by James Grady
We dance/staggered upstairs. Tossed our shoulder bags towards the rumpled bed.
Trembling, not daring to touch her, scare her away, I floated in time.
Derya dropped her gaze. Unbuttoned her soaked blue blouse. Two buttons from the top she pulled it over her head. A tan bra paled against honey skin. Her right arm disappeared behind her back. The bra obeyed gravity.
Her breasts were angel tears.
And she pressed my hands on her. Filled my grip with her secrets. Arched her back into my grasp on her soft flesh, her nipples swelling. I pushed her against the wall. Covered her with kisses. She shoved her pants down, used one foot to push them off. My hands tore from her breasts, threw away my shirt, my soaked shoes kicked off. Derya shook as she unbuckled my belt, naked, I danced with her to the bed.
We were truly there as I kissed her mouth a million times, circled her breast with my lips and sucked her velvet nub—she cried out/her hips bucked against me and she moaned “Now!” but I kissed her stomach, her navel that fed her from the last world to this. The room perfumed salty sea and musk. Her skin tasted like its warm honey color. Fingers plowed my hair and she arched her hips for me to peel off her panties. Kissed the inside of her thigh, opened my mouth to her warm sea slickness and set free my tongue.
She cried out, yelled in Turkish, panted my name. Twisted away, pulled me up. Found her bag and condoms Shabana’d given her and we did that, it was part of it, not awkward. Kissing, my hands molding her breasts, cupping her wet half moon as she alligatored her legs, pushed me flat on the bed, straddled me and guided me in. Back and forth, my hands on her back, cupping her hips, cinnamon hair covering me like willow branches as she burned my face with kisses rubbing her hips back-forth. Her hair flipped through the air as she rose up/down, her hips slamming up/down on me, couldn’t keep my hands off her breasts and she pressed my hand over her heart side squeezed her nipple with my flesh and came before me.
Panting. Coming back from then to there. She knelt astraddle me, hair across my face, her hot breath against the side of my neck. Rain pattered on the skylight. Her sweat dripped on my skin while she cradled me close, held me in as long as we could.
Laying face to face, she stroked my cheek.
Said: “I’m glad nobody was home.”
“I’m home.”
Her finger pressed against my lips. “Such words need their right moment.”
Those blue eyes glistened. “Nothing about us must be wrong.”
Her mouth wet the ribs above my heart and sealed my fate.
But we snuggled. She said: “Do you like your Christmas presents?”
I lifted the snow globe out of my bag on the floor. Laid back, set the globe on my chest not far from her chin. We watched the shaken snow settle on the tiny, trapped city.
“I love my Christmas presents.” True and safe. “And I love your name: Derya.”
“It means ocean. The sea.”
“Yes.”
She pressed her cheek against me and listened to my heartbeat.
“What do your parents think about this?” said Derya. “I mean, not this…”
We laughed and the room breathed easier.
“…But you. The martial arts thing: I understand transcending, making sometimes more, sometimes less of what other people see. And the poetry. You not being… doing what all Americans are supposed to do, get a job, marry some blonde.”
“Blondes are over-rated.”
She poked me. “You better say that! But what do your parents think of—”
“They’re dead. Dad’s heart attack and cancer for Mom. The American plagues.”
“I’m sorry!”
I kissed her head. “Dad first. Year later, I flew back for another coffin sinking into the ground. No sisters, no brother. But my folks got to see… what you see.”
“So what did they think?”
“That I was crazy.”
Laughter echoed through the room’s lengthening shadows. Rain on the skylight.
“I’ve always been… different,” I told her. “Maybe I’ve always been crazy.”
“Stay that way.”
“OK.” I kissed her head again.
“My parents live in Ankara,” she said. “Two sisters, a brother, all love me.”
“Of course they do.”
“But they worry. Not about me, about the world, out here, so far from home…
I switched on the lamp by the bed and she rose up like a lion in its glow.
“This place,” she said, looking around. “Your friend…”
“He’ll be gone for weeks.”
“So it’s a safe house.”
Accident! Just her English making a figure of speech! Not spy craft lingo!
“We’re safe here,” I said. “It’s like…”
“Our place.”
She kissed me. Held the kiss, opened her mouth to deepen it, her leg brushing up across my loins. I reached down and guided her thigh up, pulled her on me.
Her whisper turned husky as I felt her nipple stiffen. “No.”
Yes, we did the condom thing again.
She said: “Cover me!”
And I did. My left arm on the mattress took my weight, my right hand caressed her breasts as I kissed her, whispered her name. Her legs opened to scissor me, her heels curled in above my hips as I thrust myself over and over again deep into the heart of her.
We had five days for our lie.
Five days. Teaching, hammering, squeezing hands when we passed in the hall. Laughing. Surveillance photos taken by the Malaysian police Special Branch showed me standing on a street corner, alone but unable to contain my grin.
Derya urged me to practice on the school roof: ‘You can’t ignore who you are.’ She abhorred violence, yet made me show her the Yang short form of T’ai Chi I had supposedly come to Malaysia to study, plus gung fu, differences between Japanese karate and Korean Tae Kwon Do. I showed her how to turn a bad guy’s jab into his broken arm, how an open hand slap delivered with no arm muscle could give him a concussion, how one false step dropped him with a foot sweep.
One false step and down you fall.
That roof was where Julia took the picture of Derya, her hair floating in thick air.
One night we spent in the apartment she shared with Shabana and Julia. The romantic novelty of being oh so quiet vanished long before dawn.
One night we spent at “my” condo, a bus ride I took every day—officially to “check my host’s mail,” truly to stall Langley’s insistent e-mail demands for progress.
The other three nights we lived at our nearer-to-work place. The safe house. No desire to be anywhere but there with each other, with the billion things to talk about, the skylight and the bed. Nights of cinnamon and Tupelo honey.
The sixth day I was working in the shed on the roof when my cell phone buzzed.
Chinese spoke in my ear: “Wei! Wang hsien sheng yao hong yu chi se ma?”
“I’m sorry,” I said, English signaling WILCO. “Wrong number.”
Thumbed my cell phone off. What any snoop overheard didn’t matter. Wang was a place, not a man, and it wasn’t paint he wanted. The color was hong: red.
I stored my work, ran downstairs, found Derya and Julia drafting a grant proposal.
“I’ve got to go,” I told them. “Might not be back today.”
Derya hurried with me as I headed down the hall to the door.
I told her: “Tonight, go to our place. You know the door code. Wait for me.”
“Is everything OK?”
I squeezed her hand.
Two blocks away I found a killer bee driver willing to earn a huge fee from a crazy American tourist who just had to get to the giant art deco Central Market near Chinatown, probably to meet some tall American woman. I clung to the back of that
rackety bike zipping through traffic and knew I was racing into a nightmare.
That indigo night, clouds covered the stars. Mist floated above the puddles on roads and sidewalks. I stood in the shadows across the street from the TV FIX store. Lights glowed in that safe house. One on the first floor, two in the upstairs floor behind pulled curtains. My whole life waited in there.
Why couldn’t I have run away. Why did I walk across that street.
The store’s heavy door clicked closed and locked behind me.
Like a child, Derya’s head popped around the edge of the rickety stairs. She hurried to me, her blue shirt untucked from her black slacks, her feet bare.
“I was worried about you!” She kissed me.
I let her lead us up to our loft.
“You left and then I realized you’d gone with empty hands,” she said. “Didn’t take your shoulder bag, your rain jacket, and—I’m sorry, I know I shouldn’t have, but…”
She gestured the pile of my gear on the bed.
“But carrying it here, I stuck your jacket in your bag, and when I got here, I pulled it out to hang it up and when I did, this fell out.”
Derya held the scrap of paper that I’d salvaged. Most of the lines I’d scrawled were crossed out. We both knew the surviving words by heart.
Pulse
I only think of you
in light from the sun or stars
or whenever I breathe.
“It’s beautiful,” she whispered. Blushed and tried to be businesslike: “We have to get you a notebook to write in, to work, you can carry it—”
“I don’t write poems anymore.”
“I know, it’s a haiku, yes? It’s so—”
My hand cupped her mouth and at first, her blue eyes showed no fear. “Shhh.”
Her kiss wet my palm. Still I trapped her words. Stared into her blue eyes so I would never forget how they looked and looked at me before.
“We never get to pick our time,” I told her. “We only get to pick what we do.”
A wrinkle lined her brow. But she didn’t back away. Then.
“Underneath all of this, two things are stone true: I love you.”
Derya flowed into my hand, her eyes misted and as sure as T’ai Chi taught me to sense an opponent’s center, I felt her open and let go with joy.
“And I’m a spy for the American CIA.”
My hand fell away as her smile melted, her brow scarred, her eyes narrowed to make sense of what they couldn’t see.
“What?”
“I spy for the CIA. Since I dropped out of grad school. Out here, I wanted to come anyway, knew Mandarin, been doing martial arts since I was 7, so it gave me a reason to be here, drift and mix with locals and… And do what I could do. I’m deep cover. Embassies, Chiefs of Station, they only know I’m around. I’ve been all over Asia. The Agency calls me a NOC—Non-Official Cover. Alley slang calls me a Trouble Boy or a Hotshot. I—”
“You’re a spy?” She stepped back.
I was between her and the stairs. Nodded yes.
She whispered: “This isn’t a joke.”
“None of this is a joke.”
Her face flushed, paled, hardened. “Me! Us! Is all this you being a spy?”
“Wasn’t supposed to be like this! Loving you wasn’t supposed to happen.”
“Oh, so good to know you don’t fuck people for a living!”
She stormed towards the stairs, the hell with her shoes, she was going, running to where she knew where she was. I flowed ahead of her. Blocked her exit.
Saw fear crowd betrayal from her eyes.
“Derya, I’ll tell you whatever you want to know,” I said, again breaking all the rules. “But first let me tell you what you need to know.”
I moved a chair close to the stairs. Nodded for her to take it. Wary of telling me no, she sat on its hardness. I sat on the bed. The illusion was that she could make it down the stairs and out the door before I reached her. In trust, every illusion matters.
“What I’m going to tell you sounds like a bad movie, but it’s true. There’s an international terrorist organization called al Qaeda. Muslim fundamentalists but they’re not about Islam or reflecting its true heart. They’re about earthly power. Al Qaeda’s headed by a rich Saudi Arabian named Osama bin Laden. Now he’s in Afghanistan with the Taliban who have turned that country into a kind of concentration camp. No freedoms. No laws outside of what ambitious clerics proclaim. Women locked up. Forced to wear burkas, treated like… water buffalo: good for work and breeding only. Raped and beaten by any man with clerical clout.”
“That’s what they want for our whole world. They claim a divine right, just like kings and dictators from the Crusades to the Inquisition to Nazis or Communism. Their way or death. In 1998, Bin Laden declared war on all Americans, no such thing as noncombatants. Al Qaeda blew up our embassies in Kenya and Tanzania. President Clinton counter-attacked with cruise missiles, just missed nailing Bin Laden.”
“Al Qaeda is why I’m in Malaysia.”
My head fell into my hands. I looked up and hoped she saw the truth in my eyes.
“I love you. I wasn’t supposed to, but I have since… Since I saw you laugh.”
“What do you want? I can’t help your America CIA—you’ve got such clean hands! I know about fake Muslims who are terrorists and I know about Chile, the Congo, Vietnam and… I can’t help you.”
“Or,” she said, groping for a way out. “Did you have to tell me this because you do love me and because if we’re not hon-est with—”
“The Malay Special Branch knows most of what goes on. When we press them, when we ask the right questions… They helped us put together that… You’re my access.”
“To what?”
So I told her.
“No,” Derya said twenty minutes later. “I won’t let you use me. I won’t let you do that to her. I won’t turn her over to you.”
“What’s your other choice? Events have pulled the trigger. I can’t back down. I’ll have to come at this another way. That means trouble and pain. You said it: sometimes you have to push it. Everybody chooses sides by what they do. Lots of people get away without doing much. Not us. If we don’t do this, how many innocent people will die or be enslaved by pious killers with their boxes?”
Took me an hour, but finally she slumped in her chair. Nodded yes.
But said: “I won’t let you hurt her.”
“Nobody gets hurt. Nobody’ll even know what happened. That’s a successful Op.”
She closed her eyes. When they opened, I saw tears. That she banished.
“What then?” Her voice jabbed like a sword.
“Then it’s over, and I’m over. Done. Quit.”
“Why? You’ll be a CIA star.”
“Only reason I’m here, doing this… I want a world with a chance for us.”
“So you say.”
That last night of the Twentieth Century left us in the dark with our clothes on.
Morning, January 3, 2000. I hid in the school shed. Sweat trickled down my sides.
Footsteps, coming closer outside on the roof.
Derya led in a woman sacked by a black burka.
I closed the door behind them.
The burka’s hands clutched her heart. Eyes widened in the slit of her veil.
“We’re trapped,” I said.
Derya said: “No, this is just—”
“Forget Miss Samadi,” I told her Malaysian student. “She’s out of this now.”
I rattled off the student’s name, her husband, their home address, their tile shop, the name of the madrasas their son had transferred to from a public school.
Fear pushed her down in the chair. In a defiant rebellion to keep some individuality, she wore curled toed acceptably-Arabic shoes, green sho
es.
Derya paced in the shadows. With Derya, the big picture mattered.
For this woman, life had been ripped down to the personal.
“The Special Branch knows you’re al Qaeda.”
“No!”
“A month ago, you suddenly started wearing a burka. Special Branch watched you, your home, your business selling handmade tiles all over the world. They knew your husband’s cousin is al Qaeda. Now al Qaeda’s taken you over. Threatened you, yes?”
She looked away.
“Special Branch told us. The American police. They want to arrest you and your husband. They don’t care if you’re innocent. We can stop them. Save you. If.”
“Please!” she said. “Have mercy!”
“Al Qaeda operatives from all over the world are coming here to Kuala Lumpur in the next few days. For a secret meeting.”
“I’m just a woman! My husband is like a prisoner! If we say no to them…”
“They’ll kill your whole family.”
She surrendered to the dread crushing her. Sobbed.
“We Americans are your way out. You’re stuck between the Special Branch and al Qaeda. One of them will destroy you. Unless we pull you free.”
“Only Allah can save us.”
“Perhaps Allah sent us.”
Derya turned away with disgust.
“You enrolled here to learn about computers. You own a high speed Internet system. Bypass the government monitors. Al Qaeda killers use Internet cafés, but they know that’s not secure. Their local thugs have been coming into your shop. Going upstairs. All that’s up there is your fast computer. That’s where the foreign killers will go. We need to know what they do on your computer.”
“I won’t know anything!”
My hand opened to reveal three devices each smaller than my thumb.
“After they’ve used the machine… These are data keys. Not like you can buy. Plug one into your machine. They download e-mail, website histories, documents.”
I snapped a key in thirds.
“Geographic programming. This tiny rectangular chunk holds data. It’s the part that matters. Operating codes are on different sections. After you break the key, without our machine, no one can use it to know what you’ve done.”
