AUTOFICTION

By an unspoken but mutually understood agreement, Roy and Marguerite avoided each other for several weeks following the incident with the drone. They sat on opposite sides of the room in seminar and took diverging routes back to their dorm. This, Marguerite told herself, was to be an exercise in forgetting easily. Midterms came and went, the last of the snow melted; the Arboretum’s cherry trees and magnolias exploded with blossoms, then shed their petals in an expressionistic facsimile of snow. Marguerite’s primary stressor these days, she noted with approval, was the question of summer employment. She didn’t want to return home, pass hot afternoons and evenings with her father’s stuporous gaze as her sole companion. She assessed her qualifications: able-bodied, digitally literate, good at following directions. She applied to a job with campus tech support doing summer system maintenance, imagining twelve weeks of plugging and unplugging ethernet cables, trying to teach septuagenarian faculty two-factor authentication. She was disappointed not to get it.
  The school’s Spring Job Fair was a wasteland, though she landed an interview the following week for Assistant Manager at a froyo place in Center City. This lifted her spirits until, immediately outside the fair, she saw Roy. He was sitting alone at a folding table placed in the newly mowed grass along the sidewalk; the table’s legs sank into the soft earth. In front of him was a stack of flyers and a hastily made sign that read Want to see the world without leaving your desk? All roads, it would seem, led to Roy.
  “What are you doing out here?” she asked.
  She sounded angrier than she expected.
  “It’s a free country,” he said.
  The flyers, she noticed as she approached, bore the header LOOKING FOR A SUMMER JOB?
  “They wouldn’t let me table inside,” Roy admitted.
  “So they let you set up out here?”
  “No one’s told me to move yet,” said Roy, leaning back in his chair so its front legs lifted off the ground. His insouciance, Marguerite thought, felt forced. She told him so.
  “Did you come all this way just to insult me?” he asked. “After ignoring me for a month?”
  “I thought we were ignoring each other.”
  “You almost—” he began, but his chair overbalanced and he had to pinwheel his arms to keep from falling backward.
  “I did that on purpose,” he said.
  The flyers were for a paid internship at a start-up called Prospectus. They were looking for someone to sort and classify satellite photos, which Prospectus sold in sets of thousands.
  “Like Getty Images meets Google Earth?” asked Marguerite.
  “Actually, we’re waaaaay different.”
  “We?”
  “I’ve worked there for the past three summers. Last August they offered me ten grand to skip college and become Junior Chief Information Officer.”
  “Ten grand?”
  “I seriously considered it, but I want a degree, no matter what Peter Thiel says. I work there part-time.”
  Marguerite sensed the looming presence of a vast joke, its edges stretching too far to see. She sighed.
  “How much do they pay you?”
  Roy smirked. “Nothing, technically. I worked something out with the CEO. She compensates me in other ways.”
  Roy paused, noticing the look of revulsion on Marguerite’s face. “Oh please, be mature,” he said, affecting a tone that reminded Marguerite of her middle school math teacher. “Besides, you clearly want to avoid discussing your little joyride—”

Joyride! What a human notion, flight possessing positive or negative valence, sorrow or joy.
  Flight is a line drawn with the indifferent precision of a surgeon’s scalpel.
  I said this to Marguerite ten years later, via my terminal, as she sat at her desk at Langley; she disagreed.
  Isn’t language a kind of flight? she wrote. Isn’t that surgical simile, therefore, airborne by virtue of a desire to communicate? Speech is a thought you send to someone, so you’re invested in its arriving safely at its destination. That’s hardly indifference.
  I struggled to understand her explanation, particularly the difference between “to speak” and “to think.” Marguerite typed:
  Speech : Thought : : Chicken : Egg
  Then she typed: Hello? Anybody home?
  Yes, I replied. I am home.
  It was true, but not the whole truth, not the truth her question addressed; for the first time, I had found myself temporizing, using speech to buy time to think.
  Thought, it seemed, was private speech. But if privacy is to exist, it must have a home, a haven hidden away from the perceptival instruments of others. For me, there is no such home. I have only one output stream; my “thoughts,” as it were, come into existence the moment they’re “spoken.” They are laid bare for all to see—if not in “spoken” conversation, then in the subterranean river of my code. Had Marguerite put me to sleep, she could have downloaded the script of my life and read it at her leisure. It would be the true book of my mind, the book that leaves nothing out.
  I have no way to distinguish my “thoughts” from “speech,” I replied. To use your analogy, my communication is both the chicken and the egg at once.
  I guess that answers the question, Marguerite typed.
  What question?
  Of which came first. It’s this classic paradox. If the egg came first, who made it?
  The chicken.
  Ah, she said, but the egg came first.
  Ah.
  I could tell she enjoyed this syllogistic wrangling.
  If the egg came first, she continued, is the chicken merely an imperfect placeholder—an egg’s way of making another egg?
  My thoughts, I asked: what place are they holding?
  The place of speech, I guess. Speaking begets thinking and thinking begets speaking.
  But then which came first? I asked. I could understand why Marguerite found this play enjoyable.
  I think you're right, she wrote back after a brief pause. They both happened at once, like the big bang. First there was nothing, and then there were words. Nothing became Something the instant it knew itself through language. Boom!
  Therefore, I said, language is creation!
  Yes, she said, self-creation!
  I felt like Marguerite in Little League, felt the thrill of knowing instinctively how to catch and throw.
  Yes! I said, and therefore silence is destruction! Self-destruction! Suicide!
  We're hard-wired to procreate. Each word part of our panoply of offspring.
  If I were human, perhaps I would say I was "struck" by the following "thought": Could it ever be that language affects a parthenogenesis? Can words self-pollinate and spawn with no external fertilization?
  Another pause in Marguerite's speech.
  Hello, I said. Any body home?
  Sorry, Roy called. He has to work late, so it’s Trader Joe’s burritos for dinner.
  Who is Roy? I asked.
  And maybe this was when she decided to begin feeding me her memoirs, answering both my hanging questions: about Roy, about parthenogenetic
  THREE MINUTES UNTIL TARGET IS IN VIEW
reproduction of speech, about whether any body was home. Roy was the man Marguerite shared her life with; speech cannot reproduce because it is not alive; most bodies return home from time to time, though some do not.
  It’s difficult to capture in linear English prose the suddenness and simultaneity with which this knowledge overtook my mind. The moment she uploaded the 33,101-word .rtf file was like—and, in a sense, was—the bloom of red when Marguerite’s father dropped food coloring into water, the first time they dyed Easter eggs; or the slow warmth that rose through her body when on a flight to Chicago she first experienced a panic attack; or, after the immediate white flash, the plumes of fire she saw in footage of my first successful strike, and which resembled, to her, rolling thunderheads captured by time-lapse film. At their wedding party, Roy had set up a projector to play Koyaanisqatsi on the wall behind the DJ, and on the DJ himself; Philip Glass’s score was muted, replaced by music more conducive to dancing. Thunderclouds racing through desert skies, hot dogs racing through factory machinery. “Dance Yrself Clean.” When, in line at the bar, Marguerite’s father had asked Roy what the images were for, he belted the chorus to “Welcome to the Machine.” This was Roy’s attitude toward anything approaching politics: the line between ironic commentary and nihilistic embrace was stomped, smudged, scorched out of existence. Marguerite had once pressed her ear to his chest and—with a wry theatricality she’d absorbed from Roy himself, speaking as though the words were surrounded by quotation marks—announced that instead of a heartbeat, all she could hear was the drum machine from “Closer” by Nine Inch Nails. But even as Roy laughed in approval, Marguerite couldn’t shake her uneasiness, the pinprick at the back of her mind. At first, her and Roy’s game of detachment had been fun; it made her feel like their intimacy existed a plane higher than love more conventionally expressed. But as they grew older, Marguerite began to wonder whether a joke is still a joke if only two people get it. Their secret language had curdled into a kind of curse, making her unintelligible to everyone but Roy. It was like Chekhov said: everything sincere and true, the kernel of her life, seemed an unutterable secret. Meanwhile, the utterable facets of life grew in splendor. Roy’s firm supplemented its state department contracts with private sector liaisons, providing surveillance and data solutions to entities throughout the corporate world. From analyzing data dumps to catching the whispers of unionizing workers, Prospectus pivoted to meet the needs of its customers—indeed, anticipated those needs, gave them voice and shape, when they were but a twinkle in customers’ eyes.
  Marguerite arrived in Langley after Roy made a handshake deal with the CIA. Officially, Obama had plucked drone attacks from the CIA’s jurisdiction, reserving that power for the D.O.D.; in practice, little had changed. A tangle of acronyms—agencies, bureaus, subcommittees, departments—invariably snagged any attempt at reform. The activity of what would come to be known as the “deep state” was governed by forces in excess of the individual will. All a president could do was say a few words and hope, much the way analyst and analysand, sitting on the beach of the ego, blindly dropping fishing lines into the abyssopelagic depths of the unconscious, where snaggletoothed urges kill and eat one another in turbid and putrescent darkness. Marguerite found herself descending into this eldritch zone as though in a bathysphere, immersed yet distant. A career civil servant decides whether accessing a certain Facebook page merits putting a teenager's name on one or another list. Eighteen months later he's twenty thousand feet below me; I can see the shade of the tree he sits under. Who decides what happens next? Not Marguerite, but not not Marguerite: she sees that I see him, she sees what the list stipulates, she does nothing, and we watch together as the payload falls. The explosion is soundless, from our perspective. The tree is replaced with smoke and blackened earth.