Woke Up Lonely A Novel

ESME RUSHED OUT OF THE METRO. Or walked as fast as possible, given the rubber gams distending her legs, and her chest vest, which weighed a ton. A C-cup bosom that swung low, and a furl of belly fat that D-curved around her waist, not to mention the load of vulcanized ass piled on her rear. Christ, this fat suit. Christ, this life.

Times like these, she wished she and Jim had a more convenient rendezvous point. The Air and Space Museum was in the middle of nowhere. She spotted him at the entrance. She pinched his arm, and when he gave her a confused look, she laughed and said, “Hey, it’s me.”

“My God,” he said. “You are terrifying.”

“Nice to see you, too,” and she pecked him on the cheek.

“Totally unrecognizable. I don’t think I’ve ever seen your face all worked up.”

“That’s one way of putting it,” she said, and she glanced at her reflection in a window. Today’s prosthetic: a nose brinked on caricature that appeared to have been launched from the putty of her face like a dart. Today’s chin: prognathous. She wore a wig. Sawdust blond, washed out, limp. Bowl cut—a vase, really—that came in at her chin.

“Terrifying,” he said. “And what, like, fifty pounds heavier? You seem shorter, too.”

“I think the word you’re looking for is matronly. I call this look the Lynne Five-Oh. Effective, right?”

He took her arm as they made for the space hangar. Rocket boosters hung from the ceiling like Christmas ornaments. Jim said, “So how’s our boy?”

“Back in Cincinnati in a few days.”

“And you?”

“Fine.”

“Good, because after what happened in North Korea, you’re lucky to be getting another chance.”

“For what? Everything’s status quo, everything’s fine over there.”

He stopped walking. “Are we even talking about the same guy anymore? Do you need a leave of absence?”

“What? No. I’m just saying I don’t know why now is the time to try again. Nothing happened in North Korea. Thurlow never met anyone. He just drove around. I was on him the whole time. I was even in a car with him, face-to-face. Didn’t recognize me at all.”

“In this getup?”

“No. Something even better.”

“Wow.”

“So what more do you want? Should I have made something up?”

He gave her a nasty look and pinched his earlobe, which he did when stressed. He’d been working on this assignment nonstop—his file was huge—but the bureaucracy was worse. Under whose purview did a man like Thurlow Dan even fall? A domestic cult leader with foreign ties sounded like simple Joint Terrorism Task Force fare—the FBI doing its worst—but then the National Counterproliferation Center was not likely to hands-off a guy in chat with North Korea. Of course, it wasn’t like the center actually talked to the JTTF, which was probably for the best, since the JTTF took its lead from the NJTTF, which was just sixty guys stumped even by having to order lunch. Jim was at the Pentagon with Homeland Security—who knew how the job of dismantling the Helix had fallen to him. No one understood how business was run at that level.

What’s the latest, Jim? Don’t screw this up, Jim. You got nothing from North Korea, Jim? The pressure was intense. And he was losing patience. How could Esme have screwed up North Korea? And how many chances was she supposed to get? He’d been told she was the best. And when she did that Kegel thing, he knew she was the best. Also, to her credit, she did produce a lot of information. And she always knew where Thurlow was. So he would be patient. All they needed was a smoking gun.

Esme paused to admire a Corona film return capsule and to read news of its magic: a film bucket dropped from outer space, bearing snaps of the Soviet Union. And then she remembered why she liked this place so much. The early Explorer satellites—Explorer 1, which launched in ’58—marked the start of modern espionage, at which she was expert.

Jim leaned over the case.

“Unmanned surveillance,” he said. “Take the human factor out of things, and nine times out of ten, it goes better.”

“Your confidence in me is overwhelming,” she said. “I am touched.”

She leaned over the case, too, and pressed her fingers onto the glass. He left smudge prints; she did not. She never would, and in this was a reminder that you are often born perfect for the life you get. When she was eleven weeks fetal, thanks to the genetic perversion dermatopathia pigmentosa reticularis, the cells in the upper layers of her skin were marked for death. Six months later, she was born with no fingerprints. Luckily, other symptoms attached to the disorder did not present. Her hair was thick, her teeth were intact, and the rawhide that should have been her hands and feet was but your average volar padding. No, it was better than average. Smooth and soft. She had no friction ridges on the parts of her most likely to extend themselves in love, which was depressing, since in the transmission of love one hopes for (a) friction and (b) cells buoyant and irrepressible. She left no trace of herself wherever she went.

Jim moved down the aisle. His shoes slapped the concrete. “Esme, this is the deal: You need to send people down to Cincinnati again. I want round-the-clock surveillance on the house. He bites his toenails, I want it on camera. You so much as see a toy sword, and I’ll have ATF shut him down. This time, you have to produce. We can’t go in there cold.”

Did Jim have a warrant? Of course not, though she knew better than to ask.

“If that’s what you want,” she said, trying to imply that surveillance would not produce anything, but without faulting herself for it. “No problem.”

“Put whatever team in place you choose, except this time, I want them to report to me.” She rolled her eyes, but more to roll back the panic that would show in them any second. “You know I don’t work like that,” she said. “Either I’m running things or I’m not.”

He frowned. “I gotta go see my wife in a few days. Wife, lawyers, divorce. My life is a shit storm. Don’t make it worse.”

Esme nodded. She wanted to get out of there. So much to do. “You should take me with you sometime. For backup.”

“Then I have to go pick up my daughter, which means seeing my in-laws. You know what’s the last thing I want to be thinking about when dealing with those people? Your psychotic f*ck of an ex-husband.”

She linked her arm in his and tried, despite her ogre face, to remind him of their intimacy. He was Jim Bach. Her Department of Defense liaison and paramour of use. A henchman. Also a facilitator of plans brewed by men who were part of the furtive and freakishly right-wing Council for National Policy, though if asked, it was, No, no, never heard of those people, no way, no how.

They had been working together for a year. Before him, there were others, though all with the same bugbear, the Helix, and, in turn, Thurlow Dan. No one knew exactly when Dan had become such a threat, just that in 1995 he was that annoying socialist whose rhetoric offended people powerful enough to have him watched, but by 2005 he was doyen of a movement with reach. So Esme’s orders were more urgent than ever: produce enough intel on Thurlow to make the case and shut him down.

They walked past the space shuttle Enterprise, where a little boy was saying, “It’s too heavy to fly, Daddy, it’s too heavy,” and throwing himself on the floor as he did so. At the door, Jim stopped and faced Esme his way. Pinched both her arms and squeezed—the squeeze hostile and sexual in equal doses—and said, “Esme. Lynne. I’ve never told you how to do your job before, only now I have one piece of advice.”

She freed herself of his grip. “What’s that?”

“Don’t f*ck it up.”

All the way home, she tried to feel nothing. But it was no good. For her, anxiety was like many people talking at once: no clue what anyone was saying, just that no one was happy about it. And so, if you can’t beat ’em, etc.: she tried to pull from the rabble some thoughts of use. For instance: I am alone; I self-sustain; these ideas are ballast for who I am. Bywords she’d relied on for years but that were of no help now. She was afraid. She’d been on Thurlow before they were married and every day since, but really, how long could this go on? How long could she protect him? Her job had been to produce a reason to throw him in jail, and she’d managed not to with remarkable skill. When the Helix didn’t pay taxes. When the Helix had a brothel. One or two or twenty. Whatever the members did in a Bond, Esme made sure no one knew. Or covered the bases when the Helix didn’t. Think Dean actually had permits for all those guns? It hadn’t been easy, but it had been doable. Only now Thurlow was getting reckless.

And it wasn’t like confronting him was easy. You couldn’t talk to a man like that. And you certainly couldn’t have him in your life. He was who he was: monstrous in his disregard for anyone but himself, and if Esme could barely handle it, her daughter couldn’t handle it at all. She shouldn’t even have to; she was just a child.

So, fine, she’d stay away, as always. And do her best. And in the meantime, she’d put together another team. Four people who would have no business being sent on a reconnaissance mission. Who’d come back with snapshots of the Helix House that were out of focus. The house in the snow, and maybe some hooker in the window. Esme would identify the hooker for Jim and then say that was it, nothing else of note to report. Nothing at all, and that would end it until the next time. And the time after that.

She got to her bathroom and sat at a vanity with mirror and bubble lights. “Martin!” she yelled. “Get this thing off me. The face, too. I’m done for the day. The Lynne Five-Oh is great.”

She leaned in close to the mirror, trying to find herself exposed in the silicone vamped to her skin. But she couldn’t. Martin was a genius. He had managed her looks for a decade. Together they had fooled everyone she knew. Even her lovers. Even her parents, though here was cause for regret, because it was hard enough getting your parents to know you in plain face—witness her own child, whom she barely knew at all.

Martin used a butter knife to peel a flap glued to her cheekbone. “Ow,” she said. “Easy.”

“Sorry,” he said, and he knelt to take off her calf plates.

She put her elbows on the vanity. She fit her index under the elastic headband of her wig and pulled. The wig sailed overhead and landed on a couch. Her real hair was tamped under a swim cap seamed to her head with mortician’s wax, which Martin dissolved with acetone. She removed the cap as per the wig and plunged her fingers into her hair to rouse its inclination to chaos. It was dark blond with copper veins, shoulder length and undulate.

“Where’s the case?” she said. She had forty-three different pairs of contact lenses. The blues with the pupil cast in a flax corona were her favorite. Tonight, she wore the hazel taupe. They radiated an unease that itself radiated sorrow. She looked at them in the mirror and wondered if they telegraphed feeling better than her own eyes, which were white grape.

“So it all went okay?” he said. “Anything feel loose?”

“No, just fat. I look like a fifty-year-old hag. Lynne the hag.”

“Anything else I can do?”

“No.”

“Okay,” he said, which was as far as the conversation would go. Martin was not a confidant. Not even a colleague. Their first project, he’d had to regender her face and age it ten years. As he’d applied spirit gum to a hollow in her cheek, he’d asked about the job. Why a man? Why the years? She’d said, “You know how people like to joke around—if I told you I’d have to kill you—you know that joke?” He did. “It’s no joke.” And that was that.

It’s true she wasn’t a case officer. Or even a spook. In the official parlance of human intelligence, the acronym was NOC. Nonofficial cover. Go out into the world, and if you screwed up, no one would bail you out, no one would reel you in, no one would say you were alive. Only difference was that a real NOC was affiliated with a parent organization that had an interest in getting her out despite the blowback. Esme did not have this luxury. Her burden was to go unacknowledged but also untethered. In the unofficial parlance, she was a freelancer. Hired by the government, case by case. Some more harrowing than others.

During her tenure, she had done many of the absurd things that an officer does but that don’t seem absurd when the plans you’ve come to wrest from a sham curl of dog shit are for India’s fast breeder test reactor. But mostly this was adjunct work. Assignments to divert her self-regard from evidence that she’d devoted her career to the study and pursuit of Thurlow Dan. Had they really been married once? It seemed like another lifetime.

Martin fit her wig over a Styrofoam head and combed out a snag.

“The morgue called,” he said.

“What’d you tell them?”

“Same as always. You’ll call them back.”

“They say anything new?”

“Your parents are fine.”

She smiled despite herself. Her parents were dead. How else would they be?

He checked his BlackBerry. “When will you be needing me again?”

She’d put on a terry cloth robe and slippers, which she kicked off from bed. “Not until tomorrow,” she said glumly, before pilling what makeup and glue were left hewn to her chin with her fingertips.

“And now?”

“Reading files. Go on, have fun.”

Sometimes Martin forgot who he was—butler or F/X man—so he backed out of the room and bowed at the waist. Other times, he did not forget, and bowed just the same. Esme Haas was one scary woman.

She watched him go. Sad. Martin had a life outside the one he experienced in her charge. She wished she had that life, too. But no. Her house was sized for God; it was cold and quiet and quarantining of intimacies that inhered between people.

On a console of TVs set into her wall: footage from every room in the house. Her daughter was asleep. Everyone else was out. If she killed the radio, it would be deadly. On the topic of isolation, she liked to blame her work: This isn’t my fault. Only it was her fault. Her character. Type A shy: gregarious, lively, protected. Prized qualities in a sleuthing mercenary, less so for the woman inside. But never mind—she was her job 95 percent of the time.

And so: manila envelopes on the table. She opened them one by one. Looked at photos, résumés, stats. It wasn’t like she was unprepared to do Jim’s bidding. She was always plugging people into the system she might need later. People she paid for small jobs here and there. People who were willing to do something odd for reasons she would divine first and exploit later. For this gig, she chose four who seemed perfect: Ned Hammerstein, Anne-Janet Tabetha Riggs, Olgo Panjabi, Bruce Bollinger. She’d wooed them to the Department of the Interior a few weeks ago, them and fifty like them, because who kept track of what went on at the Department of the Interior? Most everyone there was astonishingly without job description. She’d once caught a guy arranging the envelopes in the mail room by size, and when she returned three hours later, he was still doing it.

At the bottom of her files was a letter she didn’t want to see, which was why it was on the bottom. A note from her daughter’s boarding school, a report card plus blurb from each teacher re: the emotional stylings of Ida Haas midway through fourth grade. She was, they said, good with the other kids. Played nice. Appeared to compensate for surplus rage with martyring gestures that won her many friends, though perhaps this way of things would not go over as well in the real world, be advised.

Esme skimmed the rest. She did not enjoy having to get news of who her child was, though it was probably better to have something to go on next time Ida showed, which was now. She could feel it, her daughter’s gaze scalding the back of her neck. She did not even have to turn around.

“What’s the matter, tulip? I thought you were asleep.”

“Ma and Pop let me stay up till whenever.”

Esme considered all the other ways her parents might have let her child grow up unbridled and decided this was okay. Besides, who was she to have an opinion? She didn’t know if she’d done wrong today, but no matter: yesterday’s guilt imported fine.

Ida was leaning against the wall, one bare foot flamingoed to her calf, working a Twizzler across her lips.

“Then stay up. You want to play a game?”

“No.”

“Want me to come read to you?”

“Ha,” Ida said, and she threw herself on the couch. She was wearing cotton pajamas—green with white stripes—that had banded cuffs at the wrists and ankles. It was hard to reconcile the scorn in her voice with the dress of her choosing, but so be it. Esme thought this conversation ranked among their finest in days.

“I’ve got work, honey bun. But you can stay. Tomorrow I’ll take you to dance class.”

Ida nose-dived for the files. Flipped one open. Stared at Ned. “Nope,” she said. “Too young.” She rolled on her back, legs in the air.

“For what?”

“For Dad. Duh,” and she grabbed at the next file, which Esme had in hand and wouldn’t let go.

“Mohhm. Give it.”

“Okay, this is not playtime, and we’re not looking for your dad.”

“Are, too,” Ida said. And, as though buffeted by the fury of it all, she lifted herself from the couch and sailed out of the room.

Esme shook her head. She had not done the easy thing of telling Ida that Thurlow was dead, just that he had vanished when she was a baby. And because she had never elaborated or furnished the story with verisimilitude—what he did for a living, what he looked like, where he was last—Ida must have known she was lying. But who was to say what went on in the mind of a nine-year-old? She was so much like her father, the passions accreting with each year. Sometimes Esme looked at her and thought, How do you even have the room?

She put her files away. Tried to relax. The years without Thurlow were cairned in her heart for the life they never had, but just because she’d grown used to the weight did not mean that it wasn’t heavy or that sometimes she could not bear it.

And to think it was her job that had brought them together. They’d known each other since they were kids, but their first real encounter came after she’d been assigned to him. And he never knew. He still didn’t. And now, a decade later, she was still following him around. Five minutes at a Laundromat. A few hours in North Korea.

Under her bed was a queen-size strongbox instead of a box spring. It was designed to conceal thirty-five rifles and seventy handguns, though she used it for DVDs and letters. Four hundred eighty-two letters from Thurlow. A thousand DVDs. She grabbed one from last year, marked 11/04, right after the election. She had filmed that night herself; the weather had been awful—a storm, a flood—but everyone still came.

She popped the DVD into her computer and closed her eyes. Thurlow’s voice was enough for her; she knew the rest by heart. He’d been wearing jeans and a long-sleeved polyester crew that hung off his shoulders. His hair was mopped across his face because he’d just showered and that was what conditioner did to it. His skin was pale and freckled, which gave him an injured, boyish look that made the traumas issuing from his lips seem all the more unjust. He had put his hands on the lectern, and she could make out the swollen knuckle that had never healed from when he fell off his bike at age twelve. He thanked everyone for coming. Three hundred in the audience? Four? A drop in the bucket.

“Now, listen,” he said. “A lot of people think solitude comes from a deep need attached in our social history to the dread of convention. Or even just the dread of belonging. How can I belong? I live in darker registers of inquiry and feeling than anyone else on earth. Does that sound familiar?”

Esme was mouthing the speech with him. She’d heard it and the others a thousand times. She remembered that this one went on for hours. And that somewhere in the middle, the rain stopped, and the wind died. And that by the time Thurlow was done, the sky was fledgling blue.

She turned off her computer. It wasn’t that she didn’t agree with Thurlow. Loneliness was a pandemic, and she had only to look at herself to see the proof. She had spent more time alone than anyone she knew, despite her daughter, whom she loved but whose presence was not companionship. Ida was just a child. Sometimes she was even an affront. So, the premise—Thurlow had that right. It was the rest Esme couldn’t get behind. Fellowship among strangers as antidote to a life’s worth of estrangement? As if when the romantic or familial valence of your secret self falls short, you can just entrust that secret self to the Helix and feel better?

She grabbed tweezers from her bedside table and stripped her cuticles. Examined her fingers, as she did almost every night. So strange not to have fingerprints. Growing up, she had let the condition ask of her questions most people spend their lives trying never to ask, among them: What the f*ck is wrong with me? And: Do the affectations of my body—and doesn’t everyone have something? that dreadful mole? a sunspot?—proceed from a darker and more dire malady clutched to my heart? Phrenology and palm reading may have been fatuous, but they still derived from a basic impulse to solipsism and self-hatred: everything in the world is but evidence of my failure.

Esme had her problems: an ex-husband she still loved and a child who might not love her. She popped a finger in her mouth. The blood about her nail had gathered like pectin.

There was nothing to do but what she could. Assemble a team: Ned, Anne-Janet, Olgo, Bruce. Execute reconnaissance on Thurlow and the Helix House. Listen up, look hard, and if, in the crosshairs between hurt and sorrow, she felt the tremor of longing—Where are you? and, I miss you—then, yes, some part of her continued to do the right thing, despite all.