Jeremy’s security clearance was so high he wasn’t allowed to talk to himself for fear of what he might say or hear. He worked alone in a steel-reinforced cavern 300 feet under a brown plain in West Texas that not even lizards cared about, and he lived in a double-wide rooted to a spot a few yards from the rusty hatch leading to the vault.
Jeremy was at the center of a web of sensors, smart landmines, drones, and robotic dogs with gun barrels where you’d expect the heads to be. Data streaked constantly from one component to another, but he never knew whether the network was watching for threats from the outside or whether he was the threat.
Jeremy’s job was to sit in front of a super-secure desktop computer and learn as many of the country’s bloodiest, most damning secrets as granularly as his memory and sanity would allow. He didn’t have to do anything like write moralizing top-secret reports or figure out how to ensure these secrets remained buried. His only job was to bear them in silence. And at a certain point, his handlers would kill him and move a replacement into the double-wide.
This is how the United States has kept going for so long.
Sometimes, at the end of a 12-hour day, he was too drained or too distracted to push his chair away from his desk, let alone climb the ladder steps to the surface. Like the day he’d studied a digitized batch of cloudy, black-and-white photos of neat piles of human heads, of limbless torsos, of arms and of legs on a dry hilltop overlooking Havana during the Spanish-American War. Jeremy got stuck on the thought that the pyramidal orderliness of the piles looked businesslike, like the soldiers posing and smiling for the camera were waiting for a trader to come size up the merchandise. On those days he ate Cheezits and nuts from his desk, drank a couple bottles of water, and wrapped himself in a silver fire blanket to sleep in a corner.
His nightmares didn’t stick to boundaries. They woke him up two or three times a night and often haunted him throughout the day. Once he saw a pair of fists hammering the inside of a pot of coffee in the office, like someone being drowned in a glass case filled with water. One morning he was spreading jam on a piece of toast and saw pulverized intestines where the bits of strawberry were supposed to be. He couldn’t say how many dead children he’d spent quiet time with.
Jeremy was allowed to have a female companion with whom he could talk and masturbate through a secure video connection. Each relationship could last no more than six weeks. The CIA created a dating app just for him. It was populated with women who shared some of his personality traits and many of his likes and dislikes, and whose bodies he would find desirable. And most importantly every one of them could be trusted to stay silent on the subject of Jeremy Wayman. His handlers were always watching their conversations, even the hoarse, panting ones, so they didn’t need his companions to act as spies. But they believed the women would have done so if asked, and they were right.
Jeanine was one of them.
She was an electrical engineer who lived in Austin and was in the Air Force Reserves. She and Jeremy had a high compatibility score. They talked a lot at first about the Air Force Academy, which they’d both graduated from.
Jeremy told her about the time he was called to the superintendent’s office because they’d discovered his obsession with the images of the World Trade Center attacks. They monitored cadets’ internet usage and discovered that Jeremy had downloaded thousands of photos and many hours of videos of the planes hitting the towers and people jumping and the towers collapsing. An investigation, which Jeremy was unaware of, concluded it he had more than likely seen every known video of the attack and had replayed some of them hundreds of times – the ones shot from the base of the towers or close to it. The videos of bodies splattering on the plaza between the two skyscrapers he’d pulled from the dark web. The superintendent questioned Jeremy slowly and methodically, and decided within half an hour that Jeremy wasn’t a psychopath but an emotionally disturbed, but nonviolent kid whose obsession with the attacks was probably unexplainable. He ordered Jeremy to undergo weekly counseling sessions.
Jeanine stopped him, her tone incredulous but still a little flirtatious.
He must have known his time online was being scrutinized. Every cadet knew that. Maybe he wanted to get caught? Whatever he was getting from looking at those images was maybe heightened by the likelihood of being found out, the thrill of not knowing which day was the one he’d be called to the superintendent’s office. Or maybe he needed to be seen being horrified in order to actually experience it.
Was it horror?
He didn’t know. Maybe. Probably. He was 12 when he watched the towers fall on a TV on a tall rolling stand in his homeroom class. It never felt like what he thought horror would feel like – it was quieter and bluer – but maybe that’s what it was.
Did he know why he watched those videos? she asked. He did not. Nobody he knew died in the attack. No, the planes didn’t strike at a time of personal upheaval or loss. The only thing he could offer up was a dream he’d had weeks after the attack. He was standing on a street corner in downtown Indianapolis, his hometown, and the sky was gray like it usually was in late fall. No other people were around, and the only sound was a strong wind blowing around mirror-skinned office towers. Then a great groan erupted – the sound the South Tower made when it collapsed – and the buildings began to move sideways. They were trading places with one another. The tallest building, the Bank One tower, planted itself one block from where he’d remained standing, too terrified to move.
Jeremy started seeking out the videos and photographs not long after having the dream.
He and Jeanine didn’t talk for a minute or so, just stared at one another on their screens, as if they were appraising something that resisted appraisal. It was their second date. They hadn’t seen each other naked yet.
Jeanine broke the silence. He’d shared, and now she would share. She said she was raised on a farm that grew corn and beans in western Idaho. She said she’d seen a lot of the world but none of it compared to there, and she tried to describe its beauty. She said the Cascades looked like fabric dyed blue, gray, and white that had bunched up against the wall of the sky.
After a while, Jeanine told Jeremy a story about her father.
He was a farm boy. On a morning in July, he was plowing in one of the back fields when a jet fighter, the likes of which he’d never seen before – with a needle nose and all silver with no Air Force markings – crashed about 300 yards away or so. The scuttlebutt later was that it was an experimental jet. The fireball was huge. Her father, who was 15, looked around but didn’t see a pilot parachuting to the ground. The Mountain Home Air Force base was just a few miles away, so most farm people in the area knew what to look for in a crash. He stopped the tractor, jumped off and ran to crash site. The jet had broken into several pieces, and each of them was on fire. A little way off, he saw a depression in the grass and smoke and a few small flames rising from it. He ran over, scared of what he was going to find. The pilot was wearing a pale blue flight suit that had flames crawling over most of it. His right arm was twisted like he was holding it in some kind of rigid salute. Most of the sleeve and the arm’s skin had already burned away and the muscles were shriveled, exposing the bones. Some of the blue fabric was fusing with his humerus. Her father tore off his shirt and started beating the flames. When his shirt caught on fire, he beat the flames with the palms of his hands. It didn’t register in the moment that the pilot wasn’t moving or making a sound. He was wearing a flight helmet with a mirror-glass visor that covered his entire face. The glass was unclouded, like the pilot had just wiped it clean. The back of his head was on a rock, so it was tilted forward, like he was watching this kid put out the flames. Her father watched himself extinguishing the fire and then pulling away, standing up and gaping in horror. That night, he came to dinner reeking of the cologne he used to attract to girls. He didn’t say anything, but then midway through he started laughing and staring wild-eyed at his mother, and he said, “It won’t come off. The smell just won’t come off.”
Jeremy ached to touch Jeanine.
A week later, one of the robotic dogs gunned down Jeremy as he walked from the double-wide to the hatch. The shock of knowing his day had arrived was etched on his face.
Birds of Bad Omen 