realize who that guy was,” Chuck said. “I’ve seen him at the RC field.” RC was what he called his radio-controlled airplanes. “He’s got this really beautiful, really big biplane.”
“We can’t tell anyone about this,” Alex said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Chuck said.
The Macallisters were out to dinner in Chicago, so we went to Alex’s basement and mixed several celebratory cocktails of vodka and 7-Up in plastic Flintstones cups, and recounted the highlights of the mission. I had never gotten drunk before. The third or fourth time Alex played the 45 of “Twistin’ the Night Away,” we all got up and danced the Twist together, which, each of us confessed, we had secretly learned and practiced at home, watching American Bandstand.
What I most clearly remember about the night of our first mission is the clatter and chaos and terror of the swimming-pool shooting and the sulfurous smell of the caps. I find that memory heartbreaking because at the time it didn’t contain even a whiff of tragedy.
That fall, once we started eighth grade, our last year at Locust, doing algebra homework and attending student council meetings, fulfilling our goody-goody gifted-children destinies as reliably as ever, our secret missions gratified me deeply. Because then it no longer felt as if we were just putting on little shows, filling up another endless summer with do-it-ourselves entertainment. During the school year, the cold light of day made our secret missions all the more glorious: I was actually leading a double life.
5
Last night I went to Alex’s Facebook page and saw, on the tiny map next to his photo, that he’s south of Turkey, at sea, a dark blue blinking dot on the pale blue expanse of the Mediterranean. I clicked on the dark blue dot: he’s at latitude 35.37, longitude 33.38. He must be going ashore in Cyprus.
Such a miraculous immensity of useless and fascinating data! When will we stop getting a kick out of having instant access to so much information we don’t need? My freshman year in college, I read two Borges stories, “The Library of Babel” and “On Exactitude in Science,” fantasies of an ultimate library and of an actual-size national map, and then forgot about them for decades. But these days the Internet often makes me think of Borges. He saw it all coming seventy years ago.
Electronically spying on Alex halfway around the world has also made me think, naturally, yet again, of James Bond. Staging Bond games like ours would be so much easier now, with GPS and Internet search and digital databases and cellphones and texting and Skype and live webcams and real-time freeway traffic monitoring and laser pointers and the forty-dollar SpyNet stealth recording video glasses I was instructed to buy for my ten-year-old nephew this past Christmas. Too easy, I suppose, and therefore not so interesting as a fevered adolescent fantasy. On the other hand, back when we were pretending to be ruthless foreign killers and saboteurs, no one in Chicago was very worried about ruthless foreign killers and saboteurs.
Although both of us live in Los Angeles now, Alex and I have seen each other only twice in the last seven years and exchange very occasional hi-how’s-tricks emails in which we reaffirm our mutual intention to get together sometime soon. The last time we spoke was when he called me a year and a half ago, during the media speculation about my possible nomination to the Supreme Court.
Despite the fortune he’s amassed, despite the fact that he’s at least as honorable a member of his (artsy, techy, show-businessy, gay) sectors of the Establishment as I am of mine, Alex still likes to think of himself as some kind of outlaw. He made a big stink in the art world some years ago when he declared that collecting was his “art practice.” His best-known piece is an assemblage consisting of four works for which he reportedly paid $100 million and then assembled into a kind of collage: in front of the
“We can’t tell anyone about this,” Alex said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Chuck said.
The Macallisters were out to dinner in Chicago, so we went to Alex’s basement and mixed several celebratory cocktails of vodka and 7-Up in plastic Flintstones cups, and recounted the highlights of the mission. I had never gotten drunk before. The third or fourth time Alex played the 45 of “Twistin’ the Night Away,” we all got up and danced the Twist together, which, each of us confessed, we had secretly learned and practiced at home, watching American Bandstand.
What I most clearly remember about the night of our first mission is the clatter and chaos and terror of the swimming-pool shooting and the sulfurous smell of the caps. I find that memory heartbreaking because at the time it didn’t contain even a whiff of tragedy.
That fall, once we started eighth grade, our last year at Locust, doing algebra homework and attending student council meetings, fulfilling our goody-goody gifted-children destinies as reliably as ever, our secret missions gratified me deeply. Because then it no longer felt as if we were just putting on little shows, filling up another endless summer with do-it-ourselves entertainment. During the school year, the cold light of day made our secret missions all the more glorious: I was actually leading a double life.
5
Last night I went to Alex’s Facebook page and saw, on the tiny map next to his photo, that he’s south of Turkey, at sea, a dark blue blinking dot on the pale blue expanse of the Mediterranean. I clicked on the dark blue dot: he’s at latitude 35.37, longitude 33.38. He must be going ashore in Cyprus.
Such a miraculous immensity of useless and fascinating data! When will we stop getting a kick out of having instant access to so much information we don’t need? My freshman year in college, I read two Borges stories, “The Library of Babel” and “On Exactitude in Science,” fantasies of an ultimate library and of an actual-size national map, and then forgot about them for decades. But these days the Internet often makes me think of Borges. He saw it all coming seventy years ago.
Electronically spying on Alex halfway around the world has also made me think, naturally, yet again, of James Bond. Staging Bond games like ours would be so much easier now, with GPS and Internet search and digital databases and cellphones and texting and Skype and live webcams and real-time freeway traffic monitoring and laser pointers and the forty-dollar SpyNet stealth recording video glasses I was instructed to buy for my ten-year-old nephew this past Christmas. Too easy, I suppose, and therefore not so interesting as a fevered adolescent fantasy. On the other hand, back when we were pretending to be ruthless foreign killers and saboteurs, no one in Chicago was very worried about ruthless foreign killers and saboteurs.
Although both of us live in Los Angeles now, Alex and I have seen each other only twice in the last seven years and exchange very occasional hi-how’s-tricks emails in which we reaffirm our mutual intention to get together sometime soon. The last time we spoke was when he called me a year and a half ago, during the media speculation about my possible nomination to the Supreme Court.
Despite the fortune he’s amassed, despite the fact that he’s at least as honorable a member of his (artsy, techy, show-businessy, gay) sectors of the Establishment as I am of mine, Alex still likes to think of himself as some kind of outlaw. He made a big stink in the art world some years ago when he declared that collecting was his “art practice.” His best-known piece is an assemblage consisting of four works for which he reportedly paid $100 million and then assembled into a kind of collage: in front of the
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