The uninterrupted flatlands. Green. Far-off clouds a miniature navy fleet in the midst of battle. The car carved its metrical path under the tumult. Somewhere, the car is being tracked by a poorly built GPS, and given the shoddy quality, the car hops back and forth between five or so streets in a repeating pattern that the GPS operator tries to whistle, thinking it might be a tune.
Above this, high up above GPS satellites, cars, skyscrapers, Redwoods, the mountains, and inches past the spot where birds caught vertigo and would latch onto each other out of fear before gravity dog-whistled for their return lay a pair of giants, seated, pants rolled up to their knees, legs sunk into the water, and they, too, were watching the scene unfold. Well-dressed, somewhat in the style of bankers at the turn of the 20th century, the giants watched the clouds ape this naval battle amongst their feet, Dutchmen flying over the tops of the topside arch of one of the feet, trying to avoid a pursuant grape shot from an enemy vessel. Their feet lay at the bottom of the ocean, their backsides on nearby islands, and once some of the clouds cleared, offering a passing frame, an opening, this is where they first spotted the car pushing its way through the gravel like blood pushing other blood out of the way to get to the heart as quickly as possible. This is what they saw, and this was the natural hurry of a spy.
The spy’s name was Reginald Morey. His government was Australia. The road he was careening along — almost as if he were an astronaut in training — belonged to his country’s western coast.
Twenty miles outside Geraldtown, heading up the road somewhere between East Chapman and Hawatharra, trying to find his point of destination: a shack. Details winnowed at high speeds, providing only stark, streaking impressions: dirt the color of steel boxing gloves that had punched and knuckled itself into rust, the monstrous feet that sat out in the oceanic distance, his radio flying out the dash of his car and tumbling on the road behind him where it continued to mutter to itself in now relative peace (“Sittin’ on the highway … left behind the adventure …”), and what he would later determine to be a chin-high, quasi-archway of brush that marked a dusty path winding a mile or so to a patchy pile of unpainted wood he could barely believe was still standing.
On the porch was his man. He was thin and slouched in his seat and had wrapped himself in a raincoat and a brow-covering Cambridgian hat. Rather than carry on the hurry he’d flagrantly displayed on the way here, Morey flipped gears one-hundred eighty degrees and only opened the car door, a smiling, lime-green Chevrolet from the 1950’s, stepped out, closed the door, and — with the file in hand — leaned up against the door and let his tie and the end of the man’s coat about his raised and resting feet be blown in the wind.
A minute passed, and the man on the porch spoke.
“You ONA?”
“ASIO.”
“ASIO? Figures.”
A black swan stood alongside Murray on the porch.
“Is that yours?”
“No.”
“Are you feeding it anything?”
“No.”
“Then why …”
The swan honked. Whether or not this was done with my encouragement, I won’t say.
2.
Melvin Maragato spun away from his wall-monitors and knocked over a cup of coffee on the parallel side of the room, this, too, lined with monitors, sending its contents running down the desk and operatives leaping from their seats, lifting clipboards and keyboards and shouting obscenities at Melvin for his lack of composure in relation to every object in the room, in which his sarcastic estimation they were unvarnished, untrammeled experts.
The organization to which he belonged were interested in contaminating the intelligence community with psychopaths, not because they held a lingering admiration for a certain kind of romance fish-hooked to a certain kind of madness; they wanted to have more agents wiretapping bird’s nests and hearing morse codes everywhere they went (one zealous listener attending a symphony with J. Cortazar in the 50’s and heard a timpani drummer tap out ‘I hope your warts are better, sweet’ in the middle of Mahler’s No. 2); they wanted to have more of these so the basic and salient things would seemingly seem out of reach, just ‘beyond,’ and in the ‘beyond,’ they could try and leverage international intelligence to their advantage. To them, this was a simple world — that is, without the giants.
Morey himself they wanted to make narcoleptic. Morey had lived in a comfortable bungalow whose attic had seemed to have become overrun with gray squirrels, no matter how many times he patched up the woodwork around the foundation or upper-edgings of his house. He couldn’t sleep, and so moved to an apartment provided by the agency, but it soon became a nigh-parodical assemblage of parties, dish-throwing fights, and would-make-a-female-tennis-player-blush bouts of sex. This led him to exploit a provision of the ASIO’s powers, and he spent most of his nights sleeping on department store mattresses, breaking into his temporary lodgings well after doors locked and eyes closed.
3.
Morning came to Perth on the backs of a gaggle of galahs attacking the glass of a public newspaper box, trying to get at a fish flapping amongst the pages inside. Scrub-robins angled off an invisible page over King’s Park.
The memory of a city left behind: trading this for the other, backwards through the baggage claim. Gradually accumulating the walker’s knowledge. The first meal when he was britches-high, and they couldn’t understand his father’s accent: “Dub a Dub, will you, love?” (The waiter leaned over and whispered in his mother’s ear. “No, that’s not what he’s asking,” she said. “Besides, that would require a sponge.”)
Up and down Moore Street. Mum was a Sydneysider who had hopped up for a vacation-sized pint and wound up drinking the whole country in. A passport, some water, Fodor’s, and a ragtag group of dog-eared bits, her affectionate nickname for The Decameron.
There was DART (as well as DARTBART, which took passengers between Dublin and San Francisco,) the free museum, and more.
Eber was a Mexican ex-pat whose sarcasm came in thick brushstrokes, the sarcasti-paint gloming onto the brush. She found him in a bar, holding court so:
And how quickly adventure pulled them out the door —
“Let’s go to Balbriggan.”
“Balbri — “
“Quickly! Now! The tide is going to explode!”
“The ti — “
“Explode! The tide is going to explode!”
They ran to the beach and waved at a giant stretching his fingers above the surf.
The two played at a thread. One would go up to the other and say, quietly, “How am I doing?” And the replies would vary — “Good. You’re doing good. How am I doing?” “These past two years were clearly bronze-medal work. You know you can do better.” — and this carried on for years. And this wasn’t done with malice — this was done by two people who appreciated the size of the where-is-this-being-lit-from? nebulae.
When they returned to Australia, they opted for Perth, and when they came to Perth, they moved in next to a pair of old Greeks who were recently able to gain access to their pension.
The wife smoked cigars and did a terrible Winston Churchill impression while the husband made tray upon smoking tray of loukoumathes that he’d bring out to the beach shore on summer mornings, his bathrobe trailing behind him like a muppet wedding gown, the local gulls suddenly caught in the food’s gravitational pull, and “Mighty Reggie” as he was then called would take his lumpy up-and-down walk over the sand towards the porch to try a few.
7.
Morey looked at Murray’s file again.
There he was in the library, studying. Heels of the shoe visible, resting over the arm of the chair. Hand lumping up the flesh. The book on the table is Nostromo. The book in his hand is William Beveridge’s Full Employment in a Free Society, having just finished The Beveridge Report.
“Do you want any coffee?” the un-photographed Murray called from the kitchen.
“Do you actually have any coffee?”
“Not really,” Murray said, returning. “I usually just like shouting off names until somebody says yes.”
“Can we talk about your work?”
“No.”
“I fancy myself something of an expert in economics.”
“You’re probably not.”
“I mean, let’s just say we imagine a graph —”
“Stop it.”
“And on one side — X1 — it’s unemployment in the United States during the Great Depression: 25%; on the other, it’s a rank of cultural figures based on some sort of tabulation of achievement — “
“Some sort of — ?”
” — and let’s say that gets us Woody Guthrie, John Steinbeck, the WPA Guides — “
“Sly and the Family Stone.”
” — and the idea is: if economics is, what ties us together? then you have to ask: does an economic engine stick around long enough that some people mistake it as a kind of fate?”
“Jesus Ch —”
“Because the last thing you want is for everybody to share the same crappy car.”
“Son of exploding fruit bats. You wouldn’t know Lausanne from Chicago from Wang goddamn Anshi. Give me that.” He snatched the folder away.
He flipped through a few pages —
That was 1969. Right outside the front. What was the conversation at the time? It was in a circle with George, Raitsman, and they were talking about a record.
“You want me to be a hyped-up Stuart Levy? Fine.”
“You have something already? What?”
“Spike their factor costs. Set up a line of bogus investors so we can add a bunch of non-existent people to the payroll of this corporation and that corporation. Siphon the money out through them. Send the state into bankruptcy. Real income will go down. Competition will drop. Prices will skyrocket.”
“And?”
“It’s not something to break them, especially if foreign powers are going to intervene, but it could prove to be a millstone in their breakfast cereal.”
“What if there’s actual demand for this shadow economy we’ll parade through? You can’t ignore —”
“We won’t ignore it. We just won’t let it out. The potential for demand is fine if there isn’t the chance to meet it.”
8.
Beneath the list of spies was research pointing towards likely madness — fourth was something called necro-Grün, vaguely interpreted as the fear that oncoming green technology might manifest itself in the middle of a Wagnerian-like opera, threaten the audience, they wouldn’t take it seriously, and then there’s your cleaning bill and blood on the walls.
This had ruined the lives of at least two spies, leading one to drink sad drinks at fifty and call friends to recount high school tales, convinced that to recapture and lock himself onto the tiger of life once again he had to find some sort of impetus of movement there, and the other spy — the other spy — the other spy — the other spy —
9.
Murray remembered it all very clearly: he was doing his work in a record shop booth off of Regent Street,
— which sailed above his ears as he smoked away at a cigarette and Malcolm the shop-owner shouted through the glass, “Should I just call this your office, then?” and he smiled and kept working, trying to figure out the rate at which manufacturing industries would leave the country and what would move in to replace it, and what would move in to replace it after that (and the axis between rates of danger and social safety nets), the rate at which new skill sets were learned, and on and on.
A man in a bowler was approaching the door. Probably someone from The City. He thought he was going to be told off, told to pack up his things and for the sake of other people, could you let me listen to this record where Beethoven supposedly invented honky-tonk in peace?
