1 #4
I saw Nico a week later, when I came down to LA for a ballet performance at her invitation.
Nico had trained as a dancer in childhood, and loved going to the ballet.
I don’t specifically love ballet and have never really understood it, but I admire technical excellence in all things, and there was pleasure in taking the train into the city, to have dinner with Nico and then sit for a while in a beautiful theatre.
“It’s Felix Washington’s farewell tour,” Nico said, as we settled into our seats.
“Who?”
“The male principal. He’s one of the great dancers of his generation.” The lights were dimming, so she dropped into a whisper. “American Ballet Theatre, then San Francisco Ballet because he was sick of the East Coast.”
“He said that in an interview?” The overture was beginning.
“Yes.”
Felix was a magnificent dancer. Everyone onstage was good, or so it seemed to me—I have no real eye for ballet—but there was a power and fluidity in his movements that set him apart.
If he was less precise than some of the others, he made up for it with a kind of physical charisma.
I could’ve watched him for much longer. I could’ve taken him to bed.
“I see why you wanted to see him,” I said to Nico at intermission.
“He’s good.” Nico seemed reluctant to rise from her seat, so I stayed with her as the theatre emptied out around us.
I liked this place, all the red velvet and gilt, the volume of empty air between me and the ceiling.
I worked too much, I thought. I worked so hard and didn’t leave enough space in my life for beauty.
But Nico was clasping her hands together. I felt her unease.
“Nico,” I said, “is everything okay?”
“Ibari, are you sure about what you’re doing? You’re sure you want this?”
“You mean leaving the college to move to Los Angeles?”
She gave me a steady look, and I understood. She meant Service. She sighed, and held up her wrist.
“Nightfall found me at the harbour,” she said. But she hadn’t touched the confirmation button on her watch, which meant her watch wasn’t recording. These phrases weren’t for the benefit of Service. They were to confirm beyond a doubt that I was Service too.
“We set out at twilight,” I said. “Visibility was poor.”
“You avoided the airless interiors of the ship,” she said, “preferring at all times to stand at the bow.”
I was sick to death of variable passphrases. “Are you sure about it?” I asked.
Nico hesitated. “I was recruited out of high school,” she murmured.
“It’s always optional.”
“You sure about that?”
“You have doubts?”
“Surveillance creates stability,” Nico said flatly. But the line sounded more like propaganda than like Nico. I felt a shiver of unease, but I’d already blown up my previous life. My last day at the college was the following Friday.
2
Eight years later, on the day I was promoted to the rank of senior detective first class in a Special Investigations unit, I was sent to a field office by the harbour.
I arrived at my new office in the late morning, carrying a box of my belongings from my previous desk, and found a building so nondescript that it was practically camouflaged.
There were faded signs for an insurance company, a beauty supply wholesaler’s, and Harbor Imports Inc.
, which I recognized intuitively as a front for Service.
Sure enough, my instructions—“Suite 220”—lined up with the import company in the directory.
Suite 220 was a locked door next to the beauty supply company.
I stood out in the corridor for some time, waiting for someone to buzz me in, then entered into a dusty reception area with forty-year-old plastic chairs and a rippled carpet.
Service employed some of the most advanced surveillance technologies on the planet, but this was paired with an almost pathological resistance to modernizing our offices.
Service offices were cluttered spaces with mismatched furniture, and had a way of looking provisional even after several decades of use.
I had noticed this years ago, and wasn’t sure why it bothered me.
In this office suite, an elderly man sat behind a decades-old reception desk with peeling wood veneer. He was also immediately recognizable to me as Service. He had the air of a man on his last posting.
“Ah, Detective Waker,” he said when I held my hand over the scanner. “You have a corner office.”
The room to which he sent me—far down at the end of the passageway, next to the janitor’s closet—turned out to be one of the smallest offices I’d ever seen.
There was a fine layer of dust on every surface.
A sliver of harbour was visible between two towers, a massive ferry sliding in.
I closed the door and used my jacket sleeve to wipe dust off my desk.
I knew, in the way I just sometimes know things, that I would work in this room for a very long time.
I spent the rest of the day reading old case files, then left in the morning for a long weekend in Ohio.
The trip had been approved long before my promotion and I’d been looking forward to it, but as the bullet train gathered speed on the way out of the city I felt an obscure resentment.
I didn’t want to go to Ohio, I wanted to be at my desk.
The case I’d been working just prior to my promotion had involved infiltrating a group of academics who had begun speaking, in veiled terms, about what it would take to restore democracy to the State.
I’d insinuated myself into their social circle, and what was difficult now was that, well, I missed them.
They were intelligent, warm people. They’d liked to talk about interesting ideas.
They were na?ve about me in a way I didn’t understand—why had they let me infiltrate them so easily?
—and my suspicion was that this was because they’d liked me, just as I’d liked them, and now I’d vanished from their lives without explanation.
They didn’t like me, I told myself, they just liked my cover, they liked talking to an urban designer with an academic background who missed the rigour of academic life, but the obvious problem with that formulation was that my cover was me.
I did miss the college in Fillmore, sometimes.
With each passing year, my life in that town felt more and more like a dream.
The train was speeding out over the desert now, a chaparral landscape dotted with abandoned towns, buildings fading into ruin in the waterless heat.
In the distance, a massive white detention centre rose up like a mirage.
There was a cluster of buildings nearby, a sprawling work camp for low-level offenders, rooftops shimmering in the heat.
I was on an express train, no stops till Nevada.
The prison train station flashed by my window—just a platform, no shelter—and I looked away.
People sent to the desert prison seldom returned, in my understanding.
The thing about Service was that I could only do my job effectively if I didn’t think about the endpoint, about where the people whom I investigated actually went after my reports were submitted.
The thing about living in a place like this was how hard you had to work to not see the obvious, that was the thing I was thinking about as the train gathered speed on the run toward Las Vegas.
I was thinking about Nico, about the night at the ballet.
I hadn’t seen her in a while, because I’d been working long hours and she had two small children now.
It had been months, I realized, since Nico and I had spoken of anything of substance.
I’d call her as soon as I returned to LA, I decided.
We’d have dinner. I had a sense as I sped eastward that I’d see her again soon.
My parents had built a house in a meadow in Ohio.
It had been a kind of non-place at the time, a neglected area between a highway and a mall, but the mall had been torn down years ago and was now an expanse of cracked concrete, which my mother and a neighbour had seeded with wildflowers.
The highway was only lightly used now, since a new expressway had gone in a few kilometres away.
On the approach from the train station, in the passenger seat of my mother’s car, it seemed to me that the meadow had acquired an unexpected beauty.
There were three other houses nearby, but the neighbours were on good enough terms that they’d agreed to take down the intervening fences, and now it looked like a postcard.
In the distance, the beige rectangle of a prison for juvenile offenders was mostly hidden by trees.
“It must be nice for you to take a break from work,” my mother said, as we got out of the car. Her understanding of my life was that I’d left academia to work in an urban planning consulting firm.
“Oh, it’s a good job,” I said. “I’m enjoying it so far.” Trying not to think about the desert prison as I got out of the car.
“Do you think you could help me with the garden while you’re here?” my mother asked.
“Are we still planting wildflowers?” I was looking up at the site where the mall had been. On a previous visit I’d helped pry broken concrete pieces out of the way to create narrow spaces for planting, and it was a pleasure to see the spindly apple trees emerging from the gaps.
I’ve never been much of a gardener, but I can follow instructions and dig a hole, so the following afternoon, I put on the oldest clothes I could find and went up to the former mall.
The work was hard in a meditative way. It was possible to still my thoughts, and only in the stillness did I realize my thoughts had been racing.
I was thinking of a study I’d read once, a long time ago, about a rise in the number of gardens following the formation of the modern State, which is to say the version of this country in which voting was no longer required and the president would one day be succeeded by his son.