12. By early ’94, forget accord — now it looked like war was imminent. A year’s worth of talks down the drain. The South running hot and cold, the North swathed in the most useful ambiguity I have ever seen, and the U.S. quartered by the hawks and skeptics, the people who thought Pyongyang had the bomb and the people who didn’t. Meantime, the IAEA’s director general was making noise about more safeguards being broken and was told, essentially, to can it, because at this point, bad news was not helping. The director was nonplussed, but how do I know for sure? Because we eavesdropped on him, too. The director general of the IAEA, and we were listening. I guess every diplomat knows he is being spied on — that his privacy is not inviolate, no matter the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations or the UN’s Convention on Privileges and Immunities — but I was shocked. Was there anyone we weren’t listening to? As a matter of fact, yes. No one was listening to me.
13. At the base, when you weren’t prodding the sky for news of vital international importance, there was nothing to do but drink and fuck. Or so I’d been told, since I’d yet to see the salacious component of our tenure. The guys on duty for the three-month siege at Waco? They drag-raced their tanks from sniper hive to home base at the end of each shift. It sounds appalling, but I get it. In boredom, you will turn to anything. Me, I just doubled down on my work.
One day, I spent hours listening to the DPRK’s negotiator, who was scheduled to meet former president Carter for a last-chance dance. The man liked to talk to himself. He was ripped with stress and grieving the loss of his mistress, who had fled to South Korea. Mostly he was shocked. Did he really want to send in the goons to haul her back? Was he really so unappetizing that she’d crossed the border to escape? Bound up in this self-pity were plaints about the negotiations. He resented his new orders — if he’d been a better man and more expert in snatching advantage from the enemy, he would have never gotten the orders — only I couldn’t tell what the orders were without listening several times over, the words coming out muffled and broken, possibly because he was speaking them into a pillow. I’d listened to him well into the evening. When my shift was over, I passed on what I knew to the next guy and called it quits.
14. I went to the pub. I took a stool at the bar and ordered a beer, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the negotiator. What was he talking about? Why so down on the new orders? Why so emasculated? I decided to flush my mind with the night air and get ready to listen again. I would block out everything I’d translated already, home in on the rest, and find meaning in the carnage of this guy’s self-esteem.
I went to the cave, which is what we called a mostly neglected listening room in the basement. You went there primarily to do what I had in mind, which was to recue a tape and try again.
15. The door was unlocked, and inside were four cryptanalysts I’d seen around but never talked to. They were gathered at a work-station-turned-bar and were playing cards. I said I had some reviewing to do and not to mind me, though I was glad for the company. It’s true I kept to myself and that I liked reclusion, but this did not militate against the loneliness of just breathing in and out and all the other fundamentals you do alone each day.
I sat with my back to the room, put on my headphones, and cued up. Okay, now pay attention. I listened once just to get back into the zone, twice to access my guy’s headspace, and a third time to parse content from emotion. By the sixth listen, I had completely tuned out his whimpers and clamor of self-disgust, but I still could not make sense of the rest. I pressed my headphones into my ears and thought: Listen.
16. Meantime, the others were kissing. I’ll just say it: they were kissing. Not that the card game had escalated into strip poker or spin-the-bottle, just that the four had tired of one pursuit and moved on to another. I went back to the tape. I knew that this was important and that if I missed something big, I’d get fired, and that I was running out of time. And so, wouldn’t you know it, the tension that should have spurred me on to greater facility instead began to manifest in a libidinal stir whose accomplice was the knob of denim pressed against my vulva. Under the circumstances, orgasm didn’t seem like the worst idea, albeit rough, given the knob of denim and on this occasion it being the cave at a tracking base in the middle of the desert, where — what do you know — two of the four, the two who were boys, had found their way to each other.
17. I’d seen this on TV, the phenomenon that is boys kissing, and felt then that my interest was anthropological. Here, too, minus the part where I could stare without offense. I was unclear if in the dawn of an orgy — because I was pretty sure that was what I was looking at—staring is ever met with offense, but what did I know? I tried to get back to work. I tried to listen to my Korean guy, in whose mewling hung the balance of war with the U.S., and to silence my screaming vulva, because the boys had moved on to the girl — her name was Morgan, and since when does a girl named Morgan let two boys touch her at once? And frankly, why was no one touching me? I was wearing a Disneyland sweatshirt with Tinker Bell in flight over the castle, jeans with an elastic waist, and clogs. Nothing says I am a frozen bread loaf better than clogs, but come on, was this a discerning orgy?
Well, fine. If I got orgied, I’d also get an STD, so lucky for me no one was noticing me panting across the cave. Why couldn’t I understand what the negotiator was saying? Why couldn’t I penetrate his wounded feelings? If I got fired and had to go home, I’d hang myself from the showerhead, never mind the war that would be my albatross for life. Where was the justice in that? I was just some girl from Anaheim with a crush on her parents, a brother in a coma, and no talent for intimacy with anyone who mattered.
18. That night was a lesson learned: there’s the erotics of a woman who feels so miserable and wrecked and anxious and sad that she will get on her knees and let four people have at her with varying degrees of rupture and bliss, and then there’s everything else. I unplugged my headphones and let the tape feed through the wall speakers. None of them minded the Korean, and so it was as though his voice kept my head in quarantine while the rest of me went to town. Who took off my clothes? Had I ever kissed a girl? Were ministrations lavished with judicious regard for people’s feelings and self-esteem? Are these the questions that spring to mind? We were five; it was exhausting. Labor intensive. You gave up what you got, were debased and exalted, and also profligate in the disport of your limbs so that they might land anywhere and on anything, and sometimes on the volume button of your listening console, so that just as one guy cums (and on your forehead, because you are not, after all, a porn star and can’t even catch rain in a storm), you suddenly understand loud and clear what your Korean negotiator is saying: “I am not a man, my shame is paramount”—in short, the DPRK will bow its head and freeze its nuclear program in exchange for light water reactors.
19. A major concession. If the U.S. knew this ahead of time, they could call off Carter — Carter, who was making the administration look impotent and ridiculous, calling in an ex-president to negotiate for them. God, I felt good. Alive. And I was slick with the proof. My thighs were wet, my lips and hands, so that when I went for the tape, hit Eject, I don’t know, my finger slipped and the tape jammed. Got caught halfway. Worse, I had done the horrible but corner-cutting thing of using the original tape — a dupe took days — which meant the only way to recoup the information was to keep hitting Eject until the button jammed as well. I knew that we shredded transcripts and that we had an entire building filled with tubs of acid to dissolve paper, but also that maybe we were not above dissolving the linguist who screwed up big-time.