Awake

Colonel Calvin Autreuf peered at the computer screen before him. The target, a chubby limp fellow hobbling into the door of the Chinese buffet, and a pale light glinted off his balding head. They were about the same age, although this guy, O'Mega, was decaying at a much faster rate than Autreuf. Access to health care and a gym, the Colonel surmised. Two things his crew had been denying him while they smoked him out. And discipline. Here was a fellow that needed a plan.

Discipline. The sunflowers came to his mind: the yellow carpet with seeds sticking out and bumblebees landing and taking off. Then across the garden, sunflowers swaying in a bright morning breeze, framing the clean blue of a big man and the fellow in the soft fedora hat standing beisde him. Low voices, the cries of his mother and a letter, and what Cal always remembered as cooing coming from the men.

This, Cal's earliest memory, was a much stronger impulse than the photo of his father in his uniform. Growing up all he knew was that he was 37 when he died off Egypt in the summer of 1967. That's the way it always went. You live anonymously and die anonymously and your loved ones are comforted by strangers who soon disappear as well.

Cal joined the army. At that age, his early 20s, it was to spite his Mom and French stepfather. He judged them in the harsh way that the young judge the old, once they realize that age doesn't always bring wisdom. Sometimes just aches, pains, and mistakes. His mother and stepfather had become hippies and his mother had devolved for a time from being thin and beautiful and young to someone who was listless, with a big ass. She smoked her way through a lawnfull of weed in the 1970s and she and Benoit drifted, with Cal in tow.

Now they both had long ago come out the other side. They owned a health food store in Half Moon Bay, were gray panthers, and went to rallies in San Francisco, springing from combi vans with fulsome smiles plastered across their faces.

He spoke French and Arabic from his childhood in Tangier, so in the service Cal was inevitably guided towards intelligence. A world of spotless desks, reasonable tones, and placid demeanors. He learned in this world that most secrets were already out there, somewhere, locked inside people like this current target, Alfred O'Mega. The problem is that you couldn't just beat it out of them, at least not on US soil anyway.

Through his speakers Cal listened to the Captain sigh into his body mike. O'Mega approached and glanced towards Two and then Three, picking them out immediately. He was staring directly into Cal's monitor, into his eyes, as if he recognized him. This was disconcerting: Cal got this a lot. A sense that the target was looking directly at you as an individual when they were comprehending the surveillance itself: the institution of you.