The Nowhere Man

10 The Strange Language of Intimacy

Blood on his neck, swollen cheek, wrists still scraped raw from handcuffs. Evan’s small for a twelve-year-old, scrawny, and can’t remember the last time he had a full belly.

He has undergone a daunting set of initiation rites to land here, in this passenger seat of this dark sedan, heading God knows where. He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know what he will be used for. He doesn’t know anything aside from the name of the man driving.

Jack Johns.

Maybe this time everything will be different, and—

Evan stops the thought. Hope is dangerous. In his brief life, he’s done his best to eradicate it.

Jack clears his throat. “You no longer exist,” he tells Evan. “You went away for a felony and disappeared into the system.”

“’Kay,” Evan says.

Jack bobs his bulldog head.

An hour later they cross the murky green water of the Potomac and forge west into Arlington, Virginia. The commercial district gives way to tree-lined streets, and then there are more trees and fewer streets. Finally they turn off between twin stone pillars onto a dirt road and wend their way back to a two-story farmhouse.

The silence has grown oppressively thick in the car, and it feels risky to break it. Evan waits until they’ve pulled in to the circular driveway and gotten out by the old-fashioned porch. Then he asks, “Where are we?” and Jack says, “Home.”

The house smells damp but pleasant, redolent of burned wood. Evan regards the foyer and the family room with suspicion. He doesn’t trust the maroon carpet runner up the stairs, the plush brown corduroy couches, the pots hanging from a brass rack in the kitchen. The spectacle of undeniable domesticity leaves him humming with distrust.

“Would you like to go upstairs, see your room?” Jack asks.

“No.”

“What do you want?”

“I want to know what I’m here for.”

“Later.”

Evan gathers his courage, does his best to summon Van Sciver. “After everything I did to get here, I think I’ve earned some respect.”

Jack regards him calmly. “If you have to ask for respect, you’re not gonna get it.”

Evan does his best to digest this. The words feel less like a slap than a solid wall dropped before him from a lofty height.

Jack says, “Someone smarter than either of us once said, ‘If you want a quality, act like you already have it.’”

Evan stares at Jack, and Jack stares right back at him.

Evan blinks first. “’Kay,” he says.

They head up the flight of stairs to a dormer room with a wooden bed. On the mattress the sheets are folded crisply, ironed into neat squares.

Jack’s voice floats over his shoulder. “I get paid for this. To have you here. It’s a job. The money is not why I took you or want you here. I don’t want you to find out later, for it to be a surprise.”

“Who’s paying you?”

“Later.”

Jack walks to the desk, lifts the blotter, and uses a fresh handkerchief to wipe away an invisible speck on the polished wood surface. He folds the handkerchief neatly and inserts it back into his rear pocket. “Make your bed.”

Jack leaves Evan alone in the room. Evan struggles with the sheets. He pulls and tugs but cannot get them on properly, let alone taut and wrinkle-free.

He goes downstairs and pokes around until he finds Jack in the garage, meticulously cleaning a handgun. Evan stiffens at the sight of the weapon, then swallows down his fear.

“The sheets aren’t right,” Evan says.

Jack keeps his gaze on the skinny brush, poking it in and out of the bore. “The sheets aren’t the problem. I’ve used them to make up that bed many times.”

Evan takes a breath. “Okay,” he says. “I can’t make the bed right.”

Jack’s eyes tick up above the top of the barrel. “And?”

It takes a moment for Evan to understand what Jack is waiting for him to say. He finds the words: “Can you help me?”

Jack lays aside the gun. “Be happy to.”

Back upstairs, Jack regards the sloppy bed as Evan squirms. Jack walks over, inverts the edge of the fitted sheet over his hand, and shows Evan how to flop it neatly over the corner of the mattress. Jack continues straightening the sheets, keeping his body out of the way so Evan can watch and learn.

“I’ll never be able to do it that good,” Evan says.

“You don’t have to. You just have to make it better than you did last time.” Jack snaps the top sheet into place, and it responds like something scared into competence. “Next time. That’s all that matters.” He finishes and pulls himself upright beside the pristine bed. He passes Evan on his way out. “Would you like to go for a walk?”

Outside, Jack gives a whistle, and a moment later a big dog bounds around the corner of the porch and joins them, keeping a few feet off Jack’s right thigh. The dog is at least a hundred pounds, with a honey-gold coat and what looks like a racing stripe of reversed fur on his spine.

Evan says, “Can I pet him?”

“Strider can be touchy. Let him get used to you.”

Their shoes crunch pleasingly in the tall grass. They make their way up a slight hill, and the view is all leafy canopy and fields.

“What are we doing?” Evan asks.

“Walking.”

“You know what I mean.”

“We’re deciding if we’re gonna like each other or not.”

Evan’s training begins the next day, a test of will that puts the previous ones to shame. At knifepoint in a dark barn, he learns his destiny. His future is illuminated, each revelation like a burst of fireworks.

To the world and even to his own instructors, he will be known only as Orphan X.

As his handler, Jack accompanies him to every session. There is breaching and shooting and hand-to-hand, psyops and spycraft and espionage technology. Evan generally returns home exhausted and bloodied. Their days are regimented.

In the evenings they set up in the study, just them and a framed photo of a woman, which rests alone on a side table. She has waist-long hair, a slender neck, and thick-framed eyeglasses from another decade. Evan sneaks glances at her now and then when Jack’s not looking. They read a lot, mostly biographies and history books. Evan finds them boring until Jack talks about them, and then the stories come to life. They listen to classical-music records, too. One night an opera is playing in the background as Evan tries to decipher a chapter about Thomas Jefferson.

Jack’s voice interrupts the music. “Do you hear that?”

When Evan looks up, he sees that Jack’s eyes are closed. The opera singer wails ever louder.

“Nine high C’s. When Pavarotti sang this aria at the Met on February seventeenth, 1972, he had seventeen curtain calls. Seventeen.”

Evan does not know what an aria is, or the Met, or a curtain call. So he asks, “Were you there?”

“No.”

Evan hesitates. “Where were you?”

Jack closes the book around his thumb. The textured skin around his eyes shifts a bit as he seems to decide whether or not to answer. “Laos,” he says.

With this response Evan senses they have broken through onto new terrain, and this is at once exciting and perilous. He ponders a reply, but even rehearsed in his head the words sound clumsy.

He dares to gesture toward the tarnished silver frame. “How’d she die? Your wife?”

Jack says, “An embassy bombing. In Kuwait.”

“Was she a spy?”

“She was a secretary.”

“Oh.” Evan waits until Jack’s attention returns to his book. He hesitates, unsure how to proceed in this foreign tongue, the strange language of intimacy. Then he says, “Her eyes are friendly.”

Jack’s gaze stays fixed on the book. “Thank you, Evan,” he says, in a voice even more gravelly than usual.

The alarm goes off early the next morning. Strider is curled on the rug in the dormer room, where he now sleeps. Evan scratches behind the dog’s ears, then makes the bed. Pausing, he realizes that the sheets are tight enough to bounce a dumbbell on.

Next time, he thinks. The two best words in the English language.

When he gets downstairs, he expects to find Jack at the stove, readying the omelet pan, but instead he has his keys in hand and is ready to go. They drive to a Veterans Day parade in town. Evan stands at Jack’s side, and they watch the open-topped cars drive by. There are fire engines and fried dough and soldiers with empty sleeves pinned up at the elbows. There are crying moms and old men with watery eyes, their hands over their hearts. There are babies in strollers and young wives with firm tanned skin and lush curls and golden sunlight falling across them, turning the tiny hairs of their arms white. Evan feels an odd sense at his core, a blurring of himself into something greater, all these people joined in common emotion, and the fine, fine flags snap overhead, and he breathes the powdered sugar and the scent of sunscreen and feels the pulse of all these hearts beating inside his own chest. That night when he slides into bed and gazes at the slanted ceiling, he feels the pulse still moving through his body, an almost sexual ache in his cells like the swell of an orchestra on Jack’s old record player, the sound track of desire, of belonging.

He thinks of Jack sleeping downstairs and how that makes him feel safe. Jack has cracked the world open like a geode, laying its glittering treasures bare. As long as Evan has Jack at his side, he can do anything. A sensation rolls through his body, unfamiliar and warm, and at last he is able to name it.

It is the feeling of being given a place in the world.