of myself forever reproaching myself

So, she roamed. Loitered, really. Agent Thoreau was a field agent by title but she commanded little of the respect, or perhaps the pity, that the position had entailed today, what with everyone moving around the building in their distinguished, patriotic duties. Not particularly bothered by the burden of being a good example, Thoreau instead paid witness to the flurry of mid-level managers and suited officials and harried low-level assistants in an emboldened though unintrusive way. Rather like God. Rather like a stray cat.

And, anyway, she was marching towards mortality as it is, so squarely on the onset of middle age even if she were too prideful to admit it. A yawn fought to escape against the back of her throat. A quick nap at her desk would not be denied, surely. Given her behavior these past two weeks, It would not even be surprising.

Walking through the building’s many halls, she finally arrived at the agents’ bullpen where their assigned desks lay, the dividers affording them with only a fair bit of privacy. Here, at the eye of the storm, where London’s desk sat and remained in the periphery, the world was relatively quiet. No one else was here, save for the crowd scurrying through the buildings’ several corridors. Rather like rats. She spotted and eyed Agent Whitman with some detached curiosity — evidently, he’d gone back to work, or some version of it — before she slinked towards her own cubicle and slid into her seat. Her cocobolo desk was indubitably expensive but unergonomic, another damning symbol of her misplaced greed: once, a lifetime ago, after a particularly good streak of missions, she’d persuaded that the admin add the new piece of furniture to the appropriations budget. She’d been unable to reverse the action since, and refused to, lest she find herself lost in the sea of bureaucracy. She crossed her arms on the desk and rested her head against them, her upper limbs acting as a makeshift pillow.

Something like rest came to her for about a minute. And then Whitman began talking. 

Being painfully alert was the curse of the profession. And, the thing is — she isn’t irritated by the distraction. Unhappy, maybe, but that was rather an expected undercurrent by now. That had nothing to do with London. In fact, she was almost grateful for it. In any case, the commotion that Whitman was up to seemed as good an excuse as any to abandon sleep. She shot up from her desk, wincing as she did, and proceeded to walk towards his cubicle. 

Something lands on her feet. She doesn’t make a move to pick it up. 

Instead, she veered her focus toward the man in question. In all these years, she and Whitman never really talked, and his retirement should have meant that they were blessedly free from doing just that. Still — how did that old adage go? — she ought to have expected the unexpected. The line was nowhere near as poetic as Abraham Lincoln’s maxims, but it did the job, and anyway, she’d never been a poet. 

“Why would you need to be productive during retirement? I would’ve thought that retirement was to keep you away from doing precisely that,” Thoreau leaned against the nearby cubicle — was it Hemingway’s? Faulkner’s? — and stared openly at the curious sight before her.

“I’m just as out of the loop as everyone else, I’m afraid. I doubt we’ll get any orders until next week,” Thoreau began. Her expression was of mild concentration, assuming a professional, measured cadence inasmuch as her weariness could muster. “I can admit that openly, at least. Everyone is out here marching like they’ve got something to prove.”  

Her skin felt clammy beneath her clothes. Something very much like guilt passed over her. She had to do something, shouldn’t she? But all she really could do — all she really wanted — was to talk to someone. Ah, the power of psychology. 

“Which is more likely? That the Bureau throw a bunch of well-meaning ingenues with bleeding hearts or some hardwired veterans?” The truth is, she’s neither, but therein lies again the matter of pride. “Worse comes to worst, you could sue the Bureau. Breach of retirement contract, or whatnot.” 

She walked forward. The distance between this cubicle and hers felt proximate to their current relationship. Maybe someday they could bridge the gap; tonight, or maybe especially tonight, perhaps she could try to inch towards it. “It appears your approach to the situation is rather unique. Maybe you could walk me through this little productivity session of yours?” 

THE workplace is charted territory, whitman knows in his jolting, jilted heart of hearts. since the decade of disco balls and nixon memoirs he has (double)crossed chronological paths with confidence, bounded over political boundaries with conviction that would be considered criminal if not for the convergence of employment booms and militant booms and luck so dumb it has joined the components of luminiferous ether. whatever minor adjustments have been made to the office in the past four years should be nothing to him, just as he is nothing to the rest of them. the people who come and go, the people who never left. the people who are flipping through calendars of the fiendish fifties pretending that preventing that provocation of a school alarm will save millions (everyone is a number, whitman has never been good at math, put two and two together and you get a white flag), the people who are combusting alongside their little cylindrical papers because london is blowing their life’s work up and blowing off their negotiation efforts. his people. their faces are flickering street lamps, incandescence condescending now that he has experienced being a person with nothing to do rather than a part of people with nothing to do. herd immunity or herd mentality? whitman feels hunted by thoreau either way. it’s a break from the hauntings. it’s still not a pleasant feeling.

his own cubicle is embittered by his return, he decides, jutting out where whitman aims to collect his wits and the balls that have rolled to thoreau’s feet. vertigo or shame? one and the same, he decides, one stone for a flock. he stands to give thoreau the salute she deserves minus any trace of dignity and then crouches to find where flea market find numero redacted has gone.

“nature abhors a vacuum. so does my bank account.” he shrugs at her initial comment on his initial grave digging. then, in case more room must be made for his remains, his shoulders tense with a lie: “i was a party clown for a week. noble profession for the strongest of god’s soldiers. the bureau’s productivity quotas? dust in the trail of frank shorter, frankly.”

have you done something to your hair? is cursory, careless. men have hacked at amateur weather reports until they were put upon the olympic pedestal of hackneyed small talk next to pregnancy schedules impregnated with more product placement than a twenty-first century feature film and business cards that have no business being exchanged at brunch and nowadays it is developing cosmetics they flirt at being concerned with, the teasing and the cutting and the rest that raphael had paid no mind to. raphael does not have any mind to pay that fee, no madam president, and neither does whitman. he scratches at the nape of his neck as thoreau answers, concise and precise as ever. what had his mother’s favourite pastor said? indeed, friendship begins with indecent exposure, so says matthew mark john paul george and ringo 1:1. he flicks yellow styrofoam crumbs from his fingernails, keeping in rhythm with her words. thoreau could recite a phone book and for friendship’s sake whitman would choreograph interpretive salsa without the usage of feet to prove that he was listening. out of the loop. afraid. he doubts it.

“at least we are in this together,” he chimes in, too influenced by squeezy rainbows to rally up a normal adult response. “and at least they are trying to prove something within the realm of bureau-appropriate conduct. is next week the usual wait for orders, these days?”

have you anything to do with london’s disappearance? is accusatory, acerbic. he stamps over his questions both verbalised and clandestine with the red ink of rejection.

“therein lies the advantage of being neither. although, now, do you know what i’ve always liked about you?” no, whitman, because you never talked. one would reckon catching bullets as a weekend hobby might have molded him into someone better at public speaking. every day with whitman is a day of reckoning to prove that wrong. “you have always been hardwired with a well-meaning heart. and considering i came back voluntarily, i do not think i would have a very strong case. if you have any recommendations when it comes to lawyers, i have a very blank pad of paper for you to write on.”

have you changed at all? is the reason why the world of interrogation was not cast upon his shoulders until he tossed himself to the titanomachy of corporate achievement. his neurotic forte lies with lying in such a way that he is a lamp on the side of the street flickering for the sake of guiding people to, with positing factual punctuation to the end of others’ paragraphs. she has changed in ways that the faint static of carpets change the complacent artificial cheesy ozone layers around them. he just can’t know for sure which way she’s going, or if she cares to take him with her.

“well, as you know, i’ve not been in contact with london since my fiery passion for professional clowning began.” although, now, one could argue it never ended. “we need to look at the mental state his missions might have left him in as much as we’ve been poring over his missions, i believe. and if he’s managed to – ” disappear is not the right word. “ – vacation temporally, temporarily, maybe he has eyes and ears on us. maybe those eyes and ears just want to see and hear that we understand, on some level, the desire to escape. and i need to remember what he was like, outside of the things gone on record.” he does not know what the fuck he is doing. “i’m sure you understand agent london better than me, of course. a fly on the wall could do the same. not to say you’re a fly on the wall, obviously. you’re, er…”

mad libs. a relic of the fiendish fifties. go and fill in the blanks for him before he fires more than a blank at himself, please.

          "     i've studied nearly every permutation of a chess board.  you are at a significant disadvantage.     "     this , of course , is a lie , or an extreme exaggeration at the very least.  at a number exceeding the amount of atoms in the world , it would take 9.2e+23 times the age of the universe to achieve what artemus claims.  

          but @whitmanners doesn't need to know that.

          they sigh and move a piece on the board.     "     knight takes pawn ,     "     they narrate.  artemus swipes back a lock of hair from his forehead , still damp from the snowstorm that he walked in to get here.  his hand is wrapped in a white bandage seeped through with red at the knuckles , a complication of being volunteered to supervise a rookie during their mission.  yeah , they won't let that happen again. 

          artemus leans back in his chair and studies raphael.  the rules of the game are eternally malleable , changing every time he sets foot into this house.  today , they've decided that each time a piece is captured , a question is asked and must be answered  (  within reasonable boundaries      ).  it adds more tension to a game that artemus finds boring on a good day.

INSCRIBED into the epistomelogical esoterics of empiricism, a headstone and a headline rattling about his head like a heliocentric model that fondled idiocy no matter the über-legalization of divorce, were three words that agent whitman was most familiar with out of nagging necessity, during those bygone bar trivia battles of yore: scientia potentia est. power, potential – was there any real difference when it came to the bureau? but there was no agent whitman sitting in his sector at the bullpen, perfect back perpendicular to paperwork he might have worked past if he had stayed, attained the ultimate nirvana of potential, and neither was there any interrogation for agent whitman to conduct as he played janus of the law; good cop, bad cop, ugly cop. there and then was raphael, hindquarters sliding off the ethically sourced quadrants of a neon pink sacco chair, staring at the bandage on agent baldwin’s hand. no, no, bad raphael. his fingers snap to the beat of the storm slashing his windows apart and his vision drifts to the wooden chessboard. try it on the tongue, raphael, but don’t let the sound past your teeth. agent artemus. drop the title. bald yang. keep the title. agent doctor greatest regret artemus yang. by god, why couldn’t they have celebrated new year’s by stopping a simple, straightforward case of first-degree arson? not that it was particularly impossible, considering the amount of sparklers raphael had left over from a new year’s party nobody attended (not that he was bitter, and not that he believed anything was impossible except for people attending his parties).

oh, it was white’s move.

knowledge was power, and raphael had accepted eons ago that he was not meant to be powerful. raphael had also accepted that he was not good at permutations and probabilities that did not have to do with people, so he accepts his defeat at the hands of doctor yang’s totally truthful research with a deep, solemn nod. he swears he can hear something crack when he looks back up. well, he argues with his joints before actually speaking, he wasn’t going to give artemus the bad beanbag. “i’ll have you know that you lost before we began through the power of the pawn’s gambit, a specialized technique developed in a labarato–”

oh, it was black’s move.

“really, doctor,” raphael gasps, one hand to his pummeled heart and two eyes wider than the synthetic imitations stuck to his only fashionable pair of sunglasses. the other hand rakes a cluster of barely-combed hair backwards. “i can’t fathom the tournaments you must have won to pull off a move like that.”

‘a move like that’ being one of the best and most obvious moves possible, of course, considering it sets him up for a sort of en passant predicament where either move will open up his queen far before he’d planned, but he relents. he looks at artemus with a tentative smile, leaning back in his own chair by the slightest degree. curiosity has never killed the cat, but it has killed his social life in the apartment complex, and he cannot handle losing another friend.

knowledge was power. he adored artemus, but there were some fields that had to keep level. “something big, obviously. a union, maybe. between governments, between timelines, between.” a pointed look at artemus’s ring finger. “agents. honestly, though, as much as i miss being a fugitive before birth, we should hope i never come back. i’m out of practice, out of touch, and certainly out of the patience needed for a proper mission or recruitment. hypothetically.”

knowledge was power. wisdom was punning one’s way into winning. “doctor, hypothetically, have you ever tried to eat a clock?”