KGB

Where, I grew up, I hate it. Everything's clichéd. Clichéd as fuck. Picture a movie about some little rural town, where nothing ever goes wrong and nobody ever commits any crimes. It's so quaint the houses could be separated by shiny white picket fences, but they're not because everyone trusts each other. You know? For me, it made me want to kill myself. I've never been in a place with less character in my life. I got out of there as soon as I could. But I'm jumping ahead of myself. I was describing where I grew up…

            The kids? Clichéd. They were all so identical they might as well have been grown on trees, hanging from branches by their umbilical cords. They all wore fire engine red backpacks and shoes that lit up when they walked. They went to school early every morning, because "To be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late, and to be late is unacceptable." So sayeth my kindergarten teacher, and everyone else in the goddamn neighborhood. Every day those kids brought home their work in their little red backpacks. Every day they did their homework, and every day their parents checked it over after they went to bed and left it sitting for them at the breakfast table the next morning with mistakes circled. It killed me. Still does.

            And the parents? The parents were just as bad. Just as clichéd. They spent their days laboring away at lucrative careers, doctors and lawyers and realtors all, picked up their kids on the way home, made dinner (from a box, of course), walked their dogs (golden retrievers, mostly, with the occasional poodle thrown in), and listened to classical music until they watched a soap opera before taking prescription sleeping meds and trudging wearily into bed. Like I said, no character. Not even a little. Couldn't we have a hotshot test pilot who wore aviators when he walked his pit bull? It's really not that much to ask, but no. No such luck. Doctors and lawyers and Doberman pinschers.

            The worst part of it all? My family was right at the center of it. My mom was a realtor, my dad was a doctor, and we lived in a big, modern house with a "splendid" (my mother's word) view of the city. Our sweeping lawn was mowed twice a week by the gardener, an older man employed by the homeowners' association. Just that name makes my skin crawl. Homeowner's association. It has cliché written all over it.

            You might be starting to wonder why I'm different – what's wrong with me? Why, if everyone else was content to go about their everyday lives, did I have such a problem with it? Well, I never really figured it out myself. Maybe I was just a bad egg – I don't really care. All I know is that for as long as I can remember, I've hated that place. I didn't figure out why until I left – but I'm getting ahead of myself again. First things first.

            First incident: when I was a kid, I think nine to be exact, I decided I couldn't take it anymore. I couldn't take everyone being the same and my family wanting, expecting, even demanding, that I fit into that. I couldn't take my off-white, eggshell finish room, my red backpack with matching folders, my perfect little uniforms that my mom washed every weekend and put away neatly in my drawers. I hatched a plan – quite cunning for a nine-year-old, I think. My parents were going on a hike. They wanted me to come, but I pretended to be sick. I overdid it a little at first, and they were going to stay home and watch me, but then suddenly I was a little better. I said I felt fine, now, but I was still really tired so I was going to sleep. My mom made sure I had their cell phone numbers, then left. Yup. They left me all alone. I couldn't believe it, but I guess they trusted me to be a good little boy. They couldn't have been more wrong. I rolled out of bed as soon as I heard their call pull out of the driveway. I pushed all my furniture to the center of the room and fetched the container of black paint I'd spotted in the basement a few weeks earlier. I painted all my walls black. Pure black. And, I decided not to move the furniture back. Not because the paint wasn't dry – I'm not sure I had fully grasped the concept of letting paint dry – but because I liked it better with all the furniture squished into the middle. My bed was at the center, and everything else was around it. It's not like I really needed my bed to be out in the open. The only time I was in it I was asleep and didn't care whether there was furniture around me. Everything else was facing the center of my room, so there was a big walkway all the way around. I don't think I actually liked it, because when you think about it the old way makes much more sense, and made the room feel much bigger. I just liked it because it was something different.

            I think that was the first step on my way to realizing why I didn't like it there. My problem was the consistency. Everything was always same old, same old. There was no variety, and with no variety there's no appreciating anything because there's no contrast. The people in that town did the same thing every day of every week of every year, like robots – you need change to really appreciate what you have. I wanted change and that town was holding me back. I had no choice but to leave.

So I did. One day I just picked up my stuff and beat it. My parents didn't leave me alone for quite a while after the painting-the-room-black incident, but I really didn't care. I waited patiently... I was twelve when the perfect opportunity arose. My parents, being the completely trusting type that little town basically bred, went on another hike, and fell for exactly the same stunt I'd pulled before. I feigned illness, but did it a little more tactfully this time. I'd carefully been especially good for a month beforehand, talking to them a lot so they would think I was a goody-two-shoes again. I expressed interest in the hike, but on the day of I felt a little nauseous and pretty tired, so could I please stay home? I would probably just sleep the whole time anyway… And of course, exactly the response I was expecting. They'd take lots of pictures, and they hoped I felt better and they made me promise to call if I needed anything.

As soon as they'd been gone for long enough I was pretty sure they wouldn't come back to get something they’d forgotten, I started packing. I took out a medium-sized rolling suitcase, stuffed it with clothes and a sleeping bag, and set about finding money. As it turned out, the bank was sort of difficult to get to, so my parents just made one large withdrawal once a month and kept tons of cash on hand, then replenished it when they ran out – they'd gone recently, so the safe was loaded. Trusting man that he is, my dad had shown me “how to open the safe,” just for fun. You know, a sort of father-son educational thing. I'd pretended to be interested in how the lock worked while I furiously tried to remember the combination he’d shown me. Sure enough, there was close to 500 bucks in there. I stuffed that into my suitcase as well and set off for the bus stop. I won't bore you with the details of the journey, but I settled in an abandoned, burned out house on the outskirts of a neighboring town, near the last stop on the bus line. Homeless people aren't very common, so I was pretty sure I'd be okay. I stocked up on food from the local grocery store and slept in my sleeping bag in a not-too-badly-burned room. It was drafty, but it was summer, so I figured I could deal. It also smelled strongly of smoke, but again, I figured I could deal.

Shortly after that I was sitting on my sleeping bag around noon, starting to get bored with the whole setup. Don't get me wrong; I never even started to miss home – I couldn't have been gladder to be away from the clichéd hellhole I hoped to never call home again. But I couldn't deny that I was getting kinda bored. I shrugged off the feeling and lay back, trying to sleep. I couldn't help but think of home, and found that I could remember it disappointingly well. I could picture the houses, so goddamn white and perfect, and hear the voices, so goddamn intelligent and perky.

I don't know how long it took me to fall asleep, but I remember waking up. It was weird – I knew I'd dreamt about home, and that it had been an alarmingly real and vivid dream. I thought back to it, and realized I could remember literally everything, in more detail that I remember ever bothering to observe it. I could remember my neighbor, Marta Hollis – I remembered how tall she was (at least relatively speaking – I've never been good one for numbers but I could easily have picked her out in a crowd of silhouettes, just by her height). I remembered her eyes, a typical blue, and her hair, brown with a few streaks of gray. She was in her mid-fifties, and she'd had a face-lift a couple years ago.

I kept thinking. I had nothing better to do, so I just lay there on my sleeping bag. I didn't fall asleep because I'd been sleeping upwards of 14 hours a day, with nothing better to do, so I wasn't tired in the least. My mind was whirring – I could remember every person I'd ever met, and all the details about their physical appearance. I remembered every conversation I'd ever had. Ever. It was a little trippy, like somehow my body had decided to devote all the energy I'd built up by sleeping 60% of the time to turning my mind into a library of everything I'd ever done and making it easily accessible.

I remembered Jose, the clerk at Walgreens, where I'd used my allowance to buy a packet of skittles last March. But it didn't stop there. I could remember – even though I'd never really known to begin with – that Jose was a nickname. His real name, I remembered, was Gabrielle Fernandez.

My head was swimming, but I couldn't seem to stop it. I remembered that he'd started going by Jose when he came to the U.S. (from Spain, when he was ten, I remembered) because "Gabrielle" was a woman's name in the U.S. I could picture his girlfriend, short and slender with small, dark brown eyes and an unusually pointed nose. They'd been living together in a (medium-sized, well-furnished) apartment (for two years now, I remembered), and Jose-Gabrielle was planning to propose to her on Valentine's Day.

I wondered how I could possibly know all that. It had been six months since I'd even seen this guy, and I'd only seen him for maybe thirty seconds. All he'd said was, "have a good night, sir." I'd replied, "okay," because I'd hit my ornery teenager stage early. I recalled that he gave me a funny look, but I hadn't thought twice about it at the time.

I thought for a while longer, my head still swimming. I could not only remember everyone I'd ever met, but I could also remember everything about everyone I'd ever met, including all the details about who they were, where they lived, and what they did – even if I'd never known those details to begin with.

I spent a long time thinking about people I'd known and examining their personal lives and histories in my internal library.

Gradually, it started to hit me how powerful an ability this was. I felt like I had a superpower! Ok, not really…it was much more lame and anticlimactic than a real superpower. But I definitely had a talent of some sort, which I was sure could be used for some purpose. I mulled over the possibilities in my mind, giving no real consideration to whether each option was good or evil – I didn't care. I thought only about how I could use to give me the most personal satisfaction. It occurred to me that I could be a spy – all I had to do was see a person, perhaps talk to them, and I could remember everything, about not only them, but everyone they associated themselves with. Surely that would make me an amazing spy.

I settled on spy. "Spy" sounded powerful and fun, and I'd always thought spies were sort of cool. Next I needed someone to spy for. Problem there was, I'd never really liked the U.S. It was too clichéd. I'd heard a lot about our differences with Russia, and Russia sounded like a cool country. I was sure they employed lots of spies. So, I popped down to the public library and looked up the Russian equivalent of the CIA, which I knew was where a spy would go if he were looking for work in the US. I sent an email to the FSB (the Federalnaya Sluzhba Bezopasnosti, the Russian secret police) explaining my situation and ability, glazing over how I'd come to possess said ability, and offering them my services. It was in English, but I figured they could work with that. However, to be safe I also checked out three books and two audio collections on speaking Russian.

I went back to my "house" and started learning the language. Since I was young and apparently had some sort of super-photographic memory, I didn't have much trouble.

I hadn't really been expecting them to reply, but I checked eagerly every day nonetheless. A few days later I was surprised to find that they had – some deputy foreign minister had expressed interest in my "curious" ability. I won't bore you with the details of my long email chat, which switched to Russian a few weeks in when I was confident I wouldn't embarrass myself too much, but here's the basic breakdown: he was a bit wary of me at first, but somehow, eventually, I convinced him both my ability and my desire to help the Russians were genuine.

They flew me out to Russia undercover – at home, I assumed the police would be looking for me, and even if they weren’t I wouldn't have been able to get a passport without legal guardians. However, the Russians (seemingly with ease) set me up with a fake and got me overseas somehow.

I'm not at liberty to disclose much more information. However, in Russia I learned that the KGB, a faction of the Secret Police left over from the communist U.S.S.R. that I (and presumably the rest of the world) thought had died out, was still going strong. My ability has served them well, and as I grow older and more experienced and become a more senior member of the group, their trust in me grows; I've been promoted several times.

I'm enjoying both the job and my coworkers, and I definitely feel confident I made the right decision all those years ago. I can't imagine any other path would've made me happier.

I used to always feel different in my hometown. As it turns out, I actually was. Hah.