5

Wednesday, January 20, 2021, 8:45 AM Eastern Standard Time

Joe Durcan walked slowly west down M Street to kill some of the time until he met with his contacts from the Student Nonviolent Resistance Movement.

He was wondering why he had felt the impulse to go to church this particular morning. He had not attended a religious service, for anything other than the usually premature weddings of his military comrades, or their definitely premature funerals, for a very long time. He did not dwell on theological matters as a rule. Some around him seemed to get far more out of their faith than he ever had: it seemed to make them more certain, to give a structure to their lives, to keep them on track. But for a subset of these, it made them more certain that they were members of a superior club; it kept them on a track that to Joe appeared to lead to nowhere good, and to make them despise those who were not in their group.

Joe had not needed certainty when he had enlisted. He was certain he wanted to get away from where he was and the people around him, to submit himself to a discipline and stop thinking for a while, to accomplish the tasks he was given and not to question their ultimate purpose. He had been young and energetic and very, very serious. He could sense that his parents, who had divorced after he left high school, worried about how serious he seemed to be. If only they had been a little more serious, he thought… He quickly banished that thought from his mind.

So much of everything else he saw around him growing up seemed to him to be very deeply unserious. He supposed the kids around him thought him somewhat humorless. He was okay with that. They never seemed to have a thought or pose or action uninflected by irony. He considered that a waste of life. Their all-pervasive humor seemed to be a massive attempt to seek relief from reality, which they apparently could not face as it was, unmediated. “Look, I just made a joke about death! I’m not scared!”

But they were scared. The constant tension-breaking by means of humor quickly irritated Joe, and made him think that the people addicted to that momentary relief were incapable of courageously facing things as they were.

Joe had no problem facing reality. Joe was a reality junkie. He had somehow imbibed very early on the truth about life: it would end. That fact did not scare him. It felt natural and even, at some level, not wholly undesirable. He was not suicidal. But he felt that the vast majority of humanity spent far too much time denying this reality, either through defensive humor, or simply by not thinking about it. That was not an option in combat. The only way Joe had found to function in combat was to go in assuming that he was going to die, and to fall back on his training to accomplish as much of his mission as he could before that happened. It all was going to end at some point. Keeping that fact somewhere near the front of your consciousness seemed to ground him. Maybe that was his religion.

But there had recently been a disturbance in his consciousness that he was having a harder and harder time ignoring.

What was he, exactly?

***

A year and a half previous, he would have had no trouble answering that question. He was a soldier. He was fighting to save people he knew and liked, and their families and communities, from radical Islamic fundamentalists who were fighting ferociously to force their religion upon those innocent civilians. He was an American and he was a Ranger and a member of an elite Special Operations unit. He had no mental reservations about any of this.

However, on the plane at the end of his tour, heading back to his own country, about to leave the service, a lot of conflict and confusion had arisen. Some of it was familiar from his pre-military existence; some of it, however, was new. He was angry and confused by the sudden betrayal, by his own government, of the allies he had fought beside to rid the region of militant theocrats. Having no job waiting for him, he had been referred by his CO to a famous ex-Special Ops CEO of a security firm, who happened (by chance? or was it planned?) to be on his military flight home. That CEO had told him that his firm had recently contracted with the federal government to infiltrate what he described as incipient domestic terrorist cells.

“Are they affiliated with ISIL? Or other Islamic fundamentalist groups?”

The CEO paused for a moment, then said, “Unclear. That’s part of what we need to find out.”

“Sounds pretty alarming,” Joe said. “I had no idea the threat was so close to home.”

“They are also affiliated with the opposition to the President,” the CEO, whose name was Maxfield King, told him. “The big guy gave me the job to get in there and disrupt these actors’ ability to impede his agenda. If people knew all the links between the Deep State and some of these groups, and the further links to foreign terrorist groups, it would blow their minds.”

“The big guy?”

“The President. He told me to use whatever means I deemed necessary to get in and mess up this ‘Resistance,’” Max told him.

Joe considered this for a second. He was not a big fan of this President. But he shared with most of his brothers-in-arms an instinctive revulsion for the woman who had run against him four years earlier. Everything she said seemed carefully calculated and tinged with phoniness. Her voice was harsh, and yet all her speeches seemed inauthentic. Whoever she was on a stage, she was not herself. She seemed to stand for all the bullshit he had grown up around and rejected. Her only skills seemed to be in bullshit things, as opposed to the very concrete technical capabilities that kept him alive in “denied territory.” She wouldn’t last a day there, he thought.

Then he thought again about the current President. He probably wouldn’t last any longer in a firefight, he thought – maybe less, he had to admit. But when he spoke, he did not ever seem to be engaged in the sort of ass-covering, guarded exercise in which his opponent specialized. He was fun to watch. He just let it fly. He knew how to rev an audience up. He was an egomaniac, and maybe an idiot, and probably even a liar. But he wasn’t the painfully calculated elitist he had defeated. Joe was glad he did not have to listen to her voice for four years.

On the other hand, the President’s voice could not be said to be less grating. He was probably not being fair to the President’s opponent, and he had to admit to himself there was an element of misogyny in his attitude.

But after seven months in a combat zone, he had zero appetite for bending over backwards to be polite, and his bank account was pretty low. If this guy was offering paying work for the President, he decided to himself, he could get over his scruples. It didn’t feel like a perfect fit, but it felt like a better fit than working for his opponent would have. Or being unemployed.

“How long have you been deployed?” Max asked him.

“Well, you probably know Spec Ops do pretty short rotations,” Joe said. “But this last one was longer than normal. I was there for seven months. Before that I was training and getting physically ready and all that. Even had some language classes.”

“So you probably have not been paying too much attention to domestic politics for the past three or four years.”

“Not really,” Joe admitted. “No time.” In fact, he had spent a lot of his scant downtime playing video games and streaming superhero and action movies.

“What language did they train you in? Arabic?”

“A little, but more Kurdish.”

“Ah.” Max was silent for a moment. “What did you think when the President pulled the plug?”

Joe seemed about to say something quickly, then thought it over. Finally, he said, “Well, as you can imagine, it was not a lot of fun when the decision came down. We had a lot of crap thrown at us. And I mean that literally. But those decisions get made way above my pay grade.”

“Yours not to question why?”

“Something like that.”

“But do you hold any lingering grudge against the President over that?”

Joe thought about telling him the truth. You’re goddamned right I hold a grudge against that fat non-serving ignorant pig, and I will till I am dead. He had barely left the battlefield, after all; was he already civilian enough to start shading the truth, just a thousand miles out of Qatar?

Apparently he was. Do I owe this stranger the truth, really? he thought.

“Lingering grudge against the President? Wow, I don’t think the President needs to be too concerned with what I think of him. That sounds like another thing far above my pay grade. I mean, what am I, some Democrat presidential candidate? I just left the AOR. I just want to get home and figure out what to do with the rest of my life.”

“Maybe I can help with that,” Max said. “Well, at least for the short term. You want some contract work? I could use a guy like you. Did you go to college?”

“Two years,” Joe said. “I’d like to finish that up.”

“Good man,” Max said. “I think you’ll quickly see that college is very easy compared to being in Special Ops. Courses are tailored to the average college kid. The average college kid has something close to ADHD, and half the time he’s on drugs or drunk or so obsessed with chasing the opposite sex that you should be able to do twice the work in half the time. I suspect you can finish your undergrad degree in a year.”

“I hope that’s true. And I could use a paying gig,” Joe said. “What precisely did you have in mind?”

And that was how Joe had learned about the Student Nonviolent Resistance Movement. “Snerm,” they pronounced it. The way Max described it, it was a cancer on the American body politic, an octopus thrusting its tentacles from campus to campus, perverting the impressionable minds of American youth, setting the whole country up for destruction. It had tens of thousands of committed dues-paying members, and they were being indoctrinated by unknown, probably foreign-based groups, possibly funded by the usual suspect foreign-born Jewish liberal billionaire under the rubric of supporting “democracy in America,” but in fact, they appeared to be devoted to the destruction of capitalism and traditional American values.

“You know, America was never supposed to be a democracy,” Max said. “It was meant to be a republic. The Founders distrusted the rabble. They wanted the enlightened wealthy to rule, elected by men of property.”

“White men of property, as I recall,” Joe said.

“Well, yes, back then,” Max said, giving him a slightly suspicious look. “But the general principle should still apply. The people don’t decide things directly in our system. The whole thing is designed to blunt the power of the ignorant majority. It all goes back to Plato.”

Joe had no response to this, not having gotten deeply into the Greek philosophers by sophomore year at the state school he had attended.

“You heard of Ban Wilson? He’s an expert on all this. A real scholar. He’s kind of a blowhard, and he sure has an ego, but he does do a great spiel on it. Liberals have perverted the Founders’ vision, removed the checks that the Constitution originally intended between direct mob rule and the running of our government. Ban also has a great analysis of how this administrative state grew up like kudzu all over the legitimate government, and how it must be rooted out and destroyed. He also shows how we’ve lost our nationalistic pride, and unless we restore it, we’ll be overrun by inferior cultures and the United States will decay into third-rate status.”

“And this job will help with all that?”

“Well, I don’t know. This is more of a straightforward security and intelligence job. There used to be an outfit called COINTELPRO in the 1960s that did something similar. People forget that we used to have bombs going off in this country on a regular basis. Every day or two in the late ’60s, early ’70s, bombs going off in banks, universities, government buildings. And those bombs weren’t set by conservatives, I can tell you.”

“And this – what was the name of the organization you wanted infiltrated?”

“Snerm. Student Nonviolent Resistance Movement. What a misleading name.”

“So, I go in, infiltrate, attend meetings, try to figure out their plans, and report back?”

“That’s about it.”

“What if someone needs to be arrested?”

“We’ll handle that. The important thing is, you need to preserve your cover. If you yourself have to get arrested to maintain cover, as long as you aren’t engaged in any serious criminality, we’ll take care of you. Just report back if there appears to be some serious stuff going down.”

***

And so he had taken the job. The pay was far superior to anything he could have gotten elsewhere on such short notice. The hours were minimal. All he had to do was to be available to attend meetings of SNRM, which were conveniently almost all in the evening, and write up intelligence reports to send back to Max. Occasionally Max would have him come in and talk over what he was finding.

The main trouble was that he wasn’t finding anything. SNRM did not seem to have the slightest connection to foreign terrorist groups or even foreign-born American Jewish liberal billionaires. It appeared to be exactly what it advertised itself to be: a group of people who were deeply concerned about the direction of the country and who were seeking out nonviolent but dramatic ways to demonstrate their displeasure with the President. That, unfortunately, was a message Max was not prepared to hear.

“You have to dig deeper,” Max said. “The connections are there. I’ve heard rumblings.”

Joe suggested that Max should tell him what the rumblings were, so he could investigate them for himself.

“No can do,” Max said. “Sources and methods.”

So, Joe kept going to the meetings, which included plenty of the kind of college student Max had mentioned: aimless, affluent, sometimes chemically altered, not-very-hard-working undergraduates who did not have a clue as to how good they had it. Some of the girls tried to get close to Joe. He tended to resist these overtures. If he had been eighteen or twenty, he thought to himself, he would almost certainly have dived right in and plunged into what he would have seen, at that age, as a serious relationship with one of them. But at twenty-six, he saw these young women as so completely lacking in life experience as to not even be living on the same planet as he.

But there was one woman who impressed him: Vaneida Allen. She was a professor of history at a local historically black university. She was tall and lean, with impressive arm tattoos. She seemed to be in her thirties; like many men his age (mid-twenties), Joe was a terrible judge of the age of anyone who was not within a few years of his own. He thought she was pretty clearly gay. She was faculty advisor for the DC chapter of SNRM, essentially running the organization as student leaders rotated in and out, and she was the best off-the-cuff speaker he had ever seen. Eventually, after one meeting at her college, he wandered up to her and asked her how she had come essentially to head up the local organization. 

“Who are you?” she had asked.

He told her who she was. Up to a point. Veteran, recently back from Iraq. Disillusioned with the administration’s betrayal of the Kurds. Came home and was distressed with the assault on democracy. Why had he fought for democracy overseas when it was being degraded here at home. Then he threw in a few more talking points he had heard at the meetings to round it out. Vote suppression. Rollback of civil rights. Destruction of the safety net. Blah blah blah.

Vaneida looked a little skeptical at this extra frosting on Joe’s disinformation cake.

“You’ve been paying close attention in the meetings,” she said, finally.

Joe sensed her skepticism and decided to come clean. Up to a point.

“Listen,” he said. “I’ve been overseas a while, and I had a job that completely consumed me. I was never a political junkie. I was a soldier. I was trying to save people from enslavement or worse, and also I was trying every day not to get killed. I did not have a lot of bandwidth to absorb political news from home. But when the President screwed the Kurds, that woke me up, right when I was finishing my tour. I was disgusted. America couldn’t do that, I thought. We’re supposed to be the good guys. So, I came back in a mood to acquire more information. A lot of it, I have gotten here. So if it sounds like I’m parroting talking points, well, guilty. A lot of what I have heard here I never knew before.”

“Are you a student here?”

“I’m studying on-line at a for-profit. I might want to sign up for some courses here, if that’s possible.”

“Normally they only take full-fledged four-year students. But there have been some exceptions.”

“I’ll look into it,” he said. “I got halfway through college before I enlisted.”

“I’d like to hear more about your experience over there,” Vaneida said.

“I am not crazy about talking about it, to be honest,” he said.

“Well, for whatever it’s worth, I was not at all surprised when the President betrayed the Kurds. By my count, this is at least the third time we have done so in the past century. Though this was the most abrupt abandonment.”

“I’ve heard some people say that. I’d like to learn more about that whole history. Hey,” Joe said abruptly, “This is going to sound like a come-on, but it isn’t. I would like to meet for coffee sometime. I could use some advice about my academic career, I want to know more about the Kurds, and American foreign policy history in general, and what needs to be done, and in return maybe I can tell you a little about what I saw over there.”

Vaneida stared at him for a moment. Then she spoke.

“If I met all my students for coffee, that would be a very inefficient method of conveying knowledge,” she said.

“Well, I’m not your student. Not yet, anyway. I’d like to discuss SNRM with you too. I feel like a complete rookie when it comes to a lot of what you guys are talking about. I’m 26, but almost every one of the freshmen in here could run rings around me, historical knowledge-wise and ‘wok-ed’-ness wise. I guess I need some remedial education.”

“Okay,” she said. “Come to my office tomorrow at 3PM. We’ll get some coffee and talk.” She handed him a card.

“Okay. Thanks,” Joe said.

And so they began to meet every Wednesday at 3 for coffee. Joe told himself it was part of his job, to infiltrate this dangerous target organization, but he knew it was actually because he liked and respected Vaneida, he was learning a lot from her, and also, he could admit to himself now as he approached the Rock Creek bridge, because he was lonely.

That last part bothered him. He did not like feeling weak, or dependent on other human beings. He could tell she was intrigued by his wartime experience; though it still made him uncomfortable to talk about that, he pushed through that in order to preserve the relationship.

He in turn was reading more than he had ever read in his life, drinking in the things she was teaching him. She was starting to make a hell of a lot of sense. He felt tectonic plates moving inside him that had not moved in a very long time, if ever. It wasn’t romantic – obviously, it never could be – but it was, to him, a very serious relationship.

And then the virus hit, and canceled all face-to-face meetings for a long time, both for SNRM and for the two of them. Meeting over a computer screen was simply not the same, though they did try it from time to time, mostly requested by him. The post-George Floyd protests further interrupted their previous routine; Vaneida seemed to be spending a fair amount of time at them, while Joe mostly stayed home and read and tried to pile up on-line college credits. His reports to Max had for some time now been little more than a tissue of tantalizing distortions meant to continue this connection. The virus provided an excuse for the lack of damning intelligence about SNRM from Joe, but it was an excuse that could not last forever.

It was during this period when he began to be beset by the feeling that he did not know who the hell he was. It was pretty obvious that Max’s ideas about SNRM were completely nuts. And that did not speak well for the President’s entire agenda, which his treachery to the Kurds had already caused Joe to doubt. He could not figure out whether Max himself was a real bullshit artist, or whether he believed his own bullshit, which would be, in a way, far worse. But Joe was in deep now, and he could not see a good way out.

He felt more at home, in general, with the libertarian right, because they seemed to have the lowest bullshit quotient of any part of the political spectrum. But he had never really had time for politics before he came back to the States. Before he had enlisted, he had been easily irritated by people obsessed by politics, whether from the left or the right. Their obsession seemed to come from some psychologically questionable place. They always seemed to be selling something, trying to convince you to be the same as them so they wouldn’t feel so alone in the universe. It was a lot like the impulse that led people to engage in compulsive ironic humor, or to join religious cults. They were bullshit artists, and bullshit artists always seemed to be bullshitting themselves most of all.

But Vaneida, he knew, was not a bullshit artist. She seemed calm and well-informed and was not eager to proselytize him or anyone else. She was no communist, nor did she have “Islamofascist sympathies,” both things that Max insisted must pervade her group. Her outlook seemed to arise more from the experience of her particular racial background and sexual orientation than from any externally inculcated ideology. If you wanted to know something, she would try to give you information. If you weren’t interested, she would not push. Unlike Maxfield King, she saw the world, it seemed to Joe, basically as it was, and then asked herself, what, if anything, should or could be done about it?

And Joe had begun to realize that he agreed with almost everything she said, and had begun to think of himself not as a spy for the President on SNRM, but maybe as a sort of double agent, with a preference for her side.

He knew it was a rationalization. Until he came clean to Vaneida, he was betraying her just as the President betrayed the Kurds: using her to achieve his own short-term ends. And that feeling was creating an unsustainable conflict within him. Something had to give.

He had been walking north along Rock Creek, giving a wide berth to masked cyclists and joggers, but no clear answer came to him. He looked at his watch. It was 9:30. As he turned around to walk to the rendezvous point for the Inauguration, a cyclist almost hit him.

“Pick a side!” the cyclist shouted as he swiftly receded to the north.

 

© 2020 Nolan O’Brian