The Switch

59

Will wanted chili con carne but decided he would get a salad.

He could smell the chili as soon as he got down to the ground floor beneath the Hart and Dirksen buildings. As he walked into the cafeteria he saw several people walking by with chili and corn bread on their trays, and it looked tremendously appetizing.

But he would get a salad. Just as he’d done every day this entire week. He wasn’t just getting tired of salads; he was beginning to actively resent them.

He was hungry and the line was moving slowly.

He was mulling over what Arthur Collins had said to him. About ambition being as bad as anger or jealousy. Being an insatiable drive. And: Be who you are now.

He didn’t really understand, in any depth, what Artie Collins meant. But he wondered what could have turned a CIA killer into a pacifist philosopher. He wondered if you could go the other way just as well.

Someone he knew walked by, the chief of staff to the Democratic senator from California. Will nodded, and the guy nodded back. He was sort of a tool.

Then someone else familiar came by, and it took him a second to recognize Gary Sapolsky. And when he did, his stomach clenched, and he felt a splash of acid in his throat.

Gary was holding an overstuffed bankers box. On top of it were several desk picture frames. His normally chafed face was a surprisingly dark crimson, and his thinning hair was mussed. His eyes were bloodshot.

“Gary, you okay?”

“I just got fired.” Gary said it in a small, tight voice, as if he didn’t believe his own words.

“What do you mean, ‘fired’?”

“Krauss put me on indefinite leave without pay, but we know what that means.” Don Krauss was Gary’s boss and the staff director of the Senate intelligence committee.

“What?” Will now realized what had happened. The boss had casually mentioned Gary’s name at her security interview as someone she wondered about. That was all it had taken.

“Do you know my salary is supposed to support my wife and two kids and both of my elderly parents too?”

Gary sounded angry, and it took Will a beat to realize the guy wasn’t being accusatory. Just angry at how unfair the world is. “That’s terrible.” Will did indeed know that but had forgotten. He felt bad about what had happened to Gary but tried to put it out of his head.

“Krauss thinks I was the one who took classified materials out of the SCIF! I told him no goddamned way I did that. But he just sort of weaseled around and said he was acting on ‘guidance’ from the NSA. That goddamned toad.”

“Sorry about that, man,” Will said, putting a consoling hand on Gary’s sloped left shoulder. “That really sucks.”

“Can you put in a word for me?”

“Uh, sure. You mean, with—”

“Krauss, right. That would be great.”

“How long is this for?”

Gary shook his head. “Indefinite. But I’m not coming back. I know how the system works.”

“They think it was you who” — the line moved forward, and Will lowered his voice so as not to be overheard — “took the documents?”

“Insane, right?”

This could be a very good thing, he realized. If the NSA fingered Gary Sapolsky for the leak, that took the boss off the list.

“They have any evidence for this?”

“Of course there isn’t any evidence. I didn’t do it.”

“But I mean, did they say they had something?”

Gary shook his head. “I didn’t talk to them. I wasn’t allowed to. Krauss called me in and told me to pack and get out, and they brought in an extra security guard to stand by my desk and make sure I didn’t take anything or copy anything I’m not supposed to.”

The line had started moving quickly, and Will had reached the salad bar. He stuck out his hand and only then realized that Gary’s hands were both gripping the file box. He withdrew it. “That totally sucks, Gary,” Will said. “I’ll see what I can do.”

A strange memory floated into his brain. He was sixteen and his brother, Clay, was thirteen. This was just two or three years after their father had died.

Will was watching TV in the family room while Clay was doing something in the garage, probably putting together one of his model cars using that chemical-smelly glue he wasn’t allowed to use in the house. It was just the two of them at home, while their mom was at work, probably showing a house. Technically, Will, as the eldest, was in charge.

He heard a sudden shriek, and he got up and ran over to the door that led into the garage, where the sound was coming from.

He flung the door open and saw Clay cowering in the far corner of the garage. Around twenty feet away from him was some kind of a big animal, hissing and growling at Clay, trapping him in the corner. A cat? No. He saw a striped tail flicking, saw the black bandit-mask fur around the eyes, realized it was a raccoon.

His heart began to wallop. While Mom was away, he was supposed to take care of his younger brother, who stood there red-faced and gasping, his hands out, trying to protect himself against what Will only later learned was a rabid raccoon.

Frantically, Will scrambled over to the wall of tools and yanked down the longest one he could find, a sharp-bladed shovel. He took a few steps toward the raccoon, which continued to menace Clay, hiss-growling. Will tinged the shovel’s steel blade against the concrete floor.

The raccoon spun around, facing Will, fangs bared, hissing, tail whipping around. It was mangy-looking and matted. Its bandit-masked face looked crazed. Then it reared up, rounded its back — and suddenly sprang at him, making its horrible hissing growl as it flew through the air.

Terrified, Will stepped back, a reflex.

But then, in the next second, he felt something he’d never felt before. His fright, his fear of the maddened raccoon, abruptly turned into outrage, a kind of indignation, an anger that this beast had dared to launch at him.

And Will leapt forward and swung the shovel with a strength he didn’t know he had. It clanged against the oil-stained concrete of the garage floor. Then he swung again, with a force even greater, and it hit the raccoon in the head.

The raccoon screamed, and a spray of blood spurted into the air. The blade of the shovel, Will saw, had sliced into the creature’s head or neck.

Yet it was still alive, and it kept screeching and hissing, its claws flailing around, gouging the air.

Will lifted the shovel to take another whack, but the raccoon’s body lifted along with it, as if it had attached itself. He was disgusted and horrified, but his heart was still skittering along and he had superpowers. He slammed the shovel’s blade against the floor, and then something repulsive happened: the creature’s head came off its body, rolling a few inches away, into a little greenish puddle of transmission fluid.

He had beheaded the animal. Gagging, he dropped the handle. It clattered on the concrete.

Clay took a few tentative steps and said, “Cool!”

At supper, Clay told the story of Will’s heroism, and Will kept himself from making fun of the way Clay screamed like a silly little kid. Will shrugged modestly, said it was no big deal, even though it had been the most intense thing he had ever been through.

And he never forgot what he’d learned that day, about the way his deep terror of the raccoon had transmuted into outrage and bravery and a wild, intoxicating fury.

And about how a frightened person could become a brave one.