Читать книгу A Geography of Secrets - Frederick Reuss - Страница 10

38°55’16.60”N

77° 6’33.17”W

Noel Leonard works at the Defense Intelligence Analysis Center, or DIAC, a complex of metal and glass blocks on Bolling Air Force Base surrounded by acres of mowed grass where the Anacostia flows into the Potomac. A new annex was built a few years ago, a sweeping brown glass facade with views downriver to Alexandria. Although it is joined to the old building, the new building stands apart physically and architecturally, as if it bears no relation. Noel’s office is in the older, silver-skinned building. When the elevator doors slide open and he steps off every morning with that airy little puff of arrival, it is always as though he has temporarily exchanged identities with someone other than himself, a completely familiar alter ego who inhabits his body and will be buried in the same tomb with him, along with the details of the top-secret work he does for the Defense Intelligence Agency, which employs him to analyze data beamed down from satellites to create vivid and detailed maps and portraits of events on Earth.

His office is deep in the interior of the building behind cipher doors. It has no windows. At the end of the corridor is a large window with a panoramic view of the city. He pauses there from time to time to remind himself where he is. He can see the domes of the Capitol and the Library of Congress, the Washington Monument. On the hilltop in the distance is the National Cathedral. In the foreground are Haines Point and East Potomac Park, where he often plays golf; Fort McNair, the National War College, and the brand-new Nationals’ baseball stadium. Immediately in front is the Anacos-tia Naval Air Station, where the president’s helicopters are parked in an enormous hangar surrounded by double rows of high-security fencing. The president always travels in convoys of three, a pea hidden in one of the identically marked VH-3D Sikorsky Sea King shells.

It is snowing. A soft white blanket is coming down gently on the city and on the sprawling lawns of the air base. It has coated the three white radar orbs of the Naval Research Laboratory, the wings and fuselage of the F-105 Thunderchief that ornaments the traffic circle just inside the main entrance, Foley’s Folly. Noel enjoys the incongruous quiet of the base. Falling snow makes everything feel ordinary, and life seem simple. Standing at the window, he is reminded of the famous photograph of Kennedy silhouetted against a window in the Oval Office, concentrated power invisibly served by bureaucrats and technicians staring intently at their computer screens—which is exactly what Noel is doing when Geoff Cowper, his first-level supervisor, comes into his office late in the afternoon. Cowper closes the door with conspiratorial gentleness. “It was a school,” he says hoarsely.

“A school?”

“Investigation under way, but basically, we already know everything.” He bounces against the door, holding the knob behind his back with both hands.

“A real school? With kids?”

A shrug.

“How many?”

Another shrug.

“Fuck!”

The light in the office is low. Noel prefers the incandescence of table lamps to high fluorescence overhead. In the corner is a light table for studying transparencies and a bank of high-res monitors. He leaves the light table on as a reminder that his existence is not all flickering fiery orange but may also be aqueous, blue and soothing. He is not without his refinements. Some time ago he taped a few lines from Wordsworth to the wall: Listen! The mighty Being is awake/And doth with his eternal motions make/A sound like thunder. Noel enjoys poetry, especially Wordsworth, who offers consolations and reassurances—fits of joy, the charm of visionary things. And golf. Noel plays whenever he can. On summer evenings, he’ll often stop at East Potomac Park and get in nine holes on his way home.

“We’ve got work to do,” Cowper says, seating himself. He picks up a pencil, drums it on the table. Noel rarely sees him flustered. Cowper is one of the pioneers of drone air reconnaissance and came to the DIAC from the navy after the war in Yugoslavia. He is tanned and ruddy, a broad-chested Californian with a full head of silver hair, ten years older than Noel—though his good looks and easy humor often lead people to mistake him for the junior colleague. He has a thirty-two-foot Beneteau 323 sailboat that he keeps docked in Annapolis. He and his Texan wife, Ann, spend weekends sailing around the Chesapeake Bay. They are outdoorsy enjoyers of life and have no children.

“A little late, isn’t it?” Noel mutters.

“You’re goddamn right it’s late.” Cowper frowns, looks at his watch.

“I mean it’s a little late for excuses.”

“I’m not going argue with you.” Cowper slides from the stool. “We gave the clear to engage. We need to have some answers ready before they’ve thought of the questions.”

Answers before questions? Noel’s impulse is to laugh. Typical Cowper: if not actually on top of things, then satisfied by his instinct to get himself there. The ever-prepared Boy Scout. Noel is not a Boy Scout. He prefers to wear his insignificance as camouflage rather than camouflage his insignificance. A message enters his in-box with an urgent ding. He knows all too well what it contains. It takes surprisingly little time for things to drift down to these lower depths. The bigger the catastrophe, the more leadenly it falls as the larger vertebrates swimming overhead voraciously consume responsibility while spitting out little pebbles of blame.

“We’re not leaving here until it’s done,” Cowper says flatly.

They cue up the gun-tape footage and the audio feed and watch it over and over. Grayscale infrared picture fringed with instrument readouts. In the target hairs, a complex of square structures inside a walled compound, vehicles, and people—little infrared white grubs—moving between them. It’s hard to look at, harder still to look away. A floating aerial camera view, circling steadily, keeping focus, command voices patched in, steady, circling, steady, then flash, white screen shock-wave shudder filtered zoom showing exploded bodies and slow-motion debris falling back to charred earth.

They craft the memo, couched in enough classified material to guard against its being released while leaving the requisite chutes and ladders open for the downward transference of blame. One of the reasons Cowper has survived for so long in the tense red-cell environment is the skill he brings to parsing and compartmentalizing the team’s duties and after-action reports. His deftness in after-action jujitsu is an aspect of his athletic and competitive personality. He enjoys his victories and considers himself, in the office and out, to be a winner. Noel’s pleasure is less gladiatorial. He thinks of it more like the action of bark-stripping porcupines, or of beavers on forests and wetlands: action from below with broad, far-reaching consequences.

After they send the carefully crafted memo into the chute, they linger in the office for a few minutes. The high-res feed runs in a soundless loop on the monitor. There are certain people, and Cowper is one, whose facial furniture gets completely rearranged when they begin to think. Frowns, creases, darkened looks are signs of deepest thought, which, like duty goods, must be declared upon arrival. He pulls his chair up to the edge of Noel’s desk, slides his folded palms between his knees. Their eyes meet for a moment, then simultaneously avert. “Shit happens,” Cowper says.

Noel understands his obligation is to be resigned to the mysterious engines that serve politics and fate. The other day, he overheard someone say, The more that die, the sooner they’re forgotten. What a shock to hear Lenin paraphrased in the DIAC cafeteria. But it’s the truth. One death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic. Nobody would openly admit it. In the world of full disclosure, certain things must not be seen, shown, or said. The same decorum that attends the arrival of flag-draped coffins at Dover Air Base attends those patriotic TV and newspaper-photo memorials to the fallen soldiers—desperate efforts to deny that the ego vanishes in history.

Snow has been falling all afternoon. He was hoping for a big storm, likes the idea of driving through it with snow swirling all around, sticking to the road, the grass and trees. He takes the South Capitol Street bridge, passes the new ballpark, and gets on the Southwest freeway. The Lincoln Navigator was made for just these conditions. It is late, and because of the snow emergency, the roads are nearly empty. He crosses the Fourteenth Street bridge, gets on the George Washington Memorial Parkway. After Arlington Cemetery, the parkway begins a steady ascent along the Potomac gorge. The river narrows here, and the banks on either side become suddenly darker. Noel is sure he is not alone in imagining, from time to time, plumes and towers of smoke rising from the city behind him, or, thinking forward, seeing cows and sheep grazing once again on the Mall. Why should the equalizing force of time that has made quaint archaeological sites of other great capitals spare Washington, D.C.?

He eases up on the gas and pulls into the scenic overlook at the top of Spout Run. He is intimate with the physiogeography of the area. The river gorge runs along the fall zone between the Piedmont Plateau and the Atlantic Coastal Plain. At Great Falls, the river drops seventy-six feet in less than a mile. How many Sundays has he spent climbing the rocks along Billy Goat Trail? Where he is now, on the very edge of the fall zone, the exposed terraces form steep bluffs that run along both sides of the river, which widens quickly just below Georgetown.

Noel steps into the chill air. Snow is coming down in great white sheets, is sticking to the trees. An airplane passes overhead, making its final descent into Reagan National. They come in low here, following the river. There has always seemed something magical to him about airplanes, the charm effect of kites and strings and flying arrows and other boyhood fantasies of projected power. Lately, he’s begun to see a fuller connection between these fantasy forms of projection and what he calls “disembodied purpose.” The gun-tape footage is lodged in his thoughts. He can’t get rid of it. The sticking point is not the engineering of remote agency—which is just another fancy way of describing disembodiment—but the much larger question of purpose.

He opens the back hatch of the Navigator and takes a club from the golf bag he keeps there. Big Bertha. He fumbles in the pocket, grabs a handful of balls and a tee. A low stone wall runs the length of the parking lot, the WPA, National Park Service style of masonry that conjures visions of Buicks and Packards motoring along with all the time in the world. He steps over the wall and walks a few paces down the grass slope to where it drops steeply off. Through the swirling snow, he can just barely make out the black surface of the river below. With his foot he clears a small patch of grass in the snow, then, leaning on the club for balance, stoops and gently presses the ball and tee into the ground.

Another passing airplane distracts him, and he tops the first drive. The ball drops through the trees. He places a second ball on the tee, feeling a pleasant adrenaline flush, a foretaste of the perfect swing. He connects with a satisfying THWICK, sending the ball high and straight out over the gorge and filling his soul with deep, tranquilizing power.

He sets another ball onto the tee.

THWICK.

And another.

THWICK.

“Step back!”

A beam of light pierces the night.

“Step back!”

He turns into a milky blindness. A moment passes. The sound of a crackling radio sets his heart racing. Little white grubs skitter and pop in all the surplus light. Was milkiness the last thing they saw? He plucks ball and tee from the ground, then, with all the cheerful insouciance he can summon, strides toward the policeman, swinging Big Bertha like a walking stick. “Good evening, Officer.”

“Drop the club!”

“It’s all right, Officer. I was just—”

“Now!”

Noel drops the club.

“Put your hands up.”

“I’m sure—”

“I am going to count to three.” The caution is delivered with a precision that makes Noel smile as he raises his hands. The parking lot is lit like a stage. Snow falls gently through rose-white lights beaming atop the cruiser. The policeman steps over the wall, shining a baton of light directly into Noel’s face.

“Officer, I can explain.”

“Turn around.”

Noel obeys.

“I’m going to frisk you. Keep your arms raised.” The officer pats him down, removes the remaining golf balls from his pocket as well as his car keys. He runs his hands down each trouser leg, then steps back and says, “Okay, you can put your hands down.”

A brief interrogation ensues. The cop is clearly a rookie. Noel can’t help feeling both amused and irritated. He recognizes the textbook earnestness, the training sequences, the mock urgency—all misplaced and misapplied in this real-world situation. The Department of Defense ID sets the officer at ease. He allows Noel to fetch his golf club. As he picks it out of the snow and wipes it off, he wishes there were some way of telling the young cop about infrared white grubs, AGM-114 Hellfire missiles, and the dead schoolchildren on the other side of the world. Perhaps it would help both of them to see a little more clearly. Instead, he assumes the role of obedient citizen, thankful for being let off with a warning.

On the parkway, the Navigator’s wiper blades beat time across the windscreen. The road is slushy, overly salted and sanded. It is cozy inside the enormous vehicle, protected against the elements. Noel’s exact geographic location is mapped and displayed on the dash in degrees, minutes, and seconds. He loves the four-wheel-drive security, the three- hundred-sixty-degree visibility, and the pleasing sense of riding higher, heavier, and beyond all need. He’d joked about it—about heaviness, need, and middle age—in the doctor’s office that morning. A bout of light-headedness yesterday and what felt like stabbing pains in his chest had gotten him an emergency appointment. “Could be gas,” the doctor told him after the EKG. “Gas? That high up?” The doctor assured him it was possible. “Could also be stress.” He ordered the full battery of tests, the outcome of which Noel foresaw exactly. Diet, exercise. He wasn’t a hypochondriac. The pains had been real. But like all the men in his family, he’s always been stoic about aches and pains. You tough out the things you can’t control. Pat, his wife, calls it dumb machismo, but it’s really something homelier, a modesty that resists calling attention to private suffering, not to hide from but simply to acknowledge the fragility and finitude of the flesh.

An old Fleetwood Mac song is on the radio. Thunder only happens when it’s raining. He switches it off. Fifteen minutes later he enters his Arlington house, a three-bedroom postwar brick colonial set among mature trees. They’ve been here since Hannah was three, when houses inside the Beltway cost a fraction of what they sell for now. A second mortgage is paying her tuition and fees at the University of Virginia. Regardless of what has happened at work, the peace of the neighborhood always makes him feel that he is returning to a parallel day here, a day he has missed.

“Pat?” He removes his wet shoes, hangs up his coat, finds her dozing on the sofa in front of the television. “Steve Kritsick called to see if he could ride with you on Saturday,” she says, pulling the blue fleece over her feet.

“What did you tell him?”

“I said yes.” She glances over when he doesn’t respond. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to say.”

“How about no?”

“I told him you’d call to confirm.”

He goes into the kitchen as Pat wonders aloud why Hannah isn’t answering her e-mail or returning her calls.

“I’m sure she has a lot on her plate.” He takes a beer from the fridge. The Pottery Barn vase that appeared yesterday has already blended into the kitchen decor and now contains a bouquet of dried flowers. Pat is expert at introducing things into the house that seem always to have been there. It’s in the kitchen that he feels they are truly cohabiting life partners. In bed, there are too many uncertain signposts en route to a good or bad night’s sleep. The bedroom is too singular a place, whereas in the kitchen, preparing and eating a meal, he is always conscious of familiar settings and can sit down like anyone else to enjoy what is being served. Plus, there’s no embarrassment about asking “So, how’d you like it?” afterward.

He puts the covered plate with his dinner into the microwave, punches the start button, and returns to the den.

“Did he say anything about tools?”

“No.”

“Well, I’m bringing my own. The stuff they had for us last year was totally fucking useless.”

Pat glances at him the way she often does when a remark strikes her as gratuitously cranky. He hadn’t meant to sound that way. The microwave beeps. He goes to fetch his dinner. When he returns, Pat is surfing through the stations, remote control in one hand, holding the fleece at her neck with the other.

“Went in for a physical today,” he says, sitting down.

Pat glances at him, contains her surprise by asking, “What prompted that?” equally casually.

“Just finally taking your advice.” He smiles, imagines slipping an arm around her waist but knows how she would stiffen ever so slightly and turn away. He has always found her attractive. A little thicker in the waist, heavier in bust and jowl, but she’s aging well. The same is said of him, in spite of the paunch.

They watch The Charlie Rose Show. There have been less even-tempered times, but they seem distant now. The big shift occurred three years ago, when Hannah left for college. It wasn’t that he and Pat were drifting apart but rather as if a little patch of gray had opened up. She’d be embarrassed to know how much he loves and has always admired her. “Sometimes I wish I could trade places with you,” he’d said to her recently in a slightly drunken, postcoital rush of emotion. They’d gone out to a bar in Clarendon for a Saint Patrick’s Day drink, something they hadn’t done in years. An early-spring breeze was blowing through the bedroom windows. What he meant was that he envied her direct, uncomplicated, open nature. She lifted the sheet up over her breasts. “Have you had these feelings for a long time?” The confusion that flashed in his eyes set her roaring with laughter. As he chuckled at her little joke, he added bawdy humor to the list of her admirable qualities. They lay for a quiet moment looking up at the ceiling. She was comfortable in her life and in her skin, someone who’d always understood that happiness is completely free. He turned his head on the pillow, looked at her, and felt the urge to embrace her again, but he waited instead to see if she came to him. The moment passed, and he realized it was not going to happen. When she got up and padded off to the bathroom, he felt a twinge of disappointment.

“I wish you hadn’t told Kritsick I’d drive,” he says, setting his empty plate on the table.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know what else to say.”

Every March for the past three years, Noel and his neighbor have driven to a spit of land near the mouth of the Potomac where the church owns and operates a children’s summer camp. It has become an annual all-men’s parish outing, with Father Neale playing the role of host and foreman. The priest hustles about amiably, inspiring esprit de corps and providing continuity. It’s impossible not to notice how conscious all are of their contribution. At the end of the day, a case of cold beer always appears.

“Why not just say you need to leave early?”

He doesn’t respond.

The Charlie Rose Show has been the backdrop to dinner since the red-cell assignment started. It’s been months since he was home before eleven o’clock. He takes his plate into the kitchen, opens the refrigerator to get another beer, and freezes up. He stands there for a moment, staring blankly at the haphazard topography of bottles, cartons, food containers—capped spikes and peaks and posts, plastic plates and foil wrapping. The interior light flickers as the motor cuts on with a shuddering whir. He takes out another beer, grips the bottle firmly, compressing the cold glass in his fist, and watches the interior light go off as he slowly closes the refrigerator door.

“I did something really stupid today,” he says, standing in the doorway holding the unopened bottle. “Really, really, really inexcusably stupid.”

Pat twists to face him. He becomes suddenly aware of the unopened bottle in his hand, returns to the kitchen. “What happened?”

He opens the bottle and, unsure, takes a long sip before returning to the sofa. “It was absurd. Plain fucking dumb. No other way to put it.”

“Would you just tell me what happened?”

He takes another long sip, then says, “I was nearly arrested on the G.W Parkway.”

“What?”

He holds the bottle on his knee and releases himself to a mild alcoholic euphoria and the fuller world that he carries in his head.

“What were you doing?”

“Nothing, really. Taking in the view.”

“For that you were nearly arrested?”

He turns to look at her squarely. “I was hitting drives.”

“Golf balls?”

“At one of the overlooks. Right out over the river. In the snow.” He traces an arc in the air with his hand. Innocent boyhood prank-ishness. Involuntarily, his eyes begin to tear and his stomach does a little roll. He lifts the bottle to his lips.

“And the police caught you?”

He nods, then chokes, sipping, as the wells of his eyes spill over.

Pat moves closer. “Want to tell me what’s the matter?” She reaches up, but he turns away, wipes his cheek in the crook of an elbow, then stares dumbly at the television screen while Pat watches him intently. Weird. He hadn’t. He didn’t. It wasn’t. In a minute it’s over, and giddiness creeps in. “I really don’t know what happened.” He shakes his head with a mild chuckle. “It was just a prank. Totally spontaneous.”

“You sure?”

He can only shrug. A blank look. The fuller world.

“You said he was going to arrest you?”

“No. He just told me to stop. I stopped. It was over, and I left. That was it.”

“What on earth possessed you?”

He shrugs.

She continues staring. “Is everything all right at work?”

He shrugs.

“Maybe the bean-counting is starting to get to you.”

He turns to her and smiles. “Not the counting. The beans.”

On television, Charlie Rose coaxes and prods his evening guest as if each is satisfying a natural appetite for being fascinated. The ingenuous vigor of talk-show routine is difficult for him to watch. Is it that they know so much of so little? Or so little of so much? One day he will tell Pat everything. When the time comes. But what will he tell her? How will he begin? With the little white grubs? Beans? The dead schoolchildren?