skit #40: spies & counterspies

I felt the unbroken cyanide capsule stowed away in your hollow tooth when we kissed outside the particle accelerator. And I felt you feel mine. We both know only highly confidential assets receive possess such dire escape methods. These are our vulnerabilities. You forwent your chance to kill me, so it must not be your mission. Yet maybe you have concluded it is not my mission either, but even that I do not know.

There must be a reason they have instructed us to operate in such close proximity. Since it is not assassination then it is espionage. Seduction comes professionally to us both. I do not know what data I must elict from you, but my intent is clear -- so instinctively natural and limpid I fear its origin is subliminal. We make unrehearsed love upon the synchocyclotron, consecrating nothing.

We have been abandoned in our assignments with no one to report to. Any contact with our respective commissioners may jeopardize our agencies' anonymities. Our only allegiences to any agencies are tenuous, built entirely on the hope they have retained documentation of our civilian identities. They own reports on who we were and who we are.

There is no hope of returning to that past life. I have never even determined my mission, my only orders gleaned through cryptographic hints, whose meanings with whom I have no superior to confirm, include mundane conversations of the weather, suspicious surnames, envelopes disguised as telephone bills, esoteric non-sequiturs, men with red handkerchiefs, women coifed with peacock feathers. Everything becomes a potential clue. Perhaps even you are a clue.

Or perhaps your agency funded a countersemiotics campaign to disrupt my agency's spies (as I suspect there are others like me). Or perhaps the campaign was devised by my agency in order to confuse its opponents (as I suspect there are other counterspies with your agency, and even more agencies than the two of ours). Or perhaps we are each agents operating under the same superagency. How paranoia flays my senses of trust and place!

Our agencies value our reconnaissance, or else our projects would have been terminated. When I think of the defunct Red sattelites with which their astronomers have littered the firmament, I too grow despondent. What gravity awaits us when we are littered?

Who are we anymore but who we are. I am the spy, you are the counterspy. We fall deeper and deeper into obscurity.