2015
For a little while, I had trouble finding peace with the espionage missions I was pulling off with Steve. He had been a spy for much longer, sort of a grandfather figure in the spy world, and I was just coming up, an alluring femme fatale who wore a shade of lipstick called “Interrogator.”
It’s clear now that all the lines I crossed for my career had the effect of scrambling the inner yolk I thought I had. My essence had gone a little gothic. Dogs were the first to suspect me, I think because my spirit was confusing. I had the appearance of a puppet who’d learned to operate itself.
These troubles, you understand them only through their ambiguous presentations. The persistent head cold, the lethargy, the itchy scalp—I could have chalked these up to food sensitivities just as easily as disorientation caused by crossing time zones as a spy. I doubled up on anti-inflammatory remedies, pretending that it was just the travel that didn’t sit with me, not the multiple disguises. How embarrassing to be allergic to your job.
Even so, Steve and I were great partners, and I operated under the belief that he respected me, as much as a guy in his position could. I was faithful to him, I admired his seeming peace, his ability, through it all, to just walk into a room and be him, no fooling. It was as if all of the assassinations, the pen knives to the throats, the silent snaps of necks, had been nothing more than natural extensions of his persona. He was grounded in a way that I could never be, positioned exactly at the center of his own mandala, able to return there every night. His universe was Steveocentric; I skirted it, never sure if I constituted my own planet, or was a just a scrap of detritus floating through his space.
Now, forget everything you know about being a spy. I might still be in the game if I hadn’t been so poorly informed from the beginning. I thought, for instance, that I could be featureless. I thought that to be disguised meant to be without detail, that to be without detail would help me go invisible. You need to put that out of your mind, that’s not how it is. Instead, whenever I applied the latex facial features of another identity, I would retain my own in a sort of murky paradox, neither me nor them, no one for the moment. Even afterwards, as I sat in the steaming bath of a rundown Paris hotel room, a chair propped under the door handle because I was afraid that at any moment an assassin with a silencer would burst in and shoot me in the direct center of the head, the fear could never overpower the feeling that I had got lost somewhere. That I was crawling on my hands and knees towards some reference point that hadn’t been identified. That’s how it is to be a spy.
Eventually, my ailments began to wear me down. The inflamation in my joints began to feel arthritic. I could no longer do the acrobatics I’d been hired for. I caught diabetes and struggled with insomnia. I could never sleep at night because it hurt to keep my body still. My appetite was ravenous and disgusting and I quelled it by smoking Parliaments. I littered black ringed butts everywhere I went, my calling card.
“I’m not depressed Steve,” I would say. He would look into my face and notice how loose the skin under my eyes had become with my inhuman circadian rhythms.
“Well you don’t look good, kid. I hate to see you like this.” He was so fatherly and qualitative sometimes, I forgot that we were independent agents.
“I’m just a little disrupted right now,” I would tell him, and I would try to imagine a time when I had thought of myself as a contiguous being. First grade? I may have been what I appeared to be when I was 6 or 7, but since then...not really. Certainly not since I’d started dressing up in wigs and walking out into the night to find the cocktail party where the secret elite were gathering, wired and toting a tiny pistol in my garter.
The international stuff was exciting, but our spy ring had been hired for several industrial espionage cases in and around Baltimore. I’d been enjoying the slower pace of this recent spell, rarely traveling further than Vienna, Virginia to track down an insider and pry information out of them using my feminine wiles. I got to spend most of my days off at home and was able to fall into an easier routine, didn’t feel like a vampire drawing the shades against the violence of the afternoon sun just so I could sleep.
I had just gotten back from a midday run in Druid Hill Park when Roger slipped one of those postcards underneath my door, the kind that instructs you to meet at a certain street corner at a certain time wearing sunglasses, the rendezvous where you and the go-between can pace around each other in circles by the trashcan. I hated when jobs started like this, walking away I always felt like I’d forgotten to ask an important question about my mission. Who’s brother is he again? How much had they embezzled?
I reached the corner of Light Street and Lombard at exactly thirteen hundred hours wearing my bob wig, sunglasses, fedora and trench coat. ‘P,’ as he was known, took one look at me and said “god L, could you look more incognito?” He had chosen a hiding-in-plain-sight disguise: pleated khaki’s and an oversized blue checked button up. He looked like a Customer Service Representative on his lunch break.
“Oh, nobody cares P, I’m just having fun.” I had been doing this 7 years, and it was just starting to dawn on me that when people look at you, they don’t really care what they see.
By twenty three hundred hours that same night, there I was, my black catsuit with a rip in the thigh exposing part of my broken flesh, crouching among the darkened cubicles on the 6th floor of an office building overlooking Market Street in Baltimore. I’d neutralized the security detail and was now searching for the desk that my mark had been occupying for the last couple of weeks. I’d gained entry by posing as a late night janitor and taking the elevator up to the 5th floor with a forged ID badge.
There were a few people still working, entering data and sending it to their correspondents in Mumbai. The sad irony of the fact that they were precariously employed independent contractors, without a health benefits plan, working for a multinational pharmaceuticals company, had slipped over them like a piece of plastic sheeting poised to suffocate them should they take too big a breath. I abandoned my janitor’s jumpsuit and crawled through a heating duct in the bathroom ceiling, finding my way to the elevator shaft and scurrying up the cables like an industrious rat. The rip in my catsuit was incidental, but leant a sort of immediacy to my project. I was never squeamish at the sight of blood; I sometimes thought of myself as a bag of flesh ready to come apart at the seams.
The job itself was amateur, the kind of stuff I pulled off when I was first starting out and no one trusted me. As P and I circled each other on the sidewalk outside of H&M, I told myself that this would be my last job, that I had no reason to keep putting my body through this process of elimination, week after week growing further and further from wholeness. I would take the money I earned from this heist (which was to retrieve a manilla file folder from the desk of some lower level coordinator in accounts management) and move in with my mom for a few months. There were plenty of jobs I could have that didn’t involve entrapment, that didn’t involve dangling myself over the abyss of inward isolation, every day a new person, never anyone at all. I would find one of those jobs, and I would meditate in the spare bedroom for a while.
Creeping among the rented rolling chairs on the puke colored carpet, the smell of hot sheets feeding out of a laser printer mixed with the smell of impermanence, of insecure sweat, I imagined myself sitting at one of the desks. I imagined my hair grown out and flung into a messy ponytail, my outfit a vague nonattempt at business casual, my mind fixating on the problem of lunch while I solved tedious programming glitches. I imagined myself simultaneously bored and anxietized, simultaneously grounded and panicking, and I pulled myself into one of the chairs and placed my hand on the stranger’s mouse, trying to feel what it would feel like to have low-back trouble, to be watching the clock.
I turned on the PC in front of me and guessed the login password in one go. I launched the stranger’s browser and opened their history, scrolled down to the beginning of their day.
I watched them open their email and their facebook, follow a few links to articles
like 43 Photos That Prove Everything In Your Life is a Lie and 10 Things You Will Only Understand If You Went to NYU. I watched them do a few hours of work in the middle of the day, occasionally googling questions about array-entering INDEX/MATCH formulas in Microsoft Excel and refreshing their facebook every 45 minutes. I watched them take their lunch break. When they got back, they opened craigslist and scanned the job listings in admin/office, marketing/pr/ad, sales/biz dev, and tv/film/video, just for fun. They searched through the missed connections to see if they could find themselves. Their supervisor walked by, they redirected to a map of Mumbai, thinking that being curious about where your company was located was a good excuse. Then they did a few minutes of work and noticed that it was 3:30. They looked up a recipe that used ground turkey, they had some in the fridge that needed to be eaten. They got up and went to the bathroom for 20 minutes and then started on the report that they were required to fill out at the end of every day, a bullet pointed list of tasks they had accomplished and things that should be troubleshot. They finished entering the last set of figures into their spreadsheet and went home.
Blood seeped slowly from my wound and darkened the sharkskin of my pantleg. In all my years of spying I had never felt so guilty, watching someone else’s every private movement, even privater than private because they had never thought to hide it. I was an errant snoop, indiscriminately penetrating. I dropped down to my knees and closed my eyes, trying to practice the yogic breathing exercises I’d been using to relax. My mind’s eye filled with images of the person whose life I had just possessed: their cat, their bus pass, their late night trips to the grocery store. I crawled along the window bank, hoping that I would remember what I’d come here for, some file, some stack of papers detailing the illegal activities of a secret double agent, some irreproachable proof of a whistleblower. When you are on a job like this, when everything is quiet and dark and raindrops silhouetted on the window form a sloppy pattern on your skin, you are less inclined to personal ego. The woman on a mission is your life’s imago, and in these silent, crawling moments you become her.
My spy watch lit up with a message alert from P. He wanted to know if I’d found the files. He said that he had located a sting op moving in on the radar and that I needed to get out ASAP, or become a fly in the spider’s web. I thought of the people working the night shift below me being picked off one by one by fatigue and disunion. I tried not to smear blood from my thigh on the window.
Using the voice-recognition software on my earpiece I messaged P. They were in hand, I said, I would be repelling down the south face of the building in approx 4 minutes, meet me with the car. On my hands and knees I crawled between the rolling chairs towards the breakroom, the smell of stale coffee and the possibility of roaches growing stronger as I neared. My fingerless gloves pressed against the seamless tiles. I thought how all this time that I believed I was born to be a spy, all these years of being Steve’s mentee, unbothered by the broken ribs and shrapnel in my flesh, I could have been here, some other type of woman. I could have thought of my head as an expression of my own personality, not just a material to attach new selves to. And then you know, I stood up. Full upright. Like the first bipedal human emerging from the ocean floor. I filled the electric kettle and popped it on. I tore the corner of an instant coffee packet and poured it into a styrofoam cup. I helped myself to a stale donut, leaning against the counter and gazing across the office onto the twinkling lights of Baltimore’s Inner Harbor. P messaged me that he was in position, and I stood licking glaze from the tips of my fingers while my water boiled. As I stirred the dissolving granules with scrapes against the bottom of the cup, I heard the bing bong of the elevator doors opening onto my floor. My spy watch vibrated persistently as I poured in a healthy scoop of nondairy creamer powder. It was P messaging me that I was hot, that the job was hot and I needed to get out. Yeah yeah yeah I said to myself, you’ll get your report when I’m good and ready, a line I think I’d snatched from a lonely scene in a movie about subordination.
Of course, you can probably guess that the ops found me, drinking coffee in the breakroom, seriously considering a second donut. It wasn’t difficult to neutralize them, a couple of death jabs, a round house, and they were down. Stultified again. I launched over them and grabbed a cardigan hanging on the back of someone’s chair. As I pulled it on I wondered if in my new life I would smoke cigarettes, or if I would be one of those health people who listen to their bodies’ truths.