“Yes. Yes. It was supposed to be in Indiana, a small town in Indiana. But, in fact, of course, it was in the Ukraine somewhere. Surrounded by these vast wheat fields. Quite beautiful really Quite typically American. They wanted us to grow up as typical Americans. That’s what the place was made for. Even as they trained us for what we were going to do, they wanted us to develop American habits of manner and mind so we could be slipped into the places they prepared for us, so we wouldn’t stand out, you know, wouldn’t give ourselves away.”
She was very good. Quiet and attentive, her expression unreadable. She could’ve been thinking anything. She could’ve simply been waiting for the sense of it to be made clear.
“The problem was, of course, that our intelligence services… well, let’s say they never had much of a sense of nuance. Or a sense of humor, for that matter.” I laughed. “No, never a lot in the way of humor, that’s for sure. They constructed the place out of self-serious field reports and magazine articles they accepted without question and programs they saw on TV. Especially the programs they saw on TV those half-hour situation comedies that were so popular in the fifties, you know, about small-town family life. They developed the whole program around them. Trained our guardians and teachers with them. Reproduced them wholesale in their plodding, literal Russian way, as the setting for our upbringing. As a result, I would say now, we grew up in an America no actual American ever did. We grew up in the America America wanted to be or thought of itself as or… I don’t know how you would express it exactly. It was a strange dichotomy, that’s for sure. Brutal psychologically, in some ways. We were planted as children in the middle of the American Dream and then taught that it was evil and had to be destroyed…”
I sipped my wine. I stroked her hair. I gazed into the middle distance, talking to myself more than anything now, musing out loud, summing up, if you will. “But it was… my childhood. You know? I was a boy there. There were, you know, friends and summer days and snowfalls. Happy memories. It was my childhood.”
“You sound as though you miss it,” she said.
“Oh, terribly. Almost as if it had been real.” I looked down at her again. Her sweet, gentle, young and old-fashioned face. “As I love you. As if you were real.”
She sat up. She took my hand. “But I am real.” I was surprised. It was the first lie she’d ever told me-aside from everything, I mean. “You see me, don’t you? Of course I’m real.”
“I’m not going to do it,” I told her. “You can tell whoever sent you. I’ve already deleted the code.” Now, again, she simply waited, simply watched me. I stroked her cheek fondly with the back of my hand. “I’ve given it a lot of thought. It was difficult to know how to approach it actually. Should I try to outguess you, determine what would activate your protocol? Or try to figure out the right and wrong of the matter-though I suppose it’s a little late for that. In the end, though… in the end, you know what it was? It was a matter of authenticity. Of all things. But really, I mean it. When I was younger, I tried to figure out: Who am I? Who was I meant to be? Who would I have been if none of this had ever happened? But what good is any of that? Thinking that way? We all have histories. We all have childhoods. Accidents, betrayals, cruelties that leave their scars. We’re none of us how we were made. So I thought, well, if I can’t be who I am, let me at least be what I seem. Let me be loyal to my longings, at least. Let me be loyal to the things I love. Even if they are just daydreams, they’re mine, aren’t they? Let me be loyal to my dreams.”
She didn’t answer. Of course. And the look on her face remained impossible to decipher. I found myself appreciating that at this point. I was grateful for it, though her beauty broke my heart.
I took a final sip of wine and set the glass down on a table and stood. I touched her face a final time, my fingers lingering, then trailing across the softness of her cheek as I moved away.
I didn’t turn to her again until I reached the bedroom doorway. And then I did stop and turn and I looked back at her. She made a nice picture, sitting on the rug, her feet tucked under her and her skirt spread out around her like a blue pool. She had followed me with her eyes and was watching me, and now she smiled tentatively.
“Look at you,” I said, full of feeling. “Look at you. You were never more beautiful.”
And as I turned again to leave the room, I added tenderly, “Come to bed.”
THE HAMBURG REDEMPTION by Robert Wilson
Waking up, hitting his head on the low shelf of his hangover smacked him back into the pillow with a groan. No sooner conscious than the images flickered through the gate of his mind. He sat up with a vomital lurch and vised his head in his considerable hands. He squeezed with his eyes tight shut, and mind wide open.
“Get back,” he said to himself. “Back inside, you fuckers.”
A clock set in the headboard told him it was 4:06. A record. He hadn’t slept beyond 3:30 in months.
“Where the hell am I?” he thought, aware that he was talking to himself more and more these days because it helped to keep his mind at bay.
He got to his feet, a little dizzy. He was naked. Didn’t remember undressing. Used to finding himself fully clothed, sometimes on the bed, other times on the bathroom floor in a sweat.
He slid open the thick, weighted blind covering the window. Night greeted him. The only immediately visible light came from the blue block letters that seemed to hang unsupported in the blackness:
fleisch grossmarkt
A heave from his stomach gushed a hot liquid memento of the savagery of last night’s drinking into his throat. He couldn’t swallow enough to rid his gullet of the acid. He gasped as if drowning.
“Hamburg,” he said, his lips moving, no sound. “I’m in Hamburg.”
He’d come here because it was home, where he’d spent the first twelve years of his life before his father, a scientist, had moved to the United States in 1964, just six months after they shot JFK. His father, who had turned his back on the collective guilt of his homeland, had embraced America and had taught him to do the same. And he had. My God, had he embraced that country. He’d hugged it so close he’d become part of the apparatus that protected it against any unseen enemy. And now? He shuddered as if a train had passed beneath him and gripped the windowsill. The guilt was rocking his foundations. Not just the guilt at what he had done, but the guilt at what he was going to do. He breathed in, steadied his thoughts by concentrating on the physical.
The hotel, yes, the hotel, it came back to him because he hadn’t been too drunk when he arrived, was a converted water tower in the Sternschanzenpark. He twisted his head round a little and saw the lights of the huge TV tower off to the left. He nodded as these certainties emerged. His feet firmed up on the carpet. Strange how comforting chain hotels had become to him, although this colossal nineteenth-century cylinder, with its cavernous entrance, had a moving metal walkway up to the raw brick reception, with sound effects of dripping water, which had so unnerved him that he’d had to grip the moving rubber banister with both hands.
No headache yet, just queasiness and a vast thirst. He opened the minibar, took a bottle of water from the cube of light, and drank it down. Tears came to his eyes. His brain had started to work in unusual sequences, and instead of the usual horrific scenes he had to work at to suppress, he saw cool, still water, mountain streams, the innocence of his seven-year-old daughter in perfect, uninterrupted sleep. He knew now he would be unlikely ever to see her again. Hence the tears. Not wholly sentimental. The water was cold.