Intelligence

When you’re putting one of these issues together and shuffling through stacks of manuscripts and your eyeballs are about to stage a coup against your brain, everything becomes 100 percent better when you come across something like what Seth sent us. He’s 25 years old and will soon have stories appearing in

McSweeney’s

and the

Missouri Review

. He’s a gem, he is.

Story read by: photographer Ed Zipco while continuously huffing canisters of nitrous.

I take a false tooth from my mouth in a diner, smash it open, and inside is the wrong microfiche. Expecting to find the Social Security number of the man I’m supposed to kill, I find, instead, inexplicably, the operating manual to a T-72 Soviet tank. I attend a ball in Prague under the guise of a diplomat only to slip and fall down the grand, winding staircase and spill out onto the dance floor. While bending back the fingernails of an innocent Korean man in the interrogation room, I accidentally break wind, undermining myself completely. And in Rome, fleeing police, I forget about the hollow statue with the launch codes tucked inside. In the cab, I punch the back of the headrest.

Stupid motherfucker

.

Stupid fucker motherfuck

.

And now they have me selling televisions, which, naturally, only has me feeling worse. I stand at a kiosk in a red golf shirt and khakis, waiting for some slob in sweatpants to fall in love with a TV-VCR combo, waiting to keep some kid from shoving his birdy thumbs into the plasma screens, waiting for the lurching, sneezing, crinkle-haired, ill-tempered crap beasts that swell the ranks of this Circuitpalooza’s clientele to darken my kiosk with their terrible, lumpy shadows—but waiting, most of all, to figure out why I’m here.

At night, I come home to a studio apartment where I live with a tabby cat, provided to me by the agency as part of my cover. The cat is government-trained, cold, and perfunctory in its duties as a companion. It sits, perched on my burgundy futon, licking its backside with a mild look of obligation. It poops in a box in the closet with an air both embarrassed and professional. There is my sad bag of toiletries and there, in the corner, is my kill dummy. After work, I pass the time by effecting life-threatening maneuvers across its plastic torso and waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for the agency to call, waiting for them to explain to me why I’m here. I attempt to put my kill dummy into a headlock and inadvertently knock over a halogen lamp.

I haven’t heard from the agency in the six months since being embedded as the assistant television sales representative at this Circuitpalooza. And to make matters worse, I have yet to actually sell a television. The numbers at my kiosk are down, way down, and lately my nineteen-year-old manager, Chaz, has been on my case. By the time I get the call, I might not even have a job here, which would be just another perfect opportunity for everyone back at the agency to share a laugh at my expense—like the time I blew the mission in Brazil because I got deliriously ill off a Cobb salad I ordered from room service and then spent three days in a gay brothel in São Paulo before realizing it wasn’t a hospital. Apparently there’s nothing funnier to a group of grown men and women than a near-fatal case of dysentery. Sure, it was a big laugh with everyone gathering around, howling at the cartoon Agent Desert Eagle put up in the break room, a poorly drawn, ill-conceived sketch of me throwing up on a nude Brazilian man. But let me ask you this: Later, when Desert Eagle accidentally blew off his left foot in a simple training procedure somewhere in Arizona, did I laugh? Did I refuse to put in for the gift basket? Did I distribute a cartoon of his severed foot wedged in a sand dune or impaled on a cactus or hollowed out and fixed with a tiny awning, serving as a swing joint for a bunch of little sexually liberated scorpion couples? No. I didn’t, because I’m a professional. I’m a professional. I’m a professional and I’ll sell one of these televisions if it kills me.

I walk into Circuitpalooza at 5:30 in the morning. It’s all part of a new initiative to bolster sales by making ours the only electronics store in town to open before dawn. It was an initiative met with a few reservations by those of us on the sales staff who found it impractical on the grounds that no one ever really comes into Circuitpalooza until a quarter after one. However, after it was brought up at the weekly sales meeting, management quickly circulated a memo in response to our complaints and also to what they referred to as our dangerous lack of can-do spirit, the type of can-do spirit which, they said, was necessary to any retail endeavor. They encouraged us to sell harder, sell harder, sell harder, sell harder, and as an added incentive, reproduced my employee picture at the bottom of the memo, my head Photoshopped onto a picture of a small girl wearing a dunce cap next to a brief cautionary note about poor salesmanship.

I step behind my kiosk with a cup of coffee and a copy of the

Times

. I clip on my name tag and tell myself that I will sell harder, sell harder, sell harder, sell harder. I prepare to sell my heart out. I prepare to enter into an earnest, thoughtful, meaningful dialogue with each and every customer regarding their television needs. I tell myself I’m ready and I can feel it, except all morning the only person in the store is a middle-aged woman in a nightgown and flannel jacket who for hours stares open-mouthed at an electronic drum set. I recognize her as the homeless woman whom we had asked to leave the store two weeks ago when we had caught her trying to take a dump on the floor of the men’s room. I watch the door. No one walks in.

I remember, my first day at the agency, I had got my start in the interrogation room. Two agents were interviewing a young woman and between questions I was the one holding her head underwater. At the agency, they teach you that questions are not so much a way of getting answers as they are a way of breaking people down.

“What’s your name?”

“Samantha.”

Dunk

.

“Tell us your name.”

“Samantha!”

Dunk

.

“How do you spell it?”

Dunk

.

I was a young agent, still full of promise and ambition. I remember the questioning agents looking at me kind of sweetly while I held the woman’s head underwater. My whole life all I ever wanted was not to be awful at something.

“Where were you the night of August 17, 1974?”

“I wasn’t born yet!”

Dunk

.

My manager, Chaz, pokes me in the chest.

He tells me to pull my head out of my ass and start selling televisions.

He pokes me in the chest again and storms off in a flash of red hair and freckles, almost knocking over a pyramid of Hello Kitty cable converters.

I have to admit it seems strange that at this point in my life I could find myself in the position to be bullied by such an unequivocal little booger of a guy. I try to tell myself that my present situation is the product of elaborate accident and circumstance. The dump lady finally abandons her drum set and I try to interest her in a modestly priced portable television. She stares at me curiously for a second before blowing a raspberry and dropping an unwrapped Maxi Pad from her pocket into a nearby bin of DVDs.

Accident and circumstance.

At home, I fall asleep with a Hungry Man dinner on my chest, waking hours later to an infomercial featuring two Asian women who claim to have made millions off of interpreting stock tips from the Bible. There’s no call from the agency and I wake to find that the cat has dragged most of my Hungry Man across the room. The cat is crouched beneath a folding chair, licking the underside of a brownie.

A man from Indiana, standing in front of his new home, thanks the Asian women and the Book of Leviticus respectively.

These two women, they could sell anything. It’s humiliating.

The cat, seeing me awake, clamps down on the brownie and slowly backs its way into the closet. I throw my empty dinner tray at the television, swearing at no one in particular.

Stupid motherfucker. Stupid fucker motherfuck

.

The next day, some teenage boys come in and pretend to ask me about televisions. They belch and make fun of my Circuitpalooza vest.

“Like, what can you tell us about this model, sir?”

They all laugh and cover their mouths. They pull on my name tag and turn up the volume on all the televisions before inevitably losing interest. They wander off, away from my kiosk, smacking each other on the back of the head with VHS cassettes, Casio keyboards, and promotional material for satellite television.

I’m glad to see them go, but Chaz gives me the evil eye and, not wanting my employee picture on the next sales memo, I chase after them, calling them all

sir

. I head them off in front of the printer nook and start in on my pitch, “Excuse me, sirs, uh, dudes? I couldn’t help but notice you seemed interested in some of our televisions back there.”

The boys stop suddenly and start looking at me as if they might be sort of amused, as if a kind of fart cloud with eyeballs were now miraculously trying to sell them a television.

I look across the sales floor toward Chaz, who, seeing me chase down a sale, actually seems impressed. It would never occur to him for a moment that what I’m about to do is unquestionably hopeless and pathetic. He nods encouragement, mouthing the words

new warranty package

and

financing options

.

“Anyway,” I say. “I don’t suppose you guys would like to hear about our new warranty package? Or we’ve got, like, these really cool financing options.”

There’s a moment of absolute quiet. Without words, the boys seem to search among themselves for a spokesman—and from their clot of baggy t-shirts and backward baseball caps, eventually, implicitly, is chosen the boy whose t-shirt is by far the baggiest, the boy whose hat is the most backward.

“We don’t want any of your shitty televisions!” he says.

I look back toward Chaz, who’s still excited, still mouthing something about a mail-in rebate. I decide to wing it.

“Well, I think you’ll find that our prices are—”

“We all have AIDS!” the boy shouts. “We have to spend all our money on medicine!”

Another boy chimes in: “Yeah! And our parents are dead!”

And another: “Yeah! We’re homeless! Go to hell!”

The boys push past me, and Chaz, noticing, rolls his eyes as if he should have known better. I return to my kiosk, defeated, and the boys all laugh hysterically, gathering around the display PCs, bringing up a video from the internet where a man puts a battery up his penis.

There are, I suppose, far unluckier fates than my own. I remember the botched assassination in Paraguay, the decapitated arms dealer in Slovenia, the lone orphan girl in Kuwait. However, I can’t help but feel that, as a spy, my position here at Circuitpalooza demands perhaps a little more from me than it would from most. For example, when approached by an eighty-year-old woman with dry, saplike spittle forming at the corners of her mouth and her Sunday hat on backward who bitterly insists on being explained the difference between a TV and a VCR, you will find that, as a spy, you are forced to remind yourself firmly again and again that under no circumstances will you collapse this woman’s windpipe. Or, if ever you find yourself being yelled at in front of a customer by your nineteen-year-old manager, who still lives with his parents and who is only working at Circuitpalooza in order to save up enough money to buy a Camaro so that he and his ugly girlfriend might be able to drive up to some beach at night and make horrible red-headed love under trembling stars, you might find that it takes more than just a little restraint to keep yourself from taking off the rest of the afternoon in order to throw together a small, impromptu biological weapon, which, once placed in Chaz’s home, would leave his entire family with an untreatable superstrain of VD.

I don’t know. This whole situation is starting to wear a little thin. Anyway, all I want is a phone call. All I want, even in light of my innumerable fuckups, is to know specifically why this is what was chosen for me.

I try to sell a television to a young married couple. The husband, a wide-eyed kid in cowboy boots, admits that he and his wife need a television for their new home in the worst way and furthermore that cost is “no problemo.” However, after two hours of pitching to them every available set, he and his wife, for no apparent reason, eventually inch away from my kiosk uncomfortably, both of them offering a congenial “Sorry, hoss”—then, twenty minutes later, I see the camcorder guy leading them both happily to the bank of cash registers at the front of the store, each proudly holding a box labeled “Sony FamCam 2200,” an item which, in addition to being by far the most expensive and least reliable item in the store, also states clearly on the box that it can only be operated in conjunction with a television. Chaz glances at me while ringing them up. He whistles through his braces, annoyed.

That night, there’s no call from the agency and I sit on my futon while the cat pauses on its way from the closet to look between both me and the kill dummy, as if unsure which is which.

When my father was alive, he painted houses for a living. Can you imagine? The father of a spy, a housepainter? At the end of the day, exhausted, my father would always strip down to his purple briefs in the living room and lie facedown on the sofa. I remember I asked him once why he didn’t try to do something possibly better with his life, but there was no answer. He only smiled at me with his eyes half closed and sort of mumbled something about birth control, scratching beneath the waistband of his Jockeys, starting to snore. Of course, now I know the answer. Why not something possibly better? It’s because he wasn’t smart enough.

I try to sell a television to a priest, a soccer coach, a schoolteacher, a weatherman, a waitress, a garbage man, a police officer, a team of gymnasts—all without success. Chaz groans, shakes his head, pats me on the shoulder, calls me not the sharpest knife in the drawer. I could kill him, but I don’t.

Chaz is ugly. Chaz is a little kid. Chaz is short with red hair and pimples. Chaz is young now, but he’ll never amount to anything more than the manager of this Circuitpalooza. He isn’t smart enough to do anything else. I, on the other hand, am a spy.

I try to sell a television to a family of four and they seem unsure. They walk out of the store empty-handed and I hate them for it. It kills me. I pound my fist on the kiosk.

Stupid motherfucker. Stupid fucker motherfuck

.