Black Box

by Egan, Jennifer

  17

  When men begin serious talk, beauties are left to themselves.

  “How long have you been divorced?” suggests the wish to resume a prior conversation.

  “A few months,” when untrue, should be uttered without eye contact.

  “What was he like, your husband?” may be answered honestly.

  “From Africa. Kenya” will satisfy your wish to talk about your husband.

  “Black?,” with eyebrows raised, may indicate racism.

  “Yes. Black,” in measured tones, should deliver a gentle reprimand.

  “How black?” suggests that it did not.

  “Very black” is somewhat less gentle, especially when accompanied by a pointed stare.

  “Nice” hints at personal experience.

  “Yes. It is nice” contradicts one’s alleged divorce. “Was nice” is a reasonable correction.

  “But not nice enough?,” with laughter, indicates friendly intimacy. Especially when followed by “Or too nice!”

  18

  House-party hosts are universally eager to make guests eat.

  For most beauties, the lure of food is a hazard; as a beauty of limited tenure, you may eat what you want.

  Squab can be consumed by ripping the bird apart with your hands and sucking the meat from the bones.

  A stunned expression reveals that your host expected the use of utensils.

  A host who caters to violent guests will understand implicitly the need for discretion.

  The adjacency of your host’s chair to your own may presage a confidence.

  If your job is to appear simpleminded, a confidence may mean that you have failed.

  Everyone should brush his teeth before dinner.

  Turning your ear toward your host’s mouth will prevent you from having to smell the breath coming from it.

  Ears must be kept clean at all times.

  If your host warns you that your Designated Mate may pose an immediate danger to you, assume that your Designated Mate has left the room.

  19

  Going to the rest room is the most efficient means of self-jettisoning.

  Never betray urgency, not even in an empty hallway.

  If you have no idea in which direction your Designated Mate has gone, hold still.

  If you find yourself hovering beside a pair of glass doors, you may open them and step outside.

  Nights in the South of France are a strange, dark, piercing blue.

  A bright moon can astonish, no matter how many times you have seen it.

  If you were a child who loved the moon, looking at the moon will forever remind you of childhood.

  Fatherless girls may invest the moon with a certain paternal promise.

  Everyone has a father.

  A vague story like “Your father died before you were born” may satisfy a curious child for an unlikely number of years.

  The truth of your paternity, discovered in adulthood, will make the lie seem retroactively ludicrous.

  Publicists occasionally have flings with their movie-star clients.

  Discovering that you are a movie star’s daughter is not necessarily a comfort.

  It is especially not a comfort when the star in question has seven other children from three different marriages.

  Discovering that you are a movie star’s daughter may prompt you to watch upward of sixty movies, dating from the beginning of his career.

  You may think, watching said movies, You don’t know about me, but I am here.

  You may think, watching said movies, I’m invisible to you, but I am here.

  A sudden reconfiguration of your past can change the fit and feel of your adulthood.

  It may cleave you, irreparably, from the mother whose single goal has been your happiness.

  If your husband has transformed greatly in his own life, he will understand your transformation.

  Avoid excessive self-reflection; your job is to look out, not in.

  20

  “There you are,” whispered from behind by your Designated Mate, suggests that he has been looking for you.

  Holding still can sometimes prove more effective than actively searching.

  “Come,” uttered softly, may communicate a renewed wish for intimate contact.

  The moon’s calm face can make you feel, in advance, that you are understood and forgiven.

  The sea is audible against the rocks well before you see it.

  Even at night, the Mediterranean is more blue than black.

  If you wish to avoid physical intimacy, the sight of a speedboat will bring relief, despite the myriad new problems it presents.

  If no words are exchanged between your Designated Mate and the speedboat’s captain, their meeting was likely prearranged.

  A man known for his cruelty may still show great care in guiding his beauty into a rocking speedboat.

  He may interpret her hesitation to board as a fear of falling in.

  Resist the impulse to ask where you are going.

  Try, when anxious, to summon up a goofy giggle.

  Locate your Personal Calming Source and use it.

  If your Personal Calming Source is the moon, be grateful that it is dark and that the moon is especially bright.

  Reflect on the many reasons you can’t yet die:

  You need to see your husband.

  You need to have children.

  You need to tell the movie star that he has an eighth child, and that she is a hero.

  21

  The moon may appear to move, but really it is you who are moving.

  At high velocity, a speedboat slams along the tops of waves.

  Fear and excitement are sometimes indistinguishable.

  When the captain of a boat adjusts his course in response to commands from your Designated Mate, he may not know where he is taking you.

  If your Designated Mate keeps looking up, he’s probably using the stars for navigation.

  The Mediterranean is vast enough to have once seemed infinite.

  A beauty should require no more context than the presence of her Designated Mate.

  A beauty must appear to enjoy any journey he initiates.

  Simulate said enjoyment by putting an affectionate arm around him and nestling your head close to his.

  A beauty whose head is aligned with her Designated Mate’s can share in his navigation and thus calculate the route.

  At night, far from shore, stars pulse with a strength that is impossible to conceive of in the proximity of light.

  Your whereabouts will never be a mystery; you will be visible at all times as a dot of light on the screens of those watching over you.

  You are one of hundreds, each a potential hero.

  Technology has afforded ordinary people a chance to glow in the cosmos of human achievement.

  Your lack of espionage and language training is what makes your record clean and neutral.

  You are an ordinary person undertaking an extraordinary task.

  You need not be remarkable for your credentials or skill sets, only for your bravery and equilibrium.

  Knowing that you are one of hundreds shouldn’t feel belittling.

  In the new heroism, the goal is to merge with something larger than yourself.

  In the new heroism, the goal is to throw off generations of self-involvement.

  In the new heroism, the goal is to renounce the American fixation with being seen and recognized.

  In the new heroism, the goal is to dig beneath your shiny persona.

  You’ll be surprised by what lies under it: a rich, deep crawl space of possibilities.

  Some liken this discovery to a dream in which a familiar home acquires new wings and rooms.

  The power of individual magnetism is nothing against the power of combined selfless effort.

  You may accomplish astonishing personal feats, but citizen agents rarely seek individual credit.

  They liken the need for personal glory to cigarette addiction:
a habit that feels life-sustaining even as it kills you.

  Childish attention-seeking is usually satisfied at the expense of real power.

  An enemy of the state could not have connived a better way to declaw and distract us.

  Now our notorious narcissism is our camouflage.

  22

  After a juddering ride of several hours, you may not notice at first that the boat is approaching a shore.

  A single lighted structure stands out strongly on a deserted coastline.

  Silence after a roaring motor is a sound of its own.

  The speedboat’s immediate departure signals that you won’t be making a return trip anytime soon.

  Knowing your latitude and longitude is not the same as knowing where you are.

  A new remote and unfamiliar place can make the prior remote and unfamiliar place seem like home.

  Imagining yourself as a dot of light on a screen is oddly reassuring.

  Because your husband is a visionary in the realm of national security, he occasionally has access to that screen.

  If it calms you to imagine your husband tracking your dot of light, then imagine it.

  Do not, however, close your eyes while ascending a rocky path in darkness.

  At Latitude X, Longitude Y, the flora is dry and crumbles under your feet.

  A voice overhead suggests that your arrival was expected and observed.

  An empty shore is not necessarily unpatrolled.

  The best patrols are imperceptible.

  23

  A formal handshake between your new host and your Designated Mate implies that this is their first meeting.

  A formal handshake followed by a complex and stylized hand gesture implies a shared allegiance.

  So does the immediate use of a language you don’t recognize.

  In certain rich, powerful men, physical slightness will seem a source of strength.

  The failure of your new host to acknowledge you may indicate that women do not register in his field of vision.

  Being invisible means that you won’t be closely watched.

  Your job is to be forgotten yet still present.

  A white, sparkling villa amid so much scrabbly darkness will appear miragelike.

  A man to whom women are invisible may still have many beauties in his domain.

  These neglected beauties will vie for his scant attention.

  Among neglected beauties, there is often an alpha beauty who assumes leadership.

  As you enter the house, her cool scrutiny will ripple through the other beauties and surround you.

  The sensation will remind you of going as a child with your mother to visit families with two parents and multiple children.

  At first, the knot of unfamiliar kids would seem impenetrable.

  You would wish, keenly, that you had a sibling who could be your ally.

  Feeling at the mercy of those around you prompted a seismic internal response.

  The will to dominate was deeper than yourself.

  You were never childish, even as a child.

  Your unchildishness is something your husband has always loved in you.

  Once the new children were under your control, it was crushing to leave their midst.

  24

  A small table and chairs carved into a spindly clifftop promontory are doubtless designed for private conversation.

  If your Designated Mate brings you with him to this place, it may mean that he feels less than perfectly at ease with your new host.

  When your new host dismisses his own alpha beauty, important business may be under way.

  An alpha beauty will not tolerate her own exclusion if another beauty is included.

  If your new host makes a motion of dismissal at you, look to your Designated Mate.

  Take orders from no one but your Designated Mate.

  If your Designated Mate keeps an arm around you in the face of your new host’s dismissal, you have become the object of a power play.

  If your new host moves close to your face and speaks directly into it, he is likely testing your ignorance of his language.

  If your Designated Mate stiffens beside you, your new host’s words are probably offensive.

  When you become an object of contention, try to neutralize the conflict.

  A giggle and a look of incomprehension are a beauty’s most reliable tools.

  If the men relax into their chairs, neutralization has been successful.

  Your new host has insulted you and, by extension, your Designated Mate.

  Your Designated Mate has prevailed in his claim that you’re too harmless to bother sending away.

  Congratulate yourself on preserving your adjacency and activate your ear mike.

  25

  In the presence of business conversation, project an utter lack of interest or curiosity.

  Notice where you are at all times.

  On a high, narrow promontory at Latitude X, Longitude Y, the ocean and heavens shimmer in all directions.

  There will be moments in your mission, perhaps very few, when you’ll sense the imminence of critical information.

  It may come in the form of a rush of joy.

  This joy may arise from your discovery that the moon, hard and radiant, is still aloft.

  It may arise from the knowledge that, when your task is complete, you will return to the husband you adore.

  It may arise from the extremity of the natural beauty around you, and the recognition that you are alive in this moment.

  It may arise from your knowledge that you have accomplished every goal you’ve set for yourself since childhood.

  It may arise from the knowledge that at long last you’ve found a goal worthy of your considerable energies.

  It may arise from the knowledge that, by accomplishing this goal, you’ll have helped to perpetuate American life as you know it.

  A wave of joy can make it difficult to sit still.

  Beware of internal states—positive or negative—that obscure what is happening around you.

  When two subjects begin making sketches, concrete planning may have commenced.

  The camera implanted in your left eye is operated by pressing your left tear duct.

  In poor light, a flash may be activated by pressing the outside tip of your left eyebrow.

  When using the flash, always cover your non-camera eye to shield it from temporary blindness occasioned by the flash.

  Never deploy flash photography in the presence of other people.

  26

  Springing from your seat with a gasp and peering toward the house will focus the attention of others in that direction.

  Having heard something inaudible to others puts you in an immediate position of authority.

  “What? What did you hear?,” uttered close to your face by your Designated Mate, means that your diversion was successful.

  Wait until their eagerness to know verges on anger, evidenced by the shaking of your shoulders.

  Then tell them, faintly, “I heard screaming.”

  Men with a history of violence live in fear of retribution.

  Your new host will be the first to depart in the direction of alleged screaming.

  Your Designated Mate’s glance toward the dock, far below, may reveal that his interests are not fully aligned with your new host’s.

  His attention to his handset may portend that your diversion has run amok, undermining the transaction you meant to capture.

  Among the violent, there is always a plan for escape.

  27

  It is reasonable to hope that a backlit screen will distract its user from a camera flash at some slight distance.

  Move close to the sketches you wish to photograph, allowing them to fill your field of vision.

  Hold very still.

  A flash is far more dramatic in total darkness.

  An epithet in another language, followed by “What the fuck was that?,” means you overestimated your Designated Mate’s
handset absorption.

  A bright, throbbing total blindness means that you neglected to cover your non-camera eye.

  Distance yourself from agency in the flash by crying out, truthfully, “I can’t see!”

  It is hard to safely navigate a clifftop promontory at high speed while blind.

  It is hard to defer said navigation when your Designated Mate is forcefully yanking your hand.

  A distant buzz presages an approaching speedboat.

  Cooler air and a downward slope indicate that you are now below the cliff’s edge.

  Trying to negotiate a crumbling wooded path in a state of blindness (and heels) will soon lead to tripping and collapsing.

  Receding downhill footfalls indicate that you’ve overtaxed your limited value to your Designated Mate.

  A sense of helpless disorientation may prevent you from doing much more than sitting there in the dirt.

  28

  Variegation in the textures around you is a first sign that your temporary blindness has begun to fade.

  Temporary blindness sharpens one’s appreciation for not being blind.

  In the aftermath of blindness, the accretion of objects around you may have an almost sensual quality.

  A boat departing at high speed will send a vibration trembling up through the soil.

  The knowledge that you are alone, without your Designated Mate, will settle upon you slowly and coldly.

  Each new phase of aloneness reveals that you were previously less alone than you thought.

  This more profound isolation may register, at first, as paralysis.

  If it soothes you to lie back in the dirt, then lie back.

  The moon shines everywhere.

  The moon can seem as expressive as a face.

  Human beings are fiercely, primordially resilient.

  In uneasy times, draw on the resilience you carry inside you.

  Recall that the mythical feats you loved to read about as a child are puny beside the accomplishments of human beings on earth.