I am all the birds covering the earth — the insects, clouds, the gamut of colors in the sky and the aurora, too.

When I say “birds,” when I say “insects,” I mean the physical thing. I see what they see. A staggering holism compiled of whip-cam-like spins transitioning from sight to sight, the how to this being a backdoor hack into the neural networks via a QED trick our avian friends use to look at the magnetic paths that circle the globe. The why isn’t because I want to track down a villain with inflated knees named ‘Manos,’ nor surprise a paltry Moriarty — this is surveillance. This is the kind of stuff a KGB agent of yore would bump into in a locked vault, say “Excuse me” to, and walk on past. I am a spy.

I became a spy because I wanted to be in one of the primary rivers of life. A progenitor. I wanted to be one of the few who built the architecture that silently echoed out into the world. I didn’t want to hear reports of this and that, I wanted to be this. I wanted to be that. And I don’t consider this to be an unfulfilled want: this is a tenet of fact. It’s bold, but for all the quiet and all the triangulation, there is a boldness I can’t deny — and if it won’t be said elsewhere, I might as well say it here.

My name is Arthur Lionshade. My Mom’s British. My Dad’s American. I am my own special relationship.

I am the birds that splash in university ponds after the rain, cry out in the middle of an empty canvas of sound when they spot a mouse Cary Granting it through the grass, and those gulls that follow a column of city air past apartment window after apartment window like an elevator bell-boy who’s lost control of their ‘vehicle.’

A novel can tie the world together. It has a breadth and a structure that — as elegant and intelligent as something like Radiohead’s “No Surprises” is or as enheartening as an Arcade Fire bellow happens to be — a song can’t match.

I’m in a unique position to argue that case. I have the tools of the book and the gift of the birds. It is indispensable in my job and in telling a story. I can start in Alaska and finish in Tasmania, swinging across the Pacific along the way. My on-ramp for Newfoundland ends in Antarctica, splitting in two along Western Africa. The bar-tailed godwit can head north from New Zealand to Japan, the Koreas, and finish off in mainland China. Ospreys are free to hop from Cape Cod to Cuba to Venezuela. House finches move from Nevada to Nebraska and pine siskins move from Nebraska to the northernmost tip of Wyoming. Wherever the birds go, I go.

It means I can nibble on a piece of bread while two supposed strangers sit on a park bench. It means I can safely look at dead-drops in trash cans while treating a disused Burger King wrapper like that old Hercules snake taking up the physical aspects of traditional Beatlemania as something more than a passing hobby. I can watch the Sarhara’s 40 million tons of nutrients blow their way to the Amazon. Joe Castiglione can talk about sky-high bombs from David Ortiz, brass bands can practice along the Malecon, and a vacationer can read Vicente Gomez on Los Roques.

Someone can wake up in Auckland, flick on Radio NZ, go and get the cat pawing at the door and come back in, saying, “It’s like bringing the milk in. Heavy, furry milk.” Nearby patches of grass can thrash about in the wind like salmon clogging up the neck of a river. The perch of Stanley Point looking across to the most populated area in the country. A bird can pass, and several hours later, it’s in Tokyo, hovering over a boiling piranha pool of light. It’s all possible.

I’ve received a communique from my handler instructing me to go to the Big Bear Lake Observatory in California. The Observatory is run by the New Jersey Institute of Technology.

The Observatory itself is set on an incredibly miniature, man-made isthmus in the center of the lake, thin enough that one could easily see Peter Sellers as Chance the Gardener continuing his walk from the end of “Being There” uninterrupted, unimpeded, and unobstructed. The surrounding landscape towered in both the height of its trees and the stretches of color that accompanied the time of the day.

Marble floors in a light beige. Spiraling staircase. Metal. Painted white. Base level of swivel chairs and computer stations. Two upper levels of direct telescope observation.

The man I was meeting introduced himself as Charles Baxter. He looked — and sounded — like an old Algerian, though he said he was younger than he looked. I asked what I could do for him — and whether or not we’d be looking at the sun from the second or the third platform.

“Neither, I’m afraid.” He checked his watch. “What I need is for you to come with me outside.”

“Early cigarette break?”

“Yes, yes. Call it that.”

We went outside. He checked his watch, and — in drawing out a soft, Beethoven’s ninth-styled syllable, a pianissimo of accumulating alignment before the thunder — he pointed.

“Look at that.”

“Look at what?”

“Look at the sky.”

“What about the sky?”

“Some of the stars are moving to the left, and some of the stars are moving to the right.”

The stars did move. Orion quite literally hitched up his belt, walked over to the crab, and — together — the two of them spelled out: “H-E-L-P-M-E-E-P.”

“Help meep?”

“Pretty good english for an alien, wouldn’t you say?”

“But doesn’t it take millions of light years for that light to reach us?”

“Yes, it does. It’s why we’re going to need a space archeologist.”

“A what?”

“Someone smart enough to reconstruct a past we’ve never seen. If we’re going to travel through time, we’re going to know what we’re aiming at. Come along, Lionshade.”

Baxter continued to walk and talk. I trotted along.

I looked up again, then down once more. “Aliens!” I said. “My oh my.”

Baxter cast over an eyebrow.

“There are people who look at space, Lionshade — all of space — and see a giant loom. You’re going to have to work on expanding your horizons quickly if you’re to take care of this for us. Are you really the best they’ve — well, look: I said that we were going to go see a space archaeologist. Here’s what I meant by that: think about the static on your TV. Some people say nearly a quarter of that comes from the Big Bang. The very beginning. We’re going to go see a man who can look at that information there, wrap a bit of it around his finger — figuratively speaking — and help build a planet you once knew — or someone once knew, presumably. To rewind the threads — the spool of tape launched out of the car.”

“But why the call for help?”

“Well — how do I put this? What you’re dealing with is a runaway galaxy.”

“A runaway —”

“Galaxy. I’ve seen wonderful things, Lionshade. Imagine oil wells of planets, stars, quasars and rocks gushing out into a simple black. And a singing black hole: they sing in b-flat, you know. You know that, right? They signify the pilot planet’s gear shift. And it helps for things passing through — planets, ships, whatever. They’re the exhaust pipes of the universe. The pilot planet rests right near the center.”

“Just assume that whenever you introduce new terminology, I’m going to repeat what you’ve just said in an incredulous voice, okay?”

“Imagine a kayak. Imagine that the effects of your kayak stretch out for miles and miles, well beyond your vision. It’s a sensitive boat, it wobbles, but all of life is around you. That’s what it’s like to pilot a galaxy.”

“And it’s a runaway galaxy because —”

“Because it’s stolen. Someone has stolen a galaxy and we want you to get it back.”

(2.)

We flew into Cuba for the second stage of the great slingshot, the launch, the briefing beginning on the plane, even, little messages being proffered on an endless string of napkins accompanying a bag of peanuts, a glass of orange juice, a magazine (“So You Want to Break the Embargo Weekly”), a personal in-flight movie, and so on — because I was off to join up with the shadow-bound version of “The Elders,” some of whom I knew. I got off the plane a little early, which is why I can make my shoes do little geysers — flipping them as if they’re a pancake, little bits of water launching into the air — and the beach that I climbed up upon had the benefit of being the secure location, too. No errant fishing boats from nearby villages – just shocked spies, which is always a welcome sight to see.

“Jesus Christ, Lionshade,” Drummonde called out. “At least use a door.”

The spies: Thiago Muntz (FBIN), Arthur Lionshade (MI-6), Blake Drummonde (CIA), Matiba Nostras (CNI), and Isabella Feen (New Zealand’s SIS.)

Thiago Muntz was a cook whose sons played bocce ball in the yard with the spare onions, skins flaking upon the particularly sharper hits and drops. He was stationed in João Pessoa, often holding meetings in the boats that encircled this easternmost bay.

His landlord had come into his restaurant one night and — with the air of Veronica Lake waiting for someone to lay a tiny red carpet beneath her hand so someone could came running up it to light her cigarette –- asked for the “best soup — if you have the time,” dragged a chair to a table where two beautiful women sat and began to introduce himself, cutting their conversation short, lacking the humility or ability to read others to make up for that immediately incurred social deficit.

Thiago was long-standing friends with Artur Xexéo. (They had both worked together at O Correio da Paraiba.) He had been visiting the offices of O Globo when word had reached them that someone had tried to steal an airplane from the Castro Pinto international airport — and would have succeeded were it not for the fact that the plane had encountered a sudden and heretofore unseen hole in the middle of one of the runways just as one thief’s hand had reached out to gun the engine. Living near the airport, Thiago had placed a call to his landlord and reached the landlord’s wife, who told him that she hadn’t seen her husband since the day before. The call to that wife had been over a week ago, and this was the first time he’d seen his landlord since.

So Thiago did something that changed the course of his life: he asked to borrow the pastry chef’s phone, dropped his own phone into the bottom of the soup, called himself, and sent the bowl out.

He watched the waiter, Miguel, walk forward through the noisy restaurant to his landlord’s table, stop halfway, turn, look at the soup, and return to the kitchen.

“What’s wrong?” Thiago asked as Miguel came back through the doors.

“Your soup is ringing,” Miguel said.

Thiago dropped a hand into the soup, answered the call, and sent Miguel out again, telling him he was hearing things.

“Yes,” Miguel turned and shouted through the open windows that marked the divide the kitchen and the open-air dining area. “Ringing soup!”

He took an erroneous cigarette break out in the back amongst the meandering Federal University students, the ghosts of Brazilwood thieves and the staggered colors of the houses that lined Barroco Park.

When the soup came to the landlord’s table and the man’s grating voice crashed down like Shostokovich passing out on a piano and the audience going along with it anyway, he heard boastful proof surrounding the attempting thieving — none of them had been caught — and heard what the cargo had been: truly quantum computer chips contained by a series of magnetic fields, which — due to the here-one-minute, gone-the-next nature of their existence — made them the perfect tools for surveillance by snooping governments looking to scoop valuable information away before anyone was the wiser. He walked the phone over the the police office — the landlord knew how to talk — and they passed it up to ABIN and they passed a job offer over to him.

Found at a bar in Savannah, Georgia called “The Tilting Veranda,” Blake Drummonde was ex-RSC. He grew up in San Francisco, and – filled with stories of the service he’d plucked from copies of the Chronicle and summer nights pottering about some book stores – there were the Blind Boys of Langley: literally blind shopkeepers and cafeteria workers who served agents their food and gifts and were unable to see maps or documents; there was Moe Berg, a catcher for the Boston Red Sox and a spy who sat in on a Heisenberg lecture and was charged with shooting the man if it sounded like he was catching on to the idea of the atomic bomb; and — in 2001, a Secret Service agent posed as an umpire during the first game of the World Series when the American President threw out the first pitch – even hearing these fragments, he figured he was capable of pulling off one or two stories of his own.

The briefing was fairly straightforward: they were to meet a ‘space archeologist’ in Cuba, the group would be launched to one of the planets on the outer rim of the galaxy in question, and then they would have to find their own way to get to the Pilot Planet at the galaxy’s center.

Matiba thumped the table.

“So! What don’t you know?”

They’d retired to the interior of a cleaning hut. Guards and the noise of the ocean crossed paths outside.

Isabella grinned.

“That’s classified. What are you going to teach us?”

“That’s classified, too.”

A pause. Matiba broke into a smile.

“Well, now that the formalities are out of the way, shall we get down to business?”

Idiom books were given to each. One way Russian disinformation campaigns were caught in the Cold War was through the improper use of idioms in whatever materials were produced at the time. Keeping on top of a language was considered a cheap but worthwhile goodwill gesture between intelligence agencies. The same mistake was never made twice: for instance, after the head of MI-5’s wife accidentally posted too much information on facebook, agents were instructed not to use the site for anything other than cover. And they stuck to it.

Thiago’s to Arthur’s featured a handful Arthur had never heard before — head of rotten garlic = Cabeça d’alho xoxo, It’s the color of a donkey on the run = É cor de burro quando foge, This is too much sand for my truck = É muita areia para a minha camioneta, Trust the Virgin and don’t run = Fia-te na Virgem e nao corras, and fish don’t pull wagons = Peixe não puxa carroça.

While opening the last of their gifts – which had included such items as a fly-away suitcase (set it down, it will take off like a drunk pigeon shouting, “Wait! Wait! Let me try this!”), sunglasses that could read the level of plastic and prosthetics applied to a man or woman’s face, and the Zipper Coat (last seen wearing a red shirt? Zip the thing up once, wait a tick, unzip, and the shirt beneath is blue) –- Thiago steered the conversation to a short anecdote.

“You know, I went to the Special Ops conference — and what I loved about it was — instead of having people sitting at trade booths talking about their products, you had people who didn’t want to be identified sitting at their booths refusing to talk about the products. I’d end every conversation with, ‘And is this where I check in?’ I loved it.”

End of the story and the end of gifts. Drummonde –- gently mocking Matiba –- thumped the table.

“All right, Lionshade. What have you got? Something interesting, I hope.”

I stared at them all for a moment. They stared back. They didn’t know.

After explaining the brief –- and getting past their initial shock -– Drummonde was the first to speak.

“Don’t you see what’s great about this, Lionshade? We no longer have to play chess on a single board: we no longer have to say, ‘Well, our navy only has 285 active warships, and only 30 years ago, we had 600 —‘ –- we can play that game in whatever direction we want, however we want. More than half the CIA’s current workforce joined up after 9/11, and what do we have to show for it?”

“We just started.”

“Right, but –- while everyone else is playing Roosevelt-warning-about-the-Navy with the internet, this is wide open. This could be our future.”

Feen was glowing.

“Island nation economies are no longer bound by size, population, or resource limitations!”

Lionshade raised his hands.

“Guys –- “

Muntz carried Feen’s thread.

“I mean, it’s taking the planet 18 months to grow what we consume in 12, and –“

“Guys!”

Silence.

  5:06 pm  |   February 20 2011   |  4 notes