LILLIE E. FRANKS / YOU ARE A SPY
You are a spy.
That means you have a job. People are so used to stories and fantasies about you, they forget that, at the end of the day, you’re just another person like them. Someone, somewhere, needs someone to do a job and they want someone else not to know about it. That’s all it takes. There’s nothing miraculous or manly about it. It’s just work.
Your handler shows you a picture and tells you a story about him. The story, you know, is certainly incomplete. It’s the pieces of this man’s life that the men in the back room want you to know about. Once, you thought it was your duty as a spy to listen attentively to this story and to believe with all the fervor you used to be capable of. Now, you pick out only the few details that you know will be relevant to you.
A tech genius.
Underworld connections.
A scorpion symbol.
Rumors of a secret project.
After all, you’re not one of the men in the back room.
You are a spy.
That means you recognize the basic details of the role your handler assigns to you. You’ll be approaching his company as a playboy millionaire interested in investing. All the necessary letters of recommendation and documents have been exchanged. From there, you’ll do what you always do. Pick at the loose ends of the organization. Watch for the signs of something unusual moving beneath the waters of everyday business and slowly map its shape and size.
You are a spy. That means you are drawn to secrets. You understand secrets and the people who have them. In truth, all secrets are similar. The longer they are kept, the closer they come to each other. They grow, slowly, in the dark places where no one is watching, and shrink away from anything busy and well-lit. Without anyone ever noticing, secrets all become maps of the places people do not go.
You are a spy. That means you are such a map yourself. Your name, which everyone asks for, has been ground down into a hundred aliases years and years ago. Your taste in food, drink, entertainment, and company have all gone the same way, eroded away into whatever they needed to be to fit your latest job.
Somewhere, at the center of all of it, in the place where no one asks and no one goes, you are waiting.
You are a spy.
That means you arrive on time for your first appointment, and you greet each person you meet with a charming smile and a small personal compliment. Already, you smell your quarry. The beautiful woman with the sad eyes who explains to you the scientific research your money might fund has something inside which is beating to get out. She wants to fall in love with you, because she wants an excuse to tell you about the thing she cannot tell anyone.
This is the border of a secret. Once, you thought of these borders as façades, curtains lying over the truth of the real nature of the secret. Now, you know you know that the hesitant, tense silence that surrounds secrets is closer to their reality than anything their masters want them to be. Silence is a shape, and all hidden things are ultimately forced into it.
You are a spy. That means you are a silence around something else, and maybe the something else isn’t the real you.
You are a spy. That means you are a key which fits many locks. To the shy, sensitive souls who never believe what they know are a secret, a spy is confident and charming. To the brash ones who drink and talk too much, they are quiet and full of questions.
To the woman with the sad eyes, who knows she is beautiful but must hear it from others to believe it, the spy is a seducer.
You believed once that it would be different when it came to love. You believed that something in the shape of a woman, or the way she would make you feel, would break through the tricks and trivialities of other falsehoods.
It didn’t. Your body operated entirely separate of the hidden piece of yourself, the piece that had shaped itself into a secret. Everything was automatic and artificial, and when you tried to make it something else, it only became awkward and false. You don’t try to make it something else any more.
As you lie next to the woman who you have drawn into your arms this time, you wish for something deeper from her. No, that isn’t quite true. You want to wish for something deeper. You wish that she could make you want something else.
You imagine how the world might shape itself to allow it. She might be killed, and that wish for something else could become rage, a rage which would scorch the world. You might have to make a decision between her and stopping the villain’s plan to plunge the world into nuclear warfare, and your pain and hesitation would show how much you hoped to love her.
It is strange how many of your visions of showing her love involve her death.
You are a spy. That means you draw from her the information that you need. A secret base on an island nearby, a secret she stumbled across in the financial records and does not understand the significance of. By the time the bullet comes through the window and she leaps in front of it to save you, you already have all you need from her.
You are a spy. That means that when you look at her naked body and see a tattoo of a scorpion, you are not shocked. It also means that, however much you might dream of feeling an anger bright enough to burn away everything else, you know that’s only a fantasy. Even the world cannot bring something like that out of you.
You are a spy. That means you know where to find a speedboat which will take you to the secret island. You know to dock behind a cliff which will hide your location from the compound which perches like a raven on the island’s highest point. When you leave the boat behind and see a guard walking on a ridge below, all it takes is a leap downwards and he’s unconscious before he can alert anyone else.
You hug the sea-soaked stones and approach the compound. The compound is an enormous metal cylinder, windowless except at the very top, rising from the rocks with sinister confidence. You find a place to perch and watch the guards walking in and out. By the third which passes, you have the combination which they are using to enter.
It is at this moment that you feel the barrel of a gun pressed into the back of your head.
“You are a spy,” the henchman with an eye patch who’s snuck up on you says, and you have no choice but to surrender.
*
You find yourself in the single windowed room of the great tower. The man who was shown to you in a photograph is sitting at a desk there, across from an enormous machine which fills the vast compound. You are made to sit opposite him, and he begins to explain.
You are a spy. That means you have heard a hundred mad doctors explain their brilliant plans to you before. At first, you thought nothing was more important than refusing to listen to their tempting words and subtle evil. You imagined that you would be corrupted by these speeches, turned away from the truth of the men in the backroom and down the twisted paths of evil.
But like women, none of them offered anything as irresistible as you had dreamed. No matter how well a scientist could explain their plan, none of them could do the one thing you dreamed of. They couldn’t make you want it. At most, you could understand what had led them to where they were. You could see the road, but nothing could force you to walk it.
You are a spy. That means you are surrounded by roads which you never walk down.
Again, you fit yourself to the lock. With the scientists and researchers, you discuss and understand. With the egomaniacs, you flatter. With this man, you goad. You challenge him and his force, and before long, he rises to offer a demonstration of the great and world-changing machine.
You are a spy. That means that moment is all you need. The room is distracted and you use the gadgets your handler gave you to free yourself and escape into the guts of the machine.
You are chased through the machine by the henchman with the eyepatch, a dangerous killer who casts aside the gun he used in your bedroom for a far more unique weapon. A chain sickle; you’ve heard of an assassin who used this weapon. You never expected you’d face him here. Surrounded by the gears and wires of the enormous machine, you battle for your life.
You are a spy. Your enemy makes one mistake and you make none. His chain weapon catches in one of the gears of the machine. You wrap it around his neck, and he dies, fingers clawing at the tightening chain.
As he dies, you cannot help wishing he had been just a little faster, or more sure with the aim of his sickle. It would have tested your capabilities more, and to be capable is, at least, to be something.
But there is nothing for it now. The machine is damaged as fatally as the henchman. You’ve won, and you can’t give your victory back now. You run out the exit and leap onto your boat with a minute or so to spare.
If your target were to appear now, you think, it would be a chance to show something. There would be no need to kill him now that his plan is foiled. If you did, it would show how much you hated men like that. If you didn’t, it would show something else. You almost wish he would appear, but he doesn’t. He is still in the laboratory, trying to save his dying contraption.
The tower explodes and you sail away. The world has left you inside yourself once again. The story is over now. Your job is done.
You do not need to be a spy.
It is not the first time a laboratory has exploded behind you, and it is not the first time you’ve had this thought. Each time, you see that it is possible. You imagine stepping out into another life, into something, anything, other than ambiguity. You imagine being someone, it doesn’t matter who, just so long as you could be them entirely.
You do not need to be a spy.
Possibility, you realize, rarely demands you. Possibility is quiet and subtle. You can go your whole life and never realize that you are surrounded by it. It is air, and you breathe it ever second, but it will not tell you so. You must notice it yourself, and even if you do, it will not congratulate you for it.
You do not need to be a spy.
The path of becoming will be painful. You will be awkward and strange. Some will hate what you come to be, especially at first, when it is small and full of wanting. And yet, for all that, pain is possible. Awkwardness and strangeness are possible. Even being hated is possible. And so is everything that lies beyond them.
You do not need to be a spy.
You do not need to be a hidden, underground thing. You do not need to be wrapped in unkept promises. You do not need to look away from possibility with a resigned sigh. You do not need to say no.
You do not need to be a spy.
Lillie E. Franks is a trans author and eccentric who lives in Chicago, Illinois with the best cats. You can read her work at places like Atlas and Alice, Poemeleon, and Drunk Monkeys or follow her on Twitter at @onyxaminedlife. She loves anything that is not the way it should be.