Life Undercover

by Amaryllis Fox

  I take a seat and begin working my way through the series of questions every operative ticks off at the start of every meeting.

  “Are there any urgent security threats I should know about right now?”

  “Yes.”

  An involuntary squirt of adrenaline fans out across my chest.

  “Okay, what can you tell me about it?” I ask.

  “There are drones in the sky that are killing us like a video game.”

  I fight the urge to exhale my relief. We both know I meant a threat from somebody other than us. We both know I don’t want to make that correction out loud. There’s nothing for it but to meet it head-on.

  “Other than the threats you face from the United States and coalition forces”—I pause and we exchange a look of mutual acknowledgment—“are there any urgent threats I should know about before we get started.”

  He shakes his head slowly. The baby wheezes again.

  “How much time do we have?”

  He gives a slight side nod, meaning “As much as I want to give you.”

  The woman reappears with a tray holding a teapot, glass cups in metal filigree holders, and sugar cubes in a bowl.

  I describe the threat reporting I’m there about.

  “Most of the dead will be your brothers and sisters in Islam.” I reach for the tourist map in my bag, moving slowly to keep everyone at ease. Roll it out on the table, using my teacup as a weight. “There are vehicle barriers here and here, meaning the truck will probably detonate here, the closest it can get to the press club or the bank. This building here is a community center. This is a mosque. This and this are both schools. This is a health clinic.”

  “And this”—he cuts me off, his finger tapping the location of the small wooden shed alongside the press club’s gates—“is a flower shop.” He smiles at me. A sad, resigned smile. “I know the area well. Why are you coming to me with this?”

  “Because I know you are a man of honor. And a man of God. You don’t believe it’s acceptable in God’s sight to kill innocents or followers of Islam.”

  “This is true. But if I object to this attack based on the risk to Muslims, they will choose an alternative target. One where the dead will be exclusively Americans. Would you prefer this?”

  “No,” I answer. “I would prefer them not to attack any target at all.”

  “And you will abide by this, too?”

  “How do you mean,” I ask.

  “You will also not attack any target at all?”

  The baby wheezes.

  “Only legitimate targets,” I say.

  “What are those?” he asks.

  “Areas used to stage bombings.”

  “So we may attack the areas where you stage bombings.”

  “No, we may. You may not.”

  There is a pause. Just traffic and the baby’s sticky breath.

  “Why?”

  “You and I both know you can’t get close to the places where we stage our strikes. To get to them means killing civilians as well.”

  In my head I add, “Like you did yesterday, asshole, when you blew up a slew of Afghans along with one of my friends.”

  “Such is also the case with your drones,” he replies. “Just ask my wife.” It’s unclear whether he means that his wife is dead or that someone she loves is dead.

  “There is too much tolerance for civilian casualties on both sides,” I concede.

  “The difference,” he says, “is we tolerate killing civilians to get you out of our country. And you tolerate killing civilians to stay here.”

  There is a pause. I can sense his wife and my friends and the thousands of tit-for-tat dead, there with us in the dust. I look at the baby, her little chest working to pull oxygen through the filter of mucus I can hear in her throat. I feel Zoë inside me.

  “Asthma?” I ask. He nods. “I have a little one, too,” I tell him. “We live in China.” His posture shifts. He gives me a look of knowing sympathy, parent to parent, lamenting governments’ inability to keep the air clean. “She has trouble breathing sometimes too. Have you ever tried clove oil?” I ask. He shakes his head.

  Clove oil has always worked when Zoë begins to cough. I happen to have some in my backpack. I take a vial along when I’m operational because it’s helpful in making certain inks, if I need to adjust alias documents on the go. And it’s an antibacterial and bug repellent, so it doesn’t look suspicious.

  I pull out the dark glass bottle, like a Shakespearean apothecary, and offer it to him.

  “You need to dilute it, because it’s very strong. Put some in hot water and let the baby inhale the steam.” I hold it in the air, but he doesn’t move to take it. I realize the extent of the leap I’m asking him to make. To trust me, a representative of the country that’s trying to kill him. To let his child inhale the unidentified contents of my bottle, on the off chance that I’m sincere. I take the top off and breathe in, to demonstrate the oil’s safety. Then close it up again and set the vial on the table.

  He squints at me, like he’s trying to make something out. The room feels like that old optical illusion, the one that can be seen as a vase or else two faces in profile. As operatives, he and I are on different sides of this struggle, fighting each other. As parents, we’re on the same side, fighting for our kids’ right to breathe. We both sense a choice, in that clove-drenched moment: whether to focus on the two opposing faces or the single unified vase.

  The woman reappears briefly and places a branch of small white flowers on the table. Something in her movement suggests that she might be his mother. And also the boss.

  “Alyssum,” he says, working the snowy blossoms off the branch and into a tidy pile atop the tourist map. “Tastes like broccoli.” He smiles and pops a flower into his mouth, a reciprocal gesture of reassurance.

  “For asthma?” I ask. He nods.

  “Trade you.” I pick up one of the flowers and he takes a sniff of the clove vial, both of us cautious, our noses wrinkled like children trying new food. Slowly, we both start laughing. The other two men in the room do not.

  “Look,” I say. “You’re right. They’ll pick new targets. We’ll all pick new targets. We can’t save everyone. But we can save the young woman who may be standing at that flower stall. We can save the kids playing in that schoolyard, same as yours and mine will be. The Qur’an says that to save one innocent life is to save all humankind. Could we try and save humankind today? Even if it destroys itself again tomorrow?”

  There’s a long pause. Then he offers an almost imperceptible nod. The other two fighters break into rapid-fire Urdu. One reaches for the weapon against the wall; the other takes a hard step toward me. I fight the urge to run. Instead, I hold their leader’s eye and put my hand to my heart to convey respect. He raises his fingers slightly from the tabletop, and the other men stop short. I fold the map around the white flowers, slide the tube into my backpack, every muscle in my body aware of the M4 now cradled in the arms of the fighter farthest from me. To show any suspicion that he might fire it would be to suggest that he would disrespect his leader—an insult to both of them, and a sure way to end up in a jumpsuit. Instead, I take my time zipping up my pack and pause to finish my tea. In my peripheral vision, I feel the fighter’s posture relax. The leader’s eyes crinkle slightly, as if in response to a private joke.

  “The alyssum is also good for stress,” he says. I smile as I get up to leave.

  “And the clove oil will help with teething.” It’s an intentional choice we both make to end the meeting as parents, not as operatives. An unspoken agreement to interpret our picture as one vase today, instead of two opposing faces.

  On my way out the door, my fingers brush the chipped brown paint and the green showing through underneath. I think of my grandmother, peeling back the dead exterior of the rose stems in her gar
den to find the white-green rawness of fresh life inside. I think of the parks in Hanoi and Berlin and Tokyo where air strikes once rained fire. And I remember the little sign in my neighbor’s front yard when I was a kid. It said, “Planting a garden is the ultimate act of faith in tomorrow.”

  * * *

  —

  It’s not until I’m back in Shanghai, listening to Peter and the Wolf with Zoë, that I find out whether those particular seeds took root. I receive a follow-up cable on the day of the intended attack. UNEVENTFUL AFTERNOON. APPEARS THREAT DEFERRED OR NEW TARGET ACQUIRED. KUDOS. I think of the dusty room and the wheezing baby, with her nostrils flared wide. I think of her dad, making choices to protect her—from pollution and air strikes and drones. I think about how everybody believes that they are the good guy. And how the trick of the thing is seeing that, from one angle or another, we all actually are.

  “Well, that’s a hundred or so fewer families that’ll grow up hating you,” I say to Zoë as I take her into the kitchen to get dinner started.

  19

  In 2009, when I’m twenty-eight and Zoë is not yet quite one, we return to Washington so that Dean can undergo an advanced surveillance detection course, the same one I completed while he was in Afghanistan. I have lunch with my old boss Jon in the HQS courtyard beside a giant metal sculpture covered in encrypted code. He tells me about an argument his team is having with a Middle Eastern government. “They’re offering us all this shit we don’t need. But they won’t do the one thing we do need until we give them something else,” he says.

  “So why don’t you give it to them?” I ask.

  “ ’Cause we don’t have it, smart-ass! But we’re not gonna fuckin’ tell them that. They think our coverage out there is way better than it is. If they knew we were this weak, they’d crush us. Or just fucking ignore us.”

  I laugh. “So you’re pissed they’re not offering you the one thing you need even though you’ve told them you already have it.”

  He punches me in the arm. “You sound like my marriage counselor.”

  Later, he texts me to meet him for a drink. “Swami G!” he calls out when I arrive. “Took your advice and told them what we wanted.”

  I laugh because I can tell from his cranky gratitude that it turned out okay. “And…?”

  He drops a shot into his Guinness, takes a swig, and says, “And they gave it to us.”

  I signal the bartender for a drink and give Jon a smile that says, “Imagine that!”

  He laughs, but there’s a sadness in it. “Too bad we weren’t channeling all this ‘Confucius say’ shit before the whole goddamned thing got started. Could have saved Tim some work.”

  Tim’s the guy who carves stars on the wall.

  I walk home and find Dean asleep in prep for early morning surveillance training. Zoë is sleeping soundly on the blanket Dean brought back from Afghanistan. I walk past all the surveillance maps spread across the desk and the floor. Trace the intricate patterns of skillful paranoia marked with the instructor’s pen. Tidy the hats and wigs and shirts piled by the door to alternate as light disguises. Turn the extra dead bolt. And stand for a minute on the inside of this fortress of professional pretend, feeling less safe than I had outside the door.

  When I hear Zoë stir, I wrap her up in the Afghan blanket, unlock the locks, and take her back out under the stars. “There is the String of Pearls,” I tell her, as she falls back to sleep. And in the cricket-filled night, I smile to Mahmoud, half a world away. Hear his words, from years ago: “We’re not so different as we pretend to be, you know.”

  * * *

  —

  After the murk-filled skies of Shanghai, the Virginia mornings taste clean. The American flags that flutter from buildings on my way to Langley remind me this country is still in motion; it’s a work in progress, this experiment in government of and by and for the people. We don’t always get it right. But after living under a government that censors the Internet and imprisons families for going to church, I swell with gratitude that we keep striving, drawing ever closer in our asymptote to freedom.

  My brother Ben comes to visit, and we walk and talk in the same streets we used to roam as children. He’s found his calling providing end-of-life care at a hospice, holding vigil at the bedsides of the dying in their final days of life.

  “What do you say to them?” I ask him.

  “I tell them to think of me as a big wooden chest they can put all their stories in,” he says. “So they know their stories will be preserved when they are gone.” After the teasing of his youth, his tenderness makes me marvel.

  “Thank you for being my big brother,” I say, as we pass the patches of mulberry leaves we used to pick to feed his silkworms.

  My sisters are growing into dynamos of community care all their own. Both are still in school—Antonia to become an early childhood educator, and Catherine a peer counselor. I am in awe of my dazzling mother, who painted our world with color and inspired each of us to, in our own way, make our communities heathier, happier, safer, smarter.

  Even my father visits from time to time, full of tales about his adventures building out the developing world’s electrical grids, ensuring light where once there was none. It’s taken a long time to see him as my dad again, after he left our mom so injured and us kids to pick up the pieces. But time has passed and the grayscale of adulthood has replaced the black-and-white judgments of my youth. Mom is happier now, and in seeing her laugh again, I begin to forgive my dad, begin to let myself love him fully for the first time in years.

  It’s cathartic, to be back among family, makes me aware of how much I’ve changed since I first applied to the Agency in that post-9/11 haze of oversimplification and fear. I begin to metabolize the lessons I’ve learned in the field, realize more fully that peacemaking requires listening, that vulnerability is a component of strength. I think of Emmett’s kung fu and the sticker in the Karachi taxicab. “Remember, the other person is you.”

  As operations ramp back up, Dean senses the shift in me, bristles at my quiet mention that a situation might be more complicated than it seems. Drone killings and enhanced interrogation become subjects of dread on the operations we plan in tandem. Each time I opt for a different choice, he takes it personally, a critique of his tradecraft, a rebuttal to his way of life, an abandonment of him. I find that building trust simply works better than exerting force. Detention simply works better than assassination. They are pragmatic decisions, the fastest, cheapest, most reliable way to save lives and prevent attacks. But Dean hears them as a condemnation of the moonless nights he spent in Afghanistan, firing at moving shapes to prevent them from firing at him. He takes it as judgment, for inflicting pain, for fighting death with death.

  He begins to feel he’s lost his only ally, the girl who wrote him love letters when he was deployed to a world of fear. It makes him anger easily, makes him hit things—first dashboards and tables, then cupboards and walls. Never Zoë and never me. But the angrier he gets, the more things he breaks. One day he puts his fist through plaster, then disappears, then returns crying, apologizing, curls up on the floor, in the fetal position and in pain. I lie behind him, fit my body to his like a spoon, reliving the past together on the cold, hard ground. I desperately want to make it better. But it feels like the only thing I can say is nothing at all. We reacquaint ourselves with silence. Talk only to our baby girl. And in both our cases, I think, though separately, to God.

  One day I make us tea in mugs my mother bought us from a camping store. Big and comfy and rustic, with country glazing. One says “Love” and the other “Peace.” But the letters are subtle, the same color as the mugs themselves, and I don’t notice that I’ve given Dean the mug that says “Peace” until he throws it at the wall. The cup smashes. The tea splatters, then drips down to the floor. He picks Zoë up from her high chair, looks into her face, and says, “Your mother’s a cunt, you
know that?”

  She’s too young to understand the word. And I’m too old not to hear the pain behind it. I shouldn’t have given him that mug, should have realized it might come across as criticism of all that he’s sacrificed, all that he’s done. In that moment, we understand that we don’t know how to fix each other. I hold my arms out to him, silently asking for our daughter. He gives her to me, already apologizing with his eyes. I’m crying. So is he. We hold each other’s gaze for a minute, allowing ourselves to be seen.

  Then he gives me a nod. And I leave.

  * * *

  —

  When Dean next deploys, I don’t go with him. It takes time to dissolve an Agency marriage, but it feels final as soon as his plane pulls away from the private air terminal; he’s on his way back to the mountains of Afghanistan, returning to the fight on behalf of his country and his principles and our daughter. I think of all that’s happened since we first met in that gazebo at the Farm. Day by day, the responsibility of lives in our hands has aged us, the trauma of knowing the wrong choice may mean death—our own or someone else’s. I wonder what our relationship might have been in the normal world, without the sacrifices that first drew us closer and then tugged us apart. We haven’t always agreed on the best way to end this war, but we’ve given dearly, given separately and together, to make the killing stop.

  I sit in the front seat of my old Jeep and watch from the end of the runway, Zoë asleep on my shoulder, as the metal tube containing her dad takes to the air. In that moment, I know he would do anything to protect us, know how lucky our daughter is to have the father that she does. I watch as the plane grows smaller, watch until it disappears completely and the sky is still. We’re alone except for a bird, moving about in the tree beside the car. I have the same feeling I had beside the lake after the siren sounded at the end of our time at the Farm—the feeling of glimpsing a theater’s bare stage between one play and the next. The stage is unalterable. But what we players do on it—our story lines, our conflicts, our drama—“Well, that’s on us, huh?” I ask my sleeping daughter as I fasten her into the car seat to head for home.