This is another Garak story; again, more of a mood piece (or Our Hero going on again). It's set just after the recent Purgatory/Inferno two parter.
Poetry Corner this week is brought to you courtesy of W. H. Auden.
Disclaimer: I fully acknowledge that Paramount has exclusive rights to the Star Trek universe, All Rights Reserved, and that all characters and locations are the property of Paramount television. No infringement is intended. STAR TREK: DEEP SPACE NINE is a Registered Trademark ® of Paramount Pictures.
Eminence Grise.
He, the trained spy,
had walked into the trap
For a bogus guide, seduced by the old tricks...
They ignored his wires: the bridges were unbuilt and trouble coming...
Woken by water running away in the dark,
he often had reproached the night for a companion
Dreamed of already.
They would shoot, of course,
Parting easily two that were never joined.
(The Secret Agent).
He's dead, now. As I sit here, in an unobtrusive corner of the Promenade, I can see him from the corner of my eye, watching me. He looks much as he did when he was young. I realise that his observation of me has never really stopped; but then, I suppose I had him under surveillance, too. Perhaps I'm as culpable as he is for the lie that my life has been. When you've been involved in intelligence work for as long as I have, you realise that there is no such thing as innocence, and that truth is the first fiction to be cast aside. Yet as you know, I've always been partial to a good enigma tale, so I thought I might commit a few thoughts to this letter and then you, my confessor, can decide who in the whole sorry story is guilty of what. You'll forgive me, of course, if I don't tell you everything. It would take too long, and besides, I don't see why you shouldn't do a little work in deciphering my codes.
You're probably aware that I first became involved in intelligence for a variety of reasons. The extraction of information served the State and the Order, of course, and consolidated my own position, but there were other, more subtle, motives behind my choice of career. I was fortunate in having such an excellent teacher. Tain was a connoisseur of confessions, collecting them with the devotion and care that others might direct towards fine wines, or rare moths. Assiduously, he tracked them all: whispered confidences; muttered codes and passwords; names shouted with a last breath. He sipped secrets from everyone he met. When he died, he must have known more about the Empire than any man alive. They used to say that if you slunk out at midnight to the end of Esperat Point and murmured a secret to the winter storms, Enabran Tain would ring you the next day to find out more.
I always used to say that my father practised his techniques on traitors and terrorists, but perfected them on me. I'm not sure if I was joking, but I still remember, and use, the basic principles of interrogation work that he taught me. I began my training during an uneasy period, in which civil unrest had become commonplace and the Order buildings were crammed with disobedient persons.
'Do you ever have them beaten?' I once asked him, and he said
'Oh, no. No, never hit a prisoner, Elim. It only strengthens their resolve, if they're convinced of the rightness of their principles and if they're not, they'll say anything just to make you stop. It's rarely worth the effort.'
He always preferred the compelling force of suggestion. When he entered the interrogation chamber, he would begin by having a chat with the subject -
'Puts them at their ease,' -
and then at the last minute, as though he had forgotten, he would call for cloths and cleaning fluid -
'Just in case.'
'What makes them talk? Is it only fear?' I once asked him.
'Fear is a part of it, obviously, but it's more than that. People confess as a result of isolation - I don't mean by this that you should shut them away in a cell for months on end. No, people are a product of their context. They operate within their own little world, and when they're removed from that, they panic. No reinforcement, you see, no support. We all like to belong somewhere, after all. Don't you find that?' he added, and he smiled. 'So once they're a little frightened, a bit disoriented, you give them the chance to belong again, return to the fold. All they have to do is talk to you. Even if they understand the consequences, the relief of acceptance is usually enough to bring them back under your wing. Then you can do what you like with them.'
He sighed, looking out at the sunlit garden.
'Well, Elim? Think you can do that? I imagine you might even be quite good at it. Let's see, shall we?'
From inside the house, distantly, I heard the closing of a door.
He was right. I was good at interrogation, and he gave me plenty of practice. When I was young, the attractions of the inquisition chamber were obvious: an easy power, and the opportunity to win my teacher's approval. I never quite outgrew these early banalities: years later, when you decided to make a hero of yourself and pay Tain a visit, you told me what the old man had said. I can imagine you aflame with righteous indignation, demanding why Tain had insisted on my cranial implant. Tain explained to you that I'd made the decision myself: 'that was the great thing about Garak, you never had to *tell* him to do anything.' Well, the reason why that was so is common knowledge now: as I'm sure you'll agree, there are few emotions more understandable or sad than the desire to win a parent's love.
Over the years, I gained a certain reputation. My colleagues (admiring and repulsed) believed that my love of my work stemmed from some personal preoccupation; some voyeuristic impulse which bordered on sexual perversity. I prefer to believe that this was not so. I became enchanted with the stories that were told in the interrogation chamber. I think I was really looking for the perfect lie. In those endless sessions of listening to justifications, excuses and frightened reasoning, I was acquiring a strategy for myself. If the subject could convince me, who knew him to be lying, I would have the answer that I looked for. I began to understand how much of the self is constructed: a creation of the desires and expectations which surround a person. How ironic, then, that the last time I interrogated anyone it should be Odo, a fluid person frozen in an unatural rigidity; in torturing him, I saw again my father and myself.
From Tain's own hopes of what I might become, I conjured a disguise and hid behind it. So you see, it was hardly a matter of training to make me a secret agent: I went under cover from an early age, a spy in my father's house. Eventually, of course, the mask slipped, and my father realised that I'd never completely been his creature. He responded with all the betrayed rage that I had anticipated - well, you know the rest. I ended up here, in splendid isolation, and Tain eventually went into voluntary retirement.
Loneliness was, for a time, dampened by the pleasures of the neural implant, but when this had gone, I discovered that I had very little self left. Moreover, I had seen enough of Tain's methodology to wonder whether, in fact, any of it was real. Too many agents of the Order had been sent out with implants of a revised and expedient personality; assigned to deep cover, for the Order's own secret reasons. What if Tain had done this? I asked myself. What if the Elim Garak I thought myself to be was no more than an artificial personality, a set of reconstructed memories, and I was someone else entirely? What if I was living the most profound lie of all? I know such thoughts might seem paranoid, but that didn't mean they weren't possible. The only person who convinced me otherwise, despite or perhaps because of his evident loathing for me, was Dukat. Don't think that I fail to find this amusing.
Isolation had its effect, just as Tain had taught me. I found myself behaving in much the same way as the subjects of my interrogations. I started latching on to people, reinventing myself again by trying to see out of their eyes. I lied to them to find the truth (or, more properly, an appropriate fiction) about myself. I hope you don't think I was merely amusing myself; on the contrary, I was desperate. For a while, you functioned in a curious sort of way as my therapist. Cardassians, however, don't believe in therapy, so perhaps the analogy of the torturer is more accurate: you've certainly tormented me enough. I know that if I'd turned up in the door of the infirmary and said: *look, I think I've driven myself mad - I don't even know who I am any more*, you'd have been sympathetic, and you might even have been able to do something about it, but the remnants of my pride wouldn't stand for that. Besides, I once read that you always fall for your analyst, and learn to love your inquisitor. I really am irritated by the thought that this unexpected passion, this love that I have for you, might just be the by-product of some latent neurosis. It does reduce the tragic grandeur of the whole thing, somehow.
When there was all that business with the implant, I'd made up my mind that I was ready to die. I even found it a romantic prospect, in an odd kind of way. I think I had some dreadful sentimental vision of gazing into your eyes, your hand in mine, as I made my last confession. Or one of them, anyway. Then I would gracefully expire in my interrogator's arms and presumably leave you weeping and inconsolable by my bedside. I actually thought I'd done it, as I fell into unconsciousness, but I woke up several hours later with a splitting headache and a lifetime of lunches to look forward to. It's a fitting punishment, I suppose. You've condemned me to polite bouts of literary criticism over cups of tea, while I burn and you don't notice. I've even wondered about confiding in you in person, but I haven't seen much of you over the last few days. I know that you've had problems of your own, and that you've confined yourself to the sanctuary of the infirmary. You probably think everyone's looking at you. Well, you're young yet, and perhaps haven't realised that no-one really cares; there'll be a mild sensation for a few days and then everyone will forget about it, except for me, who cannot help but watch you.
I'm afraid I've greeted the recent revelations about your past with a certain grim amusement; after all, you're not the only one to be recreated by his father. As I've taken pains to point out, we're all engendered and enhanced and disfigured by our parents; it's just a question of degree. So, there we are: Tain and you and I. Not a very encouraging review, is it? Still, there's more to life than happiness, I suppose. I can only hope that when you're the age that I am now, you will not look in the mirror and think of me. For both our lives have been founded on lies and shaped by secrets. You dream of being a spy; I have always been one. Secrecy has become such a way of life for me, such a necessary protection, that I doubt whether I'll ever tell you how I feel. I don't think I'll ever know whether you could be a son to me, or a lover, and under the circumstances it may be kinder not to try to find out. Any relationship we had would have to be clandestine and I don't think an association with me would do you any favours.
In any case, I'm not sure whether it's even possible for me to come in from the cold after all these years, however tempting a prospect it might be. Across the Promenade, I can see you walking down the steps; pausing, looking around. And so, like the good agent I used to be, I'm deleting this message to you before its contents can betray me. I'm wondering whether you'll come over and talk to me, but all I can do is watch and wait which is, after all, no more than I have been doing all my life.
THE END