by James Grady
She seemed fine when you drove by the house and spotted her.
Actually, she looked great, though all the men in the neighborhood, no matter their age, were careful not to say so to their wives—who knew anyway, who could read that look on their better not husbands’ faces. She’d dyed her shoulder-length silvered hair to a more treasured golden blond. The way it suited her, maybe way back before she’d turned at least fifty-five—most said sixty or more—maybe she’d been a natural blonde. She looked strong, trim, though Lisa Calhoun, the brilliant rocket scientist who worked at NASA and lived next door, said the woman’s hands sometimes trembled.
Probably from her conditions.
Zoophobia. Fear of animals.
Especially big animals. Like deer. Or snarling dogs straining the leashes of their poop bag carrying owners on the way to the park that ran beyond the stream behind the houses for everyone on the Calhoun’s side of Shelby Road. Good thing that the new folks’ renovator found that medical-needs exception buried in the county home construction zoning code and then found those like-new lengths of black metal pole fences salvaged from a warehouse fire up in Baltimore. What a work crew! Like the Army Corps of Engineers dropped into a combat zone. Only took them three days to ring the house with a chest high black steel pole fence. But some people in the neighborhood were not convinced that even that high of a fence could stop the leaping deer that had become like garden plundering rats in the suburbs of DC.
2016 was the year Bambi went berserk.
The (dyed) golden woman of that house also suffered from agoraphobia, not so much fear of leaving her home as fear of new people and new places, of any strange.
That’s why the workman replaced the glass insert front door with a can’t-see-through-it thick slab of black wood that looked like it could stop a cannonball.
Went oddly well with the brick house and the new windows that seemed double insulated for winter with some kind of filaments running through them, probably for heat.
The rehab construction started on the day when hurricane weather was hitting the East Coast and bombs were falling on Syria and GOP Presidential Candidate Trump said that Russia’s President Putin “has been a leader far more than our president has.”
They moved in on an October day when the polls showed Hillary Clinton increasing her lead over Donald Trump in the Presidential race.
They must have been busy unpacking when the newspapers talked about a census report that said 41 million people in America lived in poverty, 12 percent of the population and rising, one in three of them being children, the highest kids in poverty rate in the industrialized world.
And somewhere in their unpacking of boxes padded by crumpled newspapers, that new couple might have spotted a different news story that said 5 percent of Americans in 2016 had crossed the line into being millionaires—yay!
Of course, most of the people on Shelby Road were in the everybody else category, what the numbers crunchers called median income folks, and when those keyboard clickers ran the Who’s Number One? by percentage for those lucky middle chunk of winners, America ranked twenty steps down from the top slot of all the countries in the world.
Nobody in the neighborhood could quite figure where the new couple fell in life’s deal of dollars. Sure, like everyone else around them, they (probably with some mortgage collecting bank) owned their house—Goodbye, Martins!—but beyond all that, two months after they joined the neighborhood, the new odd couple were still strangers.
Everyone in the neighborhood was probably a stranger to them, too, right?
Like, there’s no way they could have known about the second-mortgaged Mignaults at the top of Shelby Road, how Peter was losing to throat cancer from cigarettes all the deza had sold him, sitting in his home waiting while his twenty-nine-year-old, lived-there-too son stole his pain meds to feed his Oxy addiction as poor Mary’s boss struggled to keep her on the payroll so she wouldn’t lose the family health insurance that covered nearly 19 percent of their medical costs.
And the newcomers couldn’t have known about Annie and Sheila’s eight-year-old who tested as on the spectrum for autism that no public school could accommodate.
Or how Hank three doors up from the newcomers was in line to be the new Special Assistant to the Assistant Director for Interagency Synergy in the Department.
Or who was staring at their walls, staring out their windows.
Or who would joyously dance around her empty house with the music in her ear buds.
Was the election on November 8 that let the street learn the new neighbors’ names.
The next morning, way early when most everyone was what the hell happened to the pollsters always being right, Isabel Calhoun, the bright red-haired sprite who was taking an after high school gap year, just back from Ghana and teaching in a town where no one had indoor plumbing, now living back at home with her mom, that after-the-election morning sprite Isabel went up and down Shelby Road putting single red rose on the doorstops of her neighbors to remind everyone of the beauty in this world.
And somehow, almost like he had camera eyes on the street or something, the new man of the Martin’s old house, a silver-haired guy who could have been Isabel’s lonely grandfather, he saw her on her secret mission. Unlocked the steel bars gate, stepped out into the street with her for a chat. To find out why. To say thank you.
Told Isabel he was Vin.
And that the blond woman he lived with was Merle.
Might have said they were married, Isabel couldn’t remember. Did remember that he told her that he was a “reclusive” science fiction writer and that Merle ran an Internet-based art business that accounted for frequent visitors who were much younger than them.
Plus Merle had “home visit nurse check-ins” for her conditions.
Some of those people must have brought in groceries, because you never saw Merle or Vin at the local stores, or out much in nearby downtown Silver Spring.
Though there was that one odd time where a clean-cut young man driving a New York license plate car spent several nights with the older couple. A few neighbors saw him going in and out of the house, and everyone winced when they saw a scabby scar on his left check.
One of those nights, Jim Kerry, who lived up the block and retired from being a White House reporter, Jim saw that New York car parked on the downtown street with the gun shop. The scarred man sat behind the steering wheel staring out the windshield toward nothing but the Construction/Destruction skyline and the door down to a dive bar called the Quarry House.
That young guy sat there the whole time Jim was picking up carryout dinner from the Jamaican café for him and his wife, Louise, who back then kept hoping that the three suicides of students in the public high school where she taught represented coincidence, not contagion. Jim saw that scarred man just sitting in that New York car, looking out the windshield, watching the void or maybe what he couldn’t or wouldn’t get out to go see.
Maggie from down the block, who liked to know what was going on and sure could tell you about it, Maggie just happened to be walking past that house uphill from hers one of those days when we all had our black bagged trash and our recycling’s blue bins out in the street for weekly pickup, and wouldn’t you know it: the silver-haired new home owner was taking out his trash at that very moment. Maggie launched into it—why not just skip over any polites and get to the heart of things. Said that nice young man who’d been parked in the driveway inside their property’s bars, was he your son?
Weirded Maggie out, what happened then.
Remember, that was still when nobody knew his name was Vin, so Maggie called him that silver-haired guy behind the bars around his house. She said he looked at her—he’d been looking at her since he spotted her hustling up the street, but until she said son, he’d been looking at her like some kind of hawk. Then, said Maggie, kind of like hangdog came over him, and it must have been a big dog
, because he couldn’t speak, could only shake his head no.
Hope Vin never let Merle know about that dog, what with her fear of animals.
After that, everyone thought that even though the young man with the scar wasn’t anybody’s son, a bunch of people figured that woman who dyed her hair red, a few folks wondered if Ms. Redhead 2016 might not be the new neighbors’ daughter.
Nobody ever got a chance to ask her, though she often visited Vin and Merle.
Like on that day after Christmas in 2016 when $6.5 billion in easily trackable money had been spent deciding America’s Congressional and Presidential elections. In the DC suburbs of Virginia, the once hippest mall of upscale retail stores inside the Beltway was a ghost town where the iconic American department store Macy’s, its signs still hanging on the mall’s vast walls, became a homeless shelter for hundreds of American families, sanctioned by its new owner, a corporation named for dead billionaire Howard Hughes who’d dazzled air travel, Hollywood and Las Vegas, and even worked with the CIA.
From behind his desk in his third-story loft office, Condor watched his screens show bundled-up Faye get out of her car, lock it as the iron gates clanged shut behind her.
Inside the house, Merle worked the security code to open the black front door for Faye.
Once that black door closed, Condor let whatever those two women were doing go unmonitored as he went back to helping a Handler in Saigon (OK: Ho Chi Minh City) maneuver a Conscious Operative out of Burma (OK: Myanmar) who was rescuing two political dissidents marked for death by the 90 percent Buddhist government in their persecution of the Rohingya minority. Satellite photos of that sealed country showed government security forces had burned down five towns. CIA Credible High intelligence reports told of thousands of Rohingya murdered, epidemic gang rapes, infanticide, and refugees on the run.
Condor forced himself to face the music—or rather, to not turn off the satellite radio playing in the background as he worked, the gravely bass voice of poet Leonard Cohen, who’d died from a fall the day before the 2016 election, singing: “You Want It Darker.”
C.O./Saigon (Un-unh: forget it) signaled no more backup needed.
Condor heard footsteps climbing the stairs to the second-level bedroom/guard posts.
Heard a knock on the closed door for the stairs up to his V work lair.
Didn’t check the monitors to see who.
Didn’t think twice before yelling: “OK!”
He swiveled his chair away from three monitors on his desk as up the stairs came Faye.
That redhead smiled like a daughter he never got to have: “Merry Christmas. I guess.”
“And Happy New Year,” said Condor.
“Ya think?” she said, mimicking him.
“I hope,” he told Faye. “You know about Moscow?”
“I saw a CIA alert,” said Faye.
“Oleg Erovinkin. A general in both the KGB and then its re-branded FSB internal spying and secret police agency. Linked as a possible source in the ex-British spy’s dossier about our President-elect and the Russians, the oligarchs and Putin and their spies. Erovinkin is—was—sixty-one, good health, vibrant, and today he was found dead in the back of his car in Moscow. The FSB is investigating and already saying it was of course just a heart attack.”
“Happens with old guys,” said Faye.
“Like me,” said Condor.
“Let’s hope not. You’re fine, right? The medical team says so.”
“How do you know what our medical team says?”
Faye blushed. “Part of my job is backup and security. For Merle, mostly, who they say seems to be doing fine, even great. Like a long dark cloud’s been lifted off her.”
“Nice recovery.”
They both knew he wasn’t talking about Merle. He pushed that medical team knowledge issue no further. Why should he?
Faye said: “Are you, are we working that Erovinkin hit?”
“Not a V op’.”
“Even after what happened at your last nest?”
“That was the Russians making a mistake. Yeah, we had to play it and play it out. But they still don’t know what they penetrated with their killer spy Justin. The Russians think they attacked and wounded a troll operation. Minimal data plus mistaken mirror reasoning.”
“Even after Stalingrad?”
“You trigger killers, killing comes back at you. They probably expected, accepted that.”
“Iffy.”
“What isn’t iffy in this life?”
“This life us, or—”
“Any life,” said Condor.
The radio in the background played some song they both knew, didn’t care to name.
“What about your friend Sasha?” said Faye.
“He knew Erovinkin—or at least of him. The Agency let him know. Sasha still won’t relocate from his cottage. I gave him a call. He wanted to talk about bare trees in winter.”
“Russians,” said Faye.
They sat there in that secret loft and just breathed.
Until Condor said: “What about our guy?”
Faye didn’t break eye contact. “We don’t talk much.”
She shrugged. “When you aren’t running him on an op’, he’s up in Brooklyn. He doesn’t fit—where do any of us fit—but up there, nobody notices.”
“He needs to see as much of himself as he can.”
“Yeah,” said Faye. About something.
“Do you two … ?”
She looked out the loft windows, past the winter bare trees to the suburban gray horizon.
He let it go.
Said: “He’s done good in the field. He levels up to Handler next week.”
“I figured you just up him all the way to replace you as Control Function.”
“No,” said Condor. “That will be you.”
Faye blinked.
“It’s all in place. You’ll run the V when.”
“I … I …”
“There’s no better choice,” said Condor. “For anybody.”
“What if I don’t want that. Don’t want to be … You said he was going to be you.”
“He will. When you say he’s ready. When you want to … to be whoever you want to be.”
“When does anybody ever get that?”
Red-haired Faye drilled him with her eyes. “Are you …”
Softened it with a grin: “Are you v-aporizing?”
“I don’t know. I don’t want to log off until I do. But doing me means being ready.”
“I have a thousand questions.”
“I have zero answers.”
The radio sang about breaking this trap.
“You missed lunch,” said Condor. “It’s coming up on dinner: Want to stay?”
“No! I mean, no,” she said. “Thanks, but … ”
“Sure.”
“What do you think will happen?” said Faye. “With the Russians? Their attacks on us?”
“What do you think?” said Condor.
“I think it’s all fucked up.”
“What brave new world has come ’round.” He shrugged. “Our on the way out President is putting sanctions on Russia for interfering in our election. We’ll see how long that lasts and works. The Pentagon is beefing up its cybersecurity. Supposedly there’s going to be a new $300 million bill in the coming Congress to help states gear up their polling and electoral security.”
Faye shook her head.
“All that’s fine and good, but it doesn’t hit the heart of the beast. The social media frauds. The active measures’ campaign of big lies and black money manipulations and compromises and attacks. The mauling of the minds and hearts of all of us out there in our American screens. None of it touches the big obvious of how big money driving elections is inherently corrupt. And even if th
e Russians stop doing what they did that worked, there’s still drug cartels, big oil countries, China, small dictators who’ve got big tech and dirty dollars. They all want to fuck with us to grab more power.”
“People forget,” said Condor, “even though that kills them. Most voters don’t remember what they used to know or didn’t get taught, so most of them don’t know enough about their own lives. Most voters probably think Tammany Hall is a country and western singer.”
“Or a reality TV star,” said Faye.
“Like you said,” Condor told her: “Fucked up.”
The radio played some new song.
“Happy New Year,” whispered Faye.
“To us all.”
She flowed to her feet with gung fu grace.
He followed his guest’s lead with the cautious stiffness that now owned him.
“I should get going,” said Faye, “because … well, you know.”
“Sure,” he said, without a clue as to what she meant, but being polite, social.
They stood staring at each other, that awkward moment when what the occasion calls for is unclear and what you want to do and should do are equal mysteries.
“Don’t want you to be yet another man in Me, too trouble,” said Faye, so she hugged him.
Almost like a daughter.
Who he had to let go.
All daughters and sons are let go.
“Anyway,” said Faye—
—and grinned in a way he couldn’t grok: “Really, have a hell of a happy new year.”
Then she walked down the stairs toward tomorrows’ best kiss.
Condor sat at his desk.
Looked beyond the three monitors, through the loft windows to the graying light.
Checked his watch: only 4:33, but hey: it was the afternoon after Christmas, he could—
The door at the bottom of his stairs opened.
Footsteps clunked up—
—bringing Merle into the office holding a plate and a glass of water in her hands.
Her (dyed) golden hair seemed thicker and more flowing than usual. Condor remembered not listening to the sounds of her downstairs in the shower while he’d been engaged in that murderous Buddhists op’. She must have washed her hair, her closed eyes face upturned into the rain of warm water, her fingers sudsing her thick back-to-blond hair, her pale shoulders slick with wet that flowed down her body, down her wrinkled back to the hanging low round moon of her ass, down her chest to where her breasts sagged, down between her flabby legs, water flowing down into the shower’s drain.