Last Days of the Condor (3 page)

Standing on the black iron front stoop, she said: “How are you?”

Tell her the truth:
“I don't know.”

“Can we come in?”

Her backup man added: “You can't say no.”

“I could, but what good would that do?” Walk backwards into the living room.

They follow. The man in the tan coat shut the door to the rest of the world.

Her smile lied: “
Damn,
I hope we got the right guy! Your name is…?”

“I always hated my born-with-it name:
Ronald
. For a while, I think I was
Joe
. Sometimes I think I'm other names like
Raul, Nick, Jacques,
and oddly,
Xin Shou
.”

The bald man said: “Call him—”

Peter! The bald backup man's name is Peter!

“—Condor.”

There it is
.

The silver-haired man said: “That's a fluke.”

“Why?” she asked.

“Because the Agency rotates code names. An earlier Condor was Frank Sturgis, a Watergate burglar. Then me. With a code name back then, I felt like two people. One was regular
me,
one was like the movie version of your life where you're better-looking and smarter and get the right girl. While I was locked up, the code name rotated. Something happened to that guy, they won't tell me what. But they redesignated me Condor.”

“Right here, right now,” she asked: “What's your work name?”

“Vin.”

“Why Vin?”

“
The Magnificent Seven
. Steve McQueen played him. As long as I'm a lie, I might as well be a cool one.”

“My name is Faye Dozier. What do you want me to call you? Condor or Vin?”

“Your choice.”

Bald Peter set his silver briefcase on the floor, pulled an iPad out of his tan raincoat. “Remember the drill?”

“You made the first home evaluation visit after my Reintroduction Settlement.”

Faye said: “Was he a charmer back then, too?”

“He had more hair.”

“I was as bald then as—
never mind
.”

Faye caught the flicker of Condor/Vin's
gotcha
smile.

Peter told the silver-haired man: “Kick off your shoes, go stand with your heels and head pressed against that bit of bare wall next to your fancy radio.”

Your black stocking feet press the wooden floor. Don't get caught flexing your knees or bending your hips to sink your weight but make yourself smaller, the option
no shoes
gave you. The wall of bricks grinds against your skull.

Bald Peter raised the iPad to scan the man with his back against the wall.

“Hold it,” said Peter. “Calculations for metrics and…”

The iPad snapped that picture with a FLASH!

“Turn to your right,” said Peter. “Face your radio setup.”

Faye asked: “So you like radio? NPR, the news networks?”

FLASH!

“I'm lucky. I can afford a radio that pulls in more than that from satellites.”

“Tell her about
clongs
.” Disdain filled the voice of the bald man with the iPad. “Messages from outer space. And turn with your other shoulder to the wall.”

“She knows.”

“No I don't.”

“Sure you do. You're somewhere doing something or thinking something. Maybe driving in a car. A song comes on and it's dead on target for whatever's happening, for who you are right then. The universe dialing in the exactly right soundtrack as everything epiphanies the message and feels perfect, feels …
yes!
”

FLASH!

“That's a
clong
. I don't like news on the radio. That's the invisibles telling me
what is
. No
clongs
. Songs coming out of the cosmos show me something, lining up
what could be,
something about me, us. Like poetry. A movie or a novel.”

“But one kind of radio broadcast is about your real life,” she argued.

“Yeah.”

Peter muttered: “Instead of voices in his head, he gets
clongs
.”

Condor said: “What helps you make sense of it all?”

“Me?” Peter held up his iPad. “I follow the program.”

She asked Vin: “Any problems at work?”

“I show up. Do what's there. Come home.”

“Just so you know,” she told him, “there's no record of complaints.”

“And yet, here you are.” He smiled: “How do you like your job?”

“Better than some.”

“Better than some people like their jobs, or better than some jobs you've had?”

“Yeah.” She strolled toward the kitchen.

Bald Peter stared at the wall covered by taped-up newspaper articles and photographs, torn-out color bursts of magazine art, poems and paragraphs ripped from books destined for the furnace, scissored chunks of phonograph album covers and insert sleeves of lyrics from that all-but-dead medium. He raised the iPad.

FLASH! Working his way along the wall. FLASH!

Okay! It's okay, routine, just routine. The crazy's collage wall. Random weirdness. Textbook predictable. Nothing to see. Nothing to analyze.

Get your shoes on, go after her!

Faye stared into the kitchen's refrigerator.

“Milk, hope it's fresh. OJ, that's good. Styrofoam boxes of leftovers, butter. Vanilla yogurt: for the granola on the frig? Blueberries. Your bread looks dead. Mind if I throw out those single-serving boxes of white rice? You must eat a lot of Chinese.”

“We all do.”

She stared through the bars over the back door to the wooden deck.

Said: “You look like you're in good shape.”

See the tile floor come rushing toward your face then you bounce up away from it again. Your arms burn. Set after set after set of pushups on prison time.

Then in the Dayroom where the murder has yet to happen, Victor comes over, says: “It's about your root, not your muscle. Your center, not your fist.”

Faye,
if that's not just her work name,
Faye angled her head toward the fenced-in back deck beyond the bars, and with genuine curiosity said: “Is that where you do
t'ai chi
?”

“That's where I practice the form. I ‘do'
t'ai chi
all I can.”

“Like now?”

Give her the void of
no answer
.

She said: “Show me upstairs—
no
: after you.”

They passed Peter on his way into the kitchen to make another FLASH!

“Do you always make your bed?” she asked after she'd glanced into his upstairs clutter room, moved to the room with the brass bed where dreams made him fly.

“Who would do it for me?” He shrugged. “It's a rule of lockup. A symptom.”

She looked at his clothes hanging in the closet. Peter will photograph them, too.

Then she led him into the bathroom. Blue towel over the shower rod. The toilet seat up. She opened the mirrored door for the medicine cabinet above his sink.

“Holy shit.”

On two shelves of the medicine cabinet stood lines of prescription pill bottles like squads of brave soldiers. Pill bottles labeled with words ending in “-
zines
” and “-
mine
.” Drugs whose names contain an abundance of “
x
's.” The pills famous for clearing cholesterol-clogged arteries. Blue pills. White pills. Football-shaped pills. Gel tabs. Hard yellow circle pills. Green spheres.

She pointed to one prescription bottle: “The TV commercial shows that drug is for a man and a woman sitting naked in side-by-side bathtubs as the sun sets.”

“The daily dose is also used for us guys with certain …
gotta go
issues.”

“Really.” She pushed him with her stare. “What's her name?”

“There is no
her
.”

“Or he, I don't—”

“Romance is not as easy as just popping a pill.”

“Tell me about it.” She softened her eyes. “If there's nobody now, who was your last somebody?”

Ruby lips pucker: “Shhh.”

“I'm not sure.”

Faye said: “There are other medications for guys who need to go to the bathroom all the time. Maybe your doctors want the best you can be for you.”

“Sure, that must be it.”

She looked at him. Looked back at the army of pills. Her eyes scanned the chart taped to the inside of the medicine cabinet door. “Thirteen pills a day.”

“
Everybody must get stoned
.” Looking at her, even as young as she was, she recognized that Bob Dylan quote.

“Is there anything they're not treating you for?”

“Cancer or similar assassins.”

“You think a lot about assassins?”

“
Really?
That question? From you?”

Peter's heavy footsteps clumped up the stairs outside his bathroom.

She asked: “What's your diagnosis?”

“Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Paranoid Psychosis. Delusional. Alienation. Anxiety. Depression. Recurrent Temporal Disfunctionality. Identity Integration Flux.”

“That means…?”

“Sometimes it's like I'm in a movie. I get lost in time. Can't handle remembering. The pills, the program, you: all to help me keep forgetting and move on.”

“How's that working?”

“I get flashes. Dreams.
Ghosts.
But I'm functional. Mainstreamable.”

They heard Peter enter the cluttered back room to upload its data with flashes.

“Names drift,” Condor told her, Vin told her. “Like Kevin Powell. I can tell you how he died but who he was …
Beats me
. I remember Victor and four other friends locked up with me in the CIA's secret insane asylum but not my first boss in the Agency. I remember reading books for something called Section 9, Department 17, where something happened I can't think about it
don't make me think about it don't
 …

“The big blur ends when I got out last year. What came before that … I remember the first woman who showed me herself naked, but not who I killed. Sometimes when I think about killing, I smell a men's room. I remember alleys in Beirut. Bars in Amsterdam. Airports in jungles. A Brooklyn diner. L.A. freeways. Getting shot. Shooting back. How to snap your neck. The Dewey Decimal System. The triggering event that made Dashiell Hammett a political lefty. Lying and laughing and creepy-crawlies on the back of my neck as I'm walking down some city street I can't remember the name of and that a 1911 Colt .45 automatic is my weapon of choice.”

“Any changes lately?”

Lie
. “All the time is all the same. Okay, as long as I keep taking the drugs.”

“Medicines,” she corrected.

“Aren't medicines supposed to make you better?”

She shrugged. But his question made her join him in a smile.

He said: “The diagnosis says what's best for me is not knowing what I don't know I don't know.”

“But you know what real is.”

“If you say so. I know I'm really here, or really at work. But sometimes …

“Sometimes I'm sitting on a park bench. Blue sky, trees. No sounds—or maybe whooshing. Smells like human sweat. I'm holding an iPad in my lap. In the tablet, I watch what a drone is seeing. Broadcasting. Wispy clouds. Clear air. My view drops from the sky. Buildings get distinct, bigger, then rushing closer in the center of the screen comes a park and benches and I know that if I can just keep sitting where I am, what I'll see any second now in the iPad screen is the drone's view of me.”

She's staring at you, jaw dropped.

Bald Peter clunked his aluminum briefcase down outside the bathroom. Said: “Could you step out so I can get my data snaps.”

In the hall, Faye pointed to the bedroom, then to the junk room. “I didn't spot any computer. Do you have one? A laptop? A tablet? A diary or dream journal or—”

“No, I comply with the conditions. And you know my cell phone is barely smart enough to call the Agent In Trouble line, plus you've got all its records.”

From inside the bathroom came FLASH!

“Hey, Condor!” yelled Peter. “You know what's going to come out in the pee test, so tell us: you still buying pot from that anthropologist at the Smithsonian?”

FLASH!

“
Jah
provides.”

The grin Peter carried out of the bathroom held no sympathy: “You get busted, you're busted and gone.”

“Guess we all better be careful then.”

Faye said: “What does the pot do for you?”

“I get stoned. On my own terms. Well, at least on the terms of my own drugs. I also drink a couple glasses of red wine now and then, but that's almost on doctor's orders. Clean out my All-American arteries and veins.”

“Whatever,” said Peter as he clicked open the silver briefcase on the floor. “Drop your pants so I can be sure your business is your business, fill this plastic cup for me.”

Peter's black marker pen wrote
CONDOR
on a specimen cup's white label.

“Sorry. I went right before I answered your knock on the door.”

“Motherfucker!” said Peter.

“Are you talking to me?”

Faye freed the wisp of a smile.

Does she know that movie? Or is that just about you? Or is it all swirling data?

Peter shook the thirsty specimen cup at the man he'd come to see: “There's a glass pot of cold coffee on your kitchen stove, figure it's from this morning. I'm going to microwave a cup of it, you're going to drink it
pronto,
no matter how hot it comes out of the zap, then you're gonna fill this cup so we can go!”