Authors: Jennifer Egan
A door sliding open signals his wish to take the call on the balcony.
Your Designated Mate’s important conversations will take place outdoors.
If you are within earshot of his conversation, record it.
Since beauties carry neither pocketbooks nor timepieces, you cannot credibly transport recording devices.
A microphone has been implanted just beyond the first turn of your right ear canal.
Activate the microphone by pressing the triangle of cartilage across your ear opening.
You will hear a faint whine as recording begins.
In extreme quiet, or to a person whose head is adjacent to yours, this whine may be audible.
Should the whine be detected, swat your ear as if to deflect a mosquito, hitting the on/off cartilage to deactivate the mike.
You need not identify or comprehend the language your subject is using.
Your job is proximity; if you are near your Designated Mate, recording his private speech, you are succeeding.
Profanity sounds the same in every language.
An angry subject will guard his words less carefully.
If your subject is angry, you may leave your camouflage position and move as close to him as possible to improve recording quality.
You may feel afraid as you do this.
Your pounding heartbeat will not be recorded.
If your Designated Mate is standing on a balcony, hover in the doorway just behind him.
If he pivots and discovers you, pretend that you were on the verge of approaching him.
Anger usually trumps suspicion.
If your subject brushes past you and storms out of the room, slamming the door, you have eluded detection.
If your Designated Mate leaves your company a second time, don’t follow him again.
Deactivate your ear mike and resume your “nap.”
A moment of repose may be a good time to reassure your loved ones.
Nuanced communication is too easily monitored by the enemy.
Your Subcutaneous Pulse System issues pings so generic that detection would reveal neither source nor intent.
A button is embedded behind the inside ligament of your right knee (if right-handed).
Depress twice to indicate to loved ones that you are well and thinking of them.
You may send this signal only once each day.
A continuous depression of the button indicates an emergency.
You will debate, each day, the best time to send your signal.
You will reflect on the fact that your husband, coming from a culture of tribal allegiance, understands and applauds your patriotism.
You will reflect on the enclosed and joyful life that the two of you have shared since graduate school.
You will reflect on the fact that America is your husband’s chosen country, and that he loves it.
You will reflect on the fact that your husband’s rise to prominence would have been unimaginable in any other nation.
You will reflect on your joint conviction that your service had to be undertaken before you had children.
You will reflect on the fact that you are thirty-three, and have spent your professional life fomenting musical trends.
You will reflect on the fact that you must return home the same person you were when you left.
You will reflect on the fact that you’ve been guaranteed you will not be the same person.
You will reflect on the fact that you had stopped being that person even before leaving.
You will reflect on the fact that too much reflection is pointless.
You will reflect on the fact that these “instructions” are becoming less and less instructive.
Your Field Instructions, stored in a chip beneath your hairline, will serve as both a mission log and a guide for others undertaking this work.
Pressing your left thumb (if right-handed) against your left middle fingertip begins recording.
For clearest results, mentally speak the thought, as if talking to yourself.
Always filter your observations and experience through the lens of their didactic value.
Your training is ongoing; you must learn from each step you take.
When your mission is complete, you may view the results of the download before adding your Field Instructions to your mission file.
Where stray or personal thoughts have intruded, you may delete them.
Pretend sleep can lead to actual sleep.
Sleep is restorative in almost every circumstance.
The sound of showering likely indicates the return of your Designated Mate.
As a beauty, you will be expected to return to your room and change clothes often; a fresh appearance at mealtimes is essential.
The goal is to be a lovely, innocuous, evolving surprise.
A crisp white sundress against tanned skin is widely viewed as attractive.
Avoid overbright colors; they are attention-seeking and hinder camouflage.
White is not, technically speaking, a bright color.
White is, nevertheless, bright.
Gold spike-heeled sandals may compromise your ability to run or jump, but they look good on tanned feet.
Thirty-three is still young enough to register as “young.”
Registering as “young” is especially welcome to those who may not register as “young” much longer.
If your Designated Mate leads you to dinner with an arm at your waist, assume that your attire change was successful.
When men begin serious talk, beauties are left to themselves.
“How long have you been divorced?” suggests the wish to resume a prior conversation.
“A few months,” when untrue, should be uttered without eye contact.
“What was he like, your husband?” may be answered honestly.
“From Africa. Kenya” will satisfy your wish to talk about your husband.
“Black?,” with eyebrows raised, may indicate racism.
“Yes. Black,” in measured tones, should deliver a gentle reprimand.
“How black?” suggests that it did not.
“Very black” is somewhat less gentle, especially when accompanied by a pointed stare.
“Nice” hints at personal experience.
“Yes. It is nice” contradicts one’s alleged divorce. “Was nice” is a reasonable correction.
“But not nice enough?,” with laughter, indicates friendly intimacy. Especially when followed by “Or too nice!”
House-party hosts are universally eager to make guests eat.
For most beauties, the lure of food is a hazard; as a beauty of limited tenure, you may eat what you want.
Squab can be consumed by ripping the bird apart with your hands and sucking the meat from the bones.
A stunned expression reveals that your host expected the use of utensils.
A host who caters to violent guests will understand implicitly the need for discretion.
The adjacency of your host’s chair to your own may presage a confidence.
If your job is to appear simpleminded, a confidence may mean that you have failed.
Everyone should brush his teeth before dinner.
Turning your ear toward your host’s mouth will prevent you from having to smell the breath coming from it.
Ears must be kept clean at all times.
If your host warns you that your Designated Mate may pose an immediate danger to you, assume that your Designated Mate has left the room.
Going to the rest room is the most efficient means of self-jettisoning.
Never betray urgency, not even in an empty hallway.
If you have no idea in which direction your Designated Mate has gone, hold still.
If you find yourself hovering beside a pair of glass doors, you may open them and step outside.
Nights in the South of France are a strange, dark, piercing blue.
A bright moon can astonish, no matter how many times you have seen it.
If you were a child who loved the moon, looking at the moon will forever remind you of childhood.
Fatherless girls may invest the moon with a certain paternal promise.
Everyone has a father.
A vague story like “Your father died before you were born” may satisfy a curious child for an unlikely number of years.
The truth of your paternity, discovered in adulthood, will make the lie seem retroactively ludicrous.
Publicists occasionally have flings with their movie-star clients.
Discovering that you are a movie star’s daughter is not necessarily a comfort.
It is especially not a comfort when the star in question has seven other children from three different marriages.
Discovering that you are a movie star’s daughter may prompt you to watch upward of sixty movies, dating from the beginning of his career.
You may think, watching said movies, You don’t know about me, but I am here.
You may think, watching said movies, I’m invisible to you, but I am here.
A sudden reconfiguration of your past can change the fit and feel of your adulthood.
It may cleave you, irreparably, from the mother whose single goal has been your happiness.
If your husband has transformed greatly in his own life, he will understand your transformation.
Avoid excessive self-reflection; your job is to look out, not in.
“There you are,” whispered from behind by your Designated Mate, suggests that he has been looking for you.
Holding still can sometimes prove more effective than actively searching.
“Come,” uttered softly, may communicate a renewed wish for intimate contact.
The moon’s calm face can make you feel, in advance, that you are understood and forgiven.
The sea is audible against the rocks well before you see it.
Even at night, the Mediterranean is more blue than black.
If you wish to avoid physical intimacy, the sight of a speedboat will bring relief, despite the myriad new problems it presents.
If no words are exchanged between your Designated Mate and the speedboat’s captain, their meeting was likely prearranged.
A man known for his cruelty may still show great care in guiding his beauty into a rocking speedboat.
He may interpret her hesitation to board as a fear of falling in.
Resist the impulse to ask where you are going.
Try, when anxious, to summon up a goofy giggle.
Locate your Personal Calming Source and use it.
If your Personal Calming Source is the moon, be grateful that it is dark and that the moon is especially bright.
Reflect on the many reasons you can’t yet die:
You need to see your husband.
You need to have children.
You need to tell the movie star that he has an eighth child, and that she is a hero.
The moon may appear to move, but really it is you who are moving.
At high velocity, a speedboat slams along the tops of waves.
Fear and excitement are sometimes indistinguishable.
When the captain of a boat adjusts his course in response to commands from your Designated Mate, he may not know where he is taking you.
If your Designated Mate keeps looking up, he’s probably using the stars for navigation.
The Mediterranean is vast enough to have once seemed infinite.
A beauty should require no more context than the presence of her Designated Mate.
A beauty must appear to enjoy any journey he initiates.
Simulate said enjoyment by putting an affectionate arm around him and nestling your head close to his.
A beauty whose head is aligned with her Designated Mate’s can share in his navigation and thus calculate the route.
At night, far from shore, stars pulse with a strength that is impossible to conceive of in the proximity of light.
Your whereabouts will never be a mystery; you will be visible at all times as a dot of light on the screens of those watching over you.
You are one of hundreds, each a potential hero.
Technology has afforded ordinary people a chance to glow in the cosmos of human achievement.
Your lack of espionage and language training is what makes your record clean and neutral.
You are an ordinary person undertaking an extraordinary task.
You need not be remarkable for your credentials or skill sets, only for your bravery and equilibrium.
Knowing that you are one of hundreds shouldn’t feel belittling.
In the new heroism, the goal is to merge with something larger than yourself.
In the new heroism, the goal is to throw off generations of self-involvement.
In the new heroism, the goal is to renounce the American fixation with being seen and recognized.
In the new heroism, the goal is to dig beneath your shiny persona.
You’ll be surprised by what lies under it: a rich, deep crawl space of possibilities.
Some liken this discovery to a dream in which a familiar home acquires new wings and rooms.
The power of individual magnetism is nothing against the power of combined selfless effort.
You may accomplish astonishing personal feats, but citizen agents rarely seek individual credit.
They liken the need for personal glory to cigarette addiction: a habit that feels life-sustaining even as it kills you.
Childish attention-seeking is usually satisfied at the expense of real power.
An enemy of the state could not have connived a better way to declaw and distract us.
Now our notorious narcissism is our camouflage.
After a juddering ride of several hours, you may not notice at first that the boat is approaching a shore.
A single lighted structure stands out strongly on a deserted coastline.
Silence after a roaring motor is a sound of its own.
The speedboat’s immediate departure signals that you won’t be making a return trip anytime soon.
Knowing your latitude and longitude is not the same as knowing where you are.
A new remote and unfamiliar place can make the prior remote and unfamiliar place seem like home.
Imagining yourself as a dot of light on a screen is oddly reassuring.
Because your husband is a visionary in the realm of national security, he occasionally has access to that screen.
If it calms you to imagine your husband tracking your dot of light, then imagine it.
Do not, however, close your eyes while ascending a rocky path in darkness.
At Latitude X, Longitude Y, the flora is dry and crumbles under your feet.
A voice overhead suggests that your arrival was expected and observed.
An empty shore is not necessarily unpatrolled.
The best patrols are imperceptible.