A Cabinet of Curiosity

by Bradford Morrow

  the incredible architectural curve of some spine I see

  my eyes are puffy from too much wine and

  some you’s blue

  tennis shoes—

  In my mind I animate

  the one-eyed pig, the two-headed snake, the necessity

  to learn how to lean

  into each

  other & breathe

  and I am sweating a lot by now in the hall

  all these organs have lost their use and color, swimming in ancient alcohol and

  I ran out of time before I could note them all, but saw

  further on, a tiny little dried-up human brain looks like an overgrown acorn

  That’s how dumb you are.

  A Curiosity of Spies

  Greg Jackson

  We signaled for another round of the past, watching from the city that used to make things. Below the ruins of a careworn industry, the spoiling frescoes of our shabby basilica, we watched. During the commercial breaks we offered our commentaries. Étienne proposed that we might understand the spies as students of our unconscious habits of self-betrayal. We considered this in silence, allowing that he took an interesting angle on things. Above us the spies reconnoitered backyards for sight lines, fallback positions, hidden matériel. We watched as they buried carbines under doghouses, incorporated disinformation into shopping lists, bugged massaranduba decks. Under the canopy of an off-brand gas station the Spy in Plaid made contact with his counterpart’s estranged teenage daughter. The highway plaza whistled with emptiness, the rush of cars heading west.

  We watched, we didn’t just watch. We heard, we smelt, we touched and were touched. At the break Jones came on and rubbed our shoulders in a manner the focus group had found manly but affectionate—businesslike, caring. Girls in skirts and knee-highs passed outside on their way to school, and although we could no longer see or hear them from where we sat, dully transfixed, we knew they spoke to one another with the needling playfulness of girls newly awake in the chill air of a spring morning, and we sensed in this the continuity of a meaningful order.

  “Is the application we have observed retaining their hair what is commonly termed an ‘Alice band’?” Jacques-Charles inquired, as he is wont to do.

  “It is,” Antoine admitted and, emboldened by his prior remark or perhaps by the example of the spies, Étienne submitted that lacking straightforward content the language of narrative development can still arouse a sense of entailment we find comforting. But this was too fine for us and we told him so.

  Half a world away Mazzy had impregnated herself with a drugstore kit. Her reasons began in loneliness, boredom, curiosity, and unexpended love. You could be poor, it seemed, and still have nothing to spend it on. Reminded then of her poverty and the workdays she put in at the plant Mazzy was forced to reconsider her decision as rash—alarming—impractical—foolish. And still, she was excited.

  The spies were experts in the “form” of life considered separately from its “content.” For instance: the affective signatures of twenty-two common anxiety medications; the discrete meanings of entering an ice cream parlor at 11:00 a.m., 2:30 p.m., or 6:00 p.m.; where in descending order of likelihood to look in a stranger’s house for compromising media (mortgage records, home videos, greatest-hits albums from the 1980s); the actuarial longevity of a marriage in which one or more partners has purchased a blanket with armholes. The spies, of course, were people too. This made them interesting. Like all of us they enjoyed passions, fears, difficulties in the bedroom, the oil works of Gustave Courbet, and root-beer floats.

  Jones thought root-beer floats were just fine and even approved of Courbet’s painting once you got past the bit about his being French. We didn’t care. We hungered after his taste in spies. The question everyone’s asking. The question that has the country on the edge of its seat. Étienne liked the Spy in Yellow, and Jacques-Charles liked the Spy in Plaid. Their civvies skewed garish but otherwise their OPSEC was pristine. It wasn’t until the third episode that the Spy in Plaid caught the telltale whiff of tradecraft in the reflection of a pet-store window. The vitrine shimmered. Yellow was buying a puppy for his estranged teenage daughter. He had already seduced Plaid’s wife. Plaid cut the brakes on Yellow’s car while the clerk rang up the collie pup, a cerulean velvet ribbon tied festively at its throat. She would love it, the father reflected—in voice-over—when from nowhere a car ran him off the road and into the concrete pump station of a municipal duck pond. Plaid had played this deftly into an arpeggiation of broken ribs, a Chiclet pouch of deracinated premolars. We did not approve of their methods but we recognized the difficult conditions under which we asked them to work, the greater purpose after which they labored, and we forgave them.

  The life of a spy we understood was made painful by the obligation to enact ignorance in the face of knowledge. Our lives were made painful under similar circumstances. How were we to acknowledge all the luminous, pointless things we felt in a given day? The mass of human sentiment builds up like plaque. A spy dissimulates ignorance until his information becomes actionable, then he makes his small play. Some information never becomes actionable and is useful only in informing the quality of ignorance he feigns. We were learning things, we felt, one trip wire, one hidden listening device at a time. The spies were not different from us, awareness raised simply to the level of an art. The pathos of their lives was unmistakable. The pathos of their lives was unmistakable because their lives were exhaustively broadcast. Mood music taught us the fugitive shades in their quiet nobility, the fidelity they exhibited as restraint, encountering each other below the gray exurban skies to watch their daughters’ evening soccer games as Barry (weekend watercolorist, claims adjuster, “Barry of Barry-and-Tina, Barry”) and Roberto (Samson Electrical Subcontracting, choral tenor at Remnant Family Worship).

  In that we understood what we knew of the spies as “covers” we did not take their identities to be windows on the soul. Academics argued that it was this precisely that characterized the “social death” intrinsic to celebrity espionage. Barry, we said, Roberto, we said. But they were not Barry and Roberto. They were the Spy in Yellow and the Spy in Plaid. They were the advantages that as outward signals Barry and Roberto offered when made to agree with all the things Barry and Roberto had previously been. The ghosts of girls passed by on their way to school. We had once built those schools, laid the dull yellow brick, and later interred the structures in cinder blocks to house the by-product of our pleasure. We had once built the snaking silver roads that ran like ribbons through the wild country. And earlier still we built the fort on the shores of Lac Sainte Claire, the three of us, Étienne, Jacques-Charles, and Antoine. Deprived of any future we return again and again to the past. We dwell within it. The ramshackle dome in the ceiling drips and we remember: sons and fathers constellated in their attitude of stern love. Evening pipe smoke joining with the rigid cadence of burnt leaves. The way our daughters passing in the morning spoke to one another of things about which we could not know or care, and that we did not confuse for innocence or history.

  Jones may have preferred the Spy in Plaid, he may have preferred the other. It did not signify. His task was to wait until opinion coalesced into a pollable substance at which point he would make clay figurines out of that substance all of whom in the end he would call Jones. He reckoned there were enough clay figures now to reconstitute the funerary army of Qin Shi Huang. This he thought with the self-approving bitterness of a man in a fine suit drinking scotch by the bay. The facts substantiated him. He was such a man. The bay shone with lucid seams in the afternoon light. At the approved distance, like shiftless libertines in Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe, a security detail lounged in otiose postures on the rocks.

  The bay looked gorgeous, drillable. Jones was fleeing another of McCrery’s low, prescriptive litanies. He should never have gotten mixed up with the party boss, he knew, but you couldn’t easily turn the man down. The guy could sell pasta molds to a celiac, they said. 3-D print
ers to an animist. It would be one more mistake in Jones’s long, slow descent into an irrelevant and extraordinary power. The people went just crazy for his touch. What could he do? “Like Casanova with those mitts!” With this asseveration in the congressional locker room the committee chair had approached him. Their last candidate, Gavras, had fallen out. “Defenestrated right through the Overton window,” McCrery confided. He palpated Jones’s teeth like a gift horse’s. “Plus the name was too ethnic.”

  No, you didn’t easily turn the party boss down. McCrery clapped Jones on the shoulder. He would be glad to know the PIs hadn’t dug up anything they couldn’t bury. The Quinceañera? Forget about it. But they needed Jones behind Chan’s caucus on UOP.

  “You had me investigated?” Jones said, feeling not exactly hurt but sensing something like the hidden revolutions of a secret planet inside our own. “I heard unmanned-officer was a fiasco anyway. What about Suriname?”

  “We don’t think Suriname will be missed,” McCrery said candidly.

  And then it was one-two-three, chop-chop getting Jones together with his team, Jasmine Pierna-Schatz and “Aw, shucks” Jerzy Deitch. Jerzy had the pedigree, sure, had done nat-sec for McCullah, worked with Pitsiladis on Defense Appropriations before Bar-Yosef swapped him with Corbett for Ruvolo on Permanent Investigations, thanks to his background with Chan on the select committee, of course, real dark-side weeds, they said, OLC-memo playbook, kangaroo tribunals and misplaced pallets of cash, signature strikes that looked like John Hancock with the DTs. True ends-justified funny business, Cowboy and Indians deontology, but a team player, they said, willing to fall on the sword, eat dirt, and not above dropping off your dry cleaning on his way to disappearing videos. Now with Jasmine nodding at his side Jerzy told Jones, “Say peace when you mean war and security when you mean peace, war when you mean defense and defense when you mean war, freedom when you mean guns, guns when you mean liberty, liberty when you mean box store, and freedom when you mean ‘What polar bear?’ Seem to mean things instead of meaning them.”

  “I thought you were policy,” said Jones. “She was communication.”

  The aides broke into extravagant laughter.

  “That’s good,” Jasmine said, wiping her eyes. “Remember, politics is wish fulfillment.”

  “I thought that was porn,” said Jones.

  “Remember, politics is porn,” said Jasmine.

  And you could only touch the people if you believed the way they wanted to be touched coincided with the autoerotic exercise of your own power. The machines were sensitive and could as easily pick up an inguinal readjustment as an unfortunate, delighted scream. You had to caress with conviction—the courage of your eventual legal conviction. Nowhere outside foreign-language textbooks did you encounter the technical term anymore, which had the quaint flavor of a démodé futurism heard in chronometer, phonograph, facsimile machine, computer. It was the toucher, the tickler. El Molestar in Spanish. And although Jasmine looked only negligibly older than Jones’s estranged teenage daughter, Jones felt, with a swell of nobility at the thought, that he would throw away everything he had worked for to touch, tickle, or otherwise disturb Jasmine in a manner appropriate to their self-understanding as weak yet redeemable creatures freighted with human dignity. In the Act Three resolution to which he quickly brought this fantasy around, Jones reunited with his estranged teenage daughter who discovered in Jasmine the sister she had never had and found herself disposed to reconsider Jones in the florid light of his claim on Jasmine’s estimable affection.

  “I just look young,” Jasmine said. “It’s all EGF agonists and DNA-repair enzymes. Bohr-effect exploitation, that kind of thing. I’m actually twenty-four.”

  That explained the lotions.

  In the factory where the lotions were made the products no longer gleamed. The gleam was now added at a different factory. This was spin-off technology from a proprietary military application based in micrometer refraction indices and cutting-edge behavioral psych. Wars, we understood, were won and lost along three decisive axes: market saturation, brand resonance, and rifles. The APA appended a loopy signature to the dotted line. Mazzy added her component to the product 317 times during the quality-control interval—today between 2:45 and 3:45 p.m.—above the 300x minimum threshold but below her 350x target. She was now symptomatically pregnant and her tumid belly coincided with the conveyor-belt platform. Working at an angle to reach the streaming product she attached fifty components from the left, fifty from the right, and so on in this manner, alternating.

  A month before she had been capable of four hundred attachments in an especially expeditious hour. Her supervisor, Mr. Beulah, nodded crisply. When Mazzy felt his favor descend on her she could only recognize the warmth passing through her as the echo of a lost season of youth. Sometimes she dreamed of Mr. Beulah caressing her swollen belly and shushing her when she worried—a dream complicated by arrant dislike. When in her youth had she even felt that warm liquid and indefinite hope that smelt like rotting cherry blossoms milked underfoot against the paved allée of a city park? Mr. Beulah was always on about robots anyway. Robots, he said, would take their jobs.

  “Robot,” Mazzy said. “From the German arbeit, ‘to work,’ an early twentieth-century coinage—or bastardization—courtesy of the Czech surrealist playwright Karel Čapek.”

  “Have you read much Čapek?” Mr. Beulah asked.

  “Not since college,” Mazzy admitted, blushing.

  In their realm the gods were placing bets. With Suriname gone the good money had moved to Gabon. The short position gave it six weeks. The election was right around the corner, after all. Gods of war, possessed of insider knowledge, were legally enjoined from participating but, well, Chinese walls are thin, information seeps through an organization like sacrificial blood on a paper napkin—in short, you could spot messenger gods laying out treasure at the OTB morning, noon, and night. Certain deities, destroyers of worlds, thought the humans just didn’t do it right, had no sense for the grande geste. “Couldn’t knock a charm out of superposition,” etc. Long past were the days of kenosis and satori, the life of Riley when it was nymphs and ambrosia on a rotating diner display, grab-ass by the brook with your entourage of golden youths.

  The gods were too old for all that, retirees and pensioners these days. They took antidepressants for their mood and ED pills for their antidepressants. The solvency of their benefit plans preoccupied them. The new look of the pantheon upset them. They didn’t like calling the demigods “differently immortal.” Considered against the advantage of accumulated capital, some pointed out, this concession amounted to a square pyramid of garbanzos. Children on rafts floated in the tides and trade winds of an aleatory sea. The gods had nothing left, they often felt, but the old prerogatives of their idle voyeurism, the uncertain human story with its trying repetition and inadvertent comedy.

  And here was the thing about Suburban Spy: you could never stop watching. You could never let your guard down because an entire season might hinge on one blown cover, one unconscious self-betrayal. In this way it was a gauge of our tolerance for vigilance, exposure, and deceit. It flattered our insatiable desire to be in the know, to spy on the spies, mundane as their lives truly were. We pitied them the loss of privacy. We pitied them the loss of privacy even as it comforted us that at the root of spying was the implicit suggestion that what you did bore watching. We had no real interest in returning to the way things had been, even as we kept signaling for more rounds, frothing, bitter with the prick of homecoming, as the ectoplasm of girls passed outside, the boys with their red Radio Flyers, cap guns, Buck Rogers comic books, and Indian headdresses. Guttersnipes in the inglenooks of our dripping temple skirmished for crumbs. We heard them rustling. Pontiac with his parsonic basswood dignity basked in the reptilian light of Season Three returning from the break. In this episode Plaid was taking night-school classes toward his DDS, which he hoped to finish in time to perform the maxillofacial surgery on Yellow, who convale
sced slowly, nursed by Tina and, more discreetly, Plaid’s wife.

  It was turning out to be a very good season.

  And it was indisputable that the tickler, toucher, or whatever you cared to call it at the end of the day in the consecrated self-determinism of your private American home had changed everything about how elections were lost and won. Once we had voted for the candidate who after months of defamatory half-truths seemed marginally less odious. That was back when slander mattered. Now all that mattered was how you touched a faceless sea of strangers aware that you were touching a million others as you touched them and that you touched them in the way they had told you they liked to be touched not out of care or respect for the psychophysical particulars of their pleasure but out of consideration for your own status, career, thread counts, and the mortgages on your seven ranches. And knowing this they still wanted to be touched that way, seduced into believing the stroke was genuine, attentive, and earnest, aware of each, individually, cold, alone.

  Perhaps because Jones was in love with Jasmine, because he dreamed of touching her while he stroked the people, because her skill at encouraging this transference meant that as he spoke, rubbed, and emoted he was aware only of her, the people felt the memory of a near-forgotten truth in the way he touched them, hair stood up on their arms and necks, and their spines tingled at the delicate brush of an authenticity they knew to be manufactured but that so perfectly counterfeited the bunching emotions of longing and love they had no interest in doubting it.

  “You’ve touched the people, boyo!” McCrery slapped Jones rather too hard on the back. “We want you to be the caress of the party.”

  “What do I say. It’s an incredible—”

  “Say you’ll back Chan.”

  Jones made a show of considering this. “The union’ll screw us.”

  “The union doesn’t stand an eight ball’s chance in purgatory,” McCrery said candidly.