I CAN’T SLEEP (950 words)
by Fredi Moringa

“I can’t sleep,” he said, standing there in the moonlight.
“Of course not,” I replied. “You´ve got an erection.”
“Will it rain tomorrow?” he said.
“Come on,” I said, pulling back the sheet. “Get yourself in here.”
He was only fifteen at the time—try not to think about it—and not especially big for his age, but, all in all, he was a good kid. I didn’t dislike him, as I do so most teenagers. My father says I frequently prefer small animals to children. He’s right. On Facebook I’d sooner watch a video of a newly hatched chick snuggling into the fur of a sleepy cat than endure South Korean twins tap-dancing brilliantly to a Motown melody. Maybe that was why I invited him into my bed. He had the innocent charms of a baby chick, but I did blink wonderingly, when he said as he left the bedroom, “If only I could bank on this happening regularly.”
Things changed over the next years. When he was twenty, on his first Christmas vacation from the University of Michigan, he swore that he hated me but that he also hated his need to hate me. “Then keep away,” I told him. “I didn’t ask you to come.” (But my eyes told him to stay.) There was the problem, he whined. He hated me but he couldn’t stop thinking about me. Lots of available girls were studying in Ann Arbor but, not matter hard he tried with them—maybe that was part of the problem—he couldn’t close the deal. He felt like a child in their presence, an immature creature obsessed with his aunt. “I can’t grow up or even pretend I’m a grown-up,” he went on. “It´s like I’m stranded outside the world I ought to be a part of. Like a spy.”
“In that case,” I said with a sugar-sweet smirk, “you know what to do.”
He called me poisonous to the touch and stormed out, but when he graduated from the Ave Maria School of Law, he filled out a sixteen-page application form and joined the CIA.
“Of course, they asked me about you,” he said.
“You’re kidding,” I gasped.
“Well, not directly. But when they asked ‘Have you ever been involved in sexual activity that might be used against you for blackmail or coercion?’ I was ready for it and the polygraph didn’t even twitch.”
Three years later he was traveling far and wide under an alias, carrying false documents, sometimes wearing a wig, to a European capital, to a south-west Asian seaport, to a Middle Eastern backwater, and had never felt more like himself.
The next time I met him, I hardly recognized him. He was wearing a black turtleneck, Italian driving gloves, and an expensive Harris tweed sports coat. When he removed the coat, I half-expected to see a Walther PPK in a shoulder holster.
“How was it?” he asked later.
“You used to be a lot better,” I said. “There was no waste back then, never a moment’s loss of concentration, everything was to the point. None of today’s lush opera fandango.”
That was the last time we slept together.
Two years later he came back from Kabul, saying he had fallen in love with an Afghan princess.
“Impossible,” I said. “They don’t have princesses in Afghanistan. Maybe she’s the daughter of a small-time bandit chieftain, but that’s it.”
He showed me a newspaper cutting and there she was, all dolled up, surrounded by surly turbaned males. He had met her through a professional connection and over the past year, she had consistently betrayed those males, ferreting out the sensitive information that he had asked for on his shopping list. Early on they had fallen in love—and there was the problem. They now wanted to marry. Marriage to a foreign national violated one of the CIA’s rigidly enforced policies. Once he was married to her, he would be downgraded to a “staff agent,” no longer able to enter a secure CIA facility or read classified communications. He’d be a donkey, doing donkey work.
I couldn’t let the silly boy toss away a promising career for a temporary fantasy.
I asked him what he saw in this “princess”.
He replied that, in spite of all the limiting conditions of her life, she was such happy person! “Somehow,” he insisted, “she lives a bigger, starrier life than we do.”
Of course, I was skeptical. “How can she really be happy if she isn’t American?” I asked. “She’s faking it.”
He refused to listen to reason. Clearly it was my duty, at whatever cost, to save him from himself. I wrote anonymously to the CIA telling them that he had lied in his initial polygraph test. His sexual past had been deeply compromising. My hope was to get him recalled to Langley, re-assessed, and given a different posting, while his work in Afghanistan was assigned to another agent. .
Nothing apparently happened.
So I sent letters to three Kabul officials denouncing the princess as a traitor to her family. What other option did I now have?
December last, I got a message from him, saying that the princess had disappeared without a trace. Then in January, another one, simply saying, “I am coming to get you!”
Every day now I expect his arrival, preparing myself to face him. I’ll look him in the eye, keep my shoulders squared, and act ignorant, innocent, and indignant.
Once again, I can’t sleep. Once again, it has been a day of wet winds and speeding clouds. Occasionally there’s a shaft of moonlight on the bedroom floor. I wonder if it will rain tomorrow.

END