You Think That's Bad

by Jim Shepard

  ALSO BY JIM SHEPARD

  Like You’d Understand, Anyway: Stories

  Project X

  Love and Hydrogen: New and Selected Stories

  Nosferatu

  Batting Against Castro: Stories

  Kiss of the Wolf

  Lights Out in the Reptile House

  Paper Doll

  Flights

  AS EDITOR

  You’ve Got to Read This (with Ron Hansen)

  Unleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs (with Amy Hempel)

  Writers at the Movies

  THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

  Copyright © 2011 by Jim Shepard

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.aaknopf.com

  Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  The following stories were previously published: “Happy with Crocodiles” in American Scholar; “Poland Is Watching” in The Atlantic; “Your Fate Hurtles Down at You” in Electric Literature; “Classical Scenes of Farewell” and “The Netherlands Lives with Water” in McSweeney’s; “Boys Town” in The New Yorker; “Minotaur” in Playboy; “Low-Hanging Fruit” in Tin House; “In Cretaceous Seas” in Vice; and “The Track of the Assassins” in Zoetrope: All-Story.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Shepard, Jim.

  You think that’s bad / by Jim Shepard. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-59556-0

  I. Title.

  PS3569.H39384Y68 2011

  813′.54—dc22 2010035998

  Jacket image: Contortionist from Thiele’s Photo Rooms /

  George Eastman House / Gallery Stock

  Jacket design by Jason Booher

  v3.1

  For Shep

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Minotaur

  The Track of the Assassins

  In Cretaceous Seas

  The Netherlands Lives with Water

  Happy with Crocodiles

  Your Fate Hurtles Down at You

  Low-Hanging Fruit

  Gojira, King of the Monsters

  Boys Town

  Classical Scenes of Farewell

  Poland Is Watching

  Acknowledgments

  A Note About the Author

  Minotaur

  Kenny I hadn’t seen in, what, three, four years. Kenny started with me way back when, the two of us standing there with our hands in our pants right outside the wormhole. Kenny wanders into the Windsock last night like the Keith Richards version of himself with this girl who looks like some movie star’s daughter. “Is that you?” he says when he spots me in a booth. “This is the guy you’re always talking about?” Carly asks once we’re a few minutes into the conversation. The girl’s name turns out to be Celestine. Talking to me, every so often he gets distracted and we have to wait until he takes his mouth away from hers.

  “So my husband brings you up all the time and then, when I ask what you did together, he always goes, ‘I can’t help you there,’ ” Carly tells him. “Which of course he knows I know. But he likes to say it anyway.”

  With her fingers Celestine brings his cheek over toward her, like nobody’s talking, and once they’re kissing she works on gently opening his mouth with hers. After a while he makes a sound that’s apparently the one she wanted to hear, and she disengages and returns her attention to us.

  “How’s your wife?” Carly asks him.

  Kenny says they’re separated and that she’s settled down with a project manager from Lockheed.

  “Nice to meet you,” Carly tells Celestine.

  “Mmm-hmm,” Celestine says.

  The wormhole for Kenny and me was what people in the industry call the black world, which is all about projects so far off the books that you’re not even allowed to put CLASSIFIED in the gap in your résumé afterwards. You’re told during recruitment that people in the know will know, and that when it comes to everybody else you shouldn’t give a shit.

  If you want to know how big the black world is, go click on COMPTROLLER and then RESEARCH AND DEVELOPMENT on the DOD’s Web site and make a list of the line items with names like Cerulean Blue and budgets listed as “No Number.” Then compare the number of budget items you can add up, and subtract that from the DOD’s printed budget. Now there’s an eye-opener for you home actuaries: you’re looking at a difference of forty billion dollars.

  The black world’s everywhere: regular air bases have restricted compounds; defense industries have permanently segregated sites. And anywhere that no one in his right mind would ever go to in the Southwest, there’s a black base. Drive along a wash in the back of nowhere in Nevada and you’ll suddenly hit a newish fence that goes on forever. Follow the fence and you’ll encounter some bland-looking guys in an unmarked pickup. Refuse to do what they say and they’ll shoot the tires out from under you and give you a lift to the county lockup.

  All of this was before 9/11. You can imagine what it’s like now.

  For a while Kenny helped out at Groom Lake as an engineering troubleshooter for a C-5 airlift squadron that flew only late-night operations, ferrying classified aircraft from the aerospace plants to the test sites. They had a patch that featured a crescent moon over NOYFB. “None Of Your Fucking Business,” he explained when I first saw it. He said that during the down time he hung with the stealth-bomber guys with their Huge Deposit-No Return jackets, and he told his wife when she asked that he worked in the Nellis Range, which was a little like telling someone that you worked in the Alps.

  I’d met him a few years earlier when Minotaur was hatched out at Lockheed’s Skunk Works. He’d been brought in for the sister program, Minion. We were developing an ATOP—an Advanced Technology Observation Platform—and even over the crapper it read: Furtim Vigilans: Vigilance Through Stealth.

  It wasn’t the secrecy as much as the slogans and patches and badges that drove Carly nuts. “Only you guys would have patches for secret programs,” she said. “Like what’re we supposed to do, be intrigued? Guess what’s going on?”

  In the old days Kenny’s unit had as its symbol the mushroom, and under it, in Latin: Always in the Dark. The black world’s big on patches and Latin. I had one for Minotaur that read Doing God’s Work with Other People’s Money. I’d heard there was a unit out at Point Mugu that had the ultimate patch: just a black-on-black circle.

  “ ‘Gustatus Similis Pullus,’ ” Carly said. She was tilting her head to read an oval yellow patch on Kenny’s shoulder.

  “You know Latin?” he asked.

  “Do you know how long I’ve been tired of this?” she told him.

  “I don’t know Latin,” Celestine volunteered.

  “ ‘Tastes Like Chicken,’ ” he translated.

  “Nice,” Carly told him.

  “I don’t get it,” Celestine said.

  “Neither does she,” he told her.

  “Oooh. Snap,” Carly said.

  “People’re supposed to taste like chicken,” I finally told them.

  “Oh, right,” Carly said. “So what’re you guys doing, eating people?”

  “That’s what we do: we eat people,” Kenny agreed. He made teeth with his forefingers and thumbs and had them bite up and down.

  Carly gave him a head shake and turned to the bar. “Are we gonna order?” she asked.

  It’s all infowar now. Delivering or screwing up content. We can convince a surface-to-a
ir missile that it’s a Maytag dryer. Tell an over-the-horizon radar array that it’s through for the day, or that it wants to play music. And we’ve got lookdown capabilities that can tell you from space whether your aunt’s having a Diet Coke or a regular.

  What Carly’s forgetting is that it’s not just about teasing. There’s something to be said for esprit de corps. There’s all that home-team stuff.

  I heard from various sources that Kenny’s been all over: Kirtland, Hanscom, White Sands, Groom Lake, Tonopah. “What’s my motto?” he said, in front of his wife, the last time I saw him. “ ‘A Lifetime of Silence,’ ” she answered back, as though he’d told her in the nicest possible way to go fuck herself.

  What’s it like? Carly asked me once. Not being able to tell the people you’re closest to anything about what you care about most? She was talking about how upset I was at Kenny’s having dropped right off the face of the earth. He’d gone off to his new assignment without a backwards glance some two weeks before, with not even a Have a good one, bucko left behind on a Post-it. She was talking about having just come home from a good vacation with her husband and watching him throw his drink onto the roof because of an e-mail in response to some inquiries that read No can do, in terms of a back tell. Your Hansel stipulated no bread crumbs.

  The glass had rolled back off the shingles into the azaleas. By way of explaining the duration of my upset, I’d let her in on a little of what I’d risked by that little fishing expedition. I asked if she had any idea how long it took to get the kind of security clearance her breadwinner toted around or how many federales with pocket protectors had fine-tooth-combed my every last Visa bill.

  “I almost said hello to you two Christmases ago,” Kenny told me now. “Out at SWC in Schriever.”

  “You were at SWC in Schriever?” I asked.

  “Oh, for Christ’s sake,” Carly said. “Don’t talk like this if you’re not going to tell us what it means.”

  “The Space Warfare Center in Colorado,” Kenny said, shrugging when he saw my face. “Let’s give the bad guys a fighting chance.”

  “I didn’t know we had a Space Warfare Center,” Celestine said.

  “A Space Warfare Center?” Kenny asked her.

  At our rehearsal dinner, now three years back in the rearview mirror, during a lull at our table Carly’s college roommate said, “I never had a black eye, but I always kinda wished I did.” Carly looked surprised and said, “Well, I licked one all over once.” And everybody looked at her. “You licked a black eye?” I finally asked. And Carly went, “Oh, I thought she said ‘black guy.’ ”

  “You licked a black guy all over?” I asked her later that night. She couldn’t see my face in the dark but she knew what I was getting at.

  “I did. And it was so good,” she said. Then she put a hand on the inside of each of my knees and spread my legs as wide as she could.

  “What’s the biggest secret you think I ever kept from you?” she asked during our most recent relocation, which was last Memorial Day. We had a parakeet in the backseat and were bouncing a U-Haul over a road that you would have said hadn’t seen vehicular traffic in twenty-five years. I’d been lent out to Northrup and couldn’t even tell her for how long.

  “I don’t know,” I told her. “I figured you had nothing but secrets.” Then she dropped the subject, so for two weeks I went through her e-mails.

  “I don’t know anything about this Kenny guy,” she told me the day I threw the drink. “Except that you can’t get over that he disappeared.”

  “You know, sometimes you just register a connection,” I told her later that night in bed. “And not talking about it doesn’t have to be some big deal.”

  “So it was kind of a romantic thing,” she said.

  “Yeah, it was totally physical,” I told her. “Like you and your mom.”

  Carly had gotten this far by telling herself that compartmentalizing wasn’t all bad: that some doors may have been shut off but that the really important ones were wide open. And in terms of intimacy, she was far and away as good as things were going to get for me. We had this look we gave each other in public that said, I know. I already thought that. We’d each been engaged when we met and we’d stuck with each other through a lot of other people’s crap. Late at night we lay nose to nose in the dark and told each other stuff nobody else had ever heard us say. I told her about some of the times I’d been a dick and she told me about a kid she’d miscarried, and about another she’d put up for adoption when she was seventeen. She had no idea where he was now, but not a day went by that she didn’t think about it. We called them both Little Jimmy. And for a while there was all this magical thinking, and not asking each other all that much because we thought we already knew.

  That not-being-on-the-same-page thing had become a bigger issue for me lately, though that’s something she didn’t know. Which is perfect, she would’ve said.

  What I’d been working on at that point had gone south a little. Another way of putting it would be to say that what I was doing was wrong. The ATOP we’d developed for Minotaur had been an unarmed drone that could hover above one spot like a satellite couldn’t, providing instant lookdown for as long as a battlefield commander wanted it. But how long had it taken for us to retrofit them with air-to-surface missiles? And how many Fiats and Citroëns have those drones taken out because somebody back in Langley thought the right target was in the car?

  There was an army of us out there up to the same sorts of hijinks and not able to talk about it. Where I worked, everything was black: not only the test flights, but also the resupply, the maintenance, the search-and-rescue. And the security scrutiny never went away. The guy who led my last project team, at home when he went to bed, after he hit the lights, waved to the surveillance guys. His wife never understood why even in August they had to do everything under the sheets.

  On black-world patches you see a lot of sigmas because that’s the engineering symbol for the unknown value.

  “The Minotaur’s the one in the labyrinth, right?” the materials guy in my project team asked the first day. When I told him it was, he wanted to know if the Minotaur was supposed to know where it was going, or if it was lost, too. That’d be funny, I told him. And we joked about the monster and the hero just wandering around through all these dark corridors, nobody finding anybody.

  And now here I was and here Kenny was, with poor Carly trying to get a fix on either one of us.

  “So what brings you to this neck of the woods?” I finally asked him once we were well into our second drinks.

  “You know how sad he was,” Carly asked, “when he couldn’t get in touch with you anymore?”

  “How sad?” Kenny asked. Celestine seemed curious, too.

  “I thought we were gonna have to get him some counseling,” Carly said.

  “It’s hard to adjust to not being with me anymore,” Kenny told her.

  “So did he ever talk to you about me?” she asked.

  “You came up,” Kenny answered, and even Celestine picked up on the unpleasantness.

  “I’m listening,” Carly said.

  “Oh, he was all hot to trot whenever he talked about you,” Kenny said.

  “Sang my praises, did he?” Carly’s face had the expression she gets when somebody’s tracked something into the house.

  “When he wasn’t shooting himself in the foot about you, he was pretty happy,” Kenny said. “I called it his good-woman face.”

  “As in, I had one,” I explained.

  “Whenever he tied himself in knots about something, I called it his Little Jimmy face,” he said. When Carly swung around toward him, he said, “Sorry, chief.”

  “That was a comic thing for you?” Carly asked me. “The kind of thing you’d tell like a funny story?”

  “I never thought it was a funny story,” I told her.

  “There’s his Little Jimmy face now,” Kenny noted. When she looked at him again, he used his index fingers to pull down on his lower
eyelids and made an Emmett Kelly frown.

  “We started calling potential targets Little Jimmies,” he said, “whenever we were going to bring the hammer down and maximize collateral damage.”

  Carly was looking at something in front of her the way you try not to move even your eyes to keep from throwing up. “What is that supposed to mean?” she finally said in a low voice.

  “You know,” Kenny told her. “ ‘I don’t wike the wooks of this …’ ”

  “Is that Elmer Fudd you’re doing?” Celestine wanted to know.

  And how could you not laugh, watching him do his poor-sap-in-the-crosshairs shtick?

  “This is just the fucking House of Mirth, isn’t it?” Carly said. Because she saw on my face just how many doors she’d been dealing with all along, both open and shut, and she also saw the We’re-in-the-boat-and-you’re-in-the-water expression that guys cut from our project teams always got when they asked if there was anything we could do to keep them onboard.

  “Jesus Fucking Christ,” she said to herself, because her paradigm had suddenly shifted beyond what even she could have imagined. She thought she’d put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she’d just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn’t even crossed the moat yet.

  Because here’s the thing we hadn’t talked about, nose to nose on our pillows in the dark: how I’ve never been closer to anyone isn’t the same as We’re so close. That night I threw the drink, she asked why I was so perfect for the black world, and I wanted to tell her, How am I not perfect for it? It’s a sinkhole for resources. Everyone involved with it obsesses about it all the time. Even what the insiders know about it is incomplete. Whatever stories you do get arrive without context. What’s not inconclusive is enigmatic, what’s not enigmatic is unreliable, and what’s not unreliable is quixotic.

  She hasn’t left yet, which surprises me, let me tell you. The waitress is showing some alarm at Carly’s distress and I’ve got a hand on her back. She accepts a little rubbing and then has to pull away. “I gotta get out of here,” she goes.