Fiona Maazel - Woke Up Lonely

10. In 1994, things got hot in North Korea. That was the year they’d defuel the core of their reactor at Yongbyon, unload enough plutonium for about five nuclear bombs, and threaten war if the UN Security Council imposed sanctions. It was looking very bad, very scary, and all of us on the line were listening hard. And getting nervous.

11. Need some context for all this? I’ll give it to you. Two years before, things were on the up: North and South Korea were about to sign a denuclearization agreement for the peninsula. The North had agreed to the IAEA’s safeguard protocols; the South had agreed to suspend Team Spirit (which is, ridiculously, a series of war games between the South and the U.S., designed to flaunt their ordnance). The U.S. withdrew all nuclear weaponry from the region and had gotten past the flirting stage and into the first high-level talks with the North in forty years. An accord seemed likely.

But no. Delicate are the overtures between nations that hate each other. Suddenly, the South wanted access to all of the North’s nuclear facilities. The North balked. The South threatened to reinstate Team Spirit; the North balked. The IAEA insisted on special inspections of two undeclared sites; the North balked. Team Spirit went on as scheduled, the North announced plans to withdraw from the NPT, and everyone was screwed. What did North Korea want? Were they bluffing? Maybe the thing to do was to let them drop out of the NPT, because, though they had signed on in 1985, they didn’t seem to have much regard for the international condemnation that ensues when you are found in flagrante. Also, they were making the NPT look weak and setting a bad precedent for other countries inclined to violate the regime on the sly. Possibly they were just stalling while they worked on their weapons program. Maybe they were just testing the lengths to which the U.S. would go to keep them in line.

Do we reward misconduct with high-level talks? Isn’t that like negotiating with terrorists? Do we ask for help from the international community and watch it defang every resolution that comes out of the UN? What is the point of asking for things nicely? What is the point of making threats? If I were leading the free world, I would blow my brains out for indecision.

12. By early ’94, forget accord — now it looked like war was imminent. A year’s worth of talks down the drain. The South running hot and cold, the North swathed in the most useful ambiguity I have ever seen, and the U.S. quartered by the hawks and skeptics, the people who thought Pyongyang had the bomb and the people who didn’t. Meantime, the IAEA’s director general was making noise about more safeguards being broken and was told, essentially, to can it, because at this point, bad news was not helping. The director was nonplussed, but how do I know for sure? Because we eavesdropped on him, too. The director general of the IAEA, and we were listening. I guess every diplomat knows he is being spied on — that his privacy is not inviolate, no matter the Vienna Convention on Diplomatic Relations or the UN’s Convention on Privileges and Immunities — but I was shocked. Was there anyone we weren’t listening to? As a matter of fact, yes. No one was listening to me.

13. At the base, when you weren’t prodding the sky for news of vital international importance, there was nothing to do but drink and fuck. Or so I’d been told, since I’d yet to see the salacious component of our tenure. The guys on duty for the three-month siege at Waco? They drag-raced their tanks from sniper hive to home base at the end of each shift. It sounds appalling, but I get it. In boredom, you will turn to anything. Me, I just doubled down on my work.

One day, I spent hours listening to the DPRK’s negotiator, who was scheduled to meet former president Carter for a last-chance dance. The man liked to talk to himself. He was ripped with stress and grieving the loss of his mistress, who had fled to South Korea. Mostly he was shocked. Did he really want to send in the goons to haul her back? Was he really so unappetizing that she’d crossed the border to escape? Bound up in this self-pity were plaints about the negotiations. He resented his new orders — if he’d been a better man and more expert in snatching advantage from the enemy, he would have never gotten the orders — only I couldn’t tell what the orders were without listening several times over, the words coming out muffled and broken, possibly because he was speaking them into a pillow. I’d listened to him well into the evening. When my shift was over, I passed on what I knew to the next guy and called it quits.

14. I went to the pub. I took a stool at the bar and ordered a beer, but I couldn’t stop thinking about the negotiator. What was he talking about? Why so down on the new orders? Why so emasculated? I decided to flush my mind with the night air and get ready to listen again. I would block out everything I’d translated already, home in on the rest, and find meaning in the carnage of this guy’s self-esteem.

I went to the cave, which is what we called a mostly neglected listening room in the basement. You went there primarily to do what I had in mind, which was to recue a tape and try again.

15. The door was unlocked, and inside were four cryptanalysts I’d seen around but never talked to. They were gathered at a work-station-turned-bar and were playing cards. I said I had some reviewing to do and not to mind me, though I was glad for the company. It’s true I kept to myself and that I liked reclusion, but this did not militate against the loneliness of just breathing in and out and all the other fundamentals you do alone each day.

I sat with my back to the room, put on my headphones, and cued up. Okay, now pay attention. I listened once just to get back into the zone, twice to access my guy’s headspace, and a third time to parse content from emotion. By the sixth listen, I had completely tuned out his whimpers and clamor of self-disgust, but I still could not make sense of the rest. I pressed my headphones into my ears and thought: Listen.

16. Meantime, the others were kissing. I’ll just say it: they were kissing. Not that the card game had escalated into strip poker or spin-the-bottle, just that the four had tired of one pursuit and moved on to another. I went back to the tape. I knew that this was important and that if I missed something big, I’d get fired, and that I was running out of time. And so, wouldn’t you know it, the tension that should have spurred me on to greater facility instead began to manifest in a libidinal stir whose accomplice was the knob of denim pressed against my vulva. Under the circumstances, orgasm didn’t seem like the worst idea, albeit rough, given the knob of denim and on this occasion it being the cave at a tracking base in the middle of the desert, where — what do you know — two of the four, the two who were boys, had found their way to each other.

17. I’d seen this on TV, the phenomenon that is boys kissing, and felt then that my interest was anthropological. Here, too, minus the part where I could stare without offense. I was unclear if in the dawn of an orgy — because I was pretty sure that was what I was looking at— staring is ever met with offense, but what did I know? I tried to get back to work. I tried to listen to my Korean guy, in whose mewling hung the balance of war with the U.S., and to silence my screaming vulva, because the boys had moved on to the girl — her name was Morgan, and since when does a girl named Morgan let two boys touch her at once? And frankly, why was no one touching me? I was wearing a Disneyland sweatshirt with Tinker Bell in flight over the castle, jeans with an elastic waist, and clogs. Nothing says I am a frozen bread loaf better than clogs, but come on, was this a discerning orgy?