The Traveler: You Are Being Watched

There is a sign in the mess hall that says, “You are being watched.” We laugh about it because we have never known anything else, not since we were babies left alone perhaps for a few hours. I have glimpses now and then of that early me, the one before the training, before the constant surveillance, before the surrendering of all self to the company. It feels alien to recall that before I stood before the leadership and swore my oath to the company, I was a raw embryo, ambitious to exceed its limits and dependency, to leave its home and fall to the earth somewhere, not knowing where, just eager to be expelled from that omnipresent heartbeat and amniotic embryonic sea of swishing sounds.
And then after the birth a sense of betrayal. But in between the birth and the betrayal was a blissful period of napping in a bassinet and chewing everything, of suckling and being cooed at, of being wooed and tossed into the air and swaddled and transported always like a little king in my own vehicle pushed by slave-like parents.
After the betrayal of course I was reshaped, like a strip of leather into the usefulness of a handbag, or a shoe for the government to wear, for the agency to travel the rocky shore upon. For I am now the thousand feet of the centipede that crawls across Europe silently looking for defectors. I am the eyes of a brutal but smiling nation. I am the knife of the silent predator seeking out infidels among the chosen.
So here I am. Being watched always. Like a performer, I match my pantomimes to the camera angle most suited to my physique. I clean my gun in clear view of the omnipresent surveillance camera. But cameras are the least of it nowadays. We’ve all had the implant though everyone pretends we haven’t. We all pretend we’ve never heard of such a thing, that no one would allow such a thing, that even we in the academy have certain inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness—and I can hear the commander already laughing with joy at our naive faith in the catechism of democracy.
I only half-believe these things about democracy, but I do believe them. I can’t get much farther with such a belief because I’ve seen the success of the authoritarians with their lockdowns and their contact tracing, how no one bats an eye when told to give their contacts, their whereabouts, their most intimate details. I imagine that more than one marriage is faltering as the chain of infections includes mistresses, assignations, faltering drunken kisses outside a bar at closing time, a tumble in the backseat of a roadster, the river of drunken passion running through a man’s town, sweeping decency and caution away like oxen and lumber in a mud flow.
So I don’t care. They know everything about me. Whatever dignity I had I’ve handed over with my shaving kit and my name. I’m a happy cypher now, cleaning my rifle and reciting Rilke, hoping for a chess game I’ll strategically lose, all the while seeing the checkmate like a crime photograph developing in a tray.