Fiction.
It was 2AM. Closing time. Quitting time for a bar bouncer, but the hour of reckoning for a 24-hour breakfast chain. The restaurant was full and the line was long, and blasted breakfasters crowded the entryway. Intoxicated beautiful people nauseatingly and nonsensically repeated their pet expressions. Militant fat girls stormed about in lock step, with bloodhound jowls and vacant, bovine eyes atop too-tight clothing.
A vagrant reclined adjacent his pack in a coveted booth, with his sundries wired, twined, and clamped together, clutching obscure philosophy. His colossal stench was a perfectly ironic partner to the air of superiority on his unkempt, unshaven face as he addressed the frenzied waitress. “I ordered water, no ice. This water has ice.”
“I’m sorry, sir. Most of our patrons order from the menu, then pay for their food,” she oozed. “If your water isn’t up to standard, I’ll happily fetch the manager.” Extra sweet, delivered with a smile and cleavage-revealing bow from the waist. Nerve-racking son of a bitch. Get a job. Better yet, get out of here. Closing time brought out the worst in everyone. Waitresses, intoxicated beautiful people, even the bums.
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Tom’s torso teetered on the edge of shattering the inviolable laws of physics, thumbing its bulbous nose with a corpulent digit at every step his improbably skinny and embarrassingly knock-kneed legs ventured to attempt. Indeed, it was likely that the titanic, amorphous blob perched precariously atop Tom’s toothpicks, a gut which even in static conditions appeared to flood arrogantly around the Maginot Line that was his defenseless belt, moved in more than one direction, even moved in more than just our known dimension, each time Tom’s ponderous person attempted locomotion.
The office pool was no longer for Tom’s weight, as few scales proved up to the daunting task of verifying a winner, but rather for how long Tom might still be able to walk. It was a secret pool, as Tom alone controlled when to take the wheelchair plunge. And it would require no ordinary wheelchair: only the extra-wide wheelchairs that verily shouted “GLUTTONY” or “THYROID PROBLEM” or “HOLY SHIT,” the wheelchairs made trendy in the slot machine sections of casinos everywhere, that could possibly transport such mass as Tom’s. It would be too easy for Tom to play favorites if he knew about the pool.
Tom had been a good sport about his fantastic fatness; his girth was in fact surpassed only by his mirth, the self-deprecating kind of good humor employed successfully only by one with the heartfelt conviction that there was far more to the self than the obviously laughable. Or, perhaps Tom enjoyed the good humor possessed by someone with a secret. A juicy, outrageous, over-the-top, perhaps illegal, definitely racy secret, and undoubtedly the kind of secret with staying power. Most secrets enjoy a falling star’s brief celebrity, a random exclamation point in the otherwise drab prose of the appliance user’s manual most of us are doomed to read ad nauseum and ad infinitum. But for the proprietor of a perpetual secret, a parallel, clandestine existence perhaps, life’s very commonness is cause de celebre. The infernal boredom to which most are condemned is itself reminder of the secret-holder’s brilliant subterfuge. A smug smile might emerge randomly during some everyday meaninglessness, along with a seemingly misplaced twinkle in the eye. Or a fat joke, foisted on a game but slightly freaked out audience by the fattest human in the tax bracket. Tom wouldn’t mind pulling off a wheelchair, particularly for the hot brunette’s August prediction in the fatso pool. He had a thing for brunettes.
That wasn’t the secret that kept Tom smiling.
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That’s how it goes with deception. It’s effective only when undiscovered, and devastating when the beans spill. The actual harm is rarely as consequential as the realization it fosters: life is not as we thought. A discovered lie begs the annoying existential question, what is reality beyond perception? Objectivity is an impossibility, and even if one Zenned their way to a perfectly objective perch, who is to say the act of examination doesn’t alter the subject? Really, the true nature of anything is a useless abstraction—it’s nontransferable, imperceptible, and hopelessly negotiable. Truth is only true by convention or collusion, and we largely believe what the people around us believe. And we believe it passionately. In a cruel ironic twist, life offers no absolute truths, but an abundance of absolute lies.
So why was Franklin so bothered at his discovery? Kool-Aid was an artist whose medium was deception. He was a virtuoso. He lied for practice and entertainment, for no apparent reason and for any reason, and plausible pretext was precisely the skill that made Kool-Aid indispensable. While Franklin shouldn’t have been duped in the first place, or upset by his findings, the truth was that the case officer was guilty of being both hoodwinked and hurt. Motherfucker. That fat son of a bitch has probably been lying to me for months. DC will shit. And if you distilled shit, it might taste like Franklin’s bargain scotch. He poured a third glass, and noticed that he didn’t have to add ice. Tomorrow would hurt in a number of ways.
Not the least of Franklin’s pain was the morning teleconference during which Jameson asked, with a somewhat supercilious and, if Franklin wasn’t mistaken, gleeful affectation, “precisely which elements of this take are actionable?” That was Agency dialect meaning none of this information is worth the recording media it has defiled. Though Franklin had turned himself inside out the entire preceding night to arrive at an answer to the very obvious question of the depth of Kool-Aid’s expert play, Jameson somehow caught him off guard. Perhaps it was the hangover. Perhaps it was that the nature of humanity is to misrepresent and misunderstand simultaneously, and Franklin had no concept of the extent to which he had been played. Maybe both. Hell, probably both. Franklin had been there often enough to know that there was no savory selection at the defecation deli. While everyone with Kool-Aid access would have to take a bite of the colossal shit sandwich, Franklin knew beyond doubt that he was responsible for the leftovers. And he knew that there would be plenty of leftovers. The preceding question indicated unequivocally that Jameson’s bite was going to be debutante dainty. It’s going to be a long week.
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Trust. Luxury and necessity, simultaneously. One couldn’t count on its strength, yet one couldn’t operate without its promise. One must expect to be burned, then act as if being burned was the most remote of possibilities, as if the desperate fool clinging frantically to his last options, living with furtive and perpetual glances over his shoulder, was entirely trustworthy and unmoved by adjacent inducement. And unmoved by competing coercion, typically of the non-rejectable variety, usually involving corporal threats against one’s person or family. Which is why many intelligence agencies strove to recruit, train, and employ individuals who lacked sufficiently strong links to other humans to be vulnerable to the most basic but effective leverage, then strove to inculcate complete personal subjugation to “the mission.” Men without attachments and purged of their sense of self were simply far more willing to engage in the distastefulness demanded by clandestine intelligence service. Unfortunately, one could never discern with certainty the degree to which a man lacked attachment, or subscribed viscerally to his letterhead. And so, such agencies watched their own at least as aggressively as they spied on the others.
Clearly, success varied by degrees. Personal ideological truths, as a practical matter, failed to extend beyond the reach of the internal intelligence apparat, necessitating nearly as many counterintelligence agents as intelligence operatives. Coercion never grew thicker than thin as a lone strategic tool, a reality that fostered several unsavory outcomes. Few could be accurately said to subscribe more than perfunctorily to the governing ideology, yet all demonstrated the requisite fervor of the true believer. Ironically, perhaps justly, the bureaucratic machinery of the most fervent and zealous polities gained little more than pragmatic adherence. Form was not just function, it was personal survival, and the elaborate rituals of personal loyalty to the greater good were undertaken with superb but superficial fervor. In the process, one strove to affect an appropriately pious expression, and avoided eye contact with adjacent devotees at all costs, lest a nervous tick betray the true state of things. An askew glance or a microscopic roll of the eyes could wreak havoc. Generations were at stake. Politics rarely kept one warm, but they clearly kept one alive.
It was not as if the false demonstrations entirely achieved their end. An entire art form emerged to discern the truly disingenuous from the purely disenchanted, to ferret the traitorous from the ranks of the merely tortured. It wasn’t really all that difficult. The privileged were over-exuberant, their patriotic performances energized by the sure accounting of all they had to lose. The downtrodden didn’t care one way or the other. As there weren’t many other categories of person in that time, the duplicitous donned the persona of their choice, but with a depth of gaze and a set of jaw that gave them away instantly to the learned observer. Even the best find it difficult to discipline their eyes, and even the most adept tradecraftsmen struggle mightily to hide an active mind.
That’s not to say that a neophyte could expose the experienced professional. Quite the contrary—it took years of practice in field operations to begin to understand the nuances. Tom had that kind of experience, in spades. And he had the gift of invisibility, despite his obvious characteristics. While people stared, they scrutinized the wrong aspects of Tom to understand him. Practiced operatives turned away with an unformed, unconscious “no fucking way” echoing in the recesses of their minds. He was the largest invisible human in America. Tom was perfect.
And he observed. Knew what to observe, whom to observe, with a keen sense of the sort of information useful to his employer du jour. So adept was Tom at discerning what might be important and career-extending information for his handlers, in fact, that he was not beyond inventing juicy sundries to maintain interest while he awaited truly useful information. Actually, the plausibility of his fabrications, carefully designed to be irrefutable, for which even the experts fell head over heels, gave him access to truly valuable information. On all sides. He just had to keep them straight. Truth and deception are symbiotic in practice, and few enjoyed Tom’s appreciation and mastery of that strange certainty. He was truly unique. One might think the stress would remove a pound or two, but that wasn’t Kool-Aid.
But he’d been at it too long, and Tom had pioneered his genre in the way that Hendrix, Vaughan, and Van Halen had established theirs. Staggering, inimitable, yet mundane in their virtuosity. The benchmark was immediately recognizable, and such was the case with Tom. He was admired, studied, celebrated, even if he was still, but just barely, anonymous. Not a problem, if he worked for only one intelligence agency. He didn’t. He was in danger.
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The brunette’s name was Danielle, and she was irresistible. Her silhouette was captivating from any angle. Her voice was smoky, engaging, with an enchanting timbre of possibility. Dark hair and eyebrows, and a slightly pouty smile, sheltered viciously blue eyes. The kind of eyes that stopped a man dead in his tracks, gripped his soul by the balls, and pierced his every thought. She had a long Slavic neck atop features simultaneously delicate and strong, with a beautiful Hungarian face perfect for any magazine cover. The penetration of her eyes was exceeded only by that of her intellect, manifest in an acerbic wit that cut to the quick, inevitably chased by a playful smile to gracefully reconstruct her stunned victim. Restless, sarcastic, playful, brooding, beautiful, brilliant, and unconquerable, Danielle was Armageddon in heels. For the lucky few, destruction was paradise.
Tom wasn’t lucky. Not just because Danielle was unattainable, but because she was attentive. If others at the office noticed Tom’s slightly incongruous joviality, only Danielle recognized its potential significance. Such perception was, after all, why her considerable talents “languished” as an executive assistant—at the National Security Agency. Her brilliance was obvious to even the most casual observer, but few thought to ask the corollary question: why isn’t she running the division instead of answering the phone? Beautiful women often had difficulty shattering the glass ceiling, which was perfect cover for Danielle.
She had a hunch about Tom, which meant she’d have to stay late again. She’d tell the boss that his morning schedule required some revision, which it did, but she already knew the solution, which would free her to investigate Tom’s files once the boss left. Cloud computing—computing communism—were the resurrection of espionage. Often, one didn’t have to leave one’s desk to have a peek into someone else’s knickers. Unfortunately, the sword generally cut both ways, and one couldn’t just barge into another’s electronic business. A little subtlety went a long way, and Danielle certainly appreciated subtlety’s utility. She was among the best.