Behind the Investigator was a floor-to-ceiling bookcase crammed with books both horizontal and vertical, in no discernible order—semantics, linguistics, political philosophy, novels by Upton Sinclair, John Dos Passos, Willa Cather and William Faulkner; oversized books of drawings by Käthe Kollwitz, George Grosz, Ben Shahn, and (unexpectedly) Saul Steinberg; books of photographs by Mathew Brady, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange, Robert Frank, and Bruce Davidson; David Hume’s An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding and Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan beside Noam Chomsky’s Problems of Knowledge and Freedom, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, Dostoyevsky’s The Insulted and Injured, John Rawls’s A Theory of Justice, Peter Singer’s Animal Liberation and a vivid-red paperback anthology titled Striking Back: Animal Rights Activism for the 21st Century. On a shelf with Aristotle’s Politics and Descartes’s Meditations was a slender yellow book—The Art of Paradox: Zeno of Elea.
The Investigator saw the Intern staring past his shoulder, turned and looked at the shelf—“Which of these are you interested in? Zeno of Elea?”
“No.”
“No—you’re not?”
The Intern shook her head, no. Quickly now looking from the bookcase to the Investigator who was regarding her with a quizzical expression.
“No one knows much about ‘Zeno of Elea.’ He was a contemporary of Socrates and very like Socrates, essentially. They were men who provoked others to think—in that way they made enemies.”
The Intern continued to stare at the Investigator’s desktop.
Her eyelids were lowered, impassive. Moisture filled her eyes but did not spill over onto her cheeks.
Staring at the Investigator’s hands which were narrow, long-fingered—a man’s hands yet graceful, with short-trimmed nails. And the star-shaped silver ring on the right hand, that looked like a talisman.
The Investigator returned to the subject of the interview.
“I’ve had several assistants—‘interns’—in the past. Each worked out very well, once we understood each other. Basically I am looking for a trustworthy and reliable person. I am somewhat impractical-minded—I forget things, misplace things—rarely do I actually lose things, because my intern will find them for me—that may be her greatest challenge! I’m not looking for an intellectual—I’m certainly not looking for an ‘original’ or ‘creative’ personality for whom working for another is a mere sideline. I’m looking for an individual who will, in a sense, belong to me and will not resist me—my assignments, I mean. And these will be exciting assignments! And risky, at times. So I need a fearless intern, yet not a foolhardy intern. An intern who scrupulously follows directions, anticipates problems, and solves them without involving me. An intern who is clear-minded and articulate but who speaks very little—as if each word costs her. (My first intern chattered so much, meaning to be ‘charming,’ I warned her that I would dock from her check a dollar-a-word for all words that were inconsequential. She caught on, quickly!) Particularly I am looking for an intern who draws no attention to herself—who can slip into places in which I’d be detected at once. I’m not looking to be ‘charmed’—I’ve had enough of being ‘charmed,’ believe me. The only seductions practiced in my vicinity will be my own—my ‘seductions’ of my subjects, to get them to talk imprudently, and not in their own best interests. An intern must be alert to the quagmire of ‘transference’—as in a psychoanalysis—and I never encourage any sort of ‘confessing.’ The intern will not call me ‘Cornelius’—(in fact, that dowdy old name isn’t my actual name nor, at the present time, my nom de guerre)—but ‘Dr. Hinton’—or ‘sir’—will do. The intern will not fall in love with me—even in fantasy. Or imagine that I am her father, still less her grandfather. We have work to do which I consider urgent work, exposing the sick underbelly of the American soul—if you’ll allow a surreal twist of speech—and so we may have to take risks. We must be impersonal as missiles, and we must be efficient. I do not give a damn about the intern’s inner life.”
The Intern smiled, uncertainly. Had she confided to the Investigator that she had no inner life? She had.
“Ms. McSwain—‘Sabbath.’ Tell me, do you respect the law?”
“No.”
“No?”
“Well, I’d have to ask—which law? Is there a single, singular law?”
The Investigator nodded approvingly. “Good! I like your skepticism. I like even that prissy little way you curl your lip—‘Is there a single, singular law?’ I have here”—quickly, almost abashedly, yet surely boastfully, the Investigator lowered his head, indicated a part amid snowy-white hair on the left side of his head—“a commemorative scar from a cop’s billy club, the ‘siege of Chicago 1968,’ to suggest the brutality of the law. So I take law with a grain of salt, indeed.” The Intern had a fleeting view of a startling zipper-track of serrated scalp—then the flowing-white hair, a testament to masculine vanity so refined as to approach abnegation, obscured the old, bitter hurt like a caress.
“You look like one who has lived—not ‘outside’ the law but, in some way, orthogonal to it. Is this correct?”
Orthogonal. She took a plunge, guessing: parallel? perpendicular? proximate but irrelevant?
“Yes, sir.”
“Always good to ask ‘which law’—‘law for who.’ Sometimes it’s a moral imperative to break such a law—a more noble imperative to work to abolish it. So I have a criminal record, of a kind—not as ‘Cornelius Hinton,’ however. And you, Ms. McSwain?”
“And me—what?”
“Do you have a criminal record?”
“N-no . . .”
“You haven’t been a political activist? Like Chantelle and her friends? ‘Code Pink’?”
“No.”
“And in all your travels—your years of drifting about Florida—vague as they were made to sound—you were never, as it’s said, ‘busted’?”
“No. I was not.”
The Intern laughed. She wondered if she should feel offended, or flattered.
“Quite innocent and naïve people find themselves arrested, often,” the Investigator said, “if for instance a Republican convention comes to town, and the local PD turns out its mounted storm troopers. Especially people of color, and people of ambiguous sexual identity. So my question shouldn’t strike you as rude.”
The Intern was sure, Sabbath McSwain had no criminal record, she’d died so young.
She’d never typed the name in any computer. Out of superstition she wouldn’t have wished to research the name any more than she’d have wished to research her old, lost name—the self she’d been back there.
She had no curiosity about the past, to the degree to which it touched upon her. An impersonal past, the “historical” past—social, political, cultural—this interested her far more than her own past which was befouled like a summer sweater of some light, delicate material dragged through a mud puddle.
The Investigator was saying: “So—would you be willing, if necessary, to ‘break the law’—to ‘trespass’—even to ‘steal’? By which I don’t mean any sort of common theft of property, but evidence that has been hidden away from the public, which we might require to expose deviousness and fraud.”
“Y-yes, sir.”
“You’d be willing to go, with me, into unpleasant places, even dangerous places, at my request? And if you were detected, I couldn’t help you.”
“Y-yes, sir. I mean—yes. I would be willing. I would try.”
She liked it, being asked to trespass. She liked the idea of an outlaw life, in which deceit in the service of righteousness was the prevailing logic.
A subversive life for which she would be paid. A life.
“And salary. Have we discussed ‘salary’?”
As if casually the Investigator quoted a weekly sum several times what the Intern might have expected.
The Intern smiled, uncertainly.
“Well—would that salary do?”
The Intern smiled yet more uncertainly. Was
the proper answer— yes?
“Know what I like about you, Sabbath McSwain? You don’t waste breath. You take up damned little space.”
The interview seemed to be winding down. Perhaps the interview was over.
The Investigator had begun to glance toward his computer screen, as if distracted by new email. The Intern wondered if she’d been dismissed? Rejected? Had she missed something crucial?
“I—I should leave now, Dr. Hinton? Is that—what comes next?”
Very clumsy this was. The Intern could think of no other words.
So often she went for days without speaking to anyone, at length. And seeing those few people whom she knew, she was likely to duck away from them, in a kind of shame.
The Investigator said, “Yes. Good. You can leave now of course. But return tomorrow at seven-fifteen A.M.”
“Return tomorrow?”
“Yes. How otherwise would you work as my intern, if you aren’t on-site?”
“Do you mean—I’m hired?”
“I think I mean—you will do for the time being.”
The Intern stood, stunned and dazed. The Investigator more languidly stood, looming above her. He did not see her to the door. He did not mean to be gallant—that would not be a feature of their relationship. Truly he did not want a personal connection, the Intern understood.
Yet clumsily she thrust out her hand. A child’s hand, a boy’s hand—with ragged nails, dirt-edged nails, bitten-nails. The cuff of her plaid shirt was stained, the toes of her boys’ winter shoe-boots were stained. The Investigator shook the Intern’s hand with a perturbed little smile, not rising to the level of exasperation, not rising to the level of an indulgence, fleeting, kindly, to send her on her way out of his office and out of the Institute that, positioned at an edge of the university campus that fronted a busy avenue, suggested its peripheral and orthogonal relation to the campus, much of its funding from private sources. Outside, the Intern walked quickly away. Began to run, was running in a light-autumn rain out of an opaque sky, hearing herself laughing, an inward-laughing, not-audible, rapidly blinking in the rain that cooled her warm face—You will do for the time being. I think I mean. You!
THE INTERN’S FIRST TASK under the Investigator’s tutelage was to master the “crafty art” of photographing an (ignorant, oblivious) subject from a distance of just a few feet.
“Observe. From yesterday.”
The Investigator invited the Intern to look at the screen—large, flat, state-of-the-art—of his desk computer.
She was astonished to see there eighteen pictures labeled MCSWAIN—her?
She winced to see herself head-on, innocently unsuspecting, with that little frowning-furrow in her forehead, and what the Investigator had called the prissy little set of her mouth. The photos were slightly out of focus but unmistakably Sabbath McSwain.
The Intern was too surprised to be disturbed, or offended. The Intern had to marvel.
“How did you do it, Dr. Hinton? I had n-no idea . . .”
“Of course you had ‘no idea.’ That is the point of the mini-camera.”
The Investigator laughed, as if the Intern had uttered a very naïve remark.
He explained: deftly and inconspicuously he’d snapped these pictures during their conversation with a Sony mini-camera hidden in his watch, that operated with a tiny battery charged like a cell phone.
The Investigator showed her how it was done. The Investigator reminded her how he’d engaged her fullest attention as he’d spoken with her, distracting it from his wristwatch.
The Investigator smiled with a corner of his mouth. Clearly, the Investigator was pleased with himself.
“The mini-camera-watch is a new purchase. I’m still experimenting with it. I’ve used pen-cameras, which are also good. None of these produce as sharp images as, for instance, a not-extraordinary cell phone. It does take skill. It takes practice. It takes sangfroid—chutzpah. As my intern you must possess both, while seeming to possess neither.” The Investigator paused. He could not have known—(could he?)—that no one had addressed the Intern in such a tone, at once so intimate and so aggressive, in a very long time; and that the very sound of his voice left her mildly shaken.
She did not speak of course. She knew as much of sangfroid as she did of chutzpah—from reading, and not from experience. But she did not speak. The Investigator continued:
“In the world of high-tech surveillance espionage for instance, these aren’t very sophisticated tools, but my subjects don’t seem to have caught on just yet. And of course, Professor Cornelius Hinton is so unassuming.”
The Investigator laughed, out of pride at his own cleverness.
The Intern marveled at the watch, and the tiny camera contained within the watch. The Intern despaired that she would ever master such a delicate operation, under the gaze of a subject.
“My fingers are too clumsy, Dr. Hinton. I could never do that—what you did. I’d get caught, I—”
“You will not ‘get caught.’ You will take mini-pictures as well as I do, eventually better. You will begin. Here.”
The Investigator gave the Intern her first Sony mini-camera, a feminized version of his big-faced digital watch, to slip onto her slender wrist.
Her eyes filled with tears. So beautiful!
That was eight months ago. Since then, the Intern had come to know the Investigator intimately.
Not inwardly—but intimately.
To know, for instance, that when the Investigator worked at his computer, transcribing scribbled notes from his tiny notebook into a file as he did obsessively, hour following hour, day following day—he listened to Mozart.
Mozart piano sonatas, primarily.
The simplicity of an early sonata—Sonata no. 15 in F Major.
The more powerful C Major Sonata, K. 330, played by Horowitz.
Out of the computer these notes swelled in a fluid cascade. Utter clarity. Perfection.
Working nearby in the Investigator’s office, involved in more mundane secretarial tasks, the Intern would find herself listening entranced. The Investigator’s prose was often raw, rough-textured in indignation—the savage indignation of Jonathan Swift, as he described it—but his ideal was classic clarity.
“Nothing truly matters but social justice,” the Investigator said. “Even to know that we can make very little headway against injustice, still—” His voice quavered, the challenge was thrilling to him.
The Intern wondered if the “personal life” had failed the Investigator—he’d been hurt, he’d been crippled, or had hurt others, crippled and disappointed others, who could not shape their (personal) lives to an (impersonal) life of service. The Intern wondered but would not ever have asked.
Long ago the Intern had played Mozart. The early piano pieces, composed by the child-Mozart. She smiled to recall—but no, she could not recall.
That little kick in the heart—the thrill of memory! No.
All that was back there was closed to her now. They had cast her away in shame and derision. She was the ugly one, unloved.
Almost, she could recall her (near-naked) body covered in muck, excrement. Her hair, her eyes. They’d laughed in derision.
Ugly ugly ugly. There’s the ugly one.
Her family she had shamed. Their name, debased. She could not bear to think of it and so she did not, she had not and would not ever.
Except: listening to the piano notes of Mozart lifting out of the Investigator’s computer, she was compelled to recall.
Listening entranced, staring at the back of the Investigator’s head—airy-white hair, grown just slightly long over his collar—the intelligent cast to his head, as if cocked, to hear more accurately, what another, more coarse-eared, could not hear.
At such times feeling that her soul had been vaporized. Sucked from her. The crystalline piano notes, the clarity and beauty and the ease that was without haste or urgency, and in a way anonymous—as if the composer-Mozart were not an individual, a mere man, m
ortal, who had died centuries ago, but the voice of humankind itself, refined of all that is crude, gross, debased and ugly.
“McSwain!”—the Investigator was calling to her. (Often now omitting the honorific Ms. because McSwain was so much more efficient and so much more suited to the occasion.)
“Yes, sir?”
“Not busy, are you?”
“I—n-no . . .”
Of course, the Intern was busy. The Investigator had many times more work for the Intern to do than she could possibly do in a single day.
Between interns, the Investigator had “fallen behind”—it seemed.
There were ordinary household and office bills to be paid—gas, electric, taxes. There were royalty checks to be sent to the bank(s) in which the Investigator had his account(s). There were bank statements to be recorded, there were IRS documents to be filled out and sent to the Investigator’s accountant in Fort Lauderdale. More mysteriously, there were checks—some of them monthly—to be made out to numerous individuals and services. Above all there were files—manila folders stuffed with notes, documents, newspaper articles, email printouts—to which the Intern had been assigned.
“Will you get me some tea? Green tea. A large mug. And some honey. And for yourself, if you wish. Please.”
The Investigator’s natural mode of communication was giving orders to others—matter-of-fact, just slightly bossy. He’d been a PI—“principal investigator”—in experimental psychology laboratories at the Institute and at previous universities where his role had been to give orders to younger assistants, post-docs, graduate and undergraduate students.