Black Box, Page 4

  Remember that, should you die, your Field Instructions will provide a record of your mission and lessons for those who follow.

  Remember that, should you die, you will have triumphed merely by delivering your physical person into our hands.

  The boat’s movement on the sea will remind you of a cradle.

  You’ll recall your mother rocking you in her arms when you were a baby.

  You’ll recall that she has always loved you fiercely and entirely.

  You’ll discover that you have forgiven her.

  You’ll understand that she concealed your paternity out of faith that her own inexhaustible love would be enough.

  The wish to tell your mother that you forgive her is yet another reason you must make it home alive.

  You will not be able to wait, but you will have to wait.

  We can’t tell you in advance what direction relief will come from.

  We can only reassure you that we have never yet failed to recover a citizen agent, dead or alive, who managed to reach a Hotspot.

  44

  Hotspots are not hot.

  Even a warm night turns frigid at the bottom of a wet boat.

  The stars are always there, scattered and blinking.

  Looking up at the sky from below can feel like floating, suspended, and looking down.

  The universe will seem to hang beneath you in its milky glittering mystery.

  Only when you notice a woman like yourself, crumpled and bleeding at the bottom of a boat, will you realize what has happened.

  You’ve deployed the Dissociation Technique without meaning to.

  There is no harm in this.

  Released from pain, you can waft free in the night sky.

  Released from pain, you can enact the fantasy of flying that you nurtured as a child.

  Keep your body in view at all times; if your mind loses track of your body, it may be hard—even impossible—to reunite the two.

  As you waft free in the night sky, you may notice a steady rhythmic churning in the gusting wind.

  Helicopter noise is inherently menacing.

  A helicopter without lights is like a mixture of bat, bird, and monstrous insect.

  Resist the urge to flee this apparition; it has come to save you.

  45

  Know that in returning to your body you are consenting to be racked, once again, by physical pain.

  Know that in returning to your body you are consenting to undertake a jarring reimmersion into an altered life.

  Some citizen agents have chosen not to return.

  They have left their bodies behind, and now they shimmer sublimely in the heavens.

  In the new heroism, the goal is to transcend individual life, with its petty pains and loves, in favor of the dazzling collective.

  You may picture the pulsing stars as the heroic spirits of former agent beauties.

  You may imagine Heaven as a vast screen crowded with their dots of light.

  46

  If you wish to return to your body, it is essential that you reach it before the helicopter does.

  If it helps, count backward.

  By eight, you should be close enough to see your bare and dirty feet.

  By five, you should be close enough to see the bloody dress wrapped around your shoulder.

  By three, you should be close enough to see the dimples you were praised for as a child.

  By two, you should hear the shallow bleating of your breath.

  47

  Having returned to your body, witness the chopper’s slow, throbbing descent.

  It may appear to be the instrument of a purely mechanical realm.

  It may look as if it had come to wipe you out.

  It may be hard to believe that there are human beings inside it.

  You won’t know for sure until you see them crouching above you, their faces taut with hope, ready to jump.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  My working title for this story was “Lessons Learned” and my hope was to tell a story whose shape would emerge from the lessons the narrator derived from each step in the action, rather than from straightforward narration of the action itself. The atomised structure made this piece seem like a possible candidate for serialization on Twitter – something I’d long been interested in trying. Writing fiction for Twitter is not a new idea, of course, but it’s a rich one – because of the intimacy of reaching people through their phones, and because of the odd poetry that can happen in 140 characters.

  ‘Another impulse behind “Black Box” was to take a character from a naturalistic story and travel with her into a different genre. Jon Scieszka first put this idea into my head with his spectacular meta-fictional picture book, The True Story of the Three Little Pigs!, in which the three pigs move through books drawn in radically different styles, transforming visually into the style of each world they enter. I wondered whether I might do something analogous with a character from my novel, A Visit From the Goon Squad: create a cartoon version of that person, for example – or, in this case, a spy thriller version.

  I wrote the story by hand in a Japanese notebook that had eight rectangles on each page, and it took me a year to control and calibrate that material into what is now “Black Box”.