“You know I’ll ace the civil service exam,” Judith said. “And with two salaries, we can move up and out of here.”
“Not sure you need to take a test,” her brother said. “Anyway, I’ll see what I can do.”
The CIA meant a two-hour commute to Langley, so Judith settled for NSA, just down the parkway in Fort Meade. She accepted a clerical position, but even that demanded absolute nondisclosure on her part. When her neighbors, soon to be her old neighbors, asked what she did, Judith smiled and said: “I can’t tell you. But I can assure you that we are not involved in domestic spying. NSA is forbidden by law to spy on our own citizens. So domestic spying is just my hobby.”
Then she winked, as if it were all a big joke. The women of Newfield Road—talking over back fences, drinking Tab during the soap operas, running into each other at High’s Dairy store, tying their children to the clothes line, holding frozen vegetables to their bruised eyes, pretending not to see the little boys who tortured living things—the women of Newfield Road said to each other: “Did you hear? Judith Monaghan claims she’s a spy. A spy in Edmondson Heights. Did you ever hear of anything so ridiculous?”
CUBA LIBRE
BY KATHERINE NEVILLE
Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they’re not out to get you.
He felt them rubbing the cold grease onto his temples. He kept his eyes shut against what he knew was coming. They were doing it again; no one could stop them, the shock of volts would slam through his head like a railroad car—and then, oblivion. They’d got him good now, hadn’t they? Sucker punched, and down for the count. How had this happened? It was his own fault. He should have been warned, all the signs were there, he should have seen it coming: Mea maxima, maxima culpa. But whenever he said “they” were after him, they were following him, they were spying on him, it was dismissed as paranoia. Well, paranoia or none, he knew what they were after: they were after his memory. He knew what men could do, what their actions could lead to. And now they wanted to erase his memory, kill it. They could kill him too. They would kill him. They were killing him. His job, his only job now—before the next deadly lightning bolt hit—was to hold on to what he knew. Hold on to truth. He forced himself to go down into those dangerous, dark pools of his past, descending deeper and deeper and darker, moving down until all the muted light surrounding him was slowly swallowed into darkness, despairing, despairing… then suddenly he thought he glimpsed it—just a quick flash!—like that trout lurking against the pebbled bottom of a riverbed.
And then he knew what he must communicate; he just prayed it was not too late.
My name is Paloma Perez. I am twenty-three years old, I’m so-called “mestizo” (part Anglo/Spanish, part Native American), of the Catholic faith, born in New Mexico of parents who separated shortly after my birth. I am a graduate student in History of Journalism. I am currently on an exchange grant between New Mexico State and University of Idaho. The latter place has an archive containing many very important papers of the famous writer who is the subject of my dissertation. I’ve been working on this project for almost two years. Though all my professors except one think it’s a humongous waste of time to cross that tundra again.
I’m sitting in the living room of my cabin along the Big Wood River, hundreds of miles south of the campus at Moscow, Idaho. The Big Wood is a fast river that runs from the Galena summit, 9,000 feet up in the Sawtooth Mountains, down to the reservoir below my cabin, where it joins other rivers. It is a great trout-fishing stream. I decided to live in this cabin, on this river, because it is just across the river from the place where, fifty years ago, my subject took his own life.
I mention these facts about myself and my project, because two months ago I took leave from the university and moved here so I could get closer to resolving an enigma about this man that I still cannot quite understand. One way to understand it, I thought, was to try to bond with him in some way. To understand the role that his later journalism played, I believed I needed to figure out what he was thinking just before he died. But now I’m not so sure.
Because tonight, as I was sitting here with a cold plate of uneaten macaroni on the coffee table before me and my notes scattered around me on sofas and chairs, something unexpected happened: I was browsing my subject on my laptop and I somehow got pulled into the back door of a website, where I read something that frightened me. On a black screen background, these words came up: “SECURITY, CONFIDENTIAL: Apply through the Freedom of Information Act through proper channels.”
It was a scam, I thought—so I shut down for the moment.
But that was when I got my first inkling, a premonition that something in my factual research didn’t fit, that something was very wrong. And that little idea, that small piece of doubt, began to rub at me like a burr under my saddle; it was making me more than uncomfortable, more than wary. I felt like I just had to dig it out.
Still, I always take all the security precautions that Leo taught me: I’ve switched my computer onto “private browsing,” so no one can follow my path, trying to track my train of thought; I’ve glued a sticky star onto my laptop’s camera aperture so no one can see me at work; I’ve stripped off the cookies that were left there as tracers by others; I’ve checked the antivirus data… though I cannot shake the certain conviction that I’m being watched. Maybe I’m getting as paranoid as he was. I don’t really care.
I flipped open my laptop and started to write down the facts of what I actually knew. That was four hours ago. And I’m still writing. And it still irritates me, and it still doesn’t fit.
It’s midnight now, I can hear the crickets chirping along the river, a twig snaps outside and I flinch; I go to the window; my motion-detector light is on, flooding the band of guilty culprits that are nightly huddled there at the edge of my gravel drive. A small cluster of white-tailed deer: undeterred by the glaring light, they are peacefully munching my landlord’s blueberry bushes.
I take my cold macaroni plate to the kitchen and I make a pot of black coffee—just the way my subject once famously described doing it, where you boil the grounds and water together right in the pot. (Leo says I’m sick to try to bond with my subject this way, but I hope that maybe tonight, drinking this sludgy muck will clear my brain.)
I get back to the sofa and shuffle my papers into a stack—stuff that I’d earlier culled from the web and half-covered with my own scribbled notes—and I leaf through these as I look on my screen at what I’ve just written tonight:
He was born in 1899 in the American midwest; barely got out of high school, no college; went to World War I, got wounded; came home, became a newspaper reporter (over his life he would cover four wars: three hot and one cold); got married, went to live in an icy flat in Paris; filed periodic nondescript newspaper articles for a pittance of cash; hung out in bars with other expats, who convinced him to focus on fiction rather than facts; went daily to Luxembourg Palace (“on an empty stomach”) to study the Cézannes, these gave him an epiphany about writing; inspired by hunger and painting, he invented a new way of seeing, the “Iceberg Theory,” using slashes of words like paint to suggest hidden depths without using description; one day this revolutionary technique would win him the world’s top prizes, it would re-create American literature, and would make him the most famous living writer (and one of the richest) in world history. At the absolute pinnacle of his success—when he was living in a house just across the Big Wood River from my cabin here—he put a 12-gauge Boss double-barreled shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger.