Loose Lips

by Claire Berlinski

  Once, a young boy I met on the streets of Bubaneshwar, a kid of fourteen or so, invited me to see the temple at the top of a hill. “Please,” he begged me. “You must come to see my dynamic God.” I agreed. As we climbed to the hilltop together, he nervously inquired whether I was a vegetarian and whether in America we had heard of Govindar’s munificence.

  As we approached the idol, the crowds thickened and surged, calling out the god’s name, pressing toward the temple in a wave of hot delirium. Presumably to prevent the crowds from climbing over one another, the path to Govindar was enclosed in thick wire mesh, like a chicken coop. I was swept up and crushed in the mad press, scarcely able to breathe, surging forward with the others because I had no choice. Govindar! Govindar! The women were weeping and stretching their hands to the deity, imploring, overwhelmed with passion. Before I caught even a glimpse of the idol, the crowd pushed me ahead, and it was over. Two days later, I picked up the paper: Seventy-two pilgrims had been trampled and suffocated at another temple some several hundred miles to the north. The conditions were identical.

  Everywhere I went in India, I saw unspeakable accidents waiting to happen. Unstable kerosene lamps lurched atop wooden tables in houses built of straw and dung. Unsupervised children crawled determinedly, inexorably, toward those tables. Electrical wires frayed underneath leaking kitchen sinks. Men hawked and spat in the street amid an epidemic of tuberculosis. Buses sped over narrow bridges during monsoons, without benefit of windshield wipers.

  I had been in Bombay when they detonated the Bomb at the Pokhran test site, and had watched as the old, the young, the rich, the poor, the lame, the halt—every Indian alive, it seemed—danced madly in the streets, stringing garlands around mock missiles and burning effigies of the Pakistani prime minister. They whirled and danced all night.

  The CIA failed to predict the test. Outraged congressmen justifiably asked what the hell the Agency was doing with its classified budget if it couldn’t even provide warning that the whole subcontinent was about to go nuclear. A representative from Ohio had proposed turning over the Agency’s funding to CNN, which had reported the test first. Jay Leno sneered that CIA must stand for Can’t Identify Anything.

  I could have told them the test was coming: Everyone in India knew it. Even Vishnu had been talking about it.

  Now, I wished India only good things—let me make that clear. I just believed that if the United States were to do a better job of keeping tabs on the Indian nuclear program, it would be a particularly good thing—for India as much as for the rest of us.

  Tom, my amiable new supervisor, showed me to my cubicle and my computer. There was a plastic fish on my wall that sang “Don’t Worry, Be Happy,” apparently a hand-me-down from the cubicle’s prior tenant. For some reason, everyone in the federal government seemed to own one of those fish. I explored the drawers of my new desk. The last occupant had left behind a jumbo-size bag of butterscotch candies, a copy of Culture Shock: India, and a stack of legal documents relating to her divorce proceedings. My supervisor told me to make myself at home, and suggested that I occupy myself with the office’s backlogged filing.

  Within a week, I realized that because of the enormous cost involved in getting security clearances for clerical workers, almost all of the Agency’s paperwork was done by case-officer trainees like me. The amount of paper moved daily was considerable. Virtually every document created by the Agency was classified, largely because the most elementary facts about the Agency—its budget, the number of employees who worked there, the names of the employees who worked there—were classified, and even the most routine correspondence contained clues about secret information. I often thought of this later when from time to time I would read in the papers that some schmuck had been arrested for passing secrets to the Chinese or the Russians. “The accused spy is charged with passing over six thousand classified documents to his Russian handlers,” the journalists would exclaim breathlessly. Six thousand classified documents? That was hardly enough to process a health insurance claim.

  I filed requests for Kevlar vests, and surveillance logs, and expense reports. I filed the daily cable traffic. Cable traffic was always written in the uppercase, a vestige of the days when cables were literally cables, written in Teletype. Now they were transmitted over a dedicated CIA satellite, but the correspondence retained its urgent, frantic appearance.

  I soon found myself caught up in the story of the unfolding courtship of a diplomat we called PINEAPPLE, who worked for India’s Directorate General of Foreign Trade in Colombo. He and the case officer developing him, Armand R. HIGGENBOTTOM, had met at a diplomatic reception. PINEAPPLE had accepted C/O HIGGENBOTTOM’s invitation to lunch, and the two men had been dining for several months at progressively more lavish restaurants. C/O and MRS. HIGGENBOTTOM played tennis with PINEAPPLE and MRS. PINEAPPLE, and once they had traveled together, the four of them, to visit a distant golf course.

  C/O HIGGENBOTTOM regularly reported encouraging signs: PINEAPPLE claimed to admire the United States; he had a cousin and two nieces in Los Angeles, where he hoped one day to visit. He was especially keen to see Sunset Boulevard and Malibu Beach. He liked American cinema very much, our prospective traitor did, especially movies with Sharon Stone. He had a big family, with too many mouths to feed, and a son whom he wished to send to America to educate—“I have heard there are many Indians at Texas A&M University, yes? It would be possible to be finding vegetarian food in Texas, they are not only eating cows there?” He had four daughters: How could he afford to marry them, he asked, on the salary he made? He complained of aches and pains in his back and his knees—“I am having much lumbago today,” he babbled sadly. He wished he could fly to America to see a real American doctor—real American doctors, he thought, being possessed of almost preternatural healing abilities with their special machines and devices. He confided sadly that his wife was maddening him with her complaints; their apartment was too small and their kitchen smelled, but how could he afford a bigger apartment or a new kitchen with four daughters to marry? I could imagine the man vividly, waggling his head and lamenting his woes.

  Once, at tea, PINEAPPLE’s wife had served C/O and MRS. HIGGENBOTTOM a plate of Kraft mini-marshmallows. She explained that she had received them through the mail from that distant cousin of theirs in Los Angeles. She served the revolting things with mango chutney, much to our amusement back on the desk. “I am thinking you will be liking this American dish,” she said with shy pride. “We are very much liking foodstuffs from America.” From then on, C/O HIGGENBOTTOM arrived at each meeting with PINEAPPLE bearing Oreos, Doritos, boxes of Cap’n Crunch, all pouched from Headquarters and secured with tamper-proof sealing wax. Pouched by me, in fact: I was responsible for driving to the supermarket and choosing the comestibles that best represented the American Dream. Into the tamper-resistant bag they went, accompanied by the myriad detailed bill-of-lading forms. PINEAPPLE always accepted these offerings with chortles of delight, examining them minutely and remarking at the cleverness of the American packaging.

  C/O HIGGENBOTTOM was convinced that PINEAPPLE was a highly promising candidate, and so were we back at Headquarters. He planned to pop the question—Would you like to earn money for your family by doing a vital service for the American government?—within the month.

  Privately, I wasn’t sure PINEAPPLE’s litany of complaints indicated that he was disposed to commit espionage. If PINEAPPLE had a brain in his head, he would have dined at our expense indefinitely, all the while enjoying the chance to complain to this wonderfully sympathetic American, and he would never do a thing for us in return. Who knows how long he could have kept the gravy train running that way? I kept these thoughts strictly to myself, though; I didn’t want to appear as if I might not be a team player.

  After a few weeks, my supervisor let me start drafting responses to these cables. I always wrote that Headquarters was greatly encouraged by HIGGENBOTTOM’s progress: “HQS OFFERS ITS HEARTFELT SUPPORT TO THE D
EVELOPMENTAL EFFORT AND COMMENDS C/O HIGGENBOTTOM FOR HIS ENERGETIC PURSUIT OF THE INDIAN COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY TARGET.” I wrote this because this is what Headquarters always writes; by long tradition, I learned, Headquarters cables were—each and every one—small, cheery sunbursts of praise, inevitably congratulatory even in the face of monumental failure. The rationale was that case officers needed encouragement to counteract the isolation and frustration of working undercover in the field. Rarely did a cable escape Headquarters without the word kudos in it. I never used the word myself, but someone usually added it before it went out.

  After reading the daily PINEAPPLE news and pouching the Lucky Charms or the Pop-Tarts, I spent my time exploring the compound. I made excuses to take files to the other side of the building so I could take a good look around. The corridors at Headquarters were long and dingy, with visible piping and wiring overhead. Around every corner stood vending machines with cheerless adjacent snack areas, reminding me of the huge public high school I’d attended on the Lower East Side. Peeling gray-green paint covered the walls and ceilings, sullen under cheap fluorescent lighting. Some divisions made attempts at decoration: Africa, for example, hung tribal masks in the hallways, and Latin America tacked up jolly ethnic weavings from Colombia and Mexico. But nothing could temper the massive, gray-grim seriousness of the place. Case officers in the field called Headquarters the Death Star and did everything in their power to avoid returning.

  The place was huge and the layout confusing, especially for me, with my poor sense of direction. It could take fifteen full minutes to walk from one end of the building to the other. The basement—where, the trainees nervously joked, the aliens must be kept—was a dark rat-warren of offices containing files and records in huge, mechanized stacks. It was easy to wander for ages only to realize that you had circumnavigated the basement without finding the office you were looking for. Many offices had closed doors and discreet nameplates that indicated nothing whatsoever: Special Office, or Wiring Closet. Someone told me that one of those anonymous offices was actually an ultrasecret emergency command-and-control center capable of withstanding an atomic attack, but I think that may have been one of those little jokes the old hires liked to perpetrate on the new arrivals. Another was to tell us that we were obliged, when we put bags of classified documents into the incinerator, to shout our badge numbers down the garbage chute until we heard “the guys down there” call the number back. In every class, there was someone who fell for it, hollering his number repeatedly into the silent flames until his new co-workers took pity on him and let him in on the joke.

  Every day, when I drove through those front gates, I felt a sense of wonder and astonishment that they were actually letting me in, letting me in with a wave and a smile, no less, when I presented my laminated badge. The place was mythical, its iconic power lending it an almost magnetic resonance, like the Taj Mahal or the Great Pyramids. I was not the only one to feel it; not a day passed without some nut trying to get past the front gates, driving up to the vehicle barriers with a 12,367-point list of demands from his alien masters or a desperate plea that the Agency stop beaming those obscene broadcasts into his fillings. Once, I heard, a woman had driven to the gates, departed her battered camper van, and removed a carefully constructed helmet from her head. The helmet, as she showed the guard, was lined with tinfoil and an elaborate nest of tangled copper wires. “I am here to tell you,” she told the guard, “that I am receiving radio transmissions from your organization, and I will not obey your orders anymore! I will not obey!”

  The guard had apparently seen one too many wackos that day, and he eyed her appraisingly. “Ma’am,” he said politely. “Let me ask you. Are the transmissions you’ve been receiving in VHF or UHF?”

  The woman looked slightly taken aback but quickly decided: “They’re VHF, young man, they’re VHF!”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am, but our transmissions are exclusively in UHF. What you’ll be wanting is the Department of Defense, down the road.”

  The woman thanked him and, clutching that lunatic helmet, shuffled off, never to be seen again.

  One day, I came to the office to read that HIGGENBOTTOM had invited PINEAPPLE to lunch, only to be abruptly rebuffed. PINEAPPLE had been curt to him. “I am too busy to be going lunching now,” he’d said. He had sounded frightened. We suspected this meant that someone on their side had warned him off. C/O HIGGENBOTTOM, ever the optimist, speculated in his cable that the PINEAPPLE case might yet be salvageable with time and patience. He proposed giving PINEAPPLE a few weeks to compose himself, then inviting him out again, holding out the prospect of an evening watching previously unreleased Sharon Stone videos with a bucket of Orville Redenbacher’s.

  We doubted it would work—the game was, obviously, up—but we wrote something encouraging anyway. I felt disappointed. I’d been hoping that the recruitment would occur while I was still in the branch. Soon I would be transferred to another division, and I would never know the end of the story, because I wouldn’t have the need to know.

  A while later I mentioned that I needed to have a poster framed, and Paul, the Army captain, told me he dabbled in carpentry. I watched him in his wood shop as he measured the poster. He scored the foamboard with a utility knife and sanded the edges, then sawed the legs of the frame to fit. He grooved the inside of each piece to hold the glass, inserted the joint connectors, and dabbed wood glue on the corners. Then he tapped the pieces together with a tack hammer. He surveyed his work to make sure the pieces were squared together properly.

  He told me his pretty, blond wife had left him for a golf instructor, and he’d left two women back in Mississippi. Kathy and Emma were unaware of each other. He felt ashamed of lying, but not so ashamed that he was willing to stop.

  “Selena, don’t you fall in love with me too,” he said.

  “Why would I want a lying womanizer like you?”

  “Because I’m so goddamn handsome and charming,” he said.

  A few weeks after this conversation, Paul invited the whole class over for homemade pizza. The students had a lot of get-togethers back in those days, and we often went as a group to happy hours at local bars or for beers after work at one another’s houses. These evenings were admittedly dull—when you bring together that many men and women who have never been arrested, never tried to subvert the U.S. government, never suffered major psychiatric illnesses, never done drugs, and never been in debt, you don’t get the world’s liveliest parties. But we felt the need for these social engagements with one another, tame though they were, for we could no longer enjoy natural and unforced contact with anyone else. Even the most banal engagement with outsiders was laden with traps. We quickly came to dread the question “Where do you work?” For inevitably, any response—“Oh, I’m a budget analyst”—invoked a counter-parry: “Oh, really? Where? Oh, sure, of course—hey, you couldn’t put me in touch with the HR people there, could you? I’ve got a nephew, a great guy, who’s thinking about USDA—what’s the name of the gal who does the hiring?” The questions weren’t unanswerable, if you were nimble, but the exercise wasn’t relaxing, either.

  I helped Paul take the pizzas out of the oven, and then I ended up in conversation with someone else. Later, after almost everyone had left, I saw Paul out on the porch talking to Rita, a dark-haired, perky trainee with a wide smile. She had a kind of 1950s sweater-girl appeal, but when the men in our class found out that she was a devout Catholic with a commitment to chastity, they figured that making time with her would be more effort than it was worth. But there was Paul, leaning in toward her and giving her that intense stare that said I’m positively riveted by what you’re saying, Rita, and there she was, leaning back and matching him, stare for stare.

  I went to get myself another drink.

  When I came back, Paul and Rita were still deep in conversation. Now she was laughing at every word he said, tossing her fluffy hair and twirling her necklace, with its crucifix pendant, around her forefinger.

 
; Finally, after what seemed like hours, she yawned, made her excuses, and left. I stayed. When Paul then suggested we open a bottle of whiskey since it was Friday night, I accepted, drinking with him until the last stragglers returned to their wives or their cats. Despite my promises to myself, when at last Paul reached across the table and traced the outline of my lips with his finger, I didn’t even pretend to resist.

  The next morning I tiptoed down the stairs, praying I’d woken before Paul’s roommate, Nathan. Nathan was another trainee, but he wasn’t on the same career path as Paul and me. He was slated to become a reports officer. Reports officers direct intelligence collection and disseminate reports; they don’t work directly with human assets. On the few times I’d visited their house before, Nathan had been congealed to the living room couch, watching reruns of South Park with a half-defrosted Swanson’s TV dinner in his lap. There was something about Nathan that made me worry that one day I would come over to find he’d hanged himself in the attic.

  The Agency’s bureaucracy was slow and inefficient, but its gossip network worked like a fine Swiss timepiece. If Nathan saw me, this particular report would be disseminated faster than word of a plot to blow up Air Force One. I had hoped to sneak out silently, but I tripped and crashed down the staircase. I composed myself gingerly and found myself staring right into Nathan’s glittering eyes. He took in my smeared lipstick, the torn brassiere in my hand, my unbrushed hair, the bruises on my elbows. He backed wordlessly out of the room.

  My affair with Paul lasted little more than a month. At first he dropped by my apartment whenever the spirit moved him, then he stopped calling. Then Emma, one of his girlfriends from Mississippi, came to town to spend the weekend with him, and I realized it was over.

  I had been warned, but it didn’t matter.

  After another month, I saw him sitting alone in the cafeteria, and I sat down next to him. “I’m not so angry anymore,” I said.