I.
We first met on the bus, although I had been following her since dinner. It was an impersonal tailing, strictly business. We suspected her husband of spying—probably for the Russians—although who really spies these days? Except us, of course. I could attest to that.

At the restaurant she and her husband were arguing about something I was too far away to hear. A poor bit of espionage on my part but to move any closer would be even poorer. He left early to return to work, and she stayed at the restaurant until she had finished her wine, and then his, and then the rest of the bottle she ordered to share. I wonder if she later included this occasion—his premature departure—in her mental litany of evidence against him.

General theories of intelligence have produced a closed loop model for how information gathering works: it starts with direction, then collection, on to processing, analysis, dissemination, and feedback where the situation is reevaluated, and a new direction is formed. I often hear my senior colleagues lament our “loss of direction”, which causes me to wonder where we had been heading before. My role ends somewhere in “collection”, so I’ve never had to firmly examine such thoughts.

In the spirit of discretion, I didn’t follow him from the restaurant but instead followed her onto the bus where I watched her from across the aisle for twelve stops without being noticed. By the eleventh, we were the only two people left. She was nearing the end of her book. I tilted my head to make out the title: Catch-22. Her expression was dark and grew darker as she read. Her eyes widened and watered and at one point she placed a hand tenderly over her mouth, a gesture I found both ingratiatingly feminine and oddly endearing. Eventually, she closed the book—marking her place with a receipt, placing it cautiously on her lap, as if afraid it would explode—and looked around, blinking as if just woken up. She caught me staring.

“Good book?” I asked. She took some time to consider this. I considered it too. What makes a book good? Is it enjoyability? She didn’t appear to have derived much enjoyment

“Yes,” she said. “Disturbingly so. It’s for a book club. We’re working our way through Penguin’s 100 books of all time. Have you read it?”

I smiled. The book was good because its quality had been observed and catalogued by the proper authorities, and publicized in the form of listicles, ranked for ease of cataloguing one’s own enjoyment of the book. Collection, processing, dissemination. Feedback.

“Once in University,” I said. “I can only really remember the first line.”

“Apparently he came up with that before he knew what the book was going to be about,” she said and yes, I had heard this before. “It just popped into his head one day— ‘it was love at first sight’—and he thought, that’s a pretty good way to open a novel. I wonder what made him keep it in.”

“Maybe it was love,” I offered.

“Maybe,” she agreed, “I suppose I’ll have to finish it to find out.”

Then she leaned forward as if letting me in on a secret. “Did you know he used to write until he figured out what he was writing about—sometimes halfway through a novel—he’d then finish it from there and then once he finished it, he would rewrite the first half from scratch.”

“Sounds exhausting.”

“I think it’s admirable,” she said wistfully as the bus passed what I knew to be her stop. I waited to see if she noticed (she didn’t) before pity won out and I announced that I was getting off.

The next time we saw each other she informed me that the city of London has a population of eight-point-eight million people.

“Really? I would have thought it was more,” I said, although I had never really thought about it before in my life.

“Eight point eight million,” she reiterated. “That’s almost twice the population of New Zealand. What are the chances of running into someone twice in the same week?”

“One in eight million?” I guessed. The chances, I knew, were exponentially better when one party was actively tailing the other, although I hadn’t intended to run into her that morning. I had intended to enjoy a peaceful breakfast on my day off. This line of work doesn’t really do “days off” though. We’re either active or inert but never off. I’m not trying to cry woe is me. “Off” has its detriments too. I was sitting out front a café I found nestled like a gold tooth in the mouth of an alley. It was a rare sunny day, mid-January, and the pavement was teeming with winter songbirds flittering around in pursuit of crumbs. I had caught her eye as she walked past and smiled. This was invitation enough for her to join me. She told me that, considering time and location, the chances of us running into each other were more like one in two million, which was still impressive, and less likely than being struck by lightning. It was only after this had been established that she introduced herself, apologized for not introducing herself earlier, and admitted that she didn’t have many friends.

“There’s something about me that people find difficult,” she said. “Something that just rubs them the wrong way. I don’t know what it is. Otherwise, I would try to fix it.”

I nodded in sympathy, and privately suspected it was her accent that put people off; she was the type of posh that stressed the hard “T” and long “U” in “amateur”.

“I don’t find you difficult,” I told her.

“Really?” she asked, gently as if my answer was fragile, liable to break if mishandled.

“Really,” I promised, a rare non-lie. I asked her about the book club.

“I only know most of them through my husband,” she said. “I’m not sure who organized it. Sometimes it feels like a dog park for the wives of investment bankers. As if meeting for an hour a week will keep us from whining.”

“Does it work?” I asked. She shook her head.

“It’s not like I don’t have enough to do,” she said. “I’m busier than he is. If I’m whining it's because I could do with a treat every now and then. Sorry, that was inappropriate.”

“No, it was funny,” I said. I asked if she were a writer, and she told me she managed the prime minister’s social media accounts, a job she described as “sort of like translating encyclopedias into picture books.” I already knew this, but it was entertaining to hear it explained. I was about to suggest she write a political thriller when her phone alarm went off and she told me work beckoned. I gave her my phone and told her to add her number “in case she needed some time off leash.”

II.

We met for coffee twice. Drinks thrice. Each time I collected something new. Her birthday was in December, so close to Christmas that her family celebrated both at once; when she was nineteen, she worked as a ski instructor in Canada for two months until she broke two ribs falling on a patch of ice; her mother, a television actress in the seventies, had once appeared in an episode of Fawlty Towers. None of this was worth further analysis in any official sense, but I processed it anyway. I could understand what other people found difficult about her; she was well-off, and conventionally beautiful without the easy charm or unwarranted confidence to justify such traits. She possessed a surplus of intelligence, and a deficit of practical interpersonal skills. She would stop talking briefly to apologize for talking so much only to continue talking as soon as I said, “no problem”.

She rarely asked me questions about myself, although I discouraged her when she did with vague, uninteresting answers. She wasn’t unhappy in her marriage but couldn’t help but feel that she had the potential for more happiness than she was currently experiencing.

Her husband was out when I had dinner at her house. She made chicken parmesan from scratch while I excused myself to the washroom and rooted through her belongings. Again, an impersonal intrusion, in motives at least. Highly personal in terms of discoveries. A card from her mother, in which she was referred to as “pickle”; a pair of red lace underwear with the tag still on; a box of chocolates stashed, only half eaten, at the bottom of a drawer. Not Valentine’s Day chocolates, but Christmas chocolates? Birthday chocolates? Self-bought, self-given chocolates? I imagined her eating only one every two weeks, secretly in her room. A break-glass-in-case-of-emergency box of chocolates. What I did not find was any evidence of treachery on her husband’s part. At least not at the national level. I found a pornographic magazine hidden in a box of broken kitchenware, but I assumed she was aware of this. If not, I saw no benefit in telling her. It would compromise the mission, if nothing else.

After we ate, I asked her if she finished her book and she nodded.

“Was it love?” I joked. She took some time to consider this. I considered it too. Love established explicitly yet insufficiently in the text might be explained by poor writing. However, we have already established that this was a Good Book. One can then either accept the Doylist (Hellerian?) explanation that the first lines were simply the first lines because they were the first to be writ or go searching for subtextual evidence of love.

“I think so,” she said. “I think that love really came back in the ending; Yossarian loves the Chaplain, and Heller loves Yossarian enough for them to both survive. It’s just a matter of expanding her definition of ‘love’. for instance, ‘love’ could mean trust, or friendship, or even just a lack of fear. The characters are so removed from conventional life that everything—insanity, heroism, love—it warps into something unrecognizable to us. It’s part of what makes it an ‘anti-novel’.”

“How did your book club like that answer?”

“They didn’t get to hear it,” she said. “Nobody else was that into it so we just kind of talked.”

“About what?”

“Men mostly.”

“Oh.”

“‘Oh’ is right. I mean, we’d just read an entire book about men, why not talk about them for a change? At least they were doing something interesting.”

She asked me if I was married. I shook my head. Marriage, like off time, is another thing that happens to other people. She smiled with a piece of parsley stuck in her teeth.

“Thank god for that.”

III.

We were wrong about the Russian spy theory. It happens sometimes. Honest mistake. Can’t be too careful these days, although these days we have less and less to show for our efforts. Sometimes I feel like I’m in a make-work program. 

The odds of running into someone in London are impossible to calculate. It’s a city of eight-point-eight million, after all. In a certain area, at a certain time of day they may be higher. They are exponentially lower when one party is actively avoiding the other.

I saw her crying through the window of my local pub as I was walking by. “Local” as meaning “a place I frequented”; it’s quite far from my actual address. It was quite far from hers as well. We had never visited it together. What are the odds of that? 

I hadn’t stopped talking to her yet, although I was gearing up for it. I was supposed to cut it off weeks before. Vanish. “Move countries”. Die. Although staging one’s death is quite difficult and expensive, so simple ghosting would half to do. Ghosted by a spook. My “work-things” were growing more frequent and the gaps of time between my replies were stretching from hours to days. Soon, I would be gone. It was just a matter of deciding whether to burn out vs. fade away.

IV.

She presented the evidence solemnly over a quartet of empty glasses.

“He’s been out late,” she said. “With friends apparently, but I ran into Steve the other day and he asked me how Mike was. ‘I could ask you the same thing’ I told him, but he just laughed and said he hadn’t seen him in weeks.”

I grimaced and signalled to the landlady to bring them two more pints. I had insisted on beer over wine, citing its wealth of fortifying minerals. Stout, I was told, helped combat iron deficiency. The science behind this was dubious at best, but if nothing else it was an effective placebo. She had stopped crying, at least.

When I walked in, she caught my eye and tried to muster a smile, which was invitation enough for me to join her.

“It’s been a while,” she said. I nodded.

“I look pathetic, don’t I?”

“Not pathetic,” I said. “Just hysterical.”

A few drinks later “hysterical” was replaced by conspiratorial— as if trying to better understand her husband through mimicry—as she leaned across the table and told me that he called her from Steve’s the other night. He said they’d got into the scotch, and he didn’t want to drive, so she offered to pick him up, but he said he’ll just stay the night there.

She turned her watery gaze up at the ceiling—beer coloured like the walls and tables.

“And he’s been glued to his phone,” she lamented. “Always texting, always taking ‘work calls’—I always wondered what could be so urgent. He practically lives at the office anyway. Oh God, I’m an idiot. It must seem terribly obvious from the outside.”

I knew this was where she was supposed to offer some sort of platitude— “not at all” or “could have happened to anyone” or the old classic “fuck him”—but in the preceding weeks I learned that her mind was like an excavator left running overnight, forever digging itself into deeper holes. It was best to wait until she exhausted her fuel. I took a long sip of my own beer—its aftertaste was metallic, perhaps not such a placebo after all—leaving her in rapt anticipation.

“I’m afraid the evidence seems rather damning,” I said eventually. “Do you know who the other woman is?”

“Probably twenty-three with a family estate in the country and a Jag in the garage.”

I felt inclined to remind her that she had a townhouse in Notting Hill and enjoyed a double income/no kids partnership with a man whose six-figure salary barely exceeded hers.

“Maybe I should talk to him,” she said. “Maybe I can try to talk him out of it. I’ve always believed that the key to a happy marriage is forgiving and forgetting. And, of course, it takes two to tango. I must have done something to drive him away.”

If she could only figure out what it was. She would try to fix it. She who, by her own admission, didn’t have many friends, who people found “difficult”, who had an encyclopedia’s worth of things to say and no one to say it to.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” I said, violating my no platitude rule. “I’m sure it has nothing to do with you.”

General theories of intelligence are of little help in this situation. The default model is static, ever repeating, nothing is gained, nothing is solved.

V.

“Thank you for joining me tonight,” she slurred as I helped her with her coat. She threatened to topple forward or backward with every attempt to get her arm in the hole. I had continued to order beer but had stopped matching her after three pints.

“It’s nice to have a mate, y’know?”

I nodded although I didn’t know. Not at all.

We rode the bus back to hers, sitting side by side, her head resting on my shoulder for the duration. On the twelfth stop, she told me that I was her best friend. I felt I should warn her that I was so far removed from conventional life that my idea of friendship had warped into something unrecognizable.

I wanted to know her definition of “best friend”, and whether it was open to expansion. Instead, I told her that she was mine too.

“Really?” she asked.

“Really,” I promised, wondering if it was worth starting from scratch.