ever-fixed mark

At long last we proceed with Act 2 of the three-part saga, “I Was (Almost) a Teenaged (Well, Practically) Spook.” (The radio station playing “Valerie Plame” was WERS, a really great college station, by the way.)
———————-
The preceding took place during winter break of my senior year in college. By graduation, I had still not heard from the CIA, so I got a job as a Yellow Pages salesperson in Amish country. (Ah, foreshadowing! Bet you didn’t see that coming!) My job was to travel around to small businesses in Lititz and Intercourse and Virginville in my ancient foul-smelling Volkswagen Scirocco and convince them to increase their ad space in one of the three local phone directories. I was taught to quote the price as the monthly bill (”A two-inch ad is only $7.98!”) instead of the yearly total, which concerned me ethically. I sometimes got to mock up the artwork and write copy, so it was practically like working in advertising.

I had been working about six weeks when the United States Office of Personnel Management contacted me to come to Langley for an interview. They would pay for me to fly down and put me up in a hotel overnight. Pre-internet, these arrangements involved reams of paper forms and hours of toll phone calls. Even so, it was so terribly exciting I could barely sleep. My first business trip! Paid by someone else! Visiting The Company!

The only problem was my job. I certainly had no vacation coming to me after six weeks, and I didn’t think I could muster up an illness good enough for two days off work. In a fit of honesty (see: those pesky ethics) I asked my boss for the time off, and he turned me down flat. So I took a chance and told him why I needed it: job interview, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, blah blah blah. He was sympathetic, but unhelpful. I could not have the time off. If I didn’t show up for work, I’d be fired.

Meanwhile, I happened to run into an old acquaintance from college at a party. He was a former fraternity brother of my freshman-year boyfriend, several years older than I. Like a lot of the guys in that fraternity, all of whom seemed to be named Eric, he seemed always to be propping up a wall near the dance floor, clad in a rugby shirt, beer in hand, stoned look on face. He was fairly cute and had improved considerably; now, he was able to hold up his end of the conversation in addition to the wall. He lived and worked in Washington, D.C., and he offered to take me out for dinner when I came down for my interview.

Naturally, I quit my job. Looking back, it seems like a very foolhardy move in such bad economic times, but given the sheltered life I had led, and my craving for adventure, I don’t see how I could have foregone jetting off to DC and a date with a handsome older man for a lifetime of writing ad copy for Shear Magic Hair Salon and Stoltzfus Plumbing. Obviously, the whole thing was meant to be, and in a few weeks I’d be searching for an apartment in Georgetown and shopping for furniture with my new boyfriend.

I’m pretty sure it was a prop plane that got me from Harrisburg to Dulles. I think I took a taxi to Langley, or maybe they sent a car for me. I remember getting checked in at the front desk and being assigned a badge — routine in office buildings now, but fairly awe-inspiring then. I remember an interview with a gentleman who explained the job to me (Reports Officer, under cover of the Foreign Service, posted to an embassy, gathering intelligence, and writing it up, although I have no idea how the intelligence was supposed to be gathered). I was interviewed in German by two elderly women to gauge my language skills. Then I went to the polygraph room.

When you apply to a government agency, you fill out a bunch of paperwork detailing every place you’ve lived or worked. This was a relatively easy task at this stage of my life. It would become somewhat more tedious years later when I applied to the Peace Corps, and by the time I started consulting for USAMRIID, it took hours. (I had nothing to do with the anthrax, but I did get a tour of the lab where it was probably grown.) But the CIA application has a special section where you detail all your past drug use.

Now, I am not now nor never was I a hard drug user. I was scared to death by Go Ask Alice as a child. But I was fresh out of college; I had certainly smoked pot a few times. Furthermore, I had an older cousin who was, shall we say, an avid consumer, and thanks to her I had been attending parties with people nicknamed “Darvon” who had mirrors on their coffee tables and scales in their bathrooms since I was eleven.

I had been warned that, whatever my past, I should TELL THE TRUTH about past drug use. “We’re not looking to eliminate anyone who’s ever smoked pot,” I was told, “but if you lie about it, it will come out in the polygraph.” I understood this, but I was twenty-one years old and I was NOT about to record for posterity in a permanent government record the 3.5 occasions on which I had smoked pot. So I lied.

The polygraph room was small with a table, two chairs, the machine, and a big mirror. I congratulated myself for not being fooled by this, for recognizing it as a two-way mirror hiding an observation room. The examiner hooked up the electrodes to me and explained the procedure. She started off with simple questions: Was my name X? Yes. Did I live at address Y? Yes. Was I 21 years old? Yes. Then she gave me a playing card, a seven of hearts, and instructed me to answer “No” to all the questions. Was my card the ace of spades? No. The three of clubs? No. The seven of hearts? No. She showed me how the output remained relatively serene when I was telling the truth, and spiked when I was lying.

Then we started in with the real questions.

She went through my paperwork, verifying all the items on my resume. Had I lived at X? Yes. Did I graduate from University Y? Yes. Had I worked at Z? Yes. Then we got to the drug questions, and it became a bloodbath. As soon as I started responding to the drug questions, the polygraph jumped. She tried to play good cop, telling me that any past drug use wouldn’t disqualify for the job; I just needed to admit it. Stupidly, I stuck with my story. She then tried bad cop, berating me for not telling the truth. She left the room, presumably to consult with the person behind the two-way mirror.

At that point, I reflected that I was currently unemployed, and prospects for this job were slipping away rapidly. So I admitted yes, ha-ha, of course I had smoked a LITTLE pot. The examiner modified her questions to try to pin down the exact extent of my drug use, but by this time I was so freaked that every single answer I gave made the polygraph jump, even the neutral baseline ones. The examiner accused me of hiding something big, and I countered that the results were obviously unreliable.

“What do you mean? I showed you how it worked in the beginning when I asked the questions about the card.”

“Yes, but now it says I’m lying even about my name,” I told her, pointing to the evidence.

She went to consult again with the people behind the mirror and then came back and said we had run out of time, and I would have to return some weeks later to repeat the polygraph. I was obviously not going home with a job offer.

I did have a date, though. Eric #8 picked me up at the office and took me to a Chinese restaurant. I was stupid enough to think this was exotic; “cheap” didn’t occur to me. It was a nice enough date, and when Eric #8 dropped me off at the airport I still had fantasies of moving into a cute Georgetown apartment with him, but now I realize that it hadn’t gone as well as I thought it had. Back then, I wasn’t critical about jobs or men. I never sat in an interview or a date and thought, “How is this for me? How would I like to be a yellow pages salesperson/CIA agent/life partner of a taciturn guy who wears a rugby shirt?” All I could think was, “Pick me! Pick me! Pick me!”

Neither the CIA nor Eric #8 picked me.

Husband and I are in London for a long weekend, thanks to the confluence of a work trip and a visit from my parents, who are the babysitters. Almost straight off the plane, we caught a West End matinee of Harold Pinter’s No Man’s Land, with Michael Gambon and David Bradley (Dumbledore II and Filch to you Harry Potter fans).

I don’t think it will spoil the plot of the play for you if I reveal that Mr. Gambon’s character, uncharacteristically, survives until the final curtain. Actually, I don’t think it would spoil the plot if I reproduced the entire text on screen. It’s that kind of play. My listening comprehension wasn’t helped by the jet lag. I’m still not sure what was a plot element and what was a dream.

This is my Blackberry.

There are many like it, but this one is mine.

My Blackberry is my best friend. It is my life. I must master the controls as i mster my lifeM

(The helll…? What’s the difference between Alt and Num on this thing? Where is the Shift? Why can’t I move the cursor without deleting the whole line?)

My Blackberry without me is useless. Without my Blackberry, I am useless.

I must check my Blackberry every time the blinking light alerts me to a message.

I must blog, check the weather, Google stock prices, and look up obscure facts in Wikipedia at random times during the day, just because I can.

My Blackberry is human, even as I, because it is my life.

Thus, I will learn it as a brother.

I will learn its weaknesses, its strengths, its applications, its accessories, its shortcuts, and its themes.

I will ever guard it against the ravages of loose change and drops from great height.

I will keep my Blackberry charged and ready, even as I am charged and ready.

We will become part of each other. We will…

Before God I swear this creed.

I was invited to New York for my sister-in-law’s bridal shower this weekend. Ultimately I decided that the cheapest and easiest course would be for me to fly down and back the same day, leaving the boys at home. I was a bit nervous about attending a function with Husband’s family without Husband in attendance, primarily because of my imperfect understanding of the in-laws’ classification system for conversational topics. It goes something like this:

Unclassified: Open for discussion; suitable for children and the elderly.

Restricted: Discuss only with relatives of similar religious/political bent.

Secret: Everyone knows about it, but we don’t talk about it.

Top secret: It would be easier for everyone if we kept it from your mother-in-law.

The problem with this system is that classifications are not always clearly communicated. For example, no where on the shower invitation did it state, “Surprise!” and yet, as I found out yesterday, it was indeed intended to be so. (Luckily my sister-in-law did not hear me when I said to her on the phone earlier this week, “See you Sunday at the shower!”)

Moving from sitcom territory into the fertile ground of soap operas, in the past three years there have been TWO secret marriages and ONE secret divorce in this family. Every time the door opens I expect Husband’s presumed-dead twin to walk through the door with a handgun and a cache of diamonds.

As you can imagine, I’m terrified to say more than “Hello” and “How are you?” to my mother-in-law. The truth always outs, just like on “General Hospital,” but I don’t want to be the one to break any big secrets. It seems to me that we could avoid all the drama by being open about our lives in the first place.

But that reminds me…if you see my mother-in-law, could you please not mention to her that the boys haven’t been baptized? I am not the one who told her that the “nuns in Korea” administered the sacrament, but since she already believes it, it would probably be better for all concerned if we didn’t disabuse her of the notion.

A few months ago I got a cold that lingered in the form of a horrible dry cough. It was a constant tickle in the back of my throat and a squeezing of my esophagus that made me feel like I couldn’t breathe. After two sleepless weeks, I went to the doctor.

“There are a number of viruses that cause this,” she said, “and one bacterium. On the off chance it’s the bacterium, I’ll give you a course of antibiotics. If it’s the bacterium it will clear up right away, and if it’s a virus you’ll have to suffer for a bit, but eventually it will go away.”

I took the first antibiotic pill. Within an hour I started feeling better. Within a day it had cleared up completely.

About a month later, I got the same symptoms, which I found out were also known as “walking pneumonia.” I tried to tough it out for a few weeks but eventually went back to the doctor, explained that the antibiotics had been effective before, and got another course, with the same rapid and efficacious result.

Only a week or so later, though, the tickle came back. I was in Florida for the weekend and decided that this time I wouldn’t wait. I called the practice and got the on-call doctor, whose last name is difficult to pronounce and therefore always refers to himself by his first name. “This is Dr. Steve,” he said (not his real name), and I thought, uh-oh, because it would have been so much easier to explain to the regular doc.

But I tried: walking pneumonia, antibiotics worked like a charm two times, I’m in Florida, could he call me in a prescription? “Well, 98% of the time these things are viral infections,” he said.

“Yes, I know, but the last two times for me it’s been bacterial,” I said.

“So you want to bet against medical science?”

I tried to explain that for me it was more like Pascal’s wager, except that no one has proven the existence of God, whereas plenty of people have proven the existence of bacteria.

“You know, if you’re getting repeated infections, it means your immune system has taken a hit. What are you doing to try to boost it?”

“I’m trying to sleep well and exercise, neither of which is possible when I’m coughing all the time.”

“There’s a homeopathic remedy that works on these viral infections most of the time, as long as you take it within a day of feeling sick. Write this down: [garbled]. It’s better than Airborne or Zicam.”

A homeopathic remedy! Why not leeches or nerve tonic or exorcism? Wait, has my uterus migrated elsewhere in my body, causing these symptoms? Maybe I need to have my humours balanced. What does my horoscope say?

I love that he’s all about “medical science” when it comes to the diagnosis, but not the treatment.

So there I was at a sushi restaurant in Park City on Saturday night when I heard what sounded like my mobile phone’s ring, but I didn’t feel the accompanying vibration. “Is that my phone?” I wondered out loud. The woman at the table next to me said, “No, it’s mine,” and when I looked at her I realized she was an old acquaintance of mine. It was the woman whose annotations had enlivened my reading of the book Mating.

The last time I saw her was in Paris six or seven years ago, and when I was there last month I stayed in a hotel near her old apartment. As I passed that street I thought, “I really should Google her and see what she’s doing,” and then I promptly forgot about it until I saw her in the restaurant. The odds of us meeting at some random spot midway between our respective coasts are probably astronomical, but then again when you travel as much as I do it’s probably stranger that I haven’t met more old friends (and candidates for President) out and about.

My little Ethan Frome added yet another bump/bruise to his collection when he fell against the television at his babysitter’s house yesterday. This morning, as I started to take him to school, he wailed that he didn’t want to go because he was afraid everyone would “talk about my bruise.”

I don’t think he really felt that way — he is typically squarely in the “any attention is good attention” camp — but on Monday I had stupidly tried to prepare him for the fact that everyone would exclaim over his beat-up face, so I think he thought it was an appropriate pretext for drama.

As I asked the teacher, once again, not to make too big a deal over his injury, I’m sure I saw her mentally composing the e-mail to DSS. It’s a good thing there were witnesses for both these injuries.

Meanwhile, I’m celebrating Leap Day by leaping off to Utah for some skiing, just ahead of the storm that’s going to bog down the East Coast.

I had a wonderful day in Paris yesterday, truncated though it was. I had intended to spend a few hours in the Louvre, but after walking from my hotel down the Champs d’Elysee to the Tuileries in the bright, bright sunshine, I couldn’t bear to go inside. I kept walking, on to Notre Dame and then over the river to hang out in St. Germain on the left bank.

One of the churches I checked out, Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet (right across the street from Saint-Etienne-du-Cabernet) was advertising a special mass that evening in honor of the miracle at Lourdes. February 11, 2008 was the one hundred fifty year anniversary, to the day, of the first Virgin Mary sighting. The celebration would feature a Latin mass sung by a choir, followed by a procession of flaming torches throughout the streets. Well! Flambeaux! How could I resist?

I am no stranger to the French mass. When I was in the Peace Corps, church on Sunday was my regular French lesson. (Such useful phrases: “la paix du Christ,” “le sang de l’Agneau,” “Seigneur,” “aux siècles des siècles.”) At this point in my life, it’s safe to say I’ve attended more French masses than English ones. It’s been a long time, though. I was a little late to the church, and as I settled in I saw something that amazed me: many women, perhaps as many as ten or twenty percent of the female communicants, had covered their heads. Some wore lace mantillas, but others had regular scarves wrapped around their hair, hijab-style. They were not all old ladies, either. In my row there were three women under 35 with scarves tied under their chins. I don’t think I’ve seen that in church in thirty-five years. Has this custom never died out on the Continent, or is there a nouvelle vague of Catholic fundamentalism in France?

Attending Mass made me recall what is seductive about religion. There is a comforting sense of community that comes from enacting rituals in unison with other people. Not exactly in unison — there seemed to be different opinions on sit vs. stand vs. kneel for much of the service. Plenty of people knelt, though, and there were no cushioned pries-dieux, only cold stone floor. (The Internets do not agree on that plural, by the way.) Still, there was something thrilling about all these people, young and old, black and white, European and not, coming together in this way.

I had to work hard to comprehend the homily, and that’s when this sense of community began to fade. The priest compared the pattern of apparitions at Lourdes to the pattern of the rosary. I believe he detailed each of the eighteen apparitions in turn. I was surprised, because I hadn’t realized that the clergy really took this stuff literally. I thought they just tolerated it as a salubrious metaphor that brought people to the Church. Suddenly I had the same feeling that I do while watching the characters on Battlestar Galactica perform their religious rites. It seemed so unreal to me that all — some? any? — of the people in the room really believed that Jesus’s mother visited a little girl in France almost two millennia after her death.

It’s especially hard to believe that French people believe that. Didn’t Mitt Romney just tell us in his concession speech that they’re utterly godless? “Europe is facing a demographic disaster. That is the inevitable product of weakened faith in the Creator, failed families, disrespect for the sanctity of human life and eroded morality…. I am convinced that unless America changes course, we will become the France of the 21st century.”

Cue the flambeaux!

Actually, it’s more like a day and a half because Air France cancelled my flight, the only daily non-stop between Boston and Charles de Gaulle, and consequently I got in much later than I had planned. Originally, they tried to send me via Detroit, the logic of which was presumably suggested by some inscrutable Zen koan: “You must go west to travel east.” When the Air France flight to Detroit was delayed, I was able to convince them to pony up for a flight on Alitalia, so I went to Paris via Milan’s Malpensa Airport.

(Doesn’t “Malpensa” sound like the name of a super arch-villainness in a comic book? “Malpensa! She plants evil thoughts into the minds of the Superheroes, fomenting suspicion and dissent!” Seriously, this is not a name that inspires confidence.)

I’m still marveling that there’s only one non-stop flight between Boston and Paris. Hub of the Universe, my ass. At this point, I’d settle for “hub of at least one major airline.”