Skinner

by Huston, Charlie

  Opening her eyes.

  repeat and reinforce

  IT WAS HAVEN who first led Terrence to Skinner, directing his attention to a handful of scholarly articles, and more than one sensationalist account of the story in the pages of national news magazines. Back issues, old news, and forgotten. But Terrence had been unable to keep himself from wondering what had happened to the so-called Box Boy. The experiment might never have been completed, but he was fascinated by the idea that a child raised in such circumstances could grow into anything resembling the functioning and socialized human being that Haven claimed to have seen. If he had that capacity in him, what else might he be capable of? The vast territory of human potential, and the talents it harbored on its furthest shores, had forever been one of Terrence’s obsessions.

  The obsession predated the awful night when his only child had been stillborn, but Terrence would never have denied that there was a connection between that personal tragedy and his increasing preoccupation with the eccentrically gifted individuals he recruited so avidly.

  His initial approach had been quite open; he had introduced himself, not inaccurately, as a CIA recruiter at a jobs fair on the MIT campus where Skinner was preparing to graduate after four years of middling academic success (by MIT standards) in the linguistics department, and tremendous athletic achievements (by MIT standards) rowing heavyweight crew and running cross-country. There had been nothing unusual in the initiation. What linguistics major at MIT did not expect to attract some interest from at least one organ of national intelligence? Indeed, following Skinner’s acquiescence to several followup interviews, events had proceeded with such irritating predictability that Terrence had pigeonholed him. Analyst, Terrence had thought. Without bothering to Myers-Briggs the kid, he could see the results of the personality test: ISTJ. Introverted with sensing, thinking, and judging. Not the unusual talent he’d been looking for, but a potential resource nonetheless. So the recruitment followed its course, Terrence preparing to pass Skinner off to someone, anyone, please, a bit further down the food chain, when they were mugged.

  He’d have liked to take responsibility for the mugging, claim that it was a skill assessment that he’d engineered, but it was simply improbable fate manifesting in the shape of a hoodie-wearing roughneck up from Mattapan to do a loop of the darker side streets around Mass. Ave. and Western. Terrence’s own reaction to having someone demand money from him on an empty block of Pearl Street under the looming bulk of the Cambridge Public Library was to reach for his wallet. His hand went into his pocket, his fingers closing on the worn leather of the billfold that he’d acquired at Yale, but before he could begin to pull it out, Skinner had stepped forward and kicked the hoodie in his left shin. The black kid’s foot jumped off the ground, the hands in his pockets started to come out. Skinner pushed him, both hands, a shove with too much weight behind it. Hoodie went down on his back, Skinner stumbling forward, unbalanced. On the ground, winded, acting on instinct, the hoodie kicked Skinner’s legs. The heel of one of his Nikes hammered the inside of Skinner’s right knee, and down he came, on top of the hoodie. There was a flurry of limbs, unpracticed grappling, blows delivered in close quarters, lacking force. Skinner stayed on top, refused to be jarred loose, hugging the robber as much as trying to restrain him. There was very little noise; grunts, two fully clothed bodies on the pavement. Their shapes separated a bit, Skinner lifted his upper body, sat on the other man’s chest, weight forward, knees planted in the inner hollows of elbows, pinning the hoodie’s arms to the ground.

  Hoodie talking.

  “Uncle, motherfucker. You got me. Be cool. Just let me go. No one hurt. Just let me go.”

  Skinner grabbed the edges of the robber’s sweatshirt hood, pulled it closed over the robber’s face, lifted the robber’s head from the ground, and slammed it down against the sidewalk. A slightly muffled scream, pain and outrage.

  “Uncle, motherfucker!”

  Skinner raised the head and slammed again.

  Another scream, a moan, no words.

  Skinner raised the head, resettled his weight, and slammed harder.

  No scream, no movement.

  Skinner lifted the head once more. Waited. Still no movement. He slammed it once more into the pavement and let go of the hood. Rising, favoring the knee where he’d been kicked, he stepped clear of the motionless, unsuccessful thief. His breathing was deep, rapid, but even. The breathing of a powerful endurance athlete following strenuous exercise.

  Terrence looked at the man on the ground, trying to see if he was also breathing. He bent toward the man, still thinking of him as a man rather than a body.

  “This was arguably self-defense.”

  Skinner tilted his head to the side.

  “Does that matter?”

  Terrence touched the man’s chest with the back of his hand and reclassified him. Body. Without raising his face, Terrence straightened, stepped close to Skinner, and pushed him into the shadows gathered inside the entrance to the library’s parking garage.

  In the shadows, he lifted his face and looked up at the windows on the building opposite.

  “It matters if anyone is watching us.”

  Skinner was still looking at the man on the ground.

  “No one is watching us, Terrence. I know when I’m being watched.”

  Looking at him, Terrence knew it to be so. His first twelve years spent in a box, observed half his life. How could Skinner not know when he was being watched? How could he not be skilled in appearances? How could he not know just what was expected of him and how to behave in order to suit his exterior to that expectation? And with that realization Terrence knew also that Skinner was aware that his past was no secret here, that their meeting was no coincidence. And he became afraid.

  He looked at the body.

  “You should have given him your money.”

  Skinner stopped flexing his hands.

  “No. He could have done anything. The safest thing was to make sure he couldn’t hurt us. When he couldn’t move anymore it was safe.”

  Terrence looked up from the body.

  “Do you want to call the police, tell them what happened?”

  Skinner’s eyes moved over the body.

  “No.”

  He looked at Terrence.

  “I don’t want to live in a box again.”

  Terrence hooked his elbow.

  “We need to talk.”

  Later, in a Mass. Ave. bar that Terrence insisted they go into, mixing with the students, a crowd that could easily confuse exact times of arrival and departure, they sat across from one another in a wood-benched booth, table scarred with decades of carved initials, varnished year after year. Turning a double rocks glass of Black Label with his index finger and thumb, Terrence read his protégé’s future in the half-melted ice floating in the whiskey.

  “Your life will be different now. No matter what you do. How you live. Where you go. Everything will be different now. You can’t change what you just did, can’t take it back, and that will change you.”

  Skinner touched the side of his pint glass of lager.

  “We are what we do. If you want to change, you have to work at it. Change what you do. You have to repeat and reinforce. Over and over. Do the same thing again and again. Until it is you.”

  He took a sip from his glass.

  “Doing something once doesn’t change you. That’s just a start.”

  Terrence sat across from him in the bar, dozens of people packed close, jarring their table as they edged by toward the toilets.

  “Do you want to change?”

  Skinner ran his fingertip over the plus sign carved between two sets of initials on the surface of the table.

  “Being a person.”

  He looked inside his glass.

  “Being a person is hard.”

  He looked up.

  “Maybe I could be something else. Something I’m good at.”

  Terrence drank his whiskey.

&nb
sp; Late that night, in the furnished apartment he rented during his marriage’s final deterioration, a long erosion that had begun the night he and Dorothy had watched their mercifully unnamed dead son wrapped in a small sheet and taken away from them, he would get out of bed and run to the bathroom to vomit up the alcohol. Then stay there in the harsh light of the tiny tiled chamber, afraid to return to his bedroom, where, for all he knew, Skinner was standing in plain view, willfully invisible to watching eyes.

  Skinner is sitting at the coffee bar in the Terminal One concourse of the Cologne airport. The two Pakistani women behind the counter seem never to stop polishing the surfaces and appliances of the bar, rags whisking away rings of condensation that accumulate at the bases of cold glasses of Coke, or the dark speckles of espresso that splash when cubes of sugar are dropped into tiny white cups. They speak flawless Bavarian-accented German. Educated German. Terrence orders a lemonade and looks for objects that might kill him. There are many glasses at hand. A tower of them on the other side of the counter. The bar itself is round, covered in brushed stainless steel, 360 degrees of blunt object. None of the flatware is at all sharp, but the fat end of a butter knife’s handle can be forced through the jelly of an eye. Terrence stops his catalogue. There is no point. Senseless Death chooses targets haphazardly; Skinner does not.

  One of the Pakistani women wipes the bar in front of him and places a napkin and, upon it, a sweating glass. He wraps his hand around the glass, gets up, and walks toward Skinner, half the circumference of the round bar to be traveled. Terrence carries his drink in one hand, fingers of his other hand gliding on the smooth edge of the bar, tracing the half circle.

  Am I doing this?

  Terrence stops walking, one empty stool between himself and the man he’s come to find. The years have weathered Skinner, but rather than making him more distinctive, they have etched him with a quality of ambiguity. His clothes have style dictated by a men’s magazine rather than any real panache. Every garment will have the label of an upscale franchised brand. A businessman of means, unmarried, mindful of his appearance, an experienced traveler with a sturdy, tightly packed roll-on. A common sight in any international airport and on any flight. Camouflage for the man who exists in transit. He’s drinking coffee, American, some kind of strudel on a small plate at his elbow, laptop, generic black, businessy, a news site open in the browser. Terrence notes how far Skinner’s hand is from the three-tined fork resting half off the strudel plate, and sits on the stool next to him, fingers tight on the cold glass of lemonade.

  Skinner drags his finger down the trackpad of his laptop.

  “We never had a chance to talk about Montmartre.”

  And there it is, cradle of original sin, the Montmartre Incident. They should have died. Someone should have died. Either Skinner or all the rest of them. The fact that only Lentz and the asset died is one of the greatest testaments to the excellence of Terrence’s gift for operational projections. Though no one knows that to be the case, and Montmartre was, ostensibly, his downfall.

  He raises an eyebrow.

  “Is Montmartre still relevant? Will it have to be dealt with?”

  Skinner doesn’t need to ponder this, having come to a decision about his response to Montmartre seven years ago.

  “I’m curious about details. Have you seen it, the cemetery?”

  Terrence recalls being young, a brief window of his life that closed abruptly, almost immediately, after he was himself recruited. Twenty-one, Paris, the Latin Quarter, a girl, naturally, snapping a lock closed on the Pont des Arts, their names scratched into its surface with his penknife, the key tossed into the Seine. Sex in, honestly, a garret.

  “I saw it when I did my student tour.”

  “There’s a headstone. ‘Reistroff Guenard Spy.’”

  “Really?”

  Skinner smiles, lifting the scar on his chin.

  “The comma is irresistible. Reistroff Guenard, spy.”

  Terrence sips his lemonade, too sweet by more than half.

  “Was he?”

  “I have no idea. But the sound of it.”

  “Eric Ambler.”

  For the first time Skinner turns his face from his computer and looks directly at Terrence. A look that asks if Terrence is pulling his leg in some way.

  Terrence waits.

  Skinner looks back at his screen.

  “Yes, that’s what I thought. Pure Ambler. It occurred to me a little after I’d seen the headstone.”

  Terrence rotates his drink, fingers smearing droplets of cold sweat on the side of the glass.

  “It was a marker, the headstone?”

  “Yes.”

  Skinner, doing a hushed voice, mysterious.

  “Find the headstone. One hundred meters down the avenue.”

  “As if you were working for Balkans.”

  “Or Turks.”

  Terrence raises a hand.

  “Don’t exaggerate.”

  Skinner raises his own hand.

  “Never that.”

  He lowers the hand.

  “The mausoleum.”

  Terrence studies his lemonade.

  “Mausoleum.”

  “There was a mausoleum.”

  “It’s a cemetery.”

  “The asset was in a mausoleum.”

  Terrence plucks a napkin from the tray on the service side of the bar.

  “Christ.”

  Skinner looks at him again, a direct look, landing, staying on him.

  “The name. Ask me.”

  Terrence kneads the napkin.

  “What was the name on the mausoleum?”

  “Lazarous. Family Lazarous.”

  And he looks back at his screen.

  “That was over the top, don’t you think?”

  Terrence looks up into the web of slender girders and cables that seem too light to support the roof of the terminal.

  “I never heard the details.”

  “My asset was killed. Yes. That was the salient detail. Yes.”

  Terrence pats the surface of the counter with the palm of his hand, shrugs, assets are what they are. There to be killed or kidnapped or stolen or sabotaged or blackmailed or turned or blown up or reverse-engineered or menaced or tortured. Their value wrung from them in whatever way is deemed most expedient to the circumstances.

  Skinner is scrolling down a long page of text, blurred by speed.

  “Why kill my asset first? I was the primary target. Throwing a dead body at my feet was clumsy. It couldn’t have been by accident. Did you recruit Lentz?”

  Terrence picks up the bit of paper wrapper that the Pakistani barmaid had left over the tip of his straw. He balls the paper between his fingertips and drops it, as if dropping the final word on the topic at hand.

  “It was a byzantine op. The snake eating its own tail. There are always inefficiencies when they try to kill one of their own.”

  Skinner considers this, clicks open a new tab on his screen.

  “One of their own. Was I that?”

  Terrence remembers the young man in the hooded sweatshirt, Skinner on his chest, pounding his head into the pavement, the expression on his face, that of a man trying to open the stubborn lid of jar.

  “You were one of mine. Whatever that meant.”

  “But Kestrel was no longer yours.”

  Terrence uses his straw to stir the cubes of ice floating in his glass.

  “On paper it was, but Cross had made his move, yes. The board had delivered the vote of no confidence. I was peripheral.”

  “Ignorant of the op until it was too late.”

  Terrence stops playing with his ice.

  Am I doing this?

  “I didn’t say that.”

  Skinner looks at his pastry, lifts his fork.

  “Ah.”

  “It was a protocol.”

  Skinner impales a wedge of strudel.

  “A protocol.”

  “It looked for indications of alienation. Political. Social
. Emotional.”

  Skinner contemplates the food on his fork.

  “An algorithm? Behavioral?”

  “Yes. It looked for emerging complexities in the behavior of a subset of field personnel. If it found those complexities, it measured them. If they tipped into the red, it triggered a set of responses. Proactive. Unilateral. Preemptive. Someone hatched a protocol meant to ameliorate a certain kind of risk. But theoretical. Until it ended up in a corporate context. Their bottom-line minds. Risk-averse in an environment that is nothing but risk. They want it to be a business. Security for profit. They miss the point that security is an end in and of itself.”

  Skinner smears the bite of uneaten pastry off his fork and onto the small white plate.

  “A protocol.”

  Terrence tears a corner from the wet napkin under his glass.

  “Diagramming interconnections. Projecting probable emergent threat actors within a population of highly gifted but eccentric personnel. Proposing appropriately comprehensive responses based on elimination of any possible threats.”

  Skinner nods understanding, he sees how such a thing would make sense. Yes.

  “This was a white paper?”

  “Pure thinkology.”

  “But someone activated it.”

  Terrence feels a great tiredness descending over him. A weary blanket of too many time zones traveled. It is all so hard.

  Skinner pushes his plate away, food mauled but uneaten.

  “How long before Montmartre was the protocol activated?”

  Terrence looks at him, remembers him in MIT’s Stratton Student Center, blank, rudderless, happy enough to talk about the possibility of working for the CIA. Drawing everything he could out of Terrence before revealing anything of himself.

  “One week. Just after I was voted out, the protocol was activated.”

  “And my name popped up.”

  “An algorithm for measuring alienation. Your name was bound to appear.”

  “At the top of the list.”

  “I never saw a list. But yes.”