American Spy

by Lauren Wilkinson

  I hate to lose, for example, and every time I couldn’t get you to stop crying it felt like a loss. For the sake of my sanity I had to stop approaching my life in that way.

  After I’d fed you, Agathe said in French, “Marie, maybe you can take your father over to the beach. Leave the boys here for a little while. I’ll be fine.” She turned to Pop and added in English, “The beach isn’t very far. Do you still like to swim?”

  He smiled. “Sure do. Did I ever tell you I learned at the Harlem Y?”

  “Yes,” Agathe said. I heard her exasperation and understood it—I knew she’d heard the story of how he’d learned to swim dozens of times.

  I also understood that Pop wanted to tell it because he was nervous and wanted to fill the silence with something reliable. He started to tell the story and surprised us both with a detail I’d never heard before—that he swam nude in the pool.

  My mother made a muffled noise—when I looked over, I saw her laughing into her hand. I started to laugh too.

  “What?” Agathe said to him. “I never heard that before. It’s true?” He nodded.

  “But why?”

  “Well, the old swimsuits were wool. The fibers used to get stuck in the filters.”

  It made sense, but it was also so bizarre that the explanation made us laugh harder. My father looked pleased, but maybe also unsure why we thought what he’d said was funny, which in itself was funny too.

  I was happy. I thought of the last time I could remember our family laughing like that. The four of us were at Jones Beach, Helene and me wearing yellow T-shirts over our suits, which Agathe insisted on so we wouldn’t get lost in the crowd. I don’t remember what Pop said, only that same placid, pleased but confused look on his face, Helene with her legs crossed and a smile on hers, and Agathe with her hand clapped over her mouth, laughing until she had tears in her eyes.

  While I was pregnant, I had a fantasy that the three of us could live happily forever in an anonymous suburb. That is where I thought you’d be safest, so after two years with your grandmother that I’ll be forever grateful for, I took you back to the United States. And for a little while it worked. We lived on a cul-de-sac, in a quintessentially suburban town. Before the night that man broke that life apart, you were learning how to ride a bike with training wheels. We had a dog and family dinners. We looked like a good family—by that I mean a family constructed by the good version of myself I present to the world. I guess it was naïve of me to believe that fantasy would last.

  I’ve spent the last few days on the phone with the lawyer who prepared my will. I’ve included a note here for your grandmother: instructions on how she and your grandfather should provide for you if anything happens to me. I’ve invested some money for you in mutual funds and have left you the two buildings in Brooklyn. I used the cash Ross had given me as a down payment on the brownstone across the street. Geneva sold it to me for criminally below market value because she was getting too old to take care of it and was giving me a deal because she liked my grandfather.

  Pop has since admitted that my grandfather was right to leave me the brownstone. He would’ve sold it, not expanded it into a sizable inheritance like I have done. I felt vindicated by that. I’ve asked him to manage the buildings until you’re of age. I’m glad that I can provide for you, but haunted by the poor decisions I’ve made that mean I might not see you grow up.

  Although I’ve left you some money, that isn’t a signal that I hope you’ll spend your lives in pursuit of more of it. I want to give you power and agency, of which you’ll have dangerously little without money. But for you, for black American boys, the middle class can’t help guarantee your safety. Maybe you’ll help change things.

  28

  MARTINIQUE, 1992

  AFTER YOU TWO FELL ASLEEP, ROBBIE and I went out on the back porch with some wine and a few other items. I gave him a plane ticket and the first installment of the cash I’d promised him for his help.

  “Are you scared?” he asked me.

  “Only of leaving my kids orphans.”

  “I won’t let that happen. I’ll keep you safe.”

  I smiled at him, even though he couldn’t promise that, and began to explain how we’d get started. I believed that SSI had won three contracts in the last five years to build American military bases in Africa. They’d started in Burkina Faso and moved on to Ivory Coast, having used the connection between Compaoré and his father-in-law, the Ivorian president, Felix Houphouët-Boigny, to smooth the way. I told Robbie where I thought SSI had moved on to from there, a guess based on the coordinates printed on those blueprints of Slater’s and news from that country.

  I always read the news with an eye toward finding hints about what Ross was up to, and I’d picture him out there, catalyzing political skirmishes in West Africa and making a fortune from it.

  “Marie, can I ask you something?” Robbie said. “I never understood why you became a Fed. With Helene it made sense, but—”

  “I felt like I owed her something. It’s hard to explain. And I think there’s something else to it that I never wanted to let myself admit.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Maybe I was a Fed for as long as I was so that if I ever had to, I could safely elevate myself above the law.”

  Which isn’t to say I had the intention of being dirty. I’m just describing something that lived in one of the corners of myself that I rarely shone light upon. I wasn’t the only person I knew to have those impulses. Our neighbor Matt Testaverde had run around with Robbie when we were teenagers and was, by my estimation, the same brand of petty criminal. Matt’s whiteness had saved him from any real repercussions though—while Robbie was languishing in jail, Matt was attending City College. He’d eventually gone to law school and, last I heard, had become a defense attorney for only the shadiest clients—men who paid him in cash to make their legal problems go away.

  I doubt Matt would explain it in the same way I just did, but I can’t help but see a connecting line. His interest in the law also reflects a belief that it isn’t equitably applied and therefore that he shouldn’t be held to its discretion. I might be cynical, but he’s even more so, because he’s willing to game the system for the right price.

  This outlook may be a product of growing up in the seventies. Although I was good, even I wasn’t immune to the rallying cry around me that the system was broken, and the ample evidence piling up to confirm it.

  * * *

  —

  YESTERDAY I GOT THE PHOTOS of us from that afternoon at the beach developed. As I was shuffling through them, I noticed one in which Tommy looked like an older boy. It was just a tricky angle, but I suddenly felt the pressure of time. I imagined you as adolescents, then men. There’s something about the act of writing to you in the future that makes me, I don’t know, strangely nostalgic for the present. For the time I have with you now. I realize that doesn’t make much sense. I’ll put the photos with these journals.

  I made breakfast with your grandmother this morning, and while the three of you were eating, I went to the living room to find Robbie. He was packing for our flight this afternoon. I’d told him the details about where we were headed the night before and what exactly I believed Ross was up to out there. Now he looked up at me and asked me a question he’d clearly been turning over in his mind since we’d spoken. “But why are they building military bases in the middle of nowhere?”

  “Strategically it’s not. This base is just one in the network he’s planned. If he manages to build dozens from east to west, think of how much more quickly our military could mobilize against the Russians, against terrorism. Against war in the Middle East.”

  “They’re trying to garrison the continent,” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “And our government’s letting them do that privately?”

  “Of course. Think about it
. Our government would prefer it that way. They gain the military advantage of bases in Africa without the liability of having to be directly responsible for their construction.”

  “We should burn down the one you saw,” he said.

  I shook my head. “It’s too much risk. And there are soldiers living there. I don’t want to hurt anyone innocent.”

  “Nobody out there’s innocent. They’re expanding the American empire. Invading.”

  “That’s not the fight I want to have,” I said, my voice rising. I turned toward the kitchen, wanting to make sure you couldn’t hear me. I knew what he was saying. These men who’d been chosen to defend American interests abroad were so dysfunctional that it threw the whole undertaking into question. They were so fallible, they were agents of a bloated, broken bureaucracy, and yet they were obliged to treat the expanse between Burkina and Burundi as their own dominion. But I couldn’t fight that ideology, not through flat-out warfare.

  “It’s about more than you, though,” he said.

  “You’re right. It’s about raising my kids.”

  He exhaled slowly, clearly frustrated with me. I didn’t care. There have been a lot of men in this world who have tried to shape it by getting it to conform to their own ideology. My own beliefs are too inconsistent and contradictory to expect them to change the world by having other people conform to them. I want something else. I wanted to form you into agents of change—that’s the way I want to fight. If I’m not around to raise you, know that’s what I want for you. Reading this may tell you why I believe you can be of service to other people.

  I left him and went out to the barn, taking with me a cup of coffee, the local newspaper, and this notebook. Nicolas was bent over the complicated-looking milking machinery. I called his name over the noise of the lowing cows and gears, to wish him good morning, and he waved back, his hand covered in grease. His exchanges with me in French were always as brief as they were voluble with Agathe in Creole.

  I went to the back of the barn, where I slid open one of the tall doors and sat in a chair looking out onto the pasture. The day was perfect.

  There were lemon trees behind the farmhouse, and tall palms, and mango trees with bursting, star-shaped fronds. Beyond them, dense-looking jungle and mountains jutted up into the sky, the tallest of them wreathed in clouds. As a child I’d spent a lot of time trying to picture the place Agathe left us for. It had never occurred to me to imagine mountains. If you have to stay here because something happens to me, I think you’ll be happy.

  I picked up the paper. The news there was mostly concerned with the statue of Josephine in La Savane. It had been beheaded, in protest of the fact that Josephine had encouraged Napoleon to reinstate slavery on the island. The vandals had also splattered it with red paint and written on the base in Creole: Respé ba Matinik. Respect Martinique.

  I just heard your voices in the barn; you came down the corridor to find me. There’s a calf in the pen closest to where I’m sitting, and, William, you slunk by, as far on the other side of the corridor as possible, obviously terrified. Thomas, you stopped to pet it on the nose and laughed when it licked you. “His tongue! It’s rough!”

  William, you threw yourself across my lap. I kissed your forehead and asked, “You don’t like that cow, huh?”

  You shook your head. “Maman, let’s pretend…”

  “Hmmm?”

  “Let’s pretend to be alligators and get Tommy,” you whispered loudly.

  I agreed and said I would come play in just a second. You both ran out into the pasture. William, you take up space in the world like I’d expect a little boy to do, but, Thomas, you are like a little adult sometimes. So composed. You look like me, but I hope you’ll be like your father. I’m finished telling you all that I have to. I have tried to offer you the truth in these pages. If something happens to me, at least you’ll have that.

  I hate that I have to leave you. Going to find Ross, having to do him violence, might take me away from the most revolutionary work I could do. Raising you to be better than me, in hope that you will make the world better. That you will remake it in your image—into a place that deserves you. Anyone can burn down a military barrack; my commitment to you is where real change begins.

  I love you. I hope you grow into men who are the best parts of your father and me. I hope that if you’re called to resist injustice you’ll have the courage to do so. I hope you’ll love fiercely and freely. In those ways I hope you’ll be good Americans.

  For my mother, Linda Perry

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  THERE WERE MANY PEOPLE WHO WERE crucial to the production of this book:

  The most important are Caitlin McKenna and Kristina Moore, without whom I wouldn’t have published it.

  Caitlin, thank you for your patience and for sticking your neck out for me. You’ve helped me grow as a writer, and for that I’m very grateful.

  Kristina, had you not asked me to consider writing this novel, I likely would not have done it. Thank you too for being an excellent reader for me.

  Arielle Angel and Gabe Levinson, thank you for your feedback. You both gave me insights that proved immensely helpful.

  Sam Ross, thank you for letting me borrow your last name.

  Justin Mugits, thank you for being the most generous and loyal person I have ever met.

  Jean-Éric Boulin, thank you for correcting and editing my French and for your unwavering support.

  Paul Beatty, thank you for your advice and for picking up the lunch tab way more than you should.

  John Freeman, thank you for your dedication to diversity in books, your compassion, and for giving my fiction a shot.

  Linda Perry, thank you for believing I could write novels before I did, and never once wavering in your support for me.

  Coleman Collins and Eric Osborne, thank you for being early readers.

  Cédric and Nicole Protière, Ousmane Barra, Ouépia Korabié, and Samir Ouedraogo, thank you for showing me around Ouagadougou.

  Nathaniel Sasson, thank you for always being able to make me laugh.

  Thomas Pico, thank you for being my closest friend for more than fifteen years now, and for being the only person I want to turn to when writing (as it so often does) makes me want to yank out my hair.

  David Ebershoff, thank you for acquiring my book.

  Laurence Wilkinson, thank you for your support and assistance on my research trip to Martinique.

  Elsie Wilkinson, thank you for sharing your memories with me.

  Nicole Perry and Osaze Perry-Porter, thank you for the joy that I’ve shared with you both and for being two of my favorite people.

  Bianca O’Brien, thank you for being a sister and a friend I was lucky enough to choose.

  Gilda Millar, thank you for your help and thoughtful answers on my research trip to Martinique.

  Sara Nović, thank you for blazing the trail.

  Bruno Jaffré, Ernest Harsch, Sennen Andriamirado, and Pathfinder Press, thank you for all of your research.

  Norbert Zongo, thank you for your courage.

  John Phillips, thank you just because.

  And to my grandfather, former deputy police commissioner for community affairs, William E. Perry, thank you for inspiring me.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  LAUREN WILKINSON has an MFA in fiction and literary translation from Columbia University, and has taught writing at Columbia and the Fashion Institute of Technology. She was a 2013 Center for Fiction Emerging Writer’s Fellow and has also received support from the MacDowell Colony and the Djerassi Resident Artists Program. Lauren Wilkinson lives in New York. This is her first novel.

  What’s next on

  your reading list?

  Discover your next

  great read!

  * * *

  Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about th
is author.

  Sign up now.