“It was bad enough when you were just cold and silent, but now you’re disgusting,” she said to me. I was coming through the door in the dark of first morning. She was standing in the bedroom doorway in a pink nightgown, her arms hugged tight beneath her breasts. Her face was haggard and grim. She was a competent, sophisticated woman, but anger made her look weak and humorless. As long as we’d been minimally civilized with each other, her company—the mindless conformity of her expectations, the low normalcy of her social-climbing ambitions, just her reliable, undemanding presence day to day—had been some sort of comfort to me. Now even that was gone.
“Let me at least close the door,” I said. “The whole building doesn’t have to hear you.”
“Jesus. I can smell her on you from here.”
“So you wash the smell of them off first. What does that make you? The Virgin Mary?” Naturally, it wasn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her about the never-ending fear and silence and the loneliness that made the fear and silence worse. I wanted to cry out to her that my whole purpose in life was gone and that I had known it was gone for years, but now that I could read all about it on the front page there was no denying it to myself any longer. I wanted to fall on my knees and bury my face in her belly and cling to her like a stanchion in high winds and tell her oh, oh, oh, I didn’t want to die, not now when it had all become so useless and not like this, hustled into the center of some drab tabloid scenario by a pair of deadpanned experts in faked suicides and accidents, my extermination just another job.
“Oh, and don’t give me that look,” I said to her instead— even though she had turned her face away now to hide her crying. “We don’t even make any sense anymore, do we? I mean, what’s the point? Why shouldn’t I cheat? What the hell am I getting out of it? It isn’t as if you keep house or bring me my drinks and slippers. You’re not the mother of my children. ...”
“Whose fault is that?” she said raggedly, in a tearful rage.
“You work, you make as much money as I do. It isn’t as if you need me the way a man wants to be needed. Women ...” I waved a hand in the air, too drunk to form the thought I wanted, something about the way it used to be, what women were like, what marriage was like in the good old days. “You’re just a roommate with a vagina,” I finished finally. “As if that’s supposed to count for everything. Well, I like a different vagina from time to time, if that’s all it comes down to, so sue me. . . .”
The phone rang, interrupting this learned disquisition on modern social mores. Both Sharon and I reared up and stared at the instrument, indignant, as if it were some underling who had dared to break in on important business between us. If a couple can’t rip each other to shreds in peace at four in the morning, what’s the world coming to?
It rang again. Sharon said, “Go on and talk to your whore.” Then she whirled in her pink nightgown and stormed back into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
“My whore doesn’t have our number,” I said—but only softly, because Sharon was no longer there to be hurt by it. Meanwhile, I was thinking What the hell? A wrong number? A neighbor complaining about the noise? The signal to set off a disaster or a harbinger of my own assassination? What? I was trying to talk myself out of the less pleasant scenarios, but it was no good. When the phone rang again, I tasted fear, chemical and sour, in the back of my throat.
I stepped to the lampstand by the sofa, took up the handset. Listened without a word.
“I can’t stand it anymore,” a terrified voice said at once.
“Who is this?” But I already knew—I could guess anyway.
“I don’t care about the protocol.” He was whining shamelessly. I could practically hear him sweat. “What good is protocol to me? We can t just sit here and be picked off one by one. We have to do something.”
“You have the wrong number,” I said.
I hung up. I stood in the center of the room and stared at nothing and swallowed the sour taste in my mouth. I was suddenly fully sober.
* * * *
That was almost—was it possible?—yes, almost twenty years ago. And that night—that was the worst of it. Whatever their cause, the deaths among us stopped at three. As time went by with no contact and no further disasters, the paranoia faded almost away.
Twenty years. Twenty years of silence and unknowing, the network an orphan, the regime that spawned it gone. The mission? It became a vestigial habit of thought, like some outmoded quirk of inclination or desire acquired in childhood but useless to or even at odds with adult life. I went on as I was trained to go on because I had been trained and for no other reason. What had once been the purpose of my every movement became more like a neurotic superstition, an obsessive compulsion like repeatedly washing the hands. I maneuvered my career and cultivated my contacts with an eye to sabotage, positioned myself where I could do the most damage. But there was no damage to do, and no point in doing it. And I didn’t want to anyway. Why would I? Why would I hurt this country now?
Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t that I had come to love America. I didn’t love America. Not this America, weak and drab and stagnant. Its elites in a self-righteous circle jerk and its fat farm fucks muttering “nigger” and its niggers shrunken to bug-eyed skeletons on the watery milk of the government tit. Corrupt politician-alchemists spinning guilt and fear into power. Depraved celebrities with no talent for anything but self-destruction. And John Q. Public? Turn on the television and there he was, trying to win a million dollars on some hidden-camera game show by wallowing in the slime of his own debauchery. That was entertainment now—that was culture—that was art. And then the women. Go out on the street and there they were, barking fuck and shit into their cell phones. Working like men while their men behaved like children, playing video games and slapping hands and drinking beers with their baseball caps on sideways, then trudging sheepishly home with a “yes, dear,” to their grim, sexless fuck-and-shit mommy-wives. There was no spirit in the land. No spiritual logic to lead anyone to love or charity. Nothing for the soul to strive for but welfare bread and online circuses. A Rome without a world worth conquering. I did not love this America; no. If I was loyal to anything, it was the country I had known in childhood. The innocent small-town community with its flags and churches and lawns. The women in their virtue and their skirts below the knee. The fathers in their probity and suits and ties. I loved the pride in liberty back then—not the liberty of screwing whom you wanted and cursing whatever curses—but the liberty born of self-reliance and self-control. The Village—I loved the Village. I loved Centerville. And Centerville was gone.
All the same—all the same, what was left of it—what was left of this country here and now—was still a relative paradise of comfort and convenience. What else was there left to care about but that? Revolution? Whatever came of revolution but slavery and blood? No. I had my routines, I had my successful business, the restaurants I enjoyed, my golf games, my sports on TV my occasional women. Why—in the name of what forsaken cause?—would I do damage to such a pleasant ruin of a place to live and die in as this?
So when I sensed our hand in the train wreck, I just felt my comforts threatened, frankly. I was unnerved—worried almost to the point of panic—to think that I might lose my easy, pleasant life.
What else was I supposed to feel, given the realistic possibilities?
* * * *
I spent the next several days after my meeting with Jay in virtual isolation in my apartment, trolling the Internet obsessively, searching for answers. Stein had been put in charge of the internal investigation now, so there was nothing like trustworthy information from any of the official sources. But there were clues. At least I thought there were. I thought I sensed traces of the truth lying right out in the open, right there in the daily news. A resurgence of Russian arrogance despite plummeting oil prices. A cat-and-canary silence in the Middle Eastern capitals despite all the outlying wise men beating their breasts. It all made for a sort of faint, wi
spy, curling smoke trail of reasoning if you knew how to see it, how to follow it. The implications were too horrible for me to face directly, but I must’ve understood them at some subconscious level all the same, because my anxiety grew more unbearable every day. Protocol or no, the impulse to try to contact Stein himself was almost irresistible.
I might’ve done it, too, if I hadn’t remembered Leonard Densham.
It was Densham who had called me that early morning twenty years ago—that morning of my fight with Sharon. His was the whining, sweaty voice on the phone: I can’t stand it anymore. We have to do something. He had always been the weak link, always, even when we were boys back in Centerville. The last to take a dare, the first to seize on an excuse for cowardice. He should’ve been eliminated then, but he had peculiar aptitudes when it came to rockets and satellites and so on, the big things at the time. In fact, he had ended up at the Department of Defense, working on the global navigation satellite system. But he was a weak link all the same. He should have been left behind.
As the days went by—those obsessive, anxiety-ridden days in my apartment, at my computer—I became convinced that he— Densham—was the one who had been following me in Washington Square Park. It made sense. If there was danger, uncertainty, anxiety, it made sense that Densham would be the first to break, the first to make contact, now as before. I became convinced that I had actually seen him in the park and subconsciously recognized his face, that it was that that had brought me out of my reverie.
Assuming I was right, I didn’t think he would be hard to find. If he was following me, he must’ve been looking for a chance to make a safe approach. All I needed to do was give him the opportunity.
I chose a place called Smoke—a small smoking club amid the old brick warehouses on the lower west side. Nothing but two rows of cocktail tables in a narrow room of red carpet and red walls and black curtains with no windows behind them. The light was low and the music was loud: impossible to wire, difficult to observe. I went there three days running, arriving in the early evening before the crowds. I sat at the table nearest the back, where I could see everyone who came and went. Each day, I smoked one long Sherman and had one glass of malt and left.
On the third day, just as my smoke burned down to the nub, Densham pushed through the door and came hurrying down the center aisle toward my table.
Once upon a time, I would have said he had gone mad. No one really uses that word anymore. There are syndromes now and pathologies. Schizophrenia and bipolar disorder and this disorder and that. I suppose the notion that someone could just lose touch with reality is problematic in an age when no one is quite certain reality even exists. But Densham was something, all right: delusional, paranoid, anxiety-ridden, fevered, a raging whack job—make up your own diagnosis.
You only had to look at him to see it. It was bone-cold outside—there were snow flurries—and the club was poorly heated. I had sat through my drink with my overcoat on. But Densham? The sweat was gleaming on his face when he came in. His hair was limp and shiny with it. His eyes burned. His fingers worked constantly. He sat across from me at the small round table, bent over, rocking slightly with his fingers working so that he seemed to be playing an invisible clarinet in the empty air.
The waitress was a pretty young thing in a white blouse and black skirt and black stockings, but he barely glanced at her. He brushed her away at first, in fact, with those fiddling fingers, and only called her back to him and ordered a beer as an afterthought-—so as not to look suspicious, I guess. Likewise, he shook his head when I opened my box of Shermans to him— and then quickly held my wrist before I could withdraw it. He took a cigarette and leaned into my plastic lighter so that, even through the smell of smoke, I caught a whiff of something on him, some vintage feminine perfume that touched me somehow.
“Calm down,” I murmured to him as I held the flame. “You’ll only draw attention to yourself. Just calm down.”
I lit a fresh cigarette for myself as well, and we both sat back and drew smoke. Densham tried frantically to smile and seem relaxed. It just made him look even crazier.
“You understand what they’ve done, don’t you? Can you see it?” The moment he spoke, the clues and my suspicions began to fall into place. But before I could put them all together, he leaned forward again, hot-eyed and urgent, his fingers drumming the table spasmodically. And he said, “They’ve sold us. They’ve sold the network.”
My stomach dropped and my thoughts became clear. “To the Arabs.”
“Of course, to the Arabs! Who else would . . . ?”
The waitress brought his beer, and he fell back against his chair, sucking crazily on his cigarette until he choked and coughed. I watched the girl’s skirt retreating. Then, more calmly than I felt, I said, “That’s ridiculous, Densham. Pull yourself together. Look at you. You’re falling apart.”
“Of course I’m falling apart! I didn’t come here to blow things up for a bunch of camel-fucking madmen!”
“Quiet! For God’s sake.”
He clapped his cigarette hand to his mouth as if to hush himself.
“It doesn’t make sense,” I said. “What would they sell us for?”
Densham gave a jerky shrug, his hand fluttering up into the air now like a butterfly on a string, the cigarette trailing smoke behind. “Oil. What else? The price of oil. That’s all they have left now, after all the fine philosophy they fed us. They need a lift in the price of oil—and fast. And what do they have to sell in return that the Arabs want? Us! The network.”
I laughed, or tried to make a noise like laughter. “You’re crazy You’re making this up.”
“I’m not making it up. I deduce it.”
“You can deduce anything. It may just be a train crash, Densham. For God’s sake.”
He stared at me, searched me with that peculiar power of insight crazy people have. “You know it. You know I’m right, don’t you?”
I hid behind my drink. “Ah! Things go through your mind when you’re on edge. It happens to all of us.”
“I think Stein must have gone over.”
“What? Gone over to whom?”
“The Americans!” he hissed. “Else why haven’t they killed him like they did Cumberland and the others? Or arrested him at least?”
I didn’t bother to answer him this time. I saw how it was with him now. He had sat at home in whatever life he had these twenty years and stewed in his terrors and suspicions, and now every outlandish theory seemed like the plain truth to him, every worst-case scenario seemed the obvious fact of the matter. He was like one of those people who call into radio shows at night to talk about flying saucers and government conspiracies. He saw it all clearly and everyone else was blind. He was mad, in other words.
“You’ll see. You’ll see,” he said. “We’re activated. Activated and blown. In a week, a month, a year, we’ll each get the call to serve the jihad. Refuse it, and our masters hurl us out a window. Accept it, and the Americans run us down with a car in some alley. We’re dead either way” He laughed bitterly.
I’d had enough. I reached for my wallet. “You’re out of your mind. You’ve been stewing in your own juices. You need to get out more. Get a good psychiatrist. Whatever you do, don’t come near me again.”
“I’m not going to do it! You understand? Camel-fucking madmen. I won’t do it. That’s not what I agreed to.”
I shrugged. “We were children. None of us ever agreed to anything.”
“Maybe the Americans can use me,” Densham went on. “They’ll spare me. Why not? They spared Stein, didn’t they? Americans have always been sentimental that way. They’ll see how it is. They’ll see I have something to live for now. Finally. Something to live for ...”
“Shut up. Would you shut up? Pull yourself together. Damn it!”
I threw some cash down on the table and stood. Densham looked up at me as if he only now remembered I was there. He nibbled at the end of his cigarette like a squirrel nibbling on a nut. He
seemed small and furtive and ashamed.
“Do you ever miss it?” he said.
“What are you talking about?” I said irritably. I stood there, buttoning my overcoat. “Miss what?”
“The Village. Centerville. I miss it sometimes. I miss it a lot.”
I looked away from him, embarrassed. It was as if he’d read my daydreams. “Don’t be ridiculous,” I said. “There’s nothing to miss.”
“There is to me.” He gave another pathetic little laugh, a sob almost. “I loved it. It’s the only thing I ever did love really.”
“We all. . . idealize our childhoods.”
“No. No,” he repeated earnestly. “That life, that way of life. That’s what we should’ve been fighting for all along.”
Agents of Treachery Page 30
