“Whose fault is that?” she said raggedly, in a tearful rage.
“You work, you make as much money as I do. It isn’t as if you need me the way a man wants to be needed. Women…” I waved a hand in the air, too drunk to form the thought I wanted, something about the way it used to be, what women were like, what marriage was like in the good old days. “You’re just a roommate with a vagina,” I finished finally. “As if that’s supposed to count for everything. Well, I like a different vagina from time to time, if that’s all it comes down to, so sue me…”
The phone rang, interrupting this learned disquisition on modern social mores. Both Sharon and I reared up and stared at the instrument, indignant, as if it were some underling who had dared to break in on important business between us. If a couple can’t rip each other to shreds in peace at four in the morning, what’s the world coming to?
It rang again. Sharon said, “Go on and talk to your whore.” Then she whirled in her pink nightgown and stormed back into the bedroom, slamming the door behind her.
“My whore doesn’t have our number,” I said-but only softly, because Sharon was no longer there to be hurt by it. Meanwhile, I was thinking What the hell? A wrong number? A neighbor complaining about the noise? The signal to set off a disaster or a harbinger of my own assassination? What? I was trying to talk myself out of the less pleasant scenarios, but it was no good. When the phone rang again, I tasted fear, chemical and sour, in the back of my throat.
I stepped to the lampstand by the sofa, took up the handset. Listened without a word.
“I can’t stand it anymore,” a terrified voice said at once.
“Who is this?” But I already knew-I could guess anyway.
“I don’t care about the protocol.” He was whining shamelessly. I could practically hear him sweat. “What good is protocol to me? We can t just sit here and be picked off one by one. We have to do something.”
“You have the wrong number,” I said.
I hung up. I stood in the center of the room and stared at nothing and swallowed the sour taste in my mouth. I was suddenly fully sober.
That was almost-was it possible?-yes, almost twenty years ago. And that night-that was the worst of it. Whatever their cause, the deaths among us stopped at three. As time went by with no contact and no further disasters, the paranoia faded almost away.
Twenty years. Twenty years of silence and unknowing, the network an orphan, the regime that spawned it gone. The mission? It became a vestigial habit of thought, like some outmoded quirk of inclination or desire acquired in childhood but useless to or even at odds with adult life. I went on as I was trained to go on because I had been trained and for no other reason. What had once been the purpose of my every movement became more like a neurotic superstition, an obsessive compulsion like repeatedly washing the hands. I maneuvered my career and cultivated my contacts with an eye to sabotage, positioned myself where I could do the most damage. But there was no damage to do, and no point in doing it. And I didn’t want to anyway. Why would I? Why would I hurt this country now?
Don’t get me wrong. It wasn’t that I had come to love America. I didn’t love America. Not this America, weak and drab and stagnant. Its elites in a self-righteous circle jerk and its fat farm fucks muttering “nigger” and its niggers shrunken to bug-eyed skeletons on the watery milk of the government tit. Corrupt politician-alchemists spinning guilt and fear into power. Depraved celebrities with no talent for anything but self-destruction. And John Q. Public? Turn on the television and there he was, trying to win a million dollars on some hidden-camera game show by wallowing in the slime of his own debauchery. That was entertainment now-that was culture-that was art. And then the women. Go out on the street and there they were, barking fuck and shit into their cell phones. Working like men while their men behaved like children, playing video games and slapping hands and drinking beers with their baseball caps on sideways, then trudging sheepishly home with a “yes, dear,” to their grim, sexless fuck-and-shit mommy-wives. There was no spirit in the land. No spiritual logic to lead anyone to love or charity. Nothing for the soul to strive for but welfare bread and online circuses. A Rome without a world worth conquering. I did not love this America; no. If I was loyal to anything, it was the country I had known in childhood. The innocent small-town community with its flags and churches and lawns. The women in their virtue and their skirts below the knee. The fathers in their probity and suits and ties. I loved the pride in liberty back then-not the liberty of screwing whom you wanted and cursing whatever curses-but the liberty born of self-reliance and self-control. The Village-I loved the Village. I loved Centerville. And Centerville was gone.
All the same-all the same, what was left of it-what was left of this country here and now-was still a relative paradise of comfort and convenience. What else was there left to care about but that? Revolution? Whatever came of revolution but slavery and blood? No. I had my routines, I had my successful business, the restaurants I enjoyed, my golf games, my sports on TV my occasional women. Why-in the name of what forsaken cause?-would I do damage to such a pleasant ruin of a place to live and die in as this?
So when I sensed our hand in the train wreck, I just felt my comforts threatened, frankly. I was unnerved-worried almost to the point of panic-to think that I might lose my easy, pleasant life.
What else was I supposed to feel, given the realistic possibilities?
I spent the next several days after my meeting with Jay in virtual isolation in my apartment, trolling the Internet obsessively, searching for answers. Stein had been put in charge of the internal investigation now, so there was nothing like trustworthy information from any of the official sources. But there were clues. At least I thought there were. I thought I sensed traces of the truth lying right out in the open, right there in the daily news. A resurgence of Russian arrogance despite plummeting oil prices. A cat-and-canary silence in the Middle Eastern capitals despite all the outlying wise men beating their breasts. It all made for a sort of faint, wispy, curling smoke trail of reasoning if you knew how to see it, how to follow it. The implications were too horrible for me to face directly, but I must’ve understood them at some subconscious level all the same, because my anxiety grew more unbearable every day. Protocol or no, the impulse to try to contact Stein himself was almost irresistible.
I might’ve done it, too, if I hadn’t remembered Leonard Densham.
It was Densham who had called me that early morning twenty years ago-that morning of my fight with Sharon. His was the whining, sweaty voice on the phone: I can’t stand it anymore. We have to do something. He had always been the weak link, always, even when we were boys back in Centerville. The last to take a dare, the first to seize on an excuse for cowardice. He should’ve been eliminated then, but he had peculiar aptitudes when it came to rockets and satellites and so on, the big things at the time. In fact, he had ended up at the Department of Defense, working on the global navigation satellite system. But he was a weak link all the same. He should have been left behind.
As the days went by-those obsessive, anxiety-ridden days in my apartment, at my computer-I became convinced that he- Densham-was the one who had been following me in Washington Square Park. It made sense. If there was danger, uncertainty, anxiety, it made sense that Densham would be the first to break, the first to make contact, now as before. I became convinced that I had actually seen him in the park and subconsciously recognized his face, that it was that that had brought me out of my reverie.