Don DeLillo - Libra

A silence. Win listened to the dense rush of air in the earpiece, a city alive, horns blowing, cars streaming across the Potomac bridges.

"Could be a nice find, Larry."

"Don't make it sound like a three-room apartment. We could put him together. A far-left type. Work him in. Tie him to Cuban intelligence. Possibly even place him at the scene. If he thinks he's operating on the left, pro-Castro, pro-Soviet, whatever his special interest, we'll help him select a fantasy. There's never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President."

"Tell Mackey. Give T-Jay the details. T-jay will bring him in."

He always seemed to be going to bed. It was always bedtime. The day came and went and it was time to go to bed again.

He went around turning off lights, checking the front and back doors. He'd seen a U-2 once on a salt flat in Nevada. It looked like a child's idea of advanced reconnaissance. Freakish wingspan, basic body that looked unfinished, wingtips that folded over. But it had a jet engine under a glider frame and could climb at an angle steeper than forty-five degrees, soar to eighty-five thousand feet, its camera sweeping a path over a hundred miles wide. Dark lady of espionage, the Soviets called it. He checked to see that the oven was off. The last thing downstairs was the oven.

Mary Frances was in bed, waiting. A soft light glowed by the armchair. He felt the air on his body as he undressed. The night was full of new things, earth musk and wet bark and night jasmine, a scented freshness, a turning of the earth after rain. He pressed down slowly. The wind-burnt face and whitish brows. The perfumed tincture of her breasts. He would love her into death, into the secret sleep. Her head rolled on the pillow, eyes shut tight. He hid his face in the curve of her neck. The night was full of water moving, faint wet sounds, rainwater dripping through trees, water falling from eaves, running in downspouts, wet sounds of tires on asphalt, tires on a wet street. He raised up slightly, locked his hands in hers, fingers extended. Each pushed hard against the other. A charged fragrance. Hollow thunder in the distance. Water silent in grassy pools, running down leaf stems, collecting in the webbed centers of leaves, droplets, trembling drams, water on the leaves of the blackjack oak set near the house, a light spatter on the screen when the wind shifts. She was blond and white and pink, rough-textured, broader than he was and stronger-minded now, the stronger by far, and all she wanted for him was something safe and plain. He smelled light sweat, felt spittle reaching to his chin. Their hands pushed against each other, fingers tensed and shaking. He felt a rustling response in the sheets, her ass wagging, moisture in the white down at the sides of her mouth. He said her name and watched her eyes come open to that deep wondering of hers, that trust she placed in the ordinary mysteries. She was in the world as he could never be. She meant the world. He freed a hand and wiped away the spit. She said his name quickly, many times, like some cheerleader's sideline riff, and that was that was that.

Side by side, listening to the radio.

"I wonder," she said. "What do other people say to each other?"

"When?"

"Now. I want to know what people say. Maybe there are things we haven't thought of." Laughing at herself. "Things we ought to be saying."

"While having sex or afterward?"

"While having sex is not interesting. Moany-groany love talk. No, afterward, now."

"Do you think we've been saying the wrong things all these years?"

"Wouldn't you like to overhear? I don't want to watch other people. I want to listen."

"They talk about wanting a cigarette."

"Who was that on the phone?"

" 'Where are my cigarettes?' That's what they say."

"He wouldn't tell me his name."

"Larry Parmenter. You remember him. Somebody's house in Miami."

"Kind of just barely."

"Maybe three years ago."

"What did he want to talk about?"

"Curious lady."

"Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I'm a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words. We're two gossipy bodies alone in the night. Tell me what you talked about."

"Very sexy stuff."

"Oh sure really."

"U-2 planes. The planes that spotted the missiles the Soviets were putting into Cuba. We used to call the photos pornography. The photo interpreters would gather to interpret. 'Let's see what kind of pornography we pulled in today.' Kennedy looked at the pictures in his bedroom as a matter of fact."

"Talk," she said.

"Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world."

"Isn't it one of the best things there is, feeling the air on your body on a night like this?"

"I'll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant."

Years together, years of transience, cover operations, plausible denials, dead silences had given Mary Frances no reason to believe she would ever know exactly what kind of secrets Win was keeping at a given time, which meant there was something welcome in these moments of wordiness, in the shape and range of his meanders. She encouraged him to tell her whatever he could about subjects and developments close to his work, or simply things on his mind- encouraged him tacitly, creating receptive fields around him, still-nesses. A wifely labor as natural to her as choosing curtains. By now she was adept at discharging an air of shy curiosity and although there was no longer any real work for him to do, she still wanted to know, wanted badly to hear. But tonight it happened that she fell asleep, drifting lightly off, twisted in a bedsheet, one arm swept across his chest. He listened to the radio, a man preaching the gospel in a bright clear voice, a thrilling voice, youthful, assured. Yes yes yes yes. God is alive and well in Texas.

He would put someone together, build an identity, a skein of persuasion and habit, ever so subtle. He wanted a man with believable quirks. He would create a shadowed room, the gunman's room, which investigators would eventually find, exposing each fact to relentless scrutiny, following each friend, relative, casual acquaintance into his own roomful of shadows. We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely. He would show the secret symmetries in a nondescript life.

An address book with ambiguous leads. Photographs expertly altered (or crudely altered). Letters, travel documents, counterfeit signatures, a history of false names. It would all require a massive decipherment, a conversion to plain text. He envisioned teams of linguists, photo analysts, fingerprint experts, handwriting experts, experts in hairs and fibers, smudges and blurs. Investigators building up chronologies. He would give them the makings of deep chronos, lead them to basement rooms in windy industrial slums, to lost towns in the Tropics.

He turned off the radio and slipped out from under her arm. He wanted a cigarette. He put on his pajamas and found two bent Winstons in his shirt pocket, on the armchair. He sat smoking, trying to read. The storm moved west in blue-white rattling streaks. T-Jay will bring him in. Win knew that the name Mackey was a pseudonym assigned by the Records Branch. Theodore}. mackey. Win had also used a false name through the years, standard practice for officers engaged in covert work. Mackey's name became enveloped in a certain favorable light, a legendary light, when exile leaders found out he had gone ashore with the scouts at Blue Beach. Once it was clear the invasion would fail, Mackey returned in a whaleboat and cruised the inlets with a megaphone, calling for and finding survivors. Win didn't know his real name.