It was always about the Village. Always about Centerville. Not memories of my childhood, mind you. I had those, too, but the daydreams were something different, something more pathetic really, when you consider it. In the daydreams, I was in my hometown again but as a man in his early thirties, say, a man some quarter century younger than I am now but some fifteen years older than I was when I left the Village for good. I suppose, if you wanted to get psychological about it, you could say I was imagining myself at my father’s age, the age my father was when I was little. But I think, more to the point, I was dreaming about myself at an age when I was still romantic but not unrecognizably young, more like myself than a seventeen-year-old but vigorous enough to play the handsome hero of a love story.
That’s what they were, my daydreams: love stories. Their plots are too childish and embarrassing to go into at length, but a few details give their flavor. The setting played a major role: Centerville’s green lawns and trim clapboard houses, the Stars and Stripes waving above the verandas, the bikes and trikes rattling along the sidewalks. Churches, parks and ponds, and elm-shaded walkways. And the school, of course, the gray, shingled, all-American elementary school. The world of my boyhood, in other words.
She-the girl, the love interest-was variously named Mary or Sally or Jane. Smith was always her last name. Mary or Sally or Jane Smith. She was always very prim and proper- sometimes shy, sometimes warm and outgoing, but always proper and modest as good women were back there, back then. That, I think, was the heart of what I pined for. Not the Village’s peaceful lawns and houses-or not only its lawns and houses and tree-lined walks-but the sweetness of its women, their virginity or at least their virtue or at least what I had thought as a boy was their virtue and had so admired and desired and loved.
The rest of the daydream-the plot-was, as I say, all nonsense. I would be some romantic figure just home from some war or adventure, usually with a dashing scar on my cheek to show for it. There would be misunderstandings and separations, physical heroism sometimes and finally reconciliation, even marriage, even, if I was dreaming at leisure in the solitude of my apartment, a wedding night. Insipid, adolescent scenarios, I know, but it would be difficult to overstate how engrossed I could become in them, how soothing it was to me to return in my mind to the innocence and peace of that American smalltown setting, circa 1960, to reexperience the virtue and propriety of women in the days before radicalism and feminism and sex on demand. That old and innocent America, all gone now, all forever gone.
Walking home from Ground Zero that day, I was so immersed, in fact, that I reached the middle of Washington Square Park before I came back to myself-and then I woke to my surroundings with a sort of breathless rush, a threatening flutter of panic. I stood still by the dry, leaf-littered fountain. I stood with my hands in my pockets and scanned swaths of landscape to the right and the left of the marble arch. Then I turned around and scanned the paths behind me. I had the unnerving sense that I was being followed or watched. I was almost sure of it. My eyes went over the faces of the few people sitting on the benches, the few sitting on the rim of the fountain, and the several others passing on the walks beneath the naked trees. I had the feeling that I had seen someone I knew or recognized, that it was that that had jolted me out of my daydreaming fugue state.
But there was no one. After another moment or two, I moved on. I was rattled, but uncertain what to make of it. On the one hand, my spycraft had grown rusty from long disuse, and I was doubtful it could be trusted. On the other hand, I hated even to entertain the thought that this train wreck and its riddles might mark a return to the paranoia of the bad days.
The bad days, as I still thought of them, came in the early nineties, after the system collapsed and the wall came tumbling down. Communication with our controls, always infrequent, had ceased entirely and, forbidden to make contact with one another, we were completely in the dark. Sleepers-any undercover operatives, but sleepers especially-are always in danger of losing their sense of purpose, of becoming so immersed and identified with the culture they’ve infiltrated that they become estranged from their motherland and their mission. But now our purpose was lost in fact; our motherland and mission were gone well and truly. What’s the point of a Soviet pretending to be an American once the Soviet Union no longer exists?
That little conundrum was inner hell enough, believe me, but then the deaths began. Three of us in the space of a year and a half. David Cumberland, the movie director, collapsed on top of a terrified starlet after he or she or his dealer or personal assistant or someone, the investigators never determined who, misjudged the ratio of morphine to cocaine in one of his speedballs. Then Kent Sheffield went out the window of a Paris hotel in the wake of rumors he’d embezzled some of his clients’ investments. And finally, Jonathan Synge, one of the first of the Internet billionaires, went down with his twenty-six-foot sailboat in the choppy waves outside the Golden Gate. All of which could have been coincidental or could have meant that the network was blown and the Americans were mopping up or that our own masters were getting rid of us, covering their tracks in light of the new situation. The uncertainty only added to the terror of it.
And the terror, I will not lie, was awful. There was no information, no contact, nothing but the deaths and the waiting. I was rudderless and ceaselessly afraid. My discipline collapsed. I started drinking. My marriage, such as it was, unraveled into a series of affairs and violent arguments and “discussions” that were even more vicious arguments in disguise. I couldn’t tell Sharon the truth, of course, so our fights were always off the point and only served to increase my isolation.
“It was bad enough when you were just cold and silent, but now you’re disgusting,” she said to me. I was coming through the door in the dark of first morning. She was standing in the bedroom doorway in a pink nightgown, her arms hugged tight beneath her breasts. Her face was haggard and grim. She was a competent, sophisticated woman, but anger made her look weak and humorless. As long as we’d been minimally civilized with each other, her company-the mindless conformity of her expectations, the low normalcy of her social-climbing ambitions, just her reliable, undemanding presence day to day-had been some sort of comfort to me. Now even that was gone.
“Let me at least close the door,” I said. “The whole building doesn’t have to hear you.”
“Jesus. I can smell her on you from here.”
“So you wash the smell of them off first. What does that make you? The Virgin Mary?” Naturally, it wasn’t what I wanted to say. I wanted to tell her about the never-ending fear and silence and the loneliness that made the fear and silence worse. I wanted to cry out to her that my whole purpose in life was gone and that I had known it was gone for years, but now that I could read all about it on the front page there was no denying it to myself any longer. I wanted to fall on my knees and bury my face in her belly and cling to her like a stanchion in high winds and tell her oh, oh, oh, I didn’t want to die, not now when it had all become so useless and not like this, hustled into the center of some drab tabloid scenario by a pair of deadpanned experts in faked suicides and accidents, my extermination just another job.
“Oh, and don’t give me that look,” I said to her instead- even though she had turned her face away now to hide her crying. “We don’t even make any sense anymore, do we? I mean, what’s the point? Why shouldn’t I cheat? What the hell am I getting out of it? It isn’t as if you keep house or bring me my drinks and slippers. You’re not the mother of my children…”