“Do you like it?”
“I’m not much of a cologne user.” He passes his wrist under his nose again.
“But you like it, right?”
“The name caught my attention. Do you sell it everywhere? Or just here?”
“You can get it pretty much anywhere, I guess.”
“I’m looking for a present for my wife.”
“Give her this.”
“But it’s for men.”
“Exactly,” she says with a suggestive twinkle. “You work at the Pentagon, right?”
Noel nods, rolling his sleeve down.
“What do you do there?”
“I’m just a bean counter,” he says flatly, then suddenly adds, “And I kill people.”
She laughs, returns the sample bottle to the display stand.
“Why are you laughing?”
“I don’t know. The way you said it sounded funny.”
A pit opens in his stomach, the fuller world revealed. “Believe me, there’s nothing funny about it.”
She isn’t sure how to take this.
Noel regrets the impulse and can see that she hasn’t sold much, if any, I’Homme Fatal. “Okay. I’ll take one,” he says.
She levers a box from the display table with a practiced flair that is somehow sad to see, puts the overmanufactured box into an equally overproduced little satchel with a woven drawstring. “She’s going to love it. I promise.”
Noel reaches for his wallet, takes out his credit card, then changes his mind. “I don’t have cash on me. Is there an ATM?”
“Out in the mall,” she says, flashing a wry smile.
It doesn’t take long to find a cash machine. The food court on the ground floor is busy. Underneath the glass-domed atrium, sparrows flutter down to pick up crumbs and fly up into the rafters. That they are inside is troubling; and strange that they should go about their scavenging unnoticed by the milling lunch crowd. Noel puts his card into the machine, recalling one of the more forgettable bromides from the first morning meeting. It was said that they were dealing with the law of unintended consequences, that it is often impossible to distinguish between innocent and nefarious infrastructure, and that their work must be performed with this constantly in mind. He wonders if such a thing is possible or if he is like the birds caught inside this shopping mall, trapped and living under false and artificial pretenses.
He returns to Macy’s. In the men’s department, he stops at a large display of belts. After browsing three full racks, he finally finds something. It isn’t perfect but comes close enough. Black Fandango, not too wide, not too narrow, with a simple, nickel-plated buckle. He rolls it up in his fist, taking in the departmental landscape of racks and tables and headless, liveried mannequins. An elderly woman being escorted by a nurse steps in front of him on the escalator. He puts several treads between them, then steps on. Tock tock tock. He doesn’t really need the belt. But the mindlessness of shopping makes him feel at ease, living serenely. At the bottom of the escalator, the elderly lady stumbles and is helped by her nurse. Noel veers around them, and all at once he knows that he must tell Pat everything. That very evening, as soon as he gets home. The way he just did with the girl at the perfume counter. Spontaneously. Or should he write her a letter?
Dear Pat: I am a killer. You would never think to call me that. Nobody would. In fact, you’d reject the notion and say I’m suffering from a guilt complex, or depression; that I need psychological counseling. And you’d be correct in all those things, because as long as what I do is done in secret and behind layers of abstract reasoning, is socially and legally sanctioned, it can’t be THE WRONG THING TO DO. I kill as part of a complex and vast political economy, and I have experienced a certain fulfillment in the excellence of my technical knowledge and find comfort and protection in a fully rationalized, hegemonic ideology. I consider myself a man of substance and many parts, am aware of the random inequities and the irrational contradictions that we are born into and that life throws at us. I also believe I am capable of putting these contingencies into reasonable perspective and, in essence, that I am a good person.
Will she be horrified? Or, in bringing the secret into the open, will he only horrify himself? That he will regret something is certain. One Sunday afternoon not too long ago, they went to the zoo. It had been a particularly difficult week, and he’d suggested they go have a look at the new baby panda. They stood in line and filed through the exhibit. It moved him to see how thrilled Pat was to watch those animals lolling idly in the grass, munching bamboo shoots. As they stood at the railing, Pat became quiet, as if her whole metabolism were slowing. She turned to him and said, “They seem so contented, don’t they?” He agreed, but what struck him was not how the pandas seemed but their effect on the people who had come to look, filing through the exhibit to satisfy a craving for something simple that has been lost. Rather than lulled by those cute, cuddly bears, he began to feel abandoned. A little while later Pat went into raptures over the fennec foxes, curled up in their burrows. She put her arm around his waist and hugged him as if to draw them both into that homey scene, but his thoughts had turned to the MQ-1A Sky Warrior with the Synthetic Aperture Radar/Ground Moving Target Indicator system and the GBU-44/B Viper Strike GPS-aided laser-guided bombs tucked inside its weapons bay and he wanted to shout—Listen! The mighty Being is awake!
He heads for the cosmetics counter, anticipating the happy surprise of the perfume seller when he returns. L’Homme Fatal. Sure, it’s a sick joke. But isn’t it important to have a sense of humor about precisely the things one finds most unbearable? The perfume seller is not at her post. He glances around, makes a quick circuit of the brightly lit counter, looking for any sign of her. A plainclothes security guard is standing just a short distance away. The man has a shaved head. A wire disappears into the collar of his shirt. He puts a hand into the pocket of his blue blazer and takes hold of some concealed device, distracted by something streaming into his left ear. A group of women wearing brightly colored exercise clothes passes by, talking cheerfully among themselves.
Noel takes a bottle of the perfume from the display rack and goes to find a cashier. Even if he persuades Pat that he’s a killer, will there be any change in who he is as a result? She’ll object: “That’s not really what you are!” Or maybe suggest he change jobs, do something different. What would that accomplish? Is it possible to stop being someone and become someone else? He wishes it were. But even in those clear-eyed moments—and they are rare—when one simply is, the world will usually see something else. It isn’t a question of change. He can’t say why, precisely, except that it evades the given, which is permanent and unchangeable, and thus addresses something less than what we are.
Besides, what is change when you’re invisible?
Georgetown Library
38°54’48.19”N
77°3’57.84”W
I took the old man’s card from my pocket. He lived nearby. Dropping by unannounced seemed vaguely in keeping with some earlier custom. He would understand. Leaving my car in the library lot, I walked down Wisconsin Avenue and made a left on P Street.
I’d met him just the week before my father died. I had come to the library to do some research in the Peabody Room, which houses a unique archive devoted to the history of Georgetown. Marge introduced me to the archivist, explained to him that I was doing a book about maps and Washington.
“How did you know?” I asked,