The Replacement Agency
JSR is traveling this week, as you know. He did however send us, without comment, the following text, which might or might not be intended as a short story. Militating somewhat against the interpretation that that’s what it is is the fact that he sent it in the body of an e-mail whose subject (“FW:FW:”), as well as the double grey line to the left of the text, both suggest that JSR was simply forwarding something that had been forwarded to him in turn. But by whom? To what end? JSR doesn’t say! —The Hinternet
I know I shouldn’t be doing this but I’m just going to do it anyway. I’m going to tell you everything.
My name, unless I am mistaken, is Jeff Connor Kumpe, and I was born on April 13, 1973 in Winnetka, Illinois. My father was an insurance claims adjustor, and my mother was a registered nurse and a volunteer story reader at the library. I have not been able to recover any information regarding the year of their deaths. I majored in East Asian studies at Northwestern, and after I graduated in 1995 I flew to Thailand and spent a year backpacking there, as well as through Cambodia, Laos, Singapore, and Malaysia. When I returned to the airport in Bangkok in July, 1996, intending to fly home to begin my Ph.D. studies at the University of Chicago —I was going to work either on the doctrine of anatman, or on the Sanskrit inscriptions on the hidden sides of the building stones used in temples throughout Southeast Asia, a topic subsequently covered with tremendous skill in Shelly Pollock’s The Language of the Gods in the World of Men—, I was whisked away from passport control by a group of five toughs, ethnically Thai but all speaking unaccented American English, into a room with a fluorescent ceiling light, a few office chairs, and little else. My life would never be the same again.
Initially I thought they were going to interrogate me about something, that perhaps my identity had been confused with some foolish young drug-runner from a Western country. In fact no one asked me anything that day, or on any day during the several months that followed, throughout which I was flown, always handcuffed and with a black bag over my head, to several different sites around the world, whose rough coordinates I could only begin to infer from such hints as climate, vegetation, and the angle of the sun.
I must have landed in six or seven different locations —here catching a quick glimpse of cherry blossoms in spring, there an unmistakable blast of sweet pollen from the Nilotic scented thorn— before anyone seemed to take much of an interest in me at all. It was only after they’d brought me to an abandoned mall, with a makeshift office in a commercial space that clearly had once been a RadioShack, with skylights revealing a quality of luminescence that I had not seen since leaving home, giving me to know that I was likely somewhere not at all far from Illinois — it was only at this point, I was saying, that anyone asked me anything more substantial than whether I was hungry, or whether I was alright with Pert 2-in1 shampoo+conditioner. In all these places I had been provided with perfectly acceptable living conditions, spare but clean, and I was never made to feel that I was an enemy captive. I mean, I was a captive of some sort, but of a network of people, I had begun to feel, who expected me, eventually, to join them in a common effort of some sort.
Makeshift sleeping quarters were set up in the ladies’ fitting rooms at what had previously been a Mervyn’s. The food court was converted into a general-purpose cantina, one that perhaps lacked the variety on offer at its defunct Sbarro, its Famous Amos, its Orange Julius. But they kept us fed well enough on what seemed a rather arbitrary selection of highly processed brand-name grocery products — Go-Gurt at breakfast, Lunchables at lunch, Chicken-in-a-Biscuit crackers and Orange Crush available all day, and as many LeanCuisines as we could eat for dinner. I usually had four or five them, as during a typical day I generally took advantage of more than one of the physical activities offered. Most mornings I did at least a dozen full laps around the pentagonal complex, with five former flagship stores at its points (in addition to Mervyn’s there was a Sears, a J.C. Penney, a Macy’s, and a Nordstrom), always swinging my arms vigorously with 3 1/2-pound HeavyHands in my grip. I was joined in these routines by several young men roughly my age, as peculiarly docile and uninquisitive as I was. But none of them spoke any language I knew.
After perhaps a year of living this way —during which I also must have watched every videocassette in our small library a dozen times: The Bodyguard, Dances with Wolves, Moonstruck, Don Knotts in Gus, whose titular character is a baseball-playing mule—, one morning I was summoned to the RadioShack and greeted by a curly-haired man holding a clipboard and wearing a Le Coq Sportif tracksuit. “It says here you know Sanskrit and Pali. What’s Pali?” I explained that it was the principal language of the canonical texts of Theravada Buddhism. “So no actual languages? No languages people speak?” I explained that I knew a little conversational Thai. He looked disappointed, and after a few seconds in silence he resumed his questions: “Do you have any distinctive talents at all? I’m not seeing any in your file.” “I guess not,” I replied, “not really. I can recite every line of Moonstruck by heart, but that’s a recent accomplishment.” “So no one’s said anything up until now about what you’re going to be doing for us?” And at this I worked up the courage, finally, to ask a question of my own. “Who is ‘us’?” I said. To which he replied, simply: “The Agency”.
No, I confirmed, no one has explained anything, and upon hearing this my handler apologized with unmistakable sincerity. He gave me a paper shopping bag full of books and pamphlets and encouraged me to read them. I saw Murray Bookchin’s The Ecology of Freedom, the Minimanual of the Urban Guerrilla by Carlos Marighella, and the prison writings of Abdullah Öcalan. I asked him whether this selection of literature reflected the Agency’s ideology, or perhaps the ideology of its adversaries. He told me no, he had chosen that bag at random, and I was free to select another one if these works didn’t interest me. I glanced quickly into one of several other bags lining the wall, and saw that it was filled mostly with Danielle Steel paperbacks. So I took my Bookchin et al. and turned to head back to Mervyn’s, and on my way out the man in the tracksuit assured me they’d find a job for me soon enough, but that meanwhile I should keep up my HeavyHands routine and try not to get discouraged.
Every eight months or so I was called back to RadioShack to meet with the same handler, and each time he apologized, and told me to keep up with the HeavyHands, and offered me a new bag of books to read. Soon indeed I took the Danielle Steel collection, and read every word of it, as well as Xaviera Hollander’s The Happy Hooker, V. C. Andrews’s Flowers in the Attic, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, the Reader’s Digest abridged large-type edition of Rob Roy... After some years spent in this way, little by little my fellow Mervyn’s residents and I developed a workable pidgin for everyday interaction, which made possible some limited discussion of our limbo-like condition. Much to my surprise all the others theorized that the place we had been living was in their own country of origin as well. This didn’t make any sense. Are there Mervyn’s in Xinjiang?! I begged them to explain to me. Has Orange Julius made it to South Sudan? But the others paid no attention, and besides this inexplicable difference in our perceptions, we ultimately came to rely on each other a great deal, sometimes realizing, it now seemed to me, something close to the ideal of Bookchinite mutual aid.
The prevailing theory of the Agency was of a transnational spy network. But one of us, a Malian we all called Lee because he had made for himself a uniform of Lee denim that early on he discovered in a Mervyn’s storage room, said that we were all still just believing what they wanted us to believe. “A transnational spy agency? You all need to be thinking several orders of importance higher than that,” Lee insisted, “if you want to know why they’ve taken us. They don’t want us to be spies. It’s plain that none of us has any distinctive capacities that would recommend us for that role” (Lee had somehow grown particularly eloquent in our pidgin). “They only want us to be human again. Someday.”
Years went by. We heard scattered reports of outside events — the day the Triple Towers came down, the war in Lithuania, the small pox, the tragedy at the Westminster Dog Show that I can still scarcely mention without tears welling up in my eyes. We still only had an old videocassette player. Our handlers did their best to bring us fresh entertainment options, though there was still an irreducible randomness to what they delivered. I recall a particularly long four months in which our VHS library shrank, with our original stock of movies having been handed down long ago to the residents of the bunkers at Sears, to the size of a single videocassette of 9 to 5. Meanwhile, the paper bags full of paperbacks had been largely replaced by stacks of more serious reading, John von Neumann’s Theory of Self-Reproducing Automata, Alan Turing’s “On Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem”, and so on. It gradually came to seem to me that I was being trained up for something, and that the readings and the videos were part of the same curriculum, however different they were in tone and register. Somehow the sorority of avenging secretaries giving Dabney Coleman his comeuppance was part of the same education for me as the proof of the possibility of a universal machine.
Around the time of the small pox epidemic things began to change for us in significant ways. One by one, my Mervyn’s bunkmates began getting their assignments. The handlers also brought us phones, and finally gave us access to outside media and to the remarkable new technologies that had existed for some time already, but had remained entirely unknown to us. My handler had for some reason abandoned Le Coq Sportif and had taken to wearing Adidas tracksuits. I’ll never forget the day he gave me my reassignment file —600 pages in a stack of three Manila envelopes, and a 3 MB pdf version for my phone— and told me to start studying. “You’re going to have to learn some philosophy. Nothing too complicated. French too, but nothing too elegant. Mostly you just have to burrow down, deep, into your guy’s idiosyncrasies. You know what we say here at the Agency — there’s a behavioral fingerprint for each human being, and we don’t reassign until it’s been perfectly counterfeited. It just so happens your guy’s prints show some unusually complex patterns. When we first looked at his file we thought some of the data had been corrupted.”
So I set to work. It’s been five years now — five years of studying what must have been thousands of hours of surveillance footage, private e-mails, texts, immersing myself in an arduous course of something like method acting, except that in my case there was to be no return from the character I came to inhabit. None of us, at least from the Mervyn’s cohort, were ever really told how to go about “counterfeiting the prints” — we were not, by profession, actors, any more than we were spies. But somehow we all knew, as if by natural inclination, what to do, and by the end of my training period I felt fully ready.
Not that I was not sorry to go. The food court’s dining options had grown ever more diverse and impressive. Just the other day I had a particularly vigorous HeavyHands walk around the pentagon after a delicious breakfast of Eggs from Plants and an “essential clays” smoothie. It’s not just the food that had grown more refined and expansive, but also our understanding of our work. Wrangler (from Nepal) had taken to arguing that there are “infinitely many” of us, and that even if it seems like we’ve been waiting an inordinate amount of time, in fact new assignments are begun every day, at every second of every day. There is a constant flow of us back into the world, Wrangler said, so constant in fact that properly understood it’s really just the ordinary course of things, and not a rupture at all.
We didn’t fully understand Wrangler when he spoke, but we revered him nonetheless.
It was hard, but surely good that this part of my life was coming to an end. I was getting old, and it seemed to me fitting that I should rejoin the world now, to spend at least the last good chunk of it as a human being again. Even if that means I have to be a different human being, so what, I thought, I haven’t been myself for a very long time anyhow. So I finished one last Eggs from Plants, I hugged Lee and Wrangler and all the others with whom I had been so close, and I picked up the file on my guy, which anyway I already knew by heart, and I headed out the front entrance of the mall with my handler and we got into a van and drove what must have been ten hours or so until we reached the Lincoln Tunnel, and at 41st Street and 10th Avenue my handler pushed me out with a firm “You’ve got this” slap on the shoulder. And I went into the lobby and there I saw him: my guy, who, having just come back from Planet Fitness, wearing short shorts and aviator glasses, with his enormous forehead and that ridiculous old-hippie hair he’s insisted on growing and which accordingly I’ve had to grow too, was now holding an X-large Dunkin’ Donuts coffee and was waiting for the elevator to go back up to his room at the Yotel. Just as the door opened, five ordinary-looking men got into the elevator with him, and I saw that it was now going down to the basement rather than up to where he no doubt would rather have gone. Poor guy. He’s in for a big surprise. It’s rather late in life for him to begin work as a Replacement.