Elliott Holt - You Are One of Them

I moved toward the door before I knew what I was doing.

Richard grabbed my arm to restrain me. “Hey,” he said. “There are rules. There are protocols.” I noticed the puckered mark of a closed-up hole in his left ear and imagined the midlife crisis that had led him to pierce it years before. He had probably worked very hard to be hip. And now he was a fifty-year-old in a baggy sweater. A jumper, he’d call it.

“I think I know I her,” I said.

“Millions of dollars are riding on this project,” said Richard.

Who was the puppet master? Where were the strings? Had this whole thing been organized for my benefit? Was there really a cola called Czar?

Richard was out of shape and a little drunk. I wrestled out of his arms, opened the door, let the light compromise the research. And then I stormed into the conference room.

“I need to talk to you,” I said. All four women at the table shifted their gaze to me. If they were alarmed, they didn’t show it.

“May I help you?” said Svetlana in English. She stood, pressed her knuckles into the table until the skin blanched with the stress.

“This is the surprise?” I said.

“Please,” she said to the women. “Help yourself to Pringles.”

“Zoya,” I said. “I need to talk to Zoya.”

“Ya?” said Zoya. Me? Her tone was arch.

“Da,” I said. Up close, her eyes were a murky green. Not like Jenny’s at all. Colored contacts, perhaps? I wasn’t convinced.

“You are the interruption,” Svetlana said to me.

“I know you speak English,” I said to Zoya.

“Of course I speak English,” Zoya said. “Educated people do.” She had a Moscow accent. But she’s been here for ten years, I thought. And Jenny was always good at accents.

“What’s your real name?” I said. I felt like one of the bouncers at the Georgetown bars my friends and I used to frequent in high school. They used to quiz us about the information on our driver’s licenses. The bouncers were right to be skeptical; our IDs were fake. But we were careful to memorize all the pertinent information. We lived in our false identities. We knew where everything was. In real life I was a Scorpio, but my cover was an Aquarius.

I heard the hiss of carbonation as Svetlana opened a can of Czar. She covered the can’s label with her hand as she made her way around the table, filling cups. The perfect hostess.

The other women’s eyes burned into me. I knew that Richard and Andrei were watching, too, from behind the glass. I glanced at the mirror but could see only my face staring back at me. They had obviously turned off the light. So the research was still under way, which meant that I was part of it now. I was another potential consumer under the microscope. Unless it wasn’t real research at all. Maybe it was all staged and everyone was in on it, even Richard. Maybe he spoke Russian perfectly. Rule #1: Assume nothing. In the mirror all my uncertainty reflected back at me. My hair was neither blond nor brown but somewhere in between. My eyes were neither blue nor green. An indeterminate color. I wasn’t sure what to write under “Eye Color” on my passport application. I finally settled for hazel, but that wasn’t exactly right.

“What is this ‘real name’?” Zoya was fierce, unyielding.

She looked so Russian. Until I traveled through Europe in college, I didn’t understand how much physiognomy can give away. On a train from Paris to Rome, two traveling companions and I met an Italian woman who promptly categorized us as Jamaican, Czech, and Danish. “No, we’re American,” said my friend Kate, prepared to defend the Melting Pot. But the woman wasn’t talking about nationality. She said it was clear from our faces where our ancestors had come from. Kate was in fact descended from ancient Bohemians, and Michelle’s grandparents were from Kingston, but I protested that my ancestors were English until I realized that my forebears could be traced all the way to Jutland in what is now Denmark. All that emigration and assimilation couldn’t totally erase our origins.

“Your American name,” I said to Zoya. But I was running out of steam. I’m losing my mind, I thought. I’m hallucinating because of all the smoke. This was just some woman with a vague resemblance to Jenny. Russia was making me paranoid. Jenny had been dead a long time.

“Kto ona?” said Zoya. Who is she? She was talking to Svetlana. I was acting so crazy that they were talking about me like I wasn’t there.

“She is a foreigner,” Svetlana said, as if that explained everything. Or maybe she meant, “She is a stranger.” It’s the same word in Russian. A foreigner is a stranger. A stranger is foreign.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I made a mistake.” I backed out of the room, hot with shame. My skin was prickly. I escaped to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. Deep breaths, I told myself. Deep breaths. My skin was blotchy, my eyes strained and bloodshot. I was washed out, uneasy. My skin is the sort that is often afflicted: sunburn peels like paint; mosquito bites pucker and swell. I’m quick to bruise. I break out in hives. A day at the beach leaves me raw. I don’t look relaxed on vacation, but beaten down by the elements. How I longed to have the smooth, even-toned skin and doe eyes of someone who never had to try.

There was a knock on the door. “Just a second,” I said. I needed to pull myself together.

WHEN I CAME OUT OF THE BATHROOM, Andrei was waiting for me. “What’s wrong? You saw a ghost?”

I really was turning into my mother. Chasing ghosts. “Go translate your fucking focus groups,” I said.

“Ooh,” he said. “The pretty American talks like a sailor.”

It was vaguely satisfying to debunk his idea of me as some kind of dainty flower. “She said she lived in the States when she was a kid,” I said. “I heard her. Why didn’t you translate that part?”

“You understand more Russian than I thought,” he said.

“Answer my question,” I said. “Why didn’t you translate that part?”

“Richard wants typical Russians, okay? People who haven’t been to the States, who have a very limited idea of America and American brands. That woman—Zoya—wouldn’t have matched his recruiting specs, but Svetlana didn’t have enough people for the groups, so she couldn’t be too picky. Sveta obviously forgot to tell the woman not to mention her childhood in the States. I did not want Sveta to be fired.” He was making eye contact with me. He wasn’t blinking at an unusual rate. Nothing about his face suggested he was lying. “You’re not going to say anything to Richard, are you?”

“No,” I said. I didn’t want Svetlana to get fired either. Especially since she was supporting her parents. “Did you know Sveta before you worked together?”

“Of course.” I must have looked cynical, because he added, “You know, the intelligentsia. We’re all connected.”

“Is your father a spy?” I said.

“Chto?”

“Your father the diplomat, the one who took you to Washington ... was he KGB?”

“Amerikanka molodaya,” he said. Young American.

“Was he?” I said. “Did he have an American contact named Edmund Jones?”

“Edmund Jones the spy?” he said.

“Edmund Jones was a spy?” I said.

“That’s what you just said. I’m just repeating you.”

“You should probably go back and translate. If Richard really can’t understand anything.”

“We’re taking a break,” he said. “Richard says we need to ‘reset’ their attitude and then start again in ten minutes. But don’t worry, they will talk about you, and it will be a good place to begin discussion about Americans, about Cold War iconography.”