The Traveler: A Practical Man

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

One reason I can do this job is that I don’t need theories. I don’t need explanations. I don’t need concepts or symmetry, or a belief that it all makes sense in the end. I accept that things don’t make sense. I’m a practical man.
I care how things work. For instance, I wonder, How does the Academy maintain its family-like cohesion? Is it more than Skinnerian conditioning? There must be something more that keeps us doing what we do without complaint.
As I was walking with my partner toward a position of observation and stakeout—a stunning outcrop of rock below which lay a farmhouse and vineyards cascading down the face of the Dolomites—we started talking about fathers, how we had all been taken from our fathers. He had come to believe in something which he called “the father sense.”
“You ever wonder why they take us so early?” he asked me.
No, as I say, these are things I do not wonder about.
“They have to get there before the father does. So the organization can become the father, so the organization can latch onto; consume; redirect; enclose; and encompass all that energy that would have gone into father-identification. ”
I told him it sounded rather complicated to me, but it was interesting nonetheless. He was somebody who uses a lot of words.
Then we observed, down in the valley, a man in lederhosen, moving about the vineyard with his dog. He was not the man we were looking for, but still we lay there on the sun-warmed rock for some hours, watching him go, row by row, trimming the vines, until he was called into the house for lunch, at which time we unwrapped our sandwiches and said nothing more about the matter.