She wasn’t in our room when I got back at four fifty, after I’d driven up and down the Strip a dozen times, all the way from the Tropicana to the Golden Nugget in the old part of Vegas where casinos are less cartoonish, less coy about taking every cent you’re willing to gamble away. When I got back, furious and bereft, only twenty-five minutes remained before I was due on the set. I took a three-minute shower, washing off the film of sex from a few hours earlier, my skin gray in the mirror, my gut looking like a deflated punching bag as it sagged over my jeans before I pulled on a rumpled red shirt.
I tried not to look at myself, didn’t want to see my own face because I realized then that I was upset for the wrong reasons: I hadn’t lost her. She would come back. She would keep sneaking off and coming back until I kicked her out for good or else did something worse to her. I didn’t yet know what I was capable of. Most of us, either because we’re lucky or we’re cowards, never find out. She was too young for me, too certain that she deserved the things the women she admired most already had. She saw no difference between herself and them. She was no less beautiful and no less ambitious.
THE FUNCTIONARY
The men smoked in the room where they gathered to discuss the changes they would have to make, most involving strangers in places few of them had ever visited. Some of the older men smoked cigars, the younger ones cigarettes. They wore dark suits and sober ties, their shoes polished to a prosperous sheen, and many things were implied rather than said. This was how it had long been done, which Marcus Smith understood before becoming an aide to one of the members of the inner circle of smokers, though their duties were never precisely defined, just as the circle’s enemies were never given names—instead they were labeled and categorized, discussed as the islanders, the rebels, the dissidents. The men, Marcus assumed, found it easier to work with a concept; human individuals with discrete identities implied organic life, something tractable and hard to dismiss.
Marcus Smith was his professional alias, his real name unwieldy and foreign-sounding. He did not smoke, because the airborne grit of burning tobacco dried out his eyes and cauterized his nose; he was, however, taller and more cheaply dressed than most of the men in this private room, which was underground and could be reached only after keying in three numeric sequences, submitting to a palm scan, and passing a voice prompt. The authorization process had taken him five weeks to complete, and after the phone call arrived with the news of his clearance, he had felt a witless, animal pride—as if he were already deep into the work of helping to ensure that dissidents everywhere would soon find themselves submitting to a greater, more lethal power than their own.
The smokers’ work, and his own by extension, was dire and necessary, though he was not fearless and did not like fighting, whether it was wrestling or boxing or warfare. He preferred basketball to blood sports and the idea of a gun rather than one’s actual heft. After a month of access to the underground room—some of its meetings only forty minutes; others, fourteen hours—something he had not anticipated began to happen: images arrived unbidden in his head, along with questions and misgivings pornographic in their ability to make him sweat and salivate. They were problems that he knew he was being paid not to mention, each problem a link in a long chain, one telegraphed from year to year, from one cigar-smoking man to another. This chain, however, was never acknowledged by any of the men underground, all of whom seemed to live in large homes behind locked gates and to own magnificent wooden boats they did not know how to sail properly. They drank in great quantities too, except for the Undersecretary and the General who were religious men and grimly averted their eyes to the drinkers’ excesses and went home before eight most nights to their wives and small house pets and maids and landscaped gardens.
Most of the seasoned men wore their bellies like body armor. They were mighty, these corporeal badges of wealth and power and a long procession of rich meals, but Marcus’s boss, the Secretary, had not acquired an imposing belly. He was thin and taut-muscled, and despite the cigars ran five miles every morning, with or without a hangover, through the park that sprawled along the northern border of the capital. He liked Marcus to accompany him on Mondays and Thursdays and Marcus did so without argument because anything that the Secretary asked, he was required to execute without complaint. At his third and final interview with the Secretary’s staff, six months before he was allowed access to the underground room, it became clear that he would have to be ready to serve his superiors in any capacity they declared necessary, for the greater good, obviously, not for them specifically! This was slavery, Marcus realized after he had accepted the Secretary’s offer. Nonetheless, the dark possibilities of this slavishness had titillated him. He would also earn twice what he had earned at his last job as a junior speechwriter for a senator who was an old law school friend of the Secretary’s. The senator had liked Marcus, had told him that he saw promise in his stoic bearing, his patriotism and work ethic. Was he willing to put his country’s needs before his own? Yes? Splendid!
The beginning of his own dissidence, as he later came to think of it, occurred in the underground room on the day when the General suggested that the women who had begun to turn up dead and dismembered on the edge of one of their main allies’ borders be blamed on pimps and drug dealers, not infidels, the last having long been his favorite label, as far as Marcus could tell from the newspaper blurbs he had read about the General for years before he was allowed into the underground room. These murdered women were not their responsibility, the General argued, despite their self-conferred role as the planet’s conscience.
“If we make it a religious issue, we’ll have to go after them,” said the General, who had the distracting habit of smoothing his eyebrows when emphasizing a point. “I don’t think I need to prove that to any of you. I also don’t think I need to tell you that if we wait long enough, those pimps and drug dealers will take care of their own needs.”
This last utterance was code for annihilation, as so many of the underground room’s phrases were: “address all contingencies,” “overcome obstacles,” “confront a foreign presence,” and, in a few of the more specialized cases, “meet and greet.” As Marcus soon realized, the underground room was a morgue, with the world’s dead hidden in words rather than on rolling metal planks concealed behind a stainless-steel wall.
How had he not known what he was getting into when he’d accepted the job with the Secretary? D., a trustworthy college friend, asked. D. was not in the same business as Marcus; he sold German luxury cars with other unhappy salesmen who did not appreciate his advanced degree in philosophy. He didn’t know for sure what Marcus did for a living, not anymore, but Marcus could see that his friend understood what his cryptic comments alluded to. D. recognized that men who met in secret rooms and later drank to excess were not usually upstanding citizens, despite the charitable donations, the pictures taken with orphans, and, of course, the impeccable suits.
“Those guys you work with don’t sleep much, I’ll bet,” said D. “There’s no way, unless they take pills. Or else that’s what all the gin martinis are for.”
“You can’t talk about this stuff with anyone else.”
D. looked at him. “Why would I? It’s not like we don’t already know how little those dead dark women matter to the rich white guys you work with.”
“I didn’t say they were dark.”
“You didn’t have to.”
“Let’s not talk about this anymore,” Marcus whispered. He was sure that he was being followed. All of the men from the underground room thought they were being followed. At least this was what the outgoing aide had whispered to him on the last day of his intensive training period. This paranoia had, according to the trainer-aide, become such a natural phenomenon among higher-level government officials that a Naval Academy psychiatrist had recently coined a term for it: the Shadow Syndrome.
“You brought it up,” said D.
The Secretary would have fired him, or else have him arr
ested, if he’d known about this security breach. Marcus had signed a confidentiality agreement on the same day he was offered the job—no unauthorized communication, written or oral, with any unauthorized personnel … an actionable offense … treason … imprisonment …
… death and dismemberment …
Something he had discovered after a few weeks of silent watchfulness in the underground room, of note-taking for the Secretary, notes that were destroyed soon after each meeting: there was almost no laughter in this private chamber. The jokes came later, at the bar, ones about women or scorned foreigners or rival politicians, especially those whose careers had ended in public disgrace.
“Just tell me one thing,” said D. “Do you have trouble sleeping too?”
“Not very often,” said Marcus, thinking the lie was necessary.
“When do you start traveling with this guy?”
“I’m not sure if I’ll have to.”
“You’d better hope not.”
Marcus hesitated. “What do you mean by that?”
“He’ll have you carrying his luggage and arranging his rendezvous with prostitutes. He’ll call them business contacts, but you’ll both know what that means.”
“You’re being ridiculous.”
“You’d never tell me if you did have to do those things, but you’d still know that I know.”
Marcus said nothing.
D. gave him a gloomy smile. “Come on, man. Can’t you tell when I’m teasing you?”
D. and his friendship, ailing since Marcus had started working for the Secretary, receded after this conversation. D. called a couple of days later, but Marcus did not call him back. He called a few more times before giving up. The dead women, however, were relentless, his constant companions, a mute audience to his frequent restless nights and the proceedings in the underground room. On the days when the Secretary did not have to go to the room, Marcus stayed with him in the office, with its smokeless air and pretty girls in tailored dresses, and read international affairs articles and op-ed pieces from fifteen newspapers that he culled and summarized for the Secretary.
Dead men turned up too, in dozens of cities local and foreign, but this was not as troubling. The women were more poignant, more possible—any one of them, if they had entered his life, might have become his lover, a girlfriend, perhaps even an exotic, grateful wife. Dead men were different because he did not worry that he could have loved them, and many times he found himself thinking that these dead guys were guilty, having done something stupid and criminal to bring about their premature deaths. The women, however, remained blameless. They were romantic, forsaken figures, tragic ghosts. He was too soft to be with the Secretary (a lifelong champion of firmness, of stiffness, ideally), something he was surprised hadn’t come through to him or anyone else after the innumerable questions in the two psychological profiles he had submitted to during the interview process, or during the meeting with the government shrinks, or the sleep lab observation, or the brain scan, the MRI, the stress tests.
In his eighth month with the Secretary, as D. had tauntingly predicted, a trip was planned: the Secretary ordered Marcus to accompany him on a fact-finding mission to the country of the dead women. The public was restive, tired of the unrelenting bad news, the sexual violence an abstraction but still, somehow, terrifying. No one wanted to hear about innocent victims, often naked, sometimes missing their legs or arms or heads. Fact-finding missions for the Secretary and his associates were high theater, orchestrated for the international media and would-be campaign donors. Nonetheless, Marcus could not see himself leaving the Secretary’s office, even if he was no longer dazzled by the spectacle of the household names who smoked and coughed together far below the capital’s congested streets. He was too afraid to quit; he had no idea where he would go if he did. No one would want him. He would be ruined, as tainted as a raped woman in a country where victims were blamed for the crimes they suffered.
The Secretary would be accompanied to the land of the dead women by two bureaucrats who sat high in the national security tree, three bodyguards, his beautiful personal assistant, and Marcus, whose role was to do as he was told; in this case, he was charged with drafting the official remarks the Secretary would make to the public.
“I know we’ll be able to stop this,” the Secretary confided to him as they flew over the final vast stretch of desert between home and the foreign land. “Just setting foot on their turf will deter these reprobates. It’ll work. Mark my words, Marc.”
“No pun intended,” the Secretary added with a snicker.
“What if it doesn’t deter them,” said Marcus, his voice quiet.
The Secretary shook his head. “Don’t waste your energy on doubt, my friend. It’s a zero-sum game.”
“Yes,” he agreed. “Probably so.” He had no idea what the Secretary meant. On some days, few words made sense to him, especially after a bad night’s sleep. Sentences were little more than screens filled with vague shapes.
Jennifer, the Secretary’s personal assistant, gave him an irritated look. She had never warmed to him, and Marcus wondered if this was because the Secretary appeared to like him quite a bit. With her disapproving glances, Jennifer chipped away at Marcus’s confidence every day. She wasn’t overly warm to anyone in the office but wasn’t ever openly rude or condescending, and few seemed to realize that she disliked them. Marcus suspected that the Secretary wanted to do alarming things to her body, and possibly, she was letting him. She was a lovely, sheathed dagger, flawlessly groomed, and Marcus had never, not once, seen her smiling with unfeigned joy. She was all rigor and veiled menace.
“Marcus looks tired,” she said to the Secretary.
“I guess I am,” said Marcus.
“No, you’re not,” said the Secretary.
Marcus looked down at his chapped hands. He needed nail clippers, lanolin, a manicure, but could never bring himself to make an appointment for one.
“What you are is too uptight,” said the Secretary, squeezing his shoulder with a knobby paternal hand.
Jennifer was staring at Marcus. “You need to do something about your sleep-deprivation problem. You can’t compromise this mission.”
“Don’t be such a pessimist, Jenny,” said the Secretary. “I’m sure Marcus is in good form.” For a moment it looked like he would squeeze her shoulder too, but she shrank into her seat.
The bodyguards were playing Yahtzee for money in the front of the plane, a few rows up. The bureaucrats from the national security tree were staring at the newspaper and chewing on ice cubes left over from their orange juice. It was early, not yet eight A.M., and Marcus was so tired that he felt dizzy. He was being haunted and had no brotherly feelings toward any of the people with whom he was flying to the dead women’s land. Something unfortunate was happening to him and he did not know when or how it would end.
When the plane’s wheels met the runway, two hundred miles an hour reduced to a sudden crawl after the terrifying clash of speed and gravity, Marcus found that his body would not move. His exhaustion had overtaken his brain’s insistence that his legs walk, his eyes see.
“It would help if you drank coffee,” Jennifer muttered, pinching his forearm. “Time to get up.”
“I can’t digest the caffeine,” he said, his eyelids too heavy to raise.
“I’ve never heard of that.”
“Do you want a doctor’s note?” he said, eyes still closed. His stomach felt heavy too, as if he’d swallowed a bag of stones instead of toast at breakfast.
She didn’t reply.
When he forced his eyes open, the Secretary was peering down at him, trying not to look worried. “Maybe you should rest before we meet with the Premier. You can take ten minutes after we get to the hotel.”
“Thank you.”
“Are you ill?” said the Secretary.
“No. I’m fine. Just tired.”
“Good. We need you at your sharpest.”
Marcus managed to smile. The Secr
etary looked almost guileless, the face of the wheat-farming boy he had once been briefly visible. The flashes of his boss’s past innocence unbalanced him. In these moments, it was hard not to like him.
Marcus’s room was on the eightieth floor of a glass hotel that overlooked the desert, its sands the color of a rotting peach. On the southern horizon, the ocean was the faintest smear of gray-blue. He wished he could leave, go out to walk the land of the dead women on his own, no Secretary, no Jennifer with her high heels and muscular ass and long legs. He wondered if she was afraid of becoming a dead woman too. No, she couldn’t be; she did not seem afraid of anything. She had never been in the underground room, as far as he knew. But she would have liked it, found it exciting and poignantly serious, all of the smoke transformed to her eye into a sexy, masculine mist. If he took her there, the Secretary would probably have been allowed to see her naked. Marcus wondered whom she did sleep with, if not the Secretary. Maybe no one. He did not want to care.
The Virginity of Famous Men Page 7
