The Traveler: The Hand of God

The Traveler, or, Meditations of a Company Man, illuminates the inner life of an assassin trained as a child in the art of murder and employed by a shadowy company whose national allegiances are forever cloaked in mystery. The short pieces that make up The Traveler weave in and out of time in an organic pattern more akin to music than to narrative fiction. Its pleasures lie in the joy of words heard and felt for their own particular, undefinable magic.

Transcript

It wasn’t supposed to be dangerous. I was not assigned to kill anyone. I was just supposed to meet a fellow agent and receive a little gift, a slip of paper with a number on it, and a key to a locker. And then a whole series of unexpected things happened and I was hanging from a cliff by a thread, a very strong thread, one of the threads from our lab, actually, a thread based on spider silk, like the stuff Spiderman shoots out of the reservoir on his wrist. And in that moment, looking down at the village below and just hoping I wasn’t going to fall, for I had just begun to perfect certain chess moves I was looking forward to employing in my next company-wide tournament game, and I had a new tie I wanted to wear and I’d gotten a new novel by Vladimir Nabokov I’d never read before and there were some other things worth living for that flashed before me, that pierced me with regret, and made me angry at the gods that it might end right here, not very dramatically really but in a messy and painful way, due to a mistake, a careless mistake, born out of pride and overconfidence and a careless survey of the location.
The cliff was rocky and I was hanging sideways with my cheek against a crumbling outcropping of sandstone. Something was crawling in my ear. I felt I was about to sneeze. I had to pee. I had an itch on my ankle I could not scratch. It reminded me of a time when I was a kid only a few months before I was taken from my home, I must have been six years old but an ambitious six years old and climbed too high in an oak tree and spent six hours there until my father went looking for me and called my name and looked up and saw me there and laughed, I’ll never forget the fact that he laughed.
There was a tug on the ultra-strong thread from which I was more or less dangling over infinity and I began to be slowly winched up the side of the cliff. Again, as when my father discovered me stuck high in a tree I didn’t remember climbing, there was laughter. As if waking from a dream, I saw that I would not die.
This kind of thing would happen every now and then but usually, if something went wrong, it was like a missed connection, a hotel desk clerk who cannot find a key, who has never heard of the person you are supposed to meet, or an address that does not exist, or is apparently a vacant lot, or a contact supposedly posing as an industrial pipe salesman who turns out to be actually an industrial pipe salesman.
“I wish I had some of that,” said my rescuer.
“This super-strong thread?” I said.
“Duh,” he said.
“I could get you some,” I said. “They make it in the lab.”
Another time, and this is more serious, I genuinely felt the hand of God steady me as I fell from a rooftop onto the roof of a waiting car. You see this happen in movies and it looks like the roof of the car cushions the fall but not really. I had misjudged a leap from a ledge—other things had gone wrong or I would not have been out there on the ledge, naturally—and began to fall backwards toward the street and I swear, as I fell, I felt the hand of God on the small of my back, slowing my fall, so that when I landed on the roof of the car—it was a Land Rover, a nice car to be inside—it was like landing on a featherbed.