Poumakis touched things: the oars that hung from the study-room wall; the wooden owl mascot; the air rifles racked in the basement; the little sophomore bedrooms, carved from larger bedrooms and crammed with loft beds. When we reached the threshold of the president’s room, he touched the chin-up bar in the doorframe, said, “Yup, still here,” and lifted off the floor, legs limp and straight.
Glines started to count Poumakis’s chin-ups out loud, and then the rest of us had to join in, or Glines’s love of Poumakis would be dramatically exposed. It was only fair; we were all a little in love with the soldier in our midst, and it would have been unbrotherly to let Glines stick out, like leaving an injured comrade on the field. As soon as the group counting started—we called out, “Four, five,” in chorus, like cadets—Poumakis dropped, bending his knees as he landed.
Glines gave Poumakis a beer from the fridge and guided him to the black couch on the back porch. He sat beside him and said, “So level with us. How real are the movies about Iraq and Afghanistan and everything? Is that what it’s like?” What Glines was trying to ask was, Have you been in the shit?
Poumakis wore no particular expression. There was a slot in his beard that opened and shut. “I thought Zero Dark Thirty was okay,” he said. “They showed it was a lot of people coordinating instead of one person doing everything. But they never showed anyone being funny, except for Chris Pratt at the end. I liked Chris Pratt because he’s funny. Still, when they were working in the office in Pakistan, none of them were ever funny. They were always serious. They were never like, ‘Okay, it’s eleven o’clock, who wants doughnuts?’”
The sun had set over the decrepit unaffiliated green Victorian that backed up against our yard. Rumor had it that it was all high school dropouts living off a grandma they kept in the attic. Their living room lights came on, and then music, a dance remix of a song about being sad in the summertime.
“But was it typical,” Glines asked, “of how people go undercover and find terrorists, and take them?”
What Glines meant was, Have you gone undercover? Have you killed?
Poumakis picked at the label on his beer. “I wouldn’t say typical,” he said.
“I want you to know,” said Glines, “that we’re your brothers. Whatever you say never leaves the porch.”
“I can neither confirm nor deny,” said Poumakis. He inhaled through his nose. He might have resumed talking for no other reason but to fill the silence.
“The first mode of cover they teach in training,” he said, “the one that’s most typical in the field, is called You Me Same Same. I don’t know where the name came from. I think it’s probably African or Caribbean, but some people think it’s from this novel from the eighties. There’s this Vietnamese girl, and she’s really hot and she’s Vietcong, and they’ve got her captured. She’s scared they’re going to rape her. And she points to a Native American GI, and points to her face, and goes, ‘You, me, same, same.’”
We all looked at one another and pointed. “You, me, same, same,” we said, making come-hither faces. Poumakis looked amused. We waited, rapt.
“Wherever the name comes from,” he said, “the idea with You Me Same Same is, you create a cover identity that makes the target feel like the two of you are similar. You become a person who reminds the target of him- or herself. The first objective is to research the target’s tastes, passions, and interests, and familiarize yourself as best you can. The second is to persuade the target that you’re like him, only a little more confident, a little nicer. Which is all he’s ever wanted from a partner or a friend. It’s like dating.”
Glines was grinning like a fool, like an innocent. He was grinning like a guy who’s just asked his high school sweetheart to marry him at Fenway. I felt it, too. I felt like my life had been a dream in which nothing mattered, and finally I was waking up into a world that was real, a world where people fought. It was really true that I was alive.
“So who would do that?” Glines asked Poumakis, his voice shaky with joy. “The CIA?”
“Usually more conventional military granted temporary status as intelligence,” Poumakis said. “CIA guys tend to take advantage of how everything kind of loosened up after 9/11 by farming out the fieldwork to us. The CIA is good at intelligence gathering, intelligence analysis, and planning paramilitary operations. But not when it comes to doing the actual ops. We’re better at fieldwork than they are. It’s there in the statistics. So what are we going to do? Tell them, like, ‘Fuck off, I signed up for the navy?’”
We were all nodding as if we related. We needed some way to express our exhilaration, and nodding was the available vehicle. But of the six of us, only Glines was so high on Poumakis that he could overcome his shyness and ask him what we all wanted to ask.
“You’ve done that?” asked Glines. “Ops? You Me Same Same?”
Poumakis took a Juul from a pocket of his sweatpants and puffed. “My first target was in Sudan. He loved the Canadian Brass. He was obsessed with these two albums, Bach: The Art of Fugue and Live in Germany. I bought them on old-school CD from a University of Khartoum student. I sat in my apartment and listened to them for hours.
“I bought a new wallet, which was tan, not black like my real one. I bought a Paul Smith suit with subtle stripes and vintage Nike sneakers because my research indicated my target thought those things were cool. I rented an apartment and got the kind of furniture he would’ve bought. It’s something they teach you to do, getting the furniture, so that you feel like a different person. And you need everything you can get that will make you feel like it will work, because you’re not an actor, and here you are acting. When I hung out with this guy—we went to this café on Nile Street—I was worried I would spill my glass of tea down my striped suit because I was faking. I thought faking would be stressful. But then this weird thing happened. I found out I was more relaxed in cover than when I wasn’t in cover. It was easier than being not in cover, kind of.”
“That’s because you’re a natural,” said Glines.
“In cover, daily life wasn’t that stressful at all,” Poumakis continued. “Sometimes I liked pretending to enjoy horn quintets with a target more than I liked talking about, say, Arcade Fire, my actual favorite band, with a person I actually liked. It was just easier. The awkwardness of trying to be real with someone went away. You didn’t have to try to be real. I’m pretty sure I have mild PTSD, and I get this depression that comes for a little while and then goes. That didn’t happen when I was in cover. It was like being drunk.”
Glines gave himself a neck rub. “If it’s like being drunk, sign me up,” he said. “I’m going to Sudan.”
Next door, someone threw a Frisbee into a tree. The leaves sprayed water into the air as the disc flew through them.
“It’s great to have you here,” I said to Poumakis. “But besides just getting to grill you about all the badass stuff you’ve done, we were kind of hoping you could give us some advice. You’ve done Navy Hell Week, probably, right? Tell us the tricks you learned. How do you make things shitty for a bunch of pledges?”
Poumakis vaped again. “Navy Hell Week,” he said, “is, you’re swimming in the ocean on four hours of sleep catching hypothermia and there are drill instructors with megaphones telling you it’s cool if you want to quit and go have coffee and muffins. They’re shouting at you about how there’s no dishonor in quitting, go set yourself free. They want seventy-five percent of you to quit, they expect you to bail. You’re not trying to make these pledges quit. Because if seventy-five percent of your pledges quit, you don’t have a fraternity.” We conceded that this was the case. “You want to make things shitty for a guy? Lock him up and leave him alone.”
“Have you done that?” Glines asked. “In the field?”
“I’ve done interrogations,” he said. “And the weird thing is, people can’t stand it when you leave them by themselves. They bang on the walls until they elicit a response. Or they pretend to be sick until they elicit a re
sponse.”
Glines rubbed his knees. “You put them in a box or something?”
Poumakis shook his head. “With this guy in Sudan, I put him in a room for a week. Not a box. A clean, plain room with food and water. Then I’d bring him out and You Me Same Same with him. He was always up for small talk, even to me. The next day, I offered him a sparkling water. We went for a walk, under guard. The day after that, I said, ‘Come on up to our quote-unquote kitchen, we’ve got some cabbage, some yogurt, some eggs, some fruit. Let’s see if we can slap together a real meal, because neither of us wants to be here but while we’re stuck here, might as well, right?’
“The next thing you know, he’s like, ‘It’s better than the food at camp.’ And later, he’s like, ‘You think your rifles are shit? You should see the shit rifles we have.’ Gradually, he gave me more and more of what I was after. He wanted to keep it going. He wanted company.
“He had to know what I was doing, but he went into denial about it. That’s how much he hated being by himself. That’s how badly he wanted some You Me Same Same. Can you imagine how he felt, when I put him back in his room and he thought about the information he’d given me in exchange for a little bit of bullshitting? It must have been torture for him. I tortured the guy, in a way, is I guess what I’m saying.”
“He sounds like a pussy, though,” said Glines. “It wouldn’t have been torture for a guy with balls. It would have been dinner.”
There was something about this last word, the way it hung in the air. For the first time, Poumakis seemed annoyed. The lower half of his face disappeared into his hood. Instead of stroking his beard, or his fleeces, his hands lay still on his knees.
“If you want to make Hell Week bad for a pledge,” he said, “I’ll tell you what you do. You bring him into this house, and you lock him in one of the bedrooms. Throw in some milk and bananas, throw in some water. Give him a bedroom that has a bathroom, with a toothbrush, a shower. Take away his phone, don’t let anyone visit. For the first few days, he’ll beg and plead with you. He’ll say, ‘Please, take me out of here.’ Then he’ll stop, and for the next few days, he’ll cuss you out. He’ll say, ‘Fuck you, I don’t care what you do to me anymore. I hate you. Don’t come near me.’”
Poumakis drew the hood back from his face. He swiped at his cheeks as if there were a mosquito trying to bite him. His eyes were bright and brown and he raised his scant eyebrows, settling into his lecture. The music was different now, a song about going out and having a good time. As the singer discussed a night in the club, the dance floor, the VIP, the labels on his clothing, a kid with a shaved head and full-sleeve tattoos slouched out of the house and got on a bike that was too small for him. We watched him ride a circle around his yard, one hand on the left handlebar, the other hanging at his side.
“When the week is over, you let him out of the room. But don’t let him out of the house. Let him take a walk down the hall. Let him look out the window. Let him walk up and down the stairs. Invite him to dinner.”
Glines looked at the grass. He had his head down and was fiddling with the brim of his cap. Without meaning to, I shook my head at Poumakis. I didn’t want him to keep going, because I didn’t want Glines to be further shamed. But Poumakis wasn’t looking at me. He was looking out over the yard, tugging his beard into a triangle. Just as his face had remained gentle during his brutal handshakes, so did it remain gentle during his humiliation of Glines.
“Offer him the best food you have,” he said. “Chef Bill’s chili. Pour him a nice cold beer. Gather round the table, and say, ‘Welcome, brother. Pull up a chair. We’re the ones who did that to you, and we’re in charge of everything. No need to be shy. Please, join us.’”
SAFE SPACES
Claire’s roommates threw her out on November third, for falling behind on rent and hogging the Xbox. During the next three weeks, she lived in other people’s houses. She missed the Xbox, but couch surfing was like a game. She had to not smell like coke-sweat or wipe her nose all the time in front of her hosts, and she had to figure out the magic words that would make them let her stay. At her aunt’s house, she praised a samovar. Ding-ding, x 3 nights. At her friend Abby’s mom’s house, she praised a sword, and held it, at the invitation of its owner, Abby’s mom’s boyfriend, a former military school instructor, and slipped it back into its wall-mounted case, resting the blade and pommel in the felt slot. Ding-ding, x 2 nights. In Abby’s mom’s boyfriend’s gap-toothed son’s house, she praised the smell of cows as the first snow of winter fell through sunlight and country music played on the stereo. Doo-da-la-ding, x 4 nights. In Abby’s bed, she and Abby had sex, and Abby asked, “Why won’t you look at me?” but she couldn’t make prolonged eye contact with Abby: x 1 night. In Abby’s mom’s boyfriend’s gap-toothed son’s ex-wife’s house, she told the ex-wife about the gap-toothed son’s girlfriend, shared two lines with the ex-wife, watched her clean the living room, and held the ladder so she could wipe down the candle-flame-shaped light bulbs in the chandelier: x 2 nights. The cocaine made it even more like a game because when she found a place to sleep she didn’t really sleep. She dozed two or three hours and bolted upright. She wanted to stay in bed forever and also to get up and break things, but she never slept all day or broke anything, just lay there half awake until the sun rose, her alarm went off, and it was time to go to work. By mid-November, she was a master of the whole routine, she felt no fear. But then pilgrim hats and turkeys appeared in the windows of the stores, and the game froze.
The week of Thanksgiving there were no more places to crash, because everybody she knew was either traveling or hosting. Scottish Inns, the Rodeway, and the Granby Motel were all full. Even no-pics Puffton Village bedrooms on Craigslist were priced to take advantage of the holiday. Abby, who always let her stay in a pinch, had been turned against her by puritanical friends who considered her a bad influence. Claire was the only person Abby had ever done coke with, and Abby’s nerd mafia of beautiful, frightening Jewish and Armenian girls had freaked out about how Abby kept showing up at the bio lab spilling coffee and grinding her jaw.
Tuesday morning, Claire left one of the last cheap Airbnbs downtown and worked a six-hour shift at Dunkin’, where the tiles in the bathroom were large and brown, with wet tracks left by boots and sneakers. After work, she walked to the public library. The bathroom off the children’s zone had a lockable door and a diaper-changing station, where you could cut a line vigorously without having to worry about some of it spilling off the side, which could happen when you used the top of a toilet-seat-cover dispenser. The walls were pale orange, with a framed drawing of nineteenth-century animals absorbed in books. The changing station’s yellow foldout surface was shaped like a baby, with stubby arms and legs. A private bathroom, like this one, was a safe place for flatulence. That was one of her physical reactions to coke, and it always started psychosomatically, after she’d poured some coke onto a surface but before she’d actually snorted any. She fretted a rail from a clump with her debit card, dead center of the baby, and when she did the rail it burned. Her right nasal passage felt exactly as if it had been stung by a bee.
She liked the corroded upper cone of her right nasal passage. It was trusty, like an old truck. And besides, this month, for some reason, her left nasal passage was ornery and sensitive. While she waited for the numbness, it was hard not to blow her nose, because when she was feeling the level of discomfort she now felt, she wanted to expel some mucus into a tissue and glimpse with her own eyes some sign of what the medical situation might be, to know for a fact that there was no crust, glob, or other blood event up there where the cone gave onto tunnels she couldn’t see. But if she blew her nose before her right nasal passage went numb, the pain would get worse.
Here was the numbness. She blew her nose and checked the Kleenex: the usual red spiders bathed in clear froth. Grateful that there was no bad news in the Kleenex, she did the trampoline. “The trampoline” was Abby’s term for the repetitive motion Clai
re made when she was happy: while doing knee bends, she clapped her fingers against her thumbs as if playing castanets. Claire was one-eighth autistic, by her own estimate, the way some people were one-eighth black or one-eighth straight, and whatever eighth you were, that shit was going to come out in how you moved when you were pleased with yourself. She’d done the trampoline all her life—and she wasn’t the only one, she’d seen Scripps National Spelling Bee finalists do it on YouTube—but coke could bring it on. She bounced as she cleaned the baby-shaped table with her finger, rubbing her gums with the leftovers her finger collected. Then a woman with a baby knocked and said hello—she could hear the baby screaming on the other side of the door—and she had to leave the bathroom.
She abandoned the library, which, at this time in the afternoon, was liable to fill with kids any minute, and walked out into the damp air, her sneakers squishing on the slush-covered flagstone path that bisected the library’s front lawn. The late-November wind blew into her face, and the freezing feeling in her raw, unnumbed left nostril reminded her of a frigid morning last week, when Abby had walked outside, high, with her hair wet, and studied it, amazed, totally stupid, as it iced over and stiffened. What a cum laude moment. She had a brain, Abby—she was one of the top bio majors in the Honors College—and she needed somebody like Claire, somebody more grounded in the real world. But it wasn’t just Abby’s science-genius retardation Claire loved, it was her head shaped like Tweety Bird’s, her sandy hair combed back from her pale forehead, the thin blue veins on her temples, the acne around her mouth. Her nose was even curved like Tweety Bird’s beak. That one time Abby had let Claire go down on her for fifteen minutes, that was the closest Claire had ever come to finding a grand purpose in life, forcing Abby’s face to go 100 percent brainless. And fate was conspiring to bring them together because Thanksgiving had made Claire need to stay with Abby like never before. It was urgent now that Abby ignore her bitter, unexciting friends and acknowledge the insane and undeniable vibe that she had with Claire. Claire was in the midst of an all-important revelation: Abby was the love of her life. She would present herself to Abby, bedraggled but proud, and the vibe would fill the air and Abby would be moved and turned on and take her in, to stay in her off-campus apartment, eventually for good. And Claire would make a speech at their wedding about how she knew how strong Abby was, how generous, when, during a hard time in her life, Abby had seen through the superficialities and put up with her. She would gaze across the crowd, point to Abby’s mother, and say, You have raised a daughter who is brave and good, and Abby’s mother would cry.
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