by Grant Koo for the Autumn 2025 issue
On the morning of May 21st, 2025, an exposé written up by two investigative reporters with the international desk at The New York Times was published under the headline “The Spy Factory”. He’d decided to scroll past it for something less factual and newsworthy, like from the op-eds or cooking section, which better characterized his idle content consumption preferences, to occupy the final five or so edenic minutes before he would have to muster up the wherewithal to drag himself out of bed, but still drowsy with the previous night’s cocktail-inspired dreams, as if his mind hadn’t yet fully adjusted to the novelty of possessing physical extensions, his large, uncoordinated thumbs accidentally tapped the article open instead, and he ended up hooked by the lede. He re-read the entire article twice and then stared out his window for an overindulgent period of time before eventually getting out of bed, and then found himself skimming it over a third time for a sense of the article’s structural development while getting dressed, which ultimately did make him late for work for the second consecutive day in a row. A conviction had started to take shape on the PATH into the city, and by lunchtime, it had completely seized hold of his imagination. The first thing he did immediately after his last morning meeting concluded was text the article link over to his wife, from still inside the conference room, without pausing to add any accompanying message or clarifications, and she, to her credit, responded back exactly twenty-four minutes later, in precisely the time it would take your average reader to finish the article, with a text message of her own that in its entirety consisted solely of three exclamation points shouting their speechlessness.
That’s how he knew they’d been on the same page in believing that the couple living next door were Russian spies.
Desperate for some fresh air, he stepped out for lunch and was seated in the shade at one of the dozen tables set up in the plaza outside his office. Lingering in the pleasant spring weather, he tapped open the article again, which AI summarized as follows:
Russia used Brazil as a launchpad for its elite intelligence officers, known as illegals, to shed their Russian pasts and build new identities. Brazilian counterintelligence agents, through Operation East, uncovered at least nine Russian officers operating under Brazilian cover identities. The investigation, which spanned multiple countries, dealt a devastating blow to Moscow’s illegals program, eliminating a cadre of highly trained officers.
Chewing on several thoughts at once between bites of his pastrami reuben, he vividly recalled a scene from another morning earlier that month, when he’d overslept and in the frantic rush to get out the door, realized too late that he’d forgotten his keys as it slammed shut. He pounded his open palm against the locked door, whispering an expletive under his breath.
“Good morning, Michael. Have you forgotten your keys?”
Michael looks up, startled. The man Michael and his wife now suspected of being a Russian spy smiled at him curiously. He was powerfully built, more like a dancer than a boxer, and classically handsome, wearing a white-collared, button-down shirt open under a dark navy suit that shimmered under the hallway lights. His short haircut seemed recent and lent him the look of a man for whom very little passed unnoticed. Michael straightened up and mumbled something about not really needing his keys anyways as his wife and daughter would be home well before him. They’d fallen into the habit of exchanging pleasantries whenever they saw each other around the building, in the neighborhood, and once getting off the PATH at Grove Street, but proper introductions weren’t established until they found themselves one evening several weeks prior, waiting on the same weight machine down at the gym, but Michael had immediately forgotten the man’s name, and felt like too many coincidental encounters around the building and too much time had already passed for him to ask now what it was. It may have been Antonio.
Ding!
The elevator door slides open soundlessly, and maybe Antonio indicates for Michael to please step in first. They lived on the penthouse floor of an old building with creaky elevators so it was a long ride down, interrupted by others getting on at several of the lower floors. Maybe Antonio looks down at Michael’s flip-flops, and Michael looks down at his sneakers, which look like they maybe cost several hundred dollars each. Lost in regard of each other’s footwear, maybe Antonio decides to speak up, tentatively at first, but their chitchat soon ratchets up as the elevator fills to capacity. Doors open and shut again, with no one on either side making any attempt to get on or off. Maybe Antonio asks Michael out of polite interest whether he and his daughter have been playing tennis again, harkening back to that time the three of them had run into each other in the lobby, him coming, them going, lightly burdened by water bottles and tennis gear. They haven’t. The two men lament the pool closure for what will be the second summer in a row, which elicits nods of agreement from several of the other residents for whom eavesdropping was unavoidable given the elevator’s confines, and exchange opinions on the best beach towns within a ninety-minute radius. Michael mentions having had to chauffeur his daughter and three of her closest friends to their junior prom the night before, but maybe Antonio doesn’t appear to know what that even is. Michael explains to him the fraught concept of the American high school prom, and maybe Antonio offers, by way of rebuttal, what happens in Brazil.
“Baile de formatura, graduation ball, yes, we have it in Brazil, too. Many pregnancies.”
They both fall silent and stare up at the numbers counting down the floors: four, three, two…lobby. Was Antonio implying he had something to worry about? Michael felt his dark, intelligent eyes examining him for reactions, but when he glances over, Antonio is placidly watching the elevator countdown, same as he was, but now it’s Antonio that notices Michael observing him.
Ding!
Michael was let go the following Wednesday, the day he usually worked from home, the company preferring to avoid scenes at the office that might potentially be damaging to employee morale. He fixed himself an ungarnished Manhattan at ten in the morning, continued drinking through lunch, and by two p.m., had fallen into a drunken stupor on the sofa that centered mainly around wondering, why me?
Later that afternoon, it cheered him a little to discover his Russian neighbor’s name wasn’t Antonio at all but Miguel, which he felt he really should’ve remembered for being the same as his own, only Brazilianized, and that Miguel’s wife’s name was purportedly Camila Burrata, after rummaging around the trash room and finding a few broken down cardboard boxes stickered with shipping labels that advertised their unit number.
“So why do we think they’re spies again?” Michael calls out to his wife from the kitchen later that evening, in the wake of a long, detailed discussion of their finances. Though they were in better shape than he’d originally thought, they decided to defer telling their daughter until they were absolutely sure there was nothing to worry about. Mimi was worried enough as it was with impending college tuition without having to wonder what such a drastic reduction in income might mean for their family in the near-term.
“They claim to be from Brazil, but we clearly overheard them speaking Russian to each other that night at Battello, remember?”
“That’s right. You know, the guy just has this quality about him. Like he’s using small talk to determine whether we’re also spies, I’m guessing he’d probably think for North Korea?”
“Have you noticed how impeccably he’s always dressed? Weekends, holidays…doesn’t matter. There’s a logoless luxury to his dress code that’s betrayed by all the designer leather shoes and belts he seems to own. Same with her. They probably shop together at the same stores. What’s he doing anyway, as a cover I mean?”
“I’m not sure, but he’s mentioned that he has to go out to a lot of restaurants for work.”
“That’s what I mean, what does he do at all those restaurants he’s always going to?”
“I think clients take him out or he takes them out, I don’t know, business. It’s all very opaque. Could be espionage.”
In the silence that follows, he can make out a high-pitched voice coming in garbled over her phone saying something like: I’m getting this side done in seven minutes. Obviously, it could be like, your hair thing on this side, or even on this side. I have a feeling that dyed hair takes less time since it’s drier. I don’t know, it just feels softer. This side feels softer, but especially, like, where it frames the face.
Michael stood in the hallway off the kitchen watching his unperturbed wife serenely watch what turned out to be an instructional video on her phone. She was reclined patricianly on the sofa facing the muted television. He gathered she was watching some video on hair curling techniques as a new one had just arrived earlier that afternoon. She looks up quizzically; he darts back into the kitchen.
“Did I tell you about the time I ran into her at the supermarket?” she asks, picking up her utensils. “She had on ironic mom jeans and seemed to have just stepped out of one of the supermarket scenes in that Don DeLillo novel you’ve got me reading. Maybe it just seemed that way though since I spotted her as we both turned our heads towards the commotion of someone knocking over the book rack near the registers, just like in the novel. I remember she continued very distinctly speaking Russian into her earpiece. I followed her up and down the aisles for nearly twenty minutes and didn’t see her add a single item to her cart. At self-checkout, she only purchased the two different kinds of granola that she’d already had in her cart when I first spotted her twenty-four minutes earlier.”
“Twenty-four? That’s weirdly specific.”
“Well, that’s how long the video is.”
She slices off another bite-sized cube of steak, which she uses to gesticulate at him with her fork before slipping it into her mouth.
“Anyway, I haven’t even gotten to the most interesting part yet. As she exits the supermarket, I notice her trading looks with this man in a trenchcoat too warm for the weather who just looks like a total serial killer, the type who probably grew up torturing small animals before moving onto his neighbors pets, which he basically views as empty, furry vessels for human affection. We’ll want to take the proper precautions when we’re out walking Latte. So there’s this brown leather briefcase on the serial killer’s table, I know, I know, but he’s just sitting there, smiling, not even trying to make himself appear less conspicuous by smoking a cigarette or scrolling on his phone, just watching her approach, which she doesn’t slow a single step, just swoops right on past and keeps going, but with the briefcase in hand, swinging from the end of her left arm, which was lovely-toned by the way, but muscularly asymmetrical.”
“Like it’s thrown a thousand punches, bruised a dozen noses. Is that what you’re saying?”
“Yes, darling, exactly.”
…
The following morning, the Moons were out in SoHo shopping at Brandy Melville following a leisurely brunch. By contrast, the store was an absolute madhouse, a sea of pimples, braces, and teenage chatter: How good is that blue on you! Wow. What’s wrong? You’re supposed to, like, stand over there, right? I want to break you. No, we wear black, bitch, not warm colors. Sorry, what’s going on here? I’m so happy. I love you. Do you like me? One time, I accidentally got like five. Stop it. My parents? Yeah, yeah. That was very knotty. No, knotty, like tied in knots. Wow, and she claims I have no taste? Oh, I’m used to it happening all the time. Now I just go along with it without even saying a word. No, you’re naughty. You know why, just go, I need to check out.
He’d wandered in and out of the line for the registers when he worried that it was getting too long. Stepping out of line after making it to the front confused the people who’d been waiting behind him. He stood off to the side, outside the flow of gangly bodies seized by the spirit of retail rituals, near some exposed pipes running through holes in the floor and ceiling. That’s when he spotted their Russian neighbors entering the store, all four arms already loaded up with shopping bags of various sizes and colors. He cackled at the priceless look that appeared on Miguel’s face when confronted by this sea of braces, until it dawned on him that Miguel’s expression had in fact eerily mirrored his own. He looked tired, irritable, and overwhelmed, like he’d had enough of shopping for one day, and stepped off to the side to let the unceasing flow of teenagers shoulder past. Camila Burrata turned, and surprised not to find Miguel at her side, stopped to look for him behind her. Michael was too far away to hear what they were saying to each other, but he could recognize marital conflict brewing from fifty yards away. Miguel was angrily gesturing with the shopping bags hanging from each wrist, phone in one hand, vaporizer in the other; Camila Burrata responded by rolling her eyes, holding up her left hand and splaying her fingers to indicate just five more minutes.
“Hey, isn’t that our neighbor from 5602?” his daughter suddenly at his side starts to wave, but Michael gently intercepts her wrist unnoticed and positions himself between Mimi and her view of their Russian neighbors.
“Look at this line. It would’ve saved time if you’d waited in it while Mimi was trying on outfits,” Michelle comments nonchalantly, materializing behind Mimi. Michael lets this passive aggression slide.
“Don’t look, but our comrades in 5602 just walked in,” Michael indicates to his wife with a subtle nod over his left shoulder. “I said don’t look. Do you think they saw us?”
Michelle shakes her head slowly, eyes darting to and fro like watching a tennis match from center court seats.
“Mom and I think they’re spying for Russia,” he tells Mimi by way of explanation with a sheepish shrug.
“Oh my god, you guys, me too!”
To engage in clandestine surveillance operations against the Russians was a family decision. Michael waited in line for the registers, while Michelle and Mimi moved stealthily around the store, promptly burying their faces in unison into the same rack of clothes whenever one of the Russians cast a glance anywhere near their general vicinity. That the Russians had split up made things trickier, and all three of the Moons remained on high alert.
Camila Burrata made her way back to the front of the store where Miguel was laughing at something he was watching on his phone. They were leaving without buying anything. Michael shot a frantic glance at Michelle and Mimi, and helplessly held up the armful of clothes that still needed purchasing. Reading his mind, Michelle lifted a fist with extended thumb and pinkie to her face to indicate she’d call him later with their location. Since his arms were full, Michael had to overexaggerate mouthing the letters OK while nodding vigorously. In this brief, pantomimed exchange, he’d lost sight of the Russians. Michelle and Mimi both rushed out after them, hesitated for a moment on the sidewalk just outside the store, craned their necks this way and that till Mimi grabbed her mother’s elbow with sudden gusto, leading her south, away from Houston St.
Michelle called him half a minute later to keep him apprised of their movements, which when his phone started ringing must’ve perplexed the people standing in line behind him as he’d been holding it to his ear as a prop to shield his face the entire time.
The Moons debriefed over dumplings in Chinatown.
Mimi was saying: “Maybe a two murdered birds bludgeoned by the same blunt instrument type situation. You get what I’m trying to say.”
“He told me he carries $129 in different denominations in his wallet. He likes the versatility as much as the fact that the currency he keeps is a prime number. What a weirdo.”
“Definitely a spy.”
“Once I fell asleep and woke up again in the middle of the night. Latte let me know he needed to go, so I harnessed him and went. I ran into Miguel stepping out of the elevator with a woman on each arm, neither of whom was Camila Burrata, and all three of them absolutely hammered with alcohol. As I was stepping into the elevator, he turned to me and said, ‘Comrade, trust me, it’s a life that looks great on the outside, but you wouldn’t want to be caught dead in.’”
“He did not say comrade.”
Michael didn’t deny his embellishment, and unpaused the voice memo instead.
Have you ever noticed how Santaphobia, stuttered with a Barcelonan lisp, sounds a lot like the word for fear of death?
Darling, why would I notice something like that?
“Wait, what’s he saying to her here? It sounds like he’s being a little dismissive.”
What, did they teach you to eat with a knife and fork like that in finishing school?
A la mierda una mofeta.
“Was that Spanish just now? Why’s she suddenly switching over to Spanish?”
“The real question is why were they speaking in English in the first place. Wouldn’t it be more natural for them to speak Portuguese to each other?”
“Excellent point, mi hija. And most natural for them to use Russian.”
“I think he just said, ‘I teased a split tooth with my tongue and tasted blood.’”
“You must be joking. Why would anyone say something like that out loud? A thought like that is only ever thought, never spoken.”
The Moons collectively grew fidgety when they got to the part where the Russians were reminiscing over that time they had sex at the opera. Then Miguel could be heard requesting the bill, which Michael was able to recall the accompanying visual memory of from the vantage point afforded from their table at the cafe directly across the street. After the Russians paid and left, Michael weaved through the lines of cars that were either parked, doubleparked, or waiting for the light to change. When he reached the sidewalk on the other side of the street, he abruptly swiveled around, took a knee, and pretended to be tying his shoes, surreptitiously retrieving the phone that he’d slipped unnoticed onto the back tire of a black car parked no more than ten feet from their table on the sidewalk as he straightened up, repeating the exact same ruse he’d perpetrated just half an hour earlier to plant the phone in the first place.
The Moons fell silent as the recording came to an end. Michelle skewered another dumpling and popped it into her mouth, chewing slowly.
“I couldn’t understand anything else from the recording. The sound quality was terrible. Why didn’t you just plant it closer?”
“I was worried they might’ve noticed.”
“Maybe they did and that’s why they were speaking English, to fuck with us.”
“Language, Mimi,” her mother gently chastised.
The Moons exchanged meaningful glances and gravely considered the possibility that the Russians were in fact, or fiction, fucking with them.
“So what do you do for a living?” Miguel wondered.
“I’m a fiction writer,” Michael lied, but then a moment later, decided it had been the truth. After all, he was no longer the Director of Consumer UX Programs and Operations over at Gargoyle, notorious among the big tech firms for collecting the most comprehensive user data, and he had been on an unprecedented writing tear ever since getting laid off freed up all that time in his schedule. A couple months in, or rather out, he considered it the best thing that could’ve happened to him after nearly twenty years of day in and day out over at Gargoyle.
“I’ve never met a fiction writer before,” Miguel marvelled, as if they constituted some rare species. Michael had met dozens of them and remained unimpressed. “What are you working on?”
These days Michael was working on a short story collection. Having drafted half a dozen stories so far, he figured he’d need another three to complete the collection. He’d already self-published several novels and even drafted a fourth before his promotion at work had turned what he’d always considered a day job into something more serious and all-consuming. Though he hadn’t written a word in over eight years, the composing had returned naturally, and now he figured he could spray the market with short story submissions much faster than he would with another novel, his near-term goal being to garner some positive responses to his writing that might impart the bit of encouragement he felt was necessary for him to actually continue with it. And if all else failed, he’d just take another job at some other tech company once his yearlong non-compete expired.
“These days, I’ve been writing short stories,” Michael prevaricates, but it seems to make an impression on Miguel. It suddenly occurs to Michael that some incorrect notions may have started to sprout in Miguel’s mind linking the degree of his success as a writer somehow to owning a penthouse apartment with views of Manhattan. Michael neglected to correct this misperception, but neither did he lean into it. Then an idea came to him. “The story I’m currently working on is called ‘The Spy Factory’.”
“Interesting,” Miguel nodded appreciatively, but what Michael really found interesting was how Miguel had flinched at his mention of the title. “I’m in government consulting myself, which unfortunately doesn’t leave me much time to read, but I do like stories that contain large-scale conspiracies, plot twists, big reveals, and surprise endings. How do you devise your plots?”
“Plotting isn’t my strong suit. For me, plot emerges out of little gestures, how characters react to new information in their environment, what they say or don’t say to each other. Then with a little luck, if the right moments are selected, the story builds momentum and barrels forth towards its ineluctable conclusion. I’m afraid I just don’t have the wherewithal to plot out intricate, international conspiracies. A ‘colleague’ once wrote that all plots tend deathwards. Come to think of it, I’m not that great at describing landscapes either.”
Miguel looked deflated, disappointed at first, but then, brightening up considerably, remembered that he also liked to read beautiful descriptions of weather. “Do your stories contain weather?”
“Yes, of course, I love describing the weather!” Michael blurts out, taken by surprise at his own earnest enthusiasm. “Of course weather doesn’t really impact the plot, but as a writer concerned with craft for its own sake, whenever I don’t know where the plot is supposed to be going, I’ll just launch into these rather baroque descriptions of the weather from all sorts of sightlines and seasons, out in the landscapes or as seen from the deathbed of still someone’s darkened room, and sometimes they end up being little, five-seven-five haikus, just written out as prose, but that can nevertheless capture remarkably well the kind of minutiae that can still give a guy on his deathbed the tingles. You know, there’s something I absolutely adore about…it’s really indescribable, but about the way that the self is somehow able to shine through a seventeen-syllable description of essentially nothing besides the weather. Anyway, that usually helps loosen things up enough for me to advance the plot another few yards. Also, weather is really important for setting mood and ambiance.”
“American football reference. Yes, I see. Like nineteenth century Russian novel, advancing the plot gradually, but surely. Yes, I used to read. Why do you look so surprised, comrade, hmm?” Miguel chuckles, patting Michael on the back.
The two neighbors grew friendly in their discovery of a mutual, if anachronistic, passion for discussing the works of Dostoyevsky and Nabokov, with Miguel joyfully interjecting dubious biographical, historical, and at times, even philosophical perspectives into Michael’s broadening misunderstanding of the cultural contexts and subtexts as well as the general social milieu in which those two pillars of Russian literature were writing to replenish the many meanings posed by the plethora of life situations one might encounter in Russia in any given year or city over the past two centuries.
“The thing about autobiografiction is that it does away with the distinction between life and content,” Michael opines from his corner of the sauna. “And since you own the rights to your own stories, naturally, no one can ever accuse you of cheating with Gen AI or plagiarism or censor you from telling them. I suppose on a certain level you also lose the distinction between fiction and just plain lying, but everything comes at a price.”
Miguel just shrugs as if to say, yes, there’s that aspect of it. He snorts when the word autogratification randomly occurs to him, but pretends to have been coughing to avoid having to explain what he’d found so funny.
“Autobiografiction appeals to my efficient nature,” Michael continues, “less time imagining how the furniture’s laid out in a room, so to speak, and more time crafting descriptions of rooms you’ve already been in. It helps you see them clearer somehow. It’s the same with characters. For me, it’s about a million times more satisfying to imagine myself into the heads of people I actually think I know, myself included, than to fabricate back stories and other third-person strategies to make them feel more real. In autobiografiction, a writer can be like, well if the characters don’t feel real to you, then that’s your problem. I can point to this character being me, this one my wife, this one our daughter, and oh, by the way, that incident I wrote about that you find so unrealistic actually happened, yeah, and it made me feel exactly the way I’d written it,” he manages to conclude his defense against unlikely attacks from his imaginary readers before pausing to catch his breath. “You can basically bend reality into all kinds of beautifully inventive and delightfully insightful shapes. All it takes is committing yourself to playing the consummate spy in your own life story, knowing full well that no one, maybe not even your wife and daughter, will probably ever get around to reading your strange reports anyway.”
Miguel appears speechless, then confused, and abruptly stands to leave. “Intriguing, but excuse me a minute, I think it’s time for a cold rinse.”
Michael watches the last grains of sand slip into the dead half of the hourglass affixed to the sauna’s wood-panelled wall before inverting it. He can hear Miguel singing soft operatic arias in fluent French. The heat is beginning to get unbearable, but he foolishly worries how it might look for him to join Miguel in the showers for a cold rinse. He makes up his mind to check his phone for messages when Miguel launches into the Toreador Song. No messages, but quite an impressive baritone. It was certainly a novel experience, particularly as Michael hadn’t made any new friends since college.
“I’m thinking of going for a smoothie at Maggie’s Farm,” Miguel announces from underneath his gym towel as he briskly dries his short, auburn hair. “Care to join?”
He did, but concealed the teenaged flutter from his middle-aged heart.
“Whenever I tell people back home that I’m living in Jersey City now, I’m inevitably asked where that is, and when I say New Jersey, I get the exact same response. ‘Jersey City? Never heard of it. How many people live there? Is that even a real city?’”
“Of course it’s a real city,” Michael bristles, sucking in the dregs of his berry seed infused smoothie. “We even have our own jazz festival. Nothing screams that a city’s arrived like having its own annual jazz festival.”
“Exactly, but it’s not until I explain that it’s located just on the other side of the river from lower Manhattan that they begin to show any signs of recognition. So that’s why now when people abroad ask me where I’m from, I just tell them I’m from New York. It dispenses with the tiresome script that just about everyone on the planet seems to have been cc-ed on. Jersey City really deserves proper respect in its own right, not just for its proximity to Manhattan.”
“I was born and raised here, so yes, I’m familiar with all the disrespectful jabs at Jersey. It’s because a quarter of any given audience on any given night attending a show in the city are from Jersey. We’re defenseless targets, and we can’t even punch back because everyone knows New York is the greatest city in the world, including us. But still, it’s annoying when comedians with a national platform take a piss on Jersey.”
“May I ask what your political orientations are?”
“My views on politics are basically those espoused on the Ezra Klein show and late night television, only poorly remembered. I read the Times occasionally, mostly for the op-eds and recipes. Where’d you say you grew up again?”
“Moscow actually, but I haven’t been back since my grandmother passed away.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Michael says solemnly, but is instantly flashed back to Michelle’s text of triple exclamation points shouting their speechlessness.
“That’s okay, it was years ago. She lived to a ripe old age, and was sharp as a tack right up until the bitter end.”
“Were you two very close?”
“That woman practically raised me,” Miguel starts choking up, so Michael politely turns away. Miguel takes a deep breath before continuing. “Then my father moved the family halfway around the world to Brazil for work when I was in middle school, so São Paulo still feels like home to me, even now, though I’ve been living here in Jersey City for, let’s see, the past six years?”
“I see.”
Michael recalls looking after his own grandmother on her deathbed and experiences a twinge of remorse over having ever suspected Miguel of committing crimes of espionage against America. So later that night, when Michelle makes a casual remark about spying and intelligence gathering after Michael tells her about his latest encounter in the grotto, he pretends not to have heard her.
“By the way, did you apply for your international drivers permit? Do we still have to sort out the car rental?”
“Done and done,” he smiles, foolishly leaning in for a kiss. She puckers her mouth and turns her cheek to circumvent his kiss.
“I haven’t seen the girlfriend around lately. Have you?”
Come to think of it, he hadn’t. He crawls backwards off their king-sized bed, pretends to think some more, then shakes his head.
“I wonder,” she says mysteriously. He’d decided from that moment on that he was no longer going to respond verbally to anything said in reference to their neighbor’s espionage activities, hoping to suffocate their little family game with silence.
“You know, he’s a really intelligent guy, and funny too. Apparently, he’s attended the finest schools in Brazil.”
“Says the man who’s clearly been captured by a known enemy of the state.”
When Michael shrugs, he becomes conscious for an instant that he had just, for the briefest of moments, pictured himself as Miguel might have looked shrugging. The image he called to mind transmitted to him the same static electric charge a celebrity might give off walking suavely across some long, red carpet and into a Starbucks to shake hands with fans. Once the chatter in his brain quieted down, he realized that he sometimes saw himself, not as himself, but as the Korean Don Draper, calm and collected in a dark, midcentury suit, while at other times he saw himself as the American Psy flexing Gangnam Style on the dance floor. It all depended on the weather.
On certain overcast, cloudy days, Michael might come to feel like he’s confronting the same old issues again, personal issues that expressed themselves as a kind of body dysmorphia but of the self, social anxiety issues, tricked again by the same circular thinking he’d fallen into with a fair degree of regularity since he was his daughter’s age, but never seemed to be able to steer clear of or fully climb back out of once he’d fallen in. Though he felt some essential part of him getting deducted with every fall, he could usually manage to jujitsu himself into seeing the silver linings.
Had Michael and Michelle ever really believed the couple living next door were Russian spies? Probably not. It was just one of those things they did to keep each other entertained. At least neither of them ever believed it enough to actually leap into action. Were they in fact behaving somewhat racistly against Russians, which for generations of Americans has been the most acceptable kind? Probably. At any rate, Michelle and Mimi both grew bored with the game after a few weeks of not catching their neighbors committing any treasonable offenses and moved on. Michael, on the other hand, felt like he just made his first new friend in decades.
…
In the early evening of June 12th, 2025, while celebrating their twentieth anniversary on the pristine beaches of Mallorca, Michael came across another online article, this time published in the less venerated Jersey City Times that appeared in the left rail under the section header for latest news, sandwiched between two other items that made local headlines: “Authorities Ask For Public’s Help Finding Murder Suspect” and “Riders, Officials Gather to ‘Rally for a Better PATH’”.
The article reported on two Russian spies that were apprehended in their home in a high-rise building in downtown Jersey City. He was flabbergasted to find a moonrise picture of their building accompanying the article. He was trying to triangulate where the photographer must have been standing to achieve the angle they captured when his wife returned from her preprandial dip in the sea.
“Holy shit, Michelle. You’ve got to read this.”
Over a candlelit table covered in tapas and fragrant wildflower petals, after the revelation that their neighbors really were Russian spies after all had had time to sink in and then, more importantly, slowly out of their systems, along with the cava, they were able now to bask in the afterglow of satisfying dinner gossip, which mixed with the day’s dwindling concerns, left behind a warm buzz that merged seamlessly with the pleasant tiredness that always seemed to follow afternoons spent swimming and talking for the sheer pleasure of hearing each other’s voices, but as hoarse as theirs were both getting, Michelle forged on, recalling how they’d gotten caught spying on Mimi’s first walk home alone.
“We’d make terrible spies,” he laughed.
“Speak for yourself. I can see my photographic memory coming in handy in certain fate-of-the-world type situations.”
They’d both taken off that day spur of the moment without telling Mimi, letting her think she was actually walking the three blocks from the corner where her summer camp bus would drop her off to the entrance of their building on her own. They’d walked around that morning like tourists in their own city, where they’d lived for nearly a decade, taking snapshots on their phones of all the neighborhood sights that had normally remained invisible. What had for so long become background scenery to be driven or walked past with purpose was that day attended to with a heightened attention to details selected for reasons that the sights themselves seemed to announce: a pile of bricks behind a chain linked fence not sturdy enough to discourage anyone that was serious about stealing from a construction site that hasn’t even broken ground in the entire time they’d lived in the city. They must’ve taken at least a dozen photos each of a pair of cherry blossom trees that bloomed every spring to perfume their strolls and souls. They were like an old married couple, she said, referring mainly to the trees, though he thought the description fit themselves pretty well. They spent their attention that day exclusively on each other seeking out aesthetic experiences, and now, with the candles on their table burning low, they both in their own ways felt echoes of the nostalgia they felt that day on their tenth anniversary.
“You remember the bench under the magnolias in front of that church across the street from where Mimi got dropped off?”
“You remember following her movements on the tracking app we had installed on her phone?”
“You remember Mimi stepping off the bus and proceeding as if entranced to press her face against the storefront glass of the corner ice cream parlor before whipping around to suddenly face us having spotted our reflections almost immediately?”
Michelle laughed so hard she ended up wiping the tears from her eyes and smearing her perfectly applied mascara. Michael just smiled inwardly and refilled their glasses from a new bottle of cava their waiter had left, trying to make out Miguel’s insistent baritone in a different context telling him how we all become spies in the end.
Back in their bedroom following a long, uneventful flight home, he closes his eyes and almost instantly falls to furious dreaming. Inside one of these nested Russian doll dreams, he is lying on the sofa in conversation with his wife, who is taking notes. Their living room has been faithfully reproduced, identical in every respect to the room on the other side of their bedroom door, only cast in daylight, or rather, dreamlight instead of the moonlight’s parallelogrammatic glow over their bodies lying in bed. It was as if his consciousness had just been beamed bewilderingly into his dream self, who’d been in the middle of relaying a real event to his dream wife as he struggled to keep up his end of the conversation under the handicap of having inexplicably forgotten its first half.
…and then this middle-aged Asian woman got on the elevator, took one look at me, and asked if I was Korean.
What did you say?
I was caught off guard, so I just said yes. Then to avoid an awkward silence for the rest of the ride down, I added that a lot of Koreans just assume I’m Japanese because of all the facial hair.
Were you flirting with her?
No, I was just being neighborly and polite. There’s a world of difference. Anyway, I was like, ‘good guess,’ and then she says that she’s been to Japan and that yes, I’d blend right in. It was like she bet on crazy then decided to double down.
What a weirdo.
I know, right? You think she could be spying for China?
And then he woke up a full eight hours later, discombobulated because the entirety of the dream only seemed to last a few minutes.
He’d been digging around the back of the closet for his gray tie to wear on his first interview since getting laid off, which he was late for, when he found it. He’d thought apprehensively of the word vibrator, just the word at first, without any accompanying image, and that was okay. But then a sneaky image came unbidden that both shocked and repulsed him and sent him reeling backwards into a space that yawned open between words and the images they invoked, and just like an image can inspire a thousand descriptions, a word can birth a thousand mental images as he was trying to do now with the Catskills, the Adirondacks, the Rockies, the North and South Mountains that bookended Seoul, the purple mountains surrounding the campus where he attended college, snow-capped mountains, mountains adorned in fall foliage, mountains dappled in the dawn, mountains made up in movies, and so on.
Later that evening, not wanting to discuss his discovery of the vibrator he found in a box in the back of the closet for fear of saying something grossly inappropriate the way he had during his interview with KXK’s matronly VP of Operations earlier that afternoon, he decided to come clean with his daughter about what was really weighing on his conscience.
“What would you say if I had a secret that I’ve been keeping from you, for your own good, but that I’ve had to lie to you to maintain its secrecy? Hypothetically speaking.”
“You’ve always said honesty is the best policy.”
“That was when you were a kid,” he waves off. “I’m talking now that you’ve grown both more accustomed to the policy’s complexities and suspicious of the fine print.”
“What kind of secret are we talking here? On a scale of that scoop of ice cream you had after midnight to the nation’s nuclear codes.”
“Somewhere in the middle, maybe a little closer to the double scoop of salted caramel, which apparently wasn’t very secretive. Say it was something like I lost my job but didn’t want to tell you because it would only worry you needlessly when what’s important now is for you to stay focused on college apps. And besides, you’re not even technically an adult yet.”
“Did you lose your job?”
“About four months ago.”
Mimi processes this new information as her expression goes blank. “Now it all makes sense. Your work laptop disappearing, the elaborate dinners, showing up at all my matches, your elevated moods as indicated by skyrocketing dad-jokes-per-hour metrics…and the apartment has never been cleaner.”
“Sorry, I’ve been keeping something that’s had such a profound effect on me a secret from you for so long.”
“No problema, Dad. But are we worried, you know, paying-for-stuff-wise?”
“Not at all. My severance package and the unemployment insurance should tide us over till I figure something out. In the meantime, our stock portfolio’s been kicking ass, and Mom’s given me some leeway to rest and recharge before I have to get my shit together. I already promised her in Mallorca she wouldn’t need to start worrying about money again. One of many she’d extracted while we were renewing our vows over the course of our travels through Spain, where the rains fall mainly on the plains. Neither of us could remember how our original vows went though.”
“So what have you been doing with yourself all day?”
“I’ve been on a strict regimen of reading and writing, a hundred pages a night and five hundred words a day, respectively, Mondays to Fridays except when you and Mom have off. I think of it as a nine-month holiday to birth a collection of autobiografiction stories. I’ve also been using ChatGPT to study Spanish and Korean; he’s helping me develop a business plan for a co-working space to build a local, coffee-and-doughnuts community of writers. I basically just came up with the name and a few bullet points, and he did the rest, assuming of course that ChatGPT’s pronouns are he/him/his.”
“What’s the name?”
“The Writer’s Gym.”
“And what, writers go there to like workout on their laptops?”
“Precisely.”
“Cool, great name, Dad. So was there anything else?” Mimi glances over at the door as if to indicate that his audience with her was over. And with a bat of her eyes, thick theater curtains descended upon a darkened stage.
“I must say, you’re taking this all very well.”
“Well, if you and Mom aren’t worrying about it, then why should I? On a scale of one to ten, this seems closer to ice cream after midnight. Maybe there’s a mild discomfort that creeps in during the late hours of the evening when you should be sleeping or a cause for minor embarrassment if caught off-guard in social settings, but either way, you losing your job doesn’t feel like that big a deal. My mirror neurons are just taking their cues from you guys. How are you feeling?”
“I find that the days lose a certain texture when you’re unemployed, which I’m starting to think may just be code for emancipated. Monday mornings start to feel a lot like Saturdays; they slide by and away nearly frictionless, while the same thing starts happening with weeks, and then the names of the months become just names in a foreign language you may or may not have right, enero was it? and once that happens the only thing really marking the passage of time is the weather.”
Mimi had stopped typing, all her delicate fingers poised over the keyboard save her left pinky, which pressing against the key of “A”, screamed out an elongating whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa on her screen as she looked up at her father like an alien had just unzipped and shed its human Dad suit in front of her. He turned to leave, but suddenly remembered the thought he’d wanted to share earlier in the conversation.
“Sweetheart, you’ve got to hold onto your courage and moral clarity for as long as you can. It’s easy now, but believe me, it gets harder with age.”
“Mmmhmm.”
He lingered in her doorway watching her fix and reread what she’d just written. A certain lightness of being rippled through him as he recalled her “camping” on their balcony when she must’ve been in the third or fourth grade, snug in her sleeping bag rolled out over an air mat he’d embedded among the fragrant herbs and flowers between the slightly elevated planter of lavender and the row for roses, sounds of nature emanating from a discreetly placed speaker. With one memory spurring the next, he recalled the secret school for spies they’d made out of the cardboard box that the new washer/dryer had arrived in earlier that day, with the heavy lifting left to an eight-year-old’s near infinite capacity for imagination & openness to play along, watching her growing up in the mirror and other reflections throughout the apartments they’d lived in, windows, balcony doors, television screens and art frames, and other shiny surfaces, discovering who she was when she spoke to herself when she thought no one else was listening. 🏁
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