the hanging.
Paul said: “That’s why you did this? Sent Faye? What this is all about? The Russians?”
“No.”
“But you said—”
“Past, Present, Future. Yesterday, Today, Tomorrow. The Russians and all this …”
Old Condor’s hand took in everything: Random Dude, crimson Faye, the golden woman swaying with her arms in the waves, the underground lair with its red walls and old jukebox and Molly unseen behind the bar.
“… all this is today. What’s crashed us together here and now is tomorrow.”
Paul said: “What happens tomorrow?”
“I’m going to die.”
Merle swayed as Roy Orbison sang for the lonely.
The old man’s face stayed calm, almost—but not quite—Buddhist serene.
“Are you … have they …”
“No one’s put a personal clock it,” said Old Condor. “No diagnosis or dead by, and the last wet boy who tried to make it so … made it so for him. But we’re all on the tick-tock to when.”
He shrugged his shoulders inside his black hoodie.
“Makes sense,” he said. “My age, all I’ve done and all that’s been done to me, could be tomorrow or could be in twenty years, but it’s the could be that will be.”
“So …”
“I need you to become me.”
“What?”
“You already were me, came up just like me, so it’s totally logical. Poetic.
“And vital. Not for me. For the V. For our country, fucked up as it is and will continue to be, it’s what we got and what we love.”
His eyes went to glittering golden Merle swaying with music maybe only she heard.
“Or what we love in part so we can hope for a touchable love that’s real and true, even if what we get is not the true and real we thought we’d know.”
Faye chimed in: “We take what we can get. We all do. You knew that before us showing up. We give what we can to get what we can. Even if. Even though.”
The man she’d fucked said: “So our touchable was an operational if though.”
“You were more than an assignment.”
“Gee, thanks, I get it.”
Faye said: “I hope so. I really hope so. I wish it weren’t so.”
“Us,” Old Condor told he who could have been his son. “This is about us.”
“Why me?”
“Because just like me, Condor is who you are, who you need to be. 9/11 inspired you into the CIA for all the right and good reasons. You became one of their programmers or analysts or tech trackers, quants. But you saw beyond data. You sensed. And you did something about it. Took all the right risks and when you got betrayed, you fought until you won.”
“Does this look like winning?” said the younger man in that dive bar.
“For your yesterdays, yes,” said Old Condor. “Here—all this—it’s another reason you’re perfect to become me. Who you were meant to be. Who you fought to be before here. Here is real. Here is something true, even with all its own bullshit and poses and poseurs and games. You had the brains and balls and bucks to go anywhere, but you gravitated to here. Sank to the roots of where real people look for love and joy and connection. Here lets you experience all that without the finery and finesse and façade of public policy and who’s who and very important and bottom lines that are actually lids.”
“And I thought people just came here for beers and burgers, whiskey and music, maybe a chance to make out or have the guy on the next stool listen to you.”
“What else is there?”
Old Condor shook his head, told who he saw when he looked in tomorrow’s mirror: “But all this gritty real, you’re in it, not of it. Life took that away from you.”
The jukebox stopped playing, yet still Merle swayed.
The man who brought her here kept talking.
“You beat a CIA-trained killer and traitor. Fought al Qaeda. You busted one of the new Nazis out of here one night. Now you know about the Russians of today. And you can envision the shape shifters coming at America tomorrow. You’re a rebel who doesn’t want to rule. You care enough to put yourself on the line. You go for what other pe
ople can’t or won’t or don’t see. Have the guts to pull the trigger.”
“I get to choose!”
“Yes,” said the old man, “and I’m sorry about that, sorry you have to, just … sorry.”
“Our scars carve us,” said she who’d seen more than all of his flesh.
“It’s not today,” said the old man, “it’s tomorrow. If you don’t bring your see it with movies and novels and short story eyes into the V, then going forward, we gotta rely on regular eyes, people who are smart and good but who sometimes miss this universe’s surreal.”
“I work in a bar.”
“No,” said Old Condor. “Even as we talk—just because we talked—your consciousness shifted. This is your used to be’s.
“I got a lot of used-to-be’s.” The silver-haired man nodded to where golden Merle swayed in front of the jukebox. “Like the songs she’s been playing, true and real and feeling now but out of gone yesterdays. That’s the thing about our used to be’s. We can carry them around like dead weight, or we can use them to light the way—even if we’ve got them wrong.
“When I was first learning to be me—was a song on the radio, Heart Full Of Soul, the Yardbirds. Took thirty years before I realized I had the lyrics wrong: not ‘secret heart of lonely,’ but ‘sick at heart and lonely.’ Sometimes we hear what is more our true than what’s being sung.”
Old Condor nodded to the jukebox.
“The songs Merle’s been playing are already oldy-goldy memories. The street spies who made those songs are passengers on the tick-tock train headed to the junction of Gone & Forgotten. And hell, sometimes the people they sang to couldn’t even get the words right.
“Happens to all the secret agents of storytelling. The authors who make you go wow. The directors and actors and screenwriters who reveal you in their flickering light. The spies like us who politicians won’t or can’t or dare not hear the songs we’re singing.
“But spies try to touch and tell some truth. That means something—moves something, like being a butterfly who chooses why to flap his wings. Maybe fighting to get things right creates meaning in all the universes, our ripple into forever.”
Old Condor pointed to the jukebox.
“You’ve been listening to all that, moving with the music like you’re just like everyone else. But you’re not. You have a secret heart. You hear and see deeper true, even though it makes you lonely. And if you ignore that, who’s going to watch out for them? Protect them?
“You’ve got to be the spy in the machine.”
Paul felt the red walls of the Quarry House. The smells. The crowds. The customers and crew. Gordo dancing children. Molly.
Faye put a consoling hand on his: “Sometimes if it could have, it would have.”
“You have to decide,” said Old Condor. “You have to choose.”
Faye shook her head. “You can have … different places, different people, but the conditions are so jaggedly different that trying to transfer your yesterday who’s …”
Merle danced to music Paul knew only he and the others at the table heard.
“What you and I did,” said Faye, “shows yes you can, with other people, the right people. The right rules.”
“You won’t be alone,” said Old Condor. “You’ll have us and the V.”
“Fuck you,” said Paul.
“Yeah,” said the old man. “Yeah.”
He edged out from behind the table, bent and unbent his way to standing.
Old Condor said: “All best, kid.”
Dropped $90 on the table for $40 dollar tab.
Walked out with his arm leading Merle.
Walking shadow for them came Random Dude.
Faye stood.
Leaned down and pressed a soft kiss to Paul’s skull.
Left.
Some customer walked to the jukebox. Pushed buttons.
No one heard Paul whisper: “Je ne suis pas comment je peux vive.”
He got to his feet.
Left the backroom.
Molly waited behind the bar. Her eyes took him in. She reached under the company wood, opened a cabinet, pulled out the bottle of “her” whiskey.
She poured him a generous shot.
He sipped it once. Sipped it twice. Tried to make it last but couldn’t stop himself from knocking it back in one get it over with gulp.
Set the tumbler on the bar soft and slow and silent.
Stared through the shimmers in his eyes at Molly staring back at him.
Said: “I gotta go.”
And he did, out the door, up the stairs, into that night.
Molly watched the closed door.
Picked up the tumbler. Washed it once. Washed it twice. Washed it three times. Rubbed it dry, then dryer still. Lifted the tumbler toward the shelves stacked with all the others—
—threw it at the distant garbage can.
The sound of a breaking glass.
CHAMBER FIVE
“… and taken away your name.”
On that Saturday morning, October 8, 2016, when the news he read to see What’s Officially Happening told of Hurricane Mathew charging toward Florida plus America’s spy czar and its head of Homeland Security jointly announcing that Russia had indeed attacked US citizens and political organizations plus The Great Reveal, Sasha drank coffee instead of tea as he sat at his desk in the cottage at an Undisclosed Location in the exurbs of Washington, DC.
He drank that coffee to fuel his old heart for the coming drive. Of course, the coffee would probably make him need to pull off near the Beltway and find a place that would let him pee for, perhaps, the cost of a cup of coffee to repeat the cycle.
But that was as life is.
Besides, he’d love getting out of the car to breath deep autumn’s gold leaves, to hear the whooshing tires of people going somewhere.
Coffee smell filled his cottage with no one but him to savor its perfume.
He loved perfume. How it evoked the choice of dreams over drudgery.
Nine months after he’d been moved in and was pretty sure he could get away with it, he casually added to his shopping cart three vials of women’s perfume from the grocery store’s beauty aisle, one a smell of musk and midnights, one a delightful aroma of flowers and sunshine, one scent seductive beyond name or comparison. The checkout clerk who’d graduated from the local high school and once traveled all the way to Atlantic City paid no attention to the old man’s purchases beyond scanning their bar codes for the ding ding ding. Sasha secreted the vials in his sock drawer. Sometimes he’d bring out a vial, sniff once or twice to savor lost dreams.
He sipped that morning’s black coffee.
Set its mug back on the flat white wood desk beside the black journal he’d bought at an airport on his last trip for them, a purchase that probably didn’t even make his escort’s report.
The black moleskin journal gave him blank, soft cream pages that were easy on his eyes.
Pages welcoming indigo ink from the fountain pen Jesse had given him.
What Sasha wrote that morning:
Are we ever who we think we are?
The line lay there on the page for anyone to see, to confiscate, to burn.
But now the line was.
No they could take that away.
He finished his coffee. Put the journal and carefully capped fountain pen back where they lived and would hope for his safe return. Washed his cup in the kitchen sink, who knows what difference that made in the cosmos. Chose the thin gray jacket that some who’d never known true cold might say was not enough to wear on this autumn day.
With a smile, decided yes, of course he would wear his cowboy hat. Jesse’d given it to him as a welcome present way back when Putin was not yet who he’d become. The cowboy hat fit Sasha’s gray stubbled head with room to spare. “For your
skull as it gets to grow,” Jesse’d said and they’d laughed. Sasha’d worn it to Jesse’s funeral at Arlington Cemetery the year before: How could he not wear it now? The hat was black leather, flat top and narrow rims. Jesse’d called it “gambler’s style.”
The hat was cool, even though he couldn’t wear it in the car when he was driving.
Nothing would happen in the car anyway, da?
He thought about going upstairs, opening his sock drawer, selecting a sniff. Just in case.
But no: he’d gambled on the positive, would not jinx his choice.
The drive to Washington, DC, took him seventy-seven minutes, and yes, part of that was not one but two stops to pee.
What are you, Sasha? Nervous?
That made him laugh as he listened to the woman who wasn’t, her voice coming through his cellphone in the dashboard holder telling him which way to turn and when.
How many of the voices that tell us what to do are real?
Even with traffic, he was of course early. Spent twenty-three minutes ignoring relentless redirections of the woman’s voice as he turned this way and that to drive past the beautiful buildings of America’s government on Capitol Hill, the three Senate office buildings and the three sprawling House of Representatives office buildings across the invisible border splitting that city in two and running like a bullet shot beneath the exact middle of the white marble Capitol Dome, an image known to everyone in world except perhaps for 109 million or so of life’s forgotten, flogged, lost, or ignored souls.
Sasha loved the glistening white Capitol Dome. So pure. So symbolic. Trying so hard to be regal enough for an empire. The machinegun police barricades were down that morning, so he drove past the gray Supreme Court where high above the Corinthian columns of its somber flat front, etched in stone were not the words “Equal Justice Under The Five To Four Decision” but rather some less precise motto.
He followed First Street downhill to the traffic circle in front of Union Station, followed PARKING GARAGE signs into a giant structure of concrete pancakes fused on the back of the train station. Up one level, fairly crowded with parked vehicles. Up two, half empty. Up three, 70 percent empty. Up four to the pancake-layered parking structure’s top floor, a vast gray concrete lot under only a dome of curved gray open sky.
