I
THE ISLAND CLUNG to the mainland by a spit of sandbar as low and shingled as a manicured walk and could not therefore be properly called an island. Still we called it that, ‘the island,’ and at times, when the ocean cycles and planets aligned, the perigean king tide with its liquid cargo brought the water up over the lip of that persistent littoral, briefly severing all tie to the shore and bringing the fact of the land into sympathy with its name.
The day hung over the great bay and to the west with a patience as mild as the still waters beneath it. These were so flat they might have been a living metal smelt from worn verges and outcroppings in this wild land. The waves tapping at the shore seemed accidental, emerging at the last instant and rising only ankle-high before collapsing on the broad sandy flats. It was that moment of spring when the nip in the air has not caught up to the lengthening in the evening light, and this light appears to outstay its time and swap a silvered clarity into hours meant for shadow and dream.
We were four—Frank, Izzy, Quentin, and Schmitty—four men and Izzy’s collie, Chance, and all around us were the signs of stirring life. The dry brush snapped with creatures roused from winter’s sleep. Birds flitted in the trees. Out on the southern rim, where the island turned back toward the tidal marsh and the sedge rose from the brackish fringe like ridges of spiked hair, a pair of duck blinds watched the lagoon. No, none of us hunted, and we had not been together on the island, where Frank’s brother owned a house, in close on a decade; and yet as men committed to a veneer of the most unimpeachable typicality, and men, beyond that, engaged in a deeper and more elusive type of hunt, we regarded those drab half-hidden boxes with a mix of envy and disdain. How simple their task seemed in comparison to ours, how neat and negligible its moral lines!
We were journalists, you see, newsmen at a time when the fate of civilization seemed gifted us like a distant uncle’s unsalable folly. Everyone else had seen their jobs gather at the spigots of excess until, like stone basins, they grew deformed by what they existed to receive. Everyone in government showed the strain and impress of so many shifting agendas that even the crusaders hardly knew what urgency they served; and everyone in business, needless to say, had a pair of shareholders on his shoulders rubbing their fingers. That left us. And since we worked in a dying industry, one that had been cutting back so long its dissipation bore the inevitability of a thermodynamic law, there was no god to worship but the hopeless, romantic mission of it, in service and loyal to one master: truth.
We may have seen ourselves as the descendants of noir detectives—proud, pathetic disheveled men, as prickly and sardonic on the outside as we were hopeless Manichaeans within. We believed in clarity, the disinfectant properties of sunlight, and the irrepressible triumph, in time, of fact. If the world was venal and fallen, we thought the proper response was still greater allegiance to principle. Our martyrdom and sacrifice were givens, after all, the very terms of our grueling careers, and since so many of us had quit or been laid off, those who remained made up the furthest gone of true believers, a reality we endured only by investing great cynicism and coarseness in our words. Oh, we would give them hell, the officials, the representatives, the magnates, the CEOs. Not because we were better than them, but because it was our nature, and beyond that our job. We were the bloodhounds and they our quarry. And what we believed, with fervor that flirted with the religious, was that a single, knowable reality existed and that it was every last person’s right to know what this reality was.
That makes the work sound grander than it is. Much of it felt like correcting someone’s garbled math, scribbled in a purposefully illegible hand. We read a lot: financial reports, public disclosures, white papers, declassified documents. Thank god we had been at it long enough to leave the burnout beats that shave one’s shoe-leather within a broadside’s breadth of the pavement and made our way to editorial desks and their comfy chairs. Izzy ran a southern newsroom and penned stylish features now and again about alligators and methamphetamine and the feckless part-time criminals in that part of the world, whose dreams encompass a poignant share in the human comedy. Schmitty wrote an opinion column once a week, alongside his editorial duties, and mostly he said the reasonable, measured things you’d expect, calibrating his outrage at a simmer and upholding the grammatical prescriptions of a different age. Frank was the news-desk editor at a major paper, and that was Frank through and through.
Quentin was the only one of us still grinding out the hard investigative stuff, and for that we loved and pitied him. We had all grown plump in middle age, the consequence of long hours at our desks, keeping pace with the torrents of what we had been trained to call content, glutting the arteries of knowledge like plaque. Quentin alone had stayed thin, and even looked smaller with age, as if the lifestyle ate away at his unnecessary flesh—as if someone so driven by the hunger to be undeceived suffered a double appetite that consumed him in body and spirit alike. The toll of living without myth or illusion is unbearable for most; the simple truth is myth and illusion get us by.
Someone of Quentin’s reflexive stubbornness and pitilessness would not have acknowledged his own needs if he had wasted down to the stripped spirit of witness itself. It therefore fell to Schmitty, who bumped into him at a legislative presser, to write the rest of us to say that Quentin looked like a de Chirican shadow of himself, poking out from behind a column. He seemed like he could use some cheering up. And it was true that ever since his fracas with the administration over a story the Beacon had caved on and pulled, Quentin’s byline had been scarce. These five days, then, back on the island after a decade, had all the choked elegiac flavor of old friends, whose intimacy lay buried in a receding past, returning to the site of a closer moment in hopes of digging up the capsule of their affection from the sunbaked earth. The love we bore one another had little fuel left but its own endurance, we knew, the fading image on a retina of an extinguished flame.
Naturally, Quentin didn’t mistake the purpose of our reunion. He had the coy attitude of one who knows you mean to do him a good turn but who wonders whether he might not do you one himself by indulging this desire. He seemed all right, after all. And it struck us, when we had arrived and finished unloading, that in spite of his drawn look, our friend smoldered with an acute force that made the rest of us appear shiftless and blurry by comparison. He stood by the shore smoking a cigarette, watching the wading birds that came in low through the evening skies and the small fishing craft that made for harbor in the last of the day’s light, and we wondered, struck as we occasionally are by the way a situation of our own devising turns, like a tide, leaving us the passenger of a larger force, whether we had not gathered to learn from him some forgotten chapter in the soul’s purpose.
Chance barked. The day repossessed itself, a poured light tumbling over the bay and collecting so slowly that our eyes adjusted before it dimmed. The sky gathered and diffused the brilliance, giving no sense of its source, and clouds, contrails, and other markings in the heavens ran to the vertical, seamed with light. To the north, far beyond the bridge at the edge of view, lay the capital. The smudge of rain or exhaust that claimed its space in the sky disclosed a hard reality the island brought us clear of but could not entirely obscure. The engine of industry churned out the black smoke of an old mistake, and even here, where you could almost squint and work back to the beginning, four hundred years before, when the first small crofts dotted these shores, as beige and dun as the lifeless vernal grass and bare trees, even here the price of this peace lay written in that sooted signature of men with an iron desire for a power that human shoulders couldn’t bear.
I was fishing, Quentin remarked. It was not unlike him to start a tale at some far corner and begin shading in, so that details and people emerged faster than the gist and the whole image did not coalesce until the very last accent line brought out the critical connection where, as a listener, one’s attention sought all the while to alight. It had been his habit since as far back as our time together in journalism school, and it betrayed the epistemology of a reporter, who knows that truth always inheres partly in the manner it is arrived at. We had joined him and were sitting backed into the diminutive escarpments that scalloped the shore above the beach. The assembled driftwood and fallen sticks of an unlit bonfire stood before us, and we sipped our beers, looking west, while Chance rooted in the sand after rotting crab shells and the fetor of decomposing life.
Fishing, Quentin continued. Well, you know me, fellas, I did not do the fishing myself. I knew a guy, Roland, who did a bit of amateur angling off a retaining wall upriver from the boathouses. You know the ones I mean? Almost in the shadow of the bridge by St. Augustine’s? Roland did not strike you as a homeowner, let’s just put it that way. No, I never asked what else he got up to. The fish he caught, snakehead and pike, looked deranged and half-dead to begin with, like they had had it with life and he was their exterminating angel. He tossed them in a five-gallon bucket where they twitched briefly and let go.
I wasn’t there for the sport of it, trust me. Quentin paused before continuing, Fishing is one of those meditative activities that enhance the powers of attention, like driving nowhere on country roads. And complex as our world has grown, and it is complex, sometimes it’s worth asking those who keep quiet what they see. You can learn a lot about a city by attending to its respiration. What goes in and out. Roland saw more traffic on that stretch of river in his day than Charon, I’d wager, and my own sort of fishing (I’d brought him coffee and a bagel) worked well enough with his.
This was around the time Cy left me, Quentin said, just after my fights with Haig’s moral heavyweights at the directorate. I had a lot of time on my hands and for the first stretch in many years no task to put it to. I can’t say I was shaken—no, not looking back and knowing how far down the path of an enveloping blackness I had to go. But I felt empty. Blank. Cleared out of passion and fight. I wondered, as I had never done, whether there was really a point. We all wonder, I know, but I don’t mean the idle questions we entertain in a glum moment. My deepest sense of purpose had deserted me. I felt like the boy with his finger in the dike, fighting the elemental tide of larger powers to a lousy equilibrium. I thought, why should I have the thankless task of interposing my poor finger? The tide would win in the end.
The tide always wins, I guess. Or so I thought looking out over the glassy river while Roland cast his line. It was a hot day, getting on toward high summer. Roland was in one of the few oil-stained white T-shirts he wore, which hugged his body like snakeskin.
‘How’s our old friend?’ I asked. He knew I meant the writhen waters before us and said, ‘Oh, she’s swimming in it. Drunk to the gills.’ He held a hand to shade his eyes and pointed across the river. ‘See those rocks?’ A few pebbles seemed to glint in the sun, no bigger than a turtle’s back. ‘Normally, you could picnic on ’em, dangle your feet down and not even wet your toes. College girls like to sun themselves over there.’ He ventured a shy grin. ‘Not that I notice…’
‘Course not,’ I agreed. ‘Family man like yourself.’
‘Look at the foot of the bridge.’ He removed a hand from the rod to point at a patch of ground, torn up and grassless.
‘Repairs?’
He glanced at me like I knew about as much as a walleye. ‘Erosion,’ he said. ‘More water’s flowing through.’
‘Rain?’
‘Hasn’t been much rain.’ He looked to the sky as if to make sure the heavens weren’t about to contradict him. ‘Besides, those algal blooms … It’s not dilute. You know what that means?’ I didn’t need to shake my head. ‘More sediment’s coming down too. More nutrients.’
It was early June, long past the season of snowmelt, and peering into his near-empty bucket, I said, ‘Seems like it might have helped you more.’
‘Doesn’t work like that.’ He sighed with his body. ‘Volume wrecks the deep spawning grounds. See the dead brush along the bank? The table’s dropped too. The plants can’t get water.’ I asked what it meant. ‘I had to guess,’ he said, ‘I’d say they’re running a small flood through the dam up in Minersville.’
I didn’t get it. Roland tugged the rod a few times. ‘I talked to Tim what’s-his-name. Professor at the college.’ He knocked his head back in the direction of the campus hidden behind a veil of trees. ‘He kayaks up past the state park. Says the floodplain’s shot through. Probably going to have drowned half the trees along the bank by the time it dries out this summer. Assuming they run out of water at some point.’
I laughed at this. ‘How’re we gonna keep you fed?’
He looked at me for a pregnant beat, like even for me this was too stupid. ‘You know I don’t eat these. Wouldn’t feed them to my dog.’
That was the first I heard of any dog.
There is a certain mystery to the lives of other people, you’ll have observed, Quentin remarked after a moment. This doesn’t concern what people do to sustain themselves, but the private space that is their own, where some part of them uniquely resides and where they return when they are alone. The mystery isn’t about what we spend our time doing, but the way our most private acts exist outside the flow of life, exist therefore, in some sense, beyond life and death. I imagine we are unique in this respect, humans, I mean. Alone in cultivating this sphere of private mysticism around purposeless activities.
I thought about this in connection with Cy, he went on. She had her watercolors. No, she wasn’t going to support herself painting. That’s why she and Judith had the gallery—have it. Why she consults for collectors. On the weekends, though, or on a trip to the country, when she had a morning free, I have never seen anyone happier. Or maybe happier is the wrong word. More absorbed. More lost to an utterly private peace. You know me, I can’t draw a stick figure that wouldn’t traumatize a child. I don’t have that nourishment that lies on the right-hand side of the work-life divide. My work is my life, and my life I wouldn’t wish on a scoundrel. But do you notice how the things we do when we have time to ourselves attempt to recreate some portion of the world in our image, according to the peculiarities of our vision? We build these little monuments to the idiosyncrasy of what it feels like to pass through life as us, as if it’s so different, so special, or maybe, like ants or bees, we simply find ourselves genetically disposed to render outwardly some blueprint secreted in our DNA.
I didn’t know what to make of this instinct when I started my journey. Mostly, I didn’t see the pattern in it, how even my work for the Beacon had the same impulse behind it, lining up these bits of information like so many breadcrumbs to make my sense of the way the world worked, to follow the torchlight’s illumination past the shadows on the walls. A story is a good deal more than a set of events, a mystery and its revelation. More than an impoverished stab at the why behind the what. Whatever we want to say, we fail to capture it fully because the truth lies at the seat of our being. You might even say that we are stories’ dependents rather than their masters, and we course through life on their currents and networks of exchange without ever knowing how strong the grip really is, without understanding just how much is decided for us.
Quentin stopped. We sipped our beers. The light had changed from windswept gold to a cyanotic register, flinty with the water’s mineral hue. A foghorn sounded down the bay. Fish jumped after the insects disordering the twilight. Quentin hunched forward in a windbreaker that fluttered around him. What breeze streamed up the bay had a mellow and fortifying weight, a welcome warmth, since once Quentin got going we knew that we were in for it and that the night—and more still—would be given over to his tale. But though the urge was strong to crack a joke, to light the bonfire, pass the bourbon, and relive old stories from our school days and early jobs, we held back. We waited. This was why we had come: to listen.
Cy left me just about the time the interrogation story got spiked. Quentin picked up his story like lines in a rope he was unknotting. In any meaningful sense the two had nothing to do with each other. Cy still thought about children, and more than that she thought about slowing down, enjoying life a little more. As you know, the tender mercies of this work seep into the hollows of our bones, the fissures in our joints, and you can only protect those you care about from the strain by protecting them from you, and thereby growing apart. I tried to keep the burden off Cy, but as the story drew me in, I saw her less, and when Henry killed the piece, something in me snapped. The stress and worry I’d dammed up suddenly released. I went home in the middle of the day, a late spring day. The water from an earlier rain trembled on the boxwood hedges and flower petals, and I saw a deliveryman raise a package above his head to protect it as the wind shook raindrops from the trees. A child pulled against her caretaker’s hand to pick at the holly lining the sidewalk, or perhaps simply to breathe in the fragrance that lived right then on the lush air. What is so poignant and crushing about the lives one finds underway on a residential street in the middle of a weekday afternoon? I sat in the apartment contemplating my wretchedness until Cy got home, a little after six. ‘We need to talk,’ she said, right on cue.
What a conversation, what agony! Cy and I had been together twelve years. She struggled with bouts of melancholy, I suppose I’ve told you. I could never have made a very good match for her. But we don’t choose partners for practical reasons, not the superficial sort, anyway. What do we then look for or want? Maybe someone we can take off all the armor with at day’s end, a person who, when we are too tired to explain ourselves, will consent to look at the world and see the same thing we do in broad strokes. Someone willing to live inside the same dream.
Cy talked about how we’d met. This was at a museum benefit, where I’d hoped to buttonhole a board member and bend his ear. It might have been another lifetime. My name impressed her then. Sure, the rare news junkie might have understood, but outside the circles we ran in few even glanced at bylines, and I liked that Cy got it. Not for vanity. I liked that she knew things, took knowing to be her responsibility. We were only too glad to learn from each other. And yet this changes over time. Part of you bleeds into the other person and part of her bleeds into you, and you stop having the same arguments because they have lodged in an internal space. You have them each inside yourself in silence. And the best way to make a point, you realize after a time, is to let the virus of yourself operate in peace, the proxy version of you that has taken up residence in the other person, and somehow you stop talking about the important stuff, and you forget that your partner lives in doubt and confusion, and she forgets you do too.
I thought such things while Cy was talking, narrating our life in such a way that the impending break, like the years we’d spent together, made a sorry sense. This was rubbish. We hadn’t given chance or chaos an ounce of its due, and like most of us, so terrified of contingency we’ll engineer our misery just to have a hand in the process, we jumped the gunwales of our ship for the agency that lives in choosing when to drown. No one wants to put in the hard work of salvaging a half-plotted mess by wiping the slate clean and starting fresh. That would necessitate confronting the unknown latitudes of one’s capacity to change—and where does that end?
But Cy had the instinct to punish her pride, and while she spoke her bottom lip trembled and her anguish awoke in me, at once, the fear that we would talk ourselves into a false certainty, and the memory of everything I cherished about her, those rare qualities I took for granted and now would miss. Her dry wit. Her dependability. The way she often made one short remark that cut to the heart of things. How she never got resentful when circumstances meant she had to shoulder some joint burden on her own. Her affection for the creatures of this globe, the most austere and inaccessible of living things, when otherwise her sentimentality hovered near absolute zero. The brash floral dresses she liked to wear. Her indulgence of my habits and quirks, even when I showed up at her gallery openings looking like a spectral junkie, and the perfect partisanship she showed me in anything that counted. Her love, or rather the pure joy certain pleasures could arouse in her—an excitement that seemed so youthful and unalloyed next to the sorrow and fatigue she bore more often. I don’t know … Maybe these are generic traits, because it was not the fact of them but the precise quality of her spirit under their influence that seemed to me in that instant precious beyond reckoning, undiscoverable anywhere else on earth, in anyone else, because of course it was.
My feelings at that moment verged on such a delicate register that I could only sit there, deadened, impassive while Cy spoke. I appeared emotionless, unaffected and thus heartless. But it was my unhappiness that froze me, that held me there, and I understood that I would cry less and suffer more. I have the courage of my convictions, but Cy has a sturdier soul. She clings to life like someone who has had to make the choice. She believes in other people and can trust them, while I am like some vagrant heretic with a hundred theses and no creed. I lost my faith along a wayward path. Only in misplacing it did I see I’d ever had one.
Cy left me the apartment: a kindness. I think she knew that without it I would join Roland on the pier or end up sleeping on the love seat in Henry’s office—and Henry had told me to get lost for a few weeks. He was right. I’d only have gotten jumpy hanging around the Beacon, but the alternatives, well … I stayed in and watched rivulets of rainwater wreathe on the windows. I watered Cy’s plants, took in the herbs from the fire escape and built a shelter for them of cardboard and tinfoil, caretaking her vestiges. The apartment seemed bare and run-down without her. Had there always been so much dust? I became briefly obsessed with the dirt that lodges in the crevices of moldings, and I cleared furniture from the walls, vacuumed, and set to work with an old toothbrush. The reeding and beads in the splayed crowns had collected grime along their lengths, and this dirt felt to me like the proximate force of chaos, and my own battle with it the attempt to impose order. Or, no. The battle had become simply a metaphor for the possibility of order. We all have breakdowns, mine was no different: you put the immediate urgencies of life side by side with the hopes that hang over it, and you discover the two share no common cause.
My mad spring-cleaning did serve one trifling purpose. I discovered that a previous tenant had penned tiny phrases along the baseboards in a half-legible script. These affirmed such sensible maxims as The basis of optimism is sheer terror and Paranoia is a legitimate response to my manifest persecution. The words summed to nothing; a joke. I was simply looking for a message, a communiqué from the world beyond. Tuned like a radio to the signal in the static, I could convince myself I heard the phantom threads of a human voice. This is an occupational hazard, and a genetic disposition beneath. The difference between sanity and madness seems at times to turn on little more than how tightly we gauge the salience of coincidence; and in a job that rewards conspiracy thinking by always demonstrating that the bar of unthinkable venality has further to sink—well, the work follows you home, as they say.
But straining into the mist does turn up the occasional ghost. The other thing I did—something I had never done before in my career—was to organize my notes.
Now, as you know, once you get around to organizing old notes you’re spinning your wheels. Was I trying to trick myself into believing a stalled car could make progress? Most likely. But taking it lying down was too depressing. They had burned off the less juicy bits of my story in Monday’s edition, tucking the bowdlerized remnant several pages in behind a lot of soft news and a goat-choker about education reform. According to this interminable report, a new crop of superintendents was clamoring for more technology in the classroom. Who could have guessed? You could set a watch by the predictability of it and count down from there to the heat death of the imagination—about five minutes to midnight by my reckoning. But (so the thinking seemed to go) our children’s lives would run through light portals of the virtual, and we had to prepare them, didn’t we? French might suffice for the starry romantics whose parents endowed gymnasia and museum wings, but who would deny that the machine’s language stood aspiring bilinguals in better stead? Still, the jungle names—Java, Python—seemed to purr with a half-buried longing for the contact and rawness of an ecosystem, something altogether different from the nodal network we appeared destined to become, mere points where the great tide of data inflected.
They had buried my story on A7 below the fold, a blip, a glorified squib you could have missed about a new approach to interrogation. It meant to skirt the Scylla and Charybdis of cruelty and credulity by placing interrogees within a confected narrative—one designed to induce them to divulge contacts and practices by making them the hero of their own epic. ‘Soft interrogation managed in totally artificial reality,’ it was called: SIMITAR. It would eschew inhumane methods involving violence and deprivation, and abandon the hard, artful work of turning a subject by winning his trust. The program had screenwriters and spy novelists on the payroll, Jungian scholars invested in the ‘hero’s journey’ monomyth; they consulted with a rumpled magician-turned–public intellectual, who had written a history of confidence games, Ponzi schemes, and other high-level scams. The project was run through defense research, which contracted the work out to Templar Cross, one of Athos’s private military and intelligence subsidiaries. The defense consultancy Drayman-Halley would oversee the program. They had three years to demonstrate proof of concept.
The alphabet soup of firms and agencies made for a complicated read and, from my perspective, a slippery paper trail. Although the program had begun under the Brantley administration, it was Haig’s brainchild. Haig was the ranking member on the select committee and the sparring partner of Brantley’s allies in the Senate—Maubry, Coppin, and the rest—and I guess they greenlit his pet project as a partial loaf for his support on a spending bill. Brantley wanted an end to the aggressive interrogations his predecessor had championed, but he couldn’t risk the political blowback of appearing soft if an attack occurred on his watch. Haig gave him an out. SIMITAR involved no physical coercion, no violence, and if it blew up, Haig and his allies would own the fiasco as much as Brantley.
Blow up it did. Just not, well … publicly. As far as I know, they only tested the approach once, on a detainee named Ismail Kamari. They seeded his detention facility with a pair of undercovers posing as internees who befriended Kamari and conspired with him to escape. This was carefully managed. The tricky part was constructing a version of reality—of freedom—that Kamari would believe in once he broke out and which would keep him moving within precisely delineated grooves while maintaining the illusion of his autonomy. Every consequential individual he spoke to was a plant. The devices he touched—phones, computers—were carefully monitored and diverted to fake websites, fake contacts. They went so far as to construct an alternate history of the decade of his detention. Kamari made it halfway around the world within the bosom of this deception before he got wise to the ruse, fatally stabbing one of the undercovers with a plastic shank and leaving the second in extremis in a tribal border region not known for the provision of healthcare.
Kamari had a few screws loose. He hardly made the ideal test subject, but the government didn’t have anyone else on ice who knew half as much as he did. By the time I found all this out, the hushed-up saga was several years behind us. Brantley’s deputies had been appalled. Old-timers like Maubry, Haig’s longtime rival and predecessor as committee chair, said this was what you got, farming out security work to the private sector: cut corners, sloppiness, feverish visionary stuff that horseshoes all the way around to madness. In cleanup mode, Brantley’s people brought in their own evaluators, loyalists from the agencies, and it was from one of these, a sterling analyst named Lance Berryman, that I had the story. We chatted through the election season, when no one was paying attention. Brantley was termed out; the polling looked bad for his anointed successor. And Berryman was worried that if Haig’s people came to power they’d revive the program, or sweep what was left of it under the rug. He wasn’t wrong. Things had gone into abeyance after Kamari, but the new administration managed to prevail upon my higher-ups at the Beacon to kill the story or any mention of Kamari and the test. James Tolliver, our publisher, and Cat Lewysohn, the board chair, deferred to their rationale. You had to give an incoming administration the luxury of trust, was their way of thinking. At least at the outset, before they knew you knew they were villainous liars. Haig was in as intelligence director at this point, and Athos’s chief counsel, an irascible, blowsy lawyer named Dietrich, had slotted in as the VP’s chief of staff. Behind closed doors everyone told Henry and James that SIMITAR had shut down. And maybe it had. They’d dismissed the program evaluators. Lance was at a facility across the country, prepping for his next assignment. My article, meanwhile, looked like some curiosity piece about next-generation warfare or new ‘physical principles’ weapons, just another of defense research’s follies. Henry said you didn’t ditch comity with the president’s camarilla until you could see the midterms in the whites of their eyes. Maybe that was the right play. It certainly didn’t do me any good.
Copyright © 2023 by Greg Jackson
