Spies

They found they did not want to be apart, and they married.

They were as happy as they had ever wanted to be.

He spoke her language fluently without a trace of an accent.

She told him everything she thought couples told each other.

And all the time, he transmitted messages to his contacts

in another country — it was what he had been trained to do.

Eventually, the entirety of the information he collected

related to the routines of their ordinary lives.

On their anniversaries, they went out to dinner. Once a year,

they went away for a week-long holiday in the sun.

When her handlers informed her of what they had discovered —

that it was likely her husband was not who he said he was —

she refused to believe it. When they sent her instructions

to hide in a dresser drawer a document detailing her activities

during the last war and they confirmed it — he had immediately

passed on the document’s contents — she was forced to believe it.

Suddenly she saw that every secret they had ever shared

might have only been a disguise for a secret they had kept.

She made up another document. It was her record

of the sweetest memories of their lives together. She debated

with herself about the ten years of their marriage. Her memories,

she concluded, were simply illusions. Finally, she told him

everything she knew about him and exactly how she knew.

They agreed completely. To decipher the two-way deception

would only be to carry out another deception.

That was when they fell in love again — more deeply than before.

Slowly they taught each other their original names — names

hidden by the names they had stated at their own wedding.

They would repeat their names breathlessly back and forth

until it was as if they were the only words they knew.

In those moments, in the intense uttering of those names,

their voices unfolded for the two of them a single story —

in that story, when they turned together to reveal who they were,

they dispatched each other from the lives they had known.

Orders would be handed down; trained men would come for them —

but with every event in the story that they were telling

as if reciting messages sent from themselves to themselves,

they were conspiring to disappear together.

When the men arrived, they would be gone. They had departed

from the home they had made and where they had both been found out.

They departed as soon from what they had newly named their love

and went in search of where they could begin again as spies.

When they arrived at that place, the two of them would be filled

with all there was to see — it had no eyes except their own.

There was no other place they could ever leave or return to

and gather into themselves all that was hidden, no other place

where they might marry again and be marrying nothing.

And they would depart from even that place, and run shouting

out to the lonely and waiting wild earth, where they would work

for the first time the ground of their origin for their joy.