Stories: All-New Tales

It is obvious.

Because:

Despite all of the testimony that has been given against me here today; despite all of the lies and accusations; despite the spurious contention by the unesteemed prosecutor that I set the blaze in that ramshackle hotel deliberately, in order to murder my ex-wife, her son and husband, merely because she left me to have another man’s child while I was overseas, which, the unesteemed prosecutor contends, caused me to become obsessed, to track them for months, even years and, eventually, to murder them; despite all of this, I know that if my bandages were removed; if my ruined and melted face were restored and my eyes made whole; if I could look through the inches of useless salve and acres of white gauze that enfold my head-I know with certainty that if I could do these things I would see, upon the face of each of the twelve of you who have given me this sentence of death, the Adornment of which I have so eloquently spoken.

Kurt Andersen. HUMAN INTELLIGENCE

HE FOUND IT ALMOST PHYSICALLY PAINFUL TO LIE, which was unfortunate for someone who had spent most of his life as a spy.

Back when everything was proceeding according to plan, year after year after year, he had gotten a little sloppy, allowing bystanders to see the aircraft in flight, sometimes even announcing to children and their childlike parents who he was and where he lived. What did it matter, back then? Besides, he told himself, his openness created a rapport with the natives. But mainly it relieved his loneliness.

When people asked his occupation, his standard answer for a long time had been “a writer” or “an anthropologist.” But lately, once again, he was responding to such questions with a more dangerous version of the truth. These gestures toward self-revelation felt exciting, like precursors to intimacy. But he never put himself in real jeopardy. In America in the twenty-first century, who was going to be anything but charmed and amused by a well-dressed, well-groomed, intelligent, alert, friendly old Anglo-Saxon-looking gentleman who made a fantastic remark or two? “I’m a spy,” he’d started telling the curious with a smile and a wink, “here on a long-term intelligence-gathering operation. But it’s super-top-secret, so if you don’t mind, that’s really all I can say about it.”

He had looked like an old man even when he was younger because, early on, before he took up the posting, he’d grown a full beard to conceal the purple cross-hatching of surgical scars on his chin and upper neck. Now that he was genuinely elderly, it pleased him that appearance and reality had come into sync. He looked old and, by any standard, he was old. One less lie to live.

Of course, if he told the whole truth, anyone but a lunatic would consider him a lunatic. Then the authorities would be notified, and even in this comparatively enlightened era he would lose his freedom for the rest of his life. The project to which he’d devoted such vast time and effort-dutifully, yes, but with enthusiasm as well-would be for naught.

On the other hand, with the passing years that downside calculus had changed. Incarceration and 24/7 gawking would be unpleasant, no doubt, but the rest of his life was looking like a manageably brief time.

As for aborting the operation, he doubted that anyone at headquarters was any longer aware of him or his mission-if headquarters still existed. Doing his job had become easier and easier over the years, especially with television and the Internet-although, of course, the promiscuous availability of information also tended to make his job moot. Maybe the project was already for naught.

Yet he had continued to adhere to the four main directives of the contingency plan, almost as articles of faith: remain at the last position reported to headquarters, maintain all necessary discretion and secrecy, continue to chronicle the people and their society to whatever extent possible, and await retrieval. “Retrieval” is the closest English translation of the word in the orders, not “rescue,” a bit of stoic bureaucratese he had come to resent ever since the crash. (Had he gone native? Probably.)

So here he was, living in a city now a thousand times larger than when he arrived, chronicling and waiting, chronicling and waiting, chronicling and still waiting.

After he read End Game and Waiting for Godot at the Chicago Public Library one pleasantly frigid afternoon near the end of December 1959, he wrote a long, elusive fan letter to Samuel Beckett in Paris, describing the two plays as “perhaps the most profound works of literature since Shakespeare.” Discovering them, he gushed, had “made this Christmas one of my merriest ever.” In response he received a curt, generic form letter, mimeographed, which struck him as almost funny. Since the stranding, he has not been an outwardly jovial man, but he’s never lost his sense of humor. By nature and by training, he takes the long view.

And so he was more intrigued than anxious when the little light on the remote beacon had, for the first time ever, started flashing. He wasn’t sure exactly when the flashing began, because he kept the device hidden at the back of a high shelf in his bedroom closet. He’d been checking it only once every month or so, grudgingly, feeling like a chump each time he lifted it down, pushed the test button, for the ten thousandth time heard the beep confirming that it worked and the connection was secure-Takes a Licking and Keeps on Ticking! Nothing Outlasts the Energizer Bunny! — and then, after waiting ten seconds for the flashing signal that never came, put the thing back up on the shelf.

Until the remarkable evening of September 16, 2007, when he first saw the throb of purple light and shouted so loudly that his young downstairs neighbor called up to see if he was all right. According to the contingency-plan instructions, the light on his box could flash in one or more of nine different colors, each color corresponding to a particular alert condition. Purple means that sensors on the exterior of the station, 2,400 miles away, are now exposed to sunlight.

When the station was set up all those years ago, covered by dozens of feet of ice even at the height of summer, its secrecy seemed guaranteed. Nobody else, not Peary or Amundsen or Byrd or free-ranging Inuits, had traveled so far north. But for the last several decades, more of the Arctic ice had been melting each summer-and in 2007 the summer melt radically spiked, turning a third of the polar ice cap into open sea. The top of the station, a 150-foot oval of tubing and tanks suspended just beneath the water’s surface, must be visible. And now there are permanent research stations scattered all over the high Arctic, and surveillance satellites shooting high-resolution pictures of every rod and furlong of the no-longer-trackless wastes.

What was taking them so long to find it? Seasonal ice may still grow back to hide the base in winter, but for each of the last three summers he has waited for the news bulletins (HIGH-TECH “ATLANTIS” FOUND NEAR NORTHPOLE) and the resulting global hysteria. He does worry that the discovery will discombobulate people en masse-the “unforeseeable cultural and ontological impacts,” as headquarters’ boilerplate put it. But he also has a hopeful hunch that a critical, controlling fraction of humanity had matured, and would, after some initial breathlessness, learn to accommodate the new facts.

Selfishly, he’s also eager to see pictures of the station again after all this time, to compare his hazy memories with fresh digital images. And although it felt vaguely insubordinate (to whom?), or even traitorous (to what?), he was excited by the prospect of everyone on earth learning all at once the truth that he alone had known for so long.

AS HER FLIGHT FROM Oslo approaches O’Hare, Nancy Zuckerman thinks once again of the cliche uttered sooner or later by everyone who spends time in Svalbard, including herself: This is what it must be like to live on another planet. NASA actually runs a research station on the other side of the North Pole, in the Canadian Arctic, where they simulate the conditions of a Martian space colony.

She had always liked spending time outdoors, and when she was seven could stick a live worm on a fishing hook and set up a tent herself. But it was the second Indiana Jones sequel, which came out the summer she turned eight, that decided her on becoming an explorer when she grew up. In earlier generations, adults would have smiled at a little girl who said she wanted to be an explorer. But at the turn of the twenty-first century in Boulder, Colorado, adults smiled and patronized little Nancy Zuckerman not because of her gender but because her cute dream job no longer existed.

Fortunately, she was both collegial and self-reliant, a cheerful team player as well as a cheerfully independent loner. “If I could be a superhero,” she used to say, “I’d be totally willing to be like a second-string