I put my hand under the table and held the bill up against his fingers. He grabbed it away from me and slowly pulled the hand back up out of the glossy wood, the bill in his fingers. The corner was torn-off, just like it was when I first got it.
“Pretty good, eh?” he gloated and suddenly I could see that twelve-year-old boy alone in the lab who’d figured out a nifty magic trick to show off with. Except that, seeing that boy in his face, I knew finally that it wasn’t a trick, that he did no tricks, that he could do what he said he could do, that he was what he said he was. The trick made him happy.
All the powers I’d seen-the things a greedy, ambitious man would have coveted-those didn’t do anything for him. They seemed to depress him. Putting his hand through a desk and pulling out my two-dollar bill, that made him happy. It was a stupid, real moment. It was what I needed to know about him. I felt something inside me relax.
“It’s amazing,” I said.”What good is it?”
He laughed again-a sharp crack of a laugh, an exclamation, the laugh of someone who never expects to laugh.”Good? Nothing. If I lock my keys in the car, I don’t have to worry. Otherwise, it’s just a party trick.”
“So you finished your training,” I returned to the subject. “You were only twenty. What happened?”
“I was only twenty but I’m not history. History has its own timetable. By the time I learned to control myself, I was the dregs of a dying program in a dying country. The other experiments were long gone to embassies or assignments abroad-or asylums, if they didn’t handle the training. The funding dried up, our handlers were bringing the remaining two or three of us meals from their own kitchens.
“Understand,” he said, holding up his ring finger-it had a high school graduation ring on it, one of those silly rings nobody wears anymore, “I was raised to be an American. Maybe it was the Russian idea of America but generally, KGB was pretty good at it. Inside the facility, we watched Sesame Street and Beverly Hills 90210. I listened to the Police and Springsteen and Talking Heads-one of my teachers was big on Talking Heads. I read Thomas Paine and Jefferson, Twain and Bellow and Hunter Thompson. Like most immigrants, I know far more about America than most Americans.
“Of course, we were also taught about dialectical materialism and the inevitable march toward a communitarian world. But the training misfired in me. I was excited by the chaos of America, not the super-efficient Soviet state they told me about. If they’d let me out onto the street once in a while, maybe I wouldn’t have looked so far away for my chaos.
“But I fell in love with the idea of America, the crazy quilt of too many races and too many ideas all fighting for breath. Communism was an ideology-it had the right answer for every question and I didn’t believe in that. America sounded like Indiana Jones: ‘I’m making this up as I go.’ For a rebellious teenager, what could be better?
“So when they came-my babysitters-when they came one day and said ‘It’s time for you to go’, I said ‘Where? To do what?’ I’d gotten a little training and I was no longer a danger to anyone, but it was clear to me and to most of the handlers that I was just no use as a spy.” He laughed. “I’m just not the type. So I said ‘What’s my mission?’ and they said, ‘There’s no mission. There’s no one to spy for. The Soviet Union is over.’
“Viktor, the head man, gave me a winter coat-I think it was his, it was about three sizes too big for me-and ten thousand rubles, whose value was precisely nothing and less than nothing the next day. And set me out onto the street all alone. I’d never wandered anywhere on my own before, not once in my whole life.
“Novosibirsk was a city-not Miami, not New York, but a big city, big enough for me to see what was happening. The money wasn’t worth anything. People continued to show up for work out of habit. There wasn’t even food on the black market. The police were up for hire-if you could pay them, in hard currency, they would protect you. Everything was for sale-everything. The fear and the despair in everyone’s heads-it was real ice-water for me, a cold shower, that this was the first real world I was let loose in.” He stopped, awkwardly. It was like he’d never really talked about this before.
“In the lab, I heard people’s thoughts but it was a controlled environment. We all had work to do. I knew from traces I’d picked up that things were getting difficult outside-everyone brings home to work and vice versa. But this was the first time I’d heard all those voices all at once and everyone in panic. It was…it was like being a child again, scared and alone and not really understanding anything that was happening. I wasn’t ready for real life, for how ugly it could be.”
He got up now and opened one of the sliding doors, hurriedly, like he had to get outside. A balcony stood under a retractable awning, hanging out over the edge of the cliff, a table with a few chairs standing against it and two potted plants going brown. The rain had let up and the streetlights were winking through the settling fog, showing off the contours of the canyon below. The hillside seemed to drop in tiers, first a shelf with trees, then a drop to another shelf, on and on unto infinity or at least unto town.
“I was out on the street overnight. That was all I could take. I have a little shame now for what I did-I could have stayed and tried to help my homeland-but I really doubt I could have done any good there. In truth, it didn’t feel like home. They brought me up to be an American. Freedom of speech, press, religion, the sexual revolution, mind-expanding drugs, Pearl Jam, Harrison Ford and Gwyneth Paltrow.
“I found a woman who would take me in that first night. The next morning, I broke back into the program. No one resisted-no one cared. If I’d asked politely, they probably would have given me what I took-my birthrights as a spy; several passports, social security numbers, drivers licenses, the records for my bank accounts at Chase Manhattan, the ones containing dollars that had been set up for me years earlier. The Soviet Union had collapsed and I felt like an American-where should I go?”
He sat back, waiting for me to supply a judgment, a conclusion.
“So now you’re an American,” I said.
“For almost twenty years,” he replied.
“Loyal to America,” I said but it was a question. “It’s what you were hoping it would be?”
“Hoping? This country? Hell, no. Who reads Jefferson-or Twain-here? Who reads in this country anymore? Russians read and debate all the time-they have fanatical debates about philosophical nothing. What is the price of a soul? Ask that on a street corner in Russia and take a seat for four hours-all you do is listen. Here, everything’s about money and celebrity, for its own sake, shallowness for shallowness sake, to no purpose. Real estate goes up and up and up even though everyone knows it’s overvalued-here, take a mortgage, no money down, no credit, no problem-and eventually it’ll crash, down and down even though everyone knows it’s land, it will never be worthless. The speculators make loads of money both ways and everyone else is miserable. It’s a gold rush-what could be more American?
“ No, this country is nothing like I hoped but I’m a true American now. I love what we stand for and hate what we do. I don’t file my taxes, I’m hung up on sex but I never get any and I don’t think much about freedom of speech, press or religion. And Harrison Ford hasn’t made a decent movie in years.” He looked down into the narrow infinity below and laughed.
“I’m not answering your question,” he said quietly. “This is a beautiful country but there’s lots of beautiful countries. There are good people and scumbags everywhere. Generally speaking, governments stink and religions stink and anything that tries to organize people into obedient groups stinks.
“My loyalty now is to Dave. He was a radical-he argued that this time, for the first time in history, human beings should not use a power they were given. That was a provocative thought but not one someone should die for. If America stands for anything good, it’s that guys like Dave can be their benign crackpot selves without being punished for it.”