17
W hen Cynthia went to visit Borden she almost went right past his door. It was clean. All the nerd spoor had been removed, exposing an ordinary NSA slab. She paused outside with her hand on the knob and sniffed. No smell. A knock and Borden’s voice answered; that hadn’t changed. Borden was in.
Inside, she paused and let out a whistle. “What happened, Borden? Have you been born again?”
The tiny office had been stripped like the door-no junk, no decorations, no trash. Borden himself had obtained what appeared to be an expensive haircut, and he was wearing a cotton sports jacket over a striped button-down shirt and flannel trousers.
“No,” he said, “the new me is nondenominational. I assume you approve, being fairly tight-assed yourself. So to speak.”
“I’m amazed,” she said. “You realize that you’ll be barred for life from Star Trek conventions if this gets out. What happened?”
He looked at her, and she noticed that he had traded his greasy horn-rims for stylish aviators. He said, “Oh, you know, it was time. I turned thirty-five last week.”
“I didn’t know. Happy birthday.”
“Thank you. No one knew. I say I have no life, but it’s not just a throw-away line or a disguised boast, like I’m so busy and important that I have no time for trivia like relationships. It’s simply the case. So it’s my birthday and I go to Chicago Pizza and, like I always do to celebrate, I order a giant deep-dish pepperoni-mushroom, anchovy, and olive-and I’m scarfing it down when I see two girls at a table nearby sort of watching me, and I can tell they’re grossed out; it’s a classic, a fat, stringy-haired nerd pigging on pizza, nothing new about that; but just then I happen to notice that I’m sitting just where I can see my reflection in one of those mirrors they have on the columns and all of a sudden I’m grossed out too. It was like a revelation. Half my life is over and I’m alone on my birthday grossing out a couple of girls, and I realized that this was going to be it into the indefinite future: no life, no girls, nothing but video games and porn. No child porn, not yet, but I could see it was only a matter of time. It was like I’d been hit on the head and woke up a different person. And strangely enough I thought about you.”
“Me?”
“Yeah. The way you come down here and get me to do you favors, and I pretend to sexually harass you and you flirt in a nonserious way, like an instinct, like one of the lower animals, and you let me look down your dress and get close enough for me to smell your perfume, and suddenly I could see myself from outside myself, like you probably see me, and it was, like, appalling. I stopped eating and practically ran out of there and I was thinking, What crime did I commit to be sentenced to this life? Was it just a matter of being overweight and interested in computers? Was it Asperger’s? It’s like in middle school we all lined up in the hallway and got issued a life: you got exotic beauty destined for world domination and I got pathetic fat nerd; it was like Brave New World, where all the Deltas are programmed to love their menial existence. I’m glad I’m a Delta, Deltas wear lovely brown uniforms, or whatever.
“I got into my car to drive home and the car was filthy, sticky from spilled drinks and full of wrappers, the foot well on the passenger side up to the seat rim in trash, because, what the hell, I never have a passenger, so why clean it? My skin was crawling, you know? And the same in my apartment: the junk, the filth, the spilled food, pizza boxes with roaches, no light or anything alive, except my tarantula. The banality of it! Ha ha, he’s a nerd so of course he has a tarantula. Why the fuck do I have a tarantula in my home?
“There was this smell too, and I was, like, how can I have lived all my life with this smell? So I got a roll of thirty-gallon plastic bags and started to clean up, and once I started I couldn’t stop. I took a couple of Adderall and worked all night. Not only did I clean out the junk, I threw everything away; clothes, towels, posters, everything but my comic book collection, and I put that in cartons and ran an ad on Craigslist to sell the whole thing. I’m fucking thirty-five and I’m still reading comic books?”
“The tarantula went too?”
“George? Get rid of George? I couldn’t do that. If I got rid of George, I’d be alone. The next day I called in sick and took all the shit down to the Dumpster and went to Tyson’s and got a haircut and shopped for regular grown-up-type clothes-not too many because I don’t plan to be this shape forever-and then I went to Rock Creek Park and walked for hours, until my feet hurt, and looked at, you know, normal people, until it got dark and then I went and joined a gym near my house and went to an exercise class, twenty fat women and me, and bought a lot of fruit and salad stuff at the organic market and went to sleep early, and today I came in and cleaned this place up. And here you are but still the same.”
“Not really. I’m scheduled for astronaut training right after I have the sex change operation.”
Borden flashed an impatient smile, so unlike his usual ironic grin it startled her. “Still the same. I relate the most remarkable experience of my life, and you crack a joke. So, on to business: what’s the favor?”
Cynthia felt her cheeks warm. “I’m sorry, Borden. I didn’t mean to be flippant. It’s just a little strange. The new you and all.”
“It’s strange for you, you can imagine how I feel. Have a seat. I cleaned it with a janitorial substance.” She sat. The chair exuded a sharp astringent smell.
He said, “But really-what’s on your mind?”
Cynthia had prepared an anodyne and amusing story about what she wanted done but on the instant decided, against her usual instincts, to tell Borden the plain truth.
“Okay, this is some serious shit, and I’m in trouble right now for telling you. You can’t know this, and you’re putting your career in jeopardy if you hear me out, and so am I, but more so. Are you up for that?”
Borden thought for a moment, then shrugged. “My career here is not as interesting to me as it was a couple of days ago. I think my era of staring at a screen in a tiny office, for however noble a purpose, may be coming to a close. What’s the serious shit?”
So she told him about the provocation, and how everyone was being taken in by it except her, and about what she had overheard at the meeting, Ringmaster and SHOWBOAT, and how Anspach had stonewalled on that, and how there was no one else she could tell about it but him.
When she’d finished, he said, “That’s an interesting story. You think there’s some kind of rogue operation going on at Langley? That for some reason this operation wants us to get fooled into… what, invading Pakistan? Why would anyone want that?”
She said, “I don’t care. Our only job is to find out what the truth is and send it up the line. This nuclear theft scam is not the truth. End of story.”
“That’s a fairly naïve expression of what we do. It’d be more accurate to say that we give our masters such information as they’re willing to receive.”
“Granted, and we can’t do anything about a fraud concocted above us-WMD in Iraq and so on. But it’s different when the fraud is concocted from below. It’s a deeper violation. No one elected those guys. No one authorized them to drag us into another war.”
“Why are you so sure these guys don’t have authorization? Maybe it’s another Iran-Contra. Someone way up high looks at Pakistan and thinks, This is a failed or failing state. It’s got deliverable nuclear weapons. The Taliban have complete control of an area within a day’s drive of the capital and the nuclear facilities, plus a good chunk of their army and intel apparatus seems to be in bed with the insurgents. So this someone thinks, let’s prep the world for the idea that we better move in there and secure the nukes before the crazies do, and what better way to make that happen than by a big nuclear theft scandal?”