I felt my face go hot. I stared down at him as if he were saying something incredible, something I hadn’t thought myself a thousand times. “Fighting for?” I said, trying to keep my voice down. “How could we fight for it? It wasn’t even real.”
“It was real to me.”
I sneered, disgusted by him—disgusted because he seemed just then to me to be my own pathetic Inner Man made flesh.
“Get yourself some help, Densham,” I said.
He laughed or sobbed again. I left him there and strode across the room to the door.
* * * *
His death made the news, small splashes on the inside pages of the tabloids, likewise small but more stately obituaries in the broadsheets, and then, inevitably, links online. Instapundit was where I found it. They linked to a New York Post story: Satellite Pioneer in Shocking SM Suicide. Densham had been found hanging from the clothes rod in his closet strangled with his own belt and dressed in bizarre leather corsetry and other paraphernalia. A fatal wardrobe malfunction during an otherwise quiet evening of autoerotic asphyxiation—so said the local constabulary.
As murder, it was art—if it was murder. That was the genius of it. How could you know for sure? But I knew. At least, I thought I knew. I read the story with my stomach in a tailspin. I recognized it right away as the end of peace of mind for me, the end of what was left of my peace of mind. What sort of mental breakwater would stand against the flood of paranoia now? No. There was no getting away from it: The bad days had returned.
How awful suspense is! Worse than any actual catastrophe. How often have you heard a cancer patient tell you, “The worst part was waiting for the test results.” Worse than the cancer itself: the waiting, not knowing, afraid. Awful. And there were days of it now, weeks of it, months.
Maybe that was also part of the reason I fell in love with her. Not just what she looked like and how she behaved and what she represented. That was all in the mix, of course. But maybe I was also just grateful—so grateful—that she had finally arrived.
* * * *
By then, the dark, snowy winter had given way to a spring so mild it seemed a kind of silent music. I forced myself to go out of doors just to experience it, just to feel the air. The wistful air. Truly, just like a strain of half-remembered music. Even in New York with the heat of its traffic, its noises and smells, you couldn’t feel that air without a softness opening in you, a sense of longing for the past—whatever past it was you happened to long for. I, of course, walked the city streets and dreamed of Centerville, dreamed myself into love stories set in the Village. It was the only relief I had from the suspense, the heavy winter cloud of waiting, unknowing and afraid.
I was lost in those dreams even as she approached me. I was in a coffee shop, at the window counter, my hand limp around the cardboard cup as I gazed unseeing at the storefront glass.
“Do you mind if I sit here?” she said. She had a beautiful voice. I noticed it right away. It was clear and mellow with diction at once flowing and precise. It was the way that women used to speak when they thought about how they should speak, when they trained themselves to speak like ladies.
I looked up and she was lovely. Maybe twenty years younger than I, in her thirties. Poised, but not with that brusque, mannish confidence I so often see in women today. Consciously graceful rather, as if her grace was a thing she did for people, a gift she gave them. Her whole style was graceful and vaguely old-fashioned in a sweet, pretty way. Shoulder-length blonde hair in a band. A blue spring dress wide at the shoulders, nipped at the waist, and ending modestly over the knee. I caught the scent she was wearing, and it was lovely, too, graceful and old-fashioned, too. I thought I knew it from somewhere but couldn’t remember where.
“Do you mind if I sit here next to you?”
“Not at all,” I said to her—but at the same time, my eyes swept the room and I saw there were plenty of tables open, plenty of other places she could sit.
She saw my eyes, read my thoughts. “There was a man outside,” she told me. “Following me, making remarks. I thought if I sat next to you, if it seemed as if we knew each other . . .”
What happened next happened very quickly, my brain working things out, my emotions responding, all in a cascading flash. My first reaction was instinctive, automatic. An attractive woman had asked for my protection: I was warmed and immediately alert to the possibility of romance. But in the next moment—or in the next segment of that moment—it was all so quick—I remembered where I’d smelled that perfume before. It was the same scent I’d caught coming off Densham in the club when he had leaned toward me so I could light his cigarette. I have something to live for now, he had told me. Finally. Something to live for.
My eyes went to her eyes—her pale blue eyes—and I thought, Ah, yes, of course, that’s who they would send, isn’t it? And what was, I suppose, horrible—horrible and yet mesmerizing somehow—was that I saw she saw my thought, I saw she saw that I understood everything, and I saw that she understood, understood that it didn’t matter to me, that it was to her advantage, in fact, because I wanted her, welcomed her.
She was death and the past and my dreams incarnate, and I was in love with her already. I always had been.
* * * *
You would think what followed would have been more or less bizarre, but it wasn’t. Not to me. Every lover at the start is in a kind of fiction anyway. The restraint, the things held back, the best foot forward. Even this latest generation of whores and boors must have some courting ritual or other before they go at it like monkeys and then wander off to nurse their hangovers. Every mammal has its manners, its method of approach.
So the fact that she and I never acknowledged the reality of our situation didn’t seem to me as strange as all that. We dined together and went to the movies and took long walks in Central Park and took drives into the country to see the spring scenery, just like anyone. We talked more or less at random about what we enjoyed and what we’d seen and what we ought to do. I told her about my business, which offered secure storage and online backup for the computer files of major corporations and government agencies. She told me about teaching English as a second language to visitors and immigrants. That was a nice touch: I was a wealthy entrepreneur, and she was a do-gooder, just getting by. It gave me all kinds of opportunities to take care of her, to play the man. She liked that, being taken care of. She liked for me to open the door for her and stand when she entered a room and hold her chair when she sat down. She accepted these tokens of gentlemanly respect with grace but also with gratitude. She had a way of nestling in my kindnesses, of luxuriating in my protection and the vulnerability it allowed her. She had a way of looking up at me in expectant deference when there was a decision to be made so that I felt helpless to make any decision but the one that would ultimately please and shelter her. She was all softness and beauty, and I found myself tending to her as if she were the last flower left in an otherwise stony world.
As for the past—as for talking about the past: We shared only fragments of it in those first days, fragments at intervals now and then, and if my memories were distortions and hers were lies, how different were we from anyone in the early stages of attraction?
We became lovers in the prettiest way, the gentlest and most graceful way, only after weeks and weeks of courtship and subtle seduction and slow surrender. I wish I had the words to describe the sweetness of her reticence, her modesty, and the measured yielding of her modesty to her passions and to mine. You want to tell me it was all inauthentic? False? A performance? As the kids say nowadays: Whatever! Have such things ever been anything other than a kind of performance, a kind of dance? An art form, if you will. And what’s art but a special sort of falsehood, a falsehood by which we express the inexpressible truth about ourselves and about the human condition?
Well, that was the way I thought about it anyway—as a kind of art, a kind of story we were telling with our lives, a kind of lovely dance. Right up until the moment of
climax, right up until the moment I came, holding her naked in my arms and thanking God—really, thanking God—for the late-life blessing of her. And then it all crumbled in my mind to ashes. What is it, I wonder, about the male orgasm that vaporizes every standing structure of sentiment and enchantment?
An hour later I sat bitterly in the dark, smoking a Sherman by the open window, staring balefully at the shape of her asleep on the bed. The taste of the cigarette brought my meeting with Densham back to me. His squirrelly, nervous voice beneath the smoke and music . . .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.
She stirred in the shadows and murmured my name. Then, finding me there at the window framed by the relative light of the night city, she propped herself up on an elbow. “Are you all right, sweetheart?”
“Which was it?” I said to her. “Did he take the mission or refuse it?”
“What? Who?”
“Densham. He said he was going to turn them down and trust in the protection of the Americans. But I don’t think he would have had the courage in the end. Once he was actually confronted with the choice, it would’ve been easier just to go along.” The words came out of me in a low, tumbling rush. “He would’ve told himself that he was all wrong about the Americans, that they had no clue about us, that that’s why Stein had gone along and gotten away with it scot-free. He could’ve convinced himself of anything if he thought it meant being with you. You were all he wanted, what he was living for. And there you were, all the while, waiting patiently, watching to see what he knew, who he spoke to, which way he’d turn. Just like you’re doing with me.”
She didn’t answer. She didn’t say, I don’t know what you’re talking about. It was chilling. She didn’t even bother to pretend.
“I suppose that means that you are with the Americans,” I said. “He took the mission and you had to stop him. . . . Or, who knows, maybe you’re one of ours. Maybe he did refuse and that’s why you did it. . . .”
“What time is it?” she murmured. “I’m sorry—I’m still asleep. Whatever it is, we can talk in the morning. Come back to bed and be with me.”
Eventually, the mood passed and I did.
* * * *
Strangely, as much as I was expecting the final call, it came unexpectedly. Because I was that lost in her, that immersed in the living dream of our romance. Hours and days at a time, I would forget the call was coming, though I always knew. When it finally did come, nothing could have been further from my mind.
We were in the park. It was an early summer’s day. We were eating lunch at the café overlooking the lake. I was telling a funny story about a website I had sold to a teenage millionaire who had dropped out of high school and had all the money in the world but no manners whatsoever. She was laughing in the most charming and flattering way, graciously covering her mouth with one hand. I was thinking how lovely, how truly lovely she was and what a joy.
The phone in my jacket pocket began to vibrate. Normally, of course, I wouldn’t have answered during lunch, but this was the third time it had gone off in as many minutes.
“Excuse me,” I said to her. “It might be an emergency at my office.” I believed it, too. That was how completely submerged I was in our fairy tale.
I fetched out the cell phone and held it to my ear and even then, even when I heard the cantata in the background, it was a moment before I understood. Bach 140: the first part of the signal. And then a voice said, “George?” which was the other part.
“I’m sorry, you have the wrong number,” I responded automatically.
“Oh, sorry, my mistake,” the man said. The music was cut short as he hung up.
I slipped the phone back into my pocket, my eyes on her the whole time now.
“Wrong number?” she said finally. Just like that, completely natural, completely believable.
And in the same way, the same tone, almost believing it myself, I answered, “Yes. Sorry. Now what was I saying?”
* * * *
As we walked back to my apartment, I found myself saddened more than anything, saddened that it was over. Though the light of the summer day stayed bright through the late afternoon, it had acquired, I noticed, an aura of emotional indigo, a brooding border of darkness that I remembered seeing in my college days when I had walked a lover to the train station for what I knew to be the last time. Now I held her cool hand in mine and glanced down from time to time at her fresh, upturned face and listened to that flowing, ladylike diction as she chattered about this or that future plan—and I ached for every passing minute, every minute that brought us closer to the end.
“Why don t you pour us some wine?” I said, as I helped her with her coat in the foyer. “I just have to check my e-mail for a moment.”
I went into the study, consciously cherishing the domestic noises she made moving around the kitchen. I switched on the computer.
Our procedures had last been updated more than twenty years ago. They still included quaint arrangements like drop points and locker keys and corner meetings. I doubted that sort of thing was operational anymore and, as it turned out, I was right. They had sent the material straight to my computer: an untraceable packet that simply appeared as an icon on the desktop when I turned the machine on. I didn t read the whole code. Just enough to see what it was. A virus I could spread through my backup apparatus so that my clients would lose some of their files. Then, when they went to restore the files through my service, they would be rewritten with instructions that would plant minor, undetectable but ultimately devastating glitches throughout entire systems. It was, in other words, a cyber time bomb that would hobble key security responses at essential moments and render the nation helpless to defend against. . . whatever it was our camel-fucking friends were planning to do. At a glance, the business seemed quite elegant and devastating. But I think what struck me most about it was its clinical and efficient realism. It was as devoid of romance as a bad news X-ray. It pushed the whole notion of romance out of my mind.
Maybe that’s why I seemed to see her afresh when I walked back into the living room. There she stood now in the center of the floor with our wineglasses, one in each hand. Wearing a pleated skirt and a buttoned blouse and a pearl necklace against her pink skin. It was the first time she seemed simply fraudulent to me. Beautiful, but fraudulent. Like a satire of a fifties housewife. Not even that. A satire of a television program about a fifties housewife. The sight of her brought a bitter taste of irony into my mouth and into my mind, and as I took a glass from her, I smirked into those wonderful eyes—while they regarded me with nothing I could detect but wide, blue innocence.
I sat in my favorite easy chair. She sat on the rug at my feet. That, too, in my suddenly prosaic mood, struck me as somewhat overintentional: a patent construct, a cynical tableau of a woman modest in her youth doting on a somewhat older man in his authority.
All the same, I held my glass down to hers and she lifted hers to mine and we clinked them together. I sipped and sighed.
“I was raised,” I said, “in a town called Centerville.” I don’t know why I felt I had to tell her this, but I did. It was the last act of the play, I guess. The only way I could think to keep it going just a little longer.
She did her part as well. She put her head on my knee and gazed up at me dreamily as I stroked her hair. “Yes,” she said. “You’ve mentioned it. In Indiana, you said.”
“Yes. Yes. It was supposed to be in Indiana, a small town in Indiana. But, in fact, of course, it was in the Ukraine somewhere. Surrounded by these vast wheat fields. Quite beautiful really Quite typically American. They wanted us to grow up as typical Americans. That’s what the place was made for. Even as they trained us for what we were going to do, they wanted us to develop American habits of manner and mind so we could be slipped into the places t
hey prepared for us, so we wouldn’t stand out, you know, wouldn’t give ourselves away.”
She was very good. Quiet and attentive, her expression unreadable. She could’ve been thinking anything. She could’ve simply been waiting for the sense of it to be made clear.
“The problem was, of course, that our intelligence services . . . well, let’s say they never had much of a sense of nuance. Or a sense of humor, for that matter.” I laughed. “No, never a lot in the way of humor, that’s for sure. They constructed the place out of self-serious field reports and magazine articles they accepted without question and programs they saw on TV. Especially the programs they saw on TV those half-hour situation comedies that were so popular in the fifties, you know, about small-town family life. They developed the whole program around them. Trained our guardians and teachers with them. Reproduced them wholesale in their plodding, literal Russian way, as the setting for our upbringing. As a result, I would say now, we grew up in an America no actual American ever did. We grew up in the America America wanted to be or thought of itself as or ... I don’t know how you would express it exactly. It was a strange dichotomy, that’s for sure. Brutal psychologically, in some ways. We were planted as children in the middle of the American Dream and then taught that it was evil and had to be destroyed. . . .”
Agents of Treachery Page 31
