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| In the Beginning was the Word, but it Couldn't Get Cleared |
1.
He was, let's be frank, a junior officer in trouble. He wasn't sure why he was in trouble, or how much trouble he was in, as the sine qua non of success in the Department of State really was never to say anything, the meaning of which could be concretely determined. It was an Art. A Very High Art. The high practitioners of this high art, in their high places, were able to go on this way for hours, sounding as perfectly reasonable as daylight until you actually tried to put some meat to the gristle and the gleam, at which point like some ancient oracular Rorschach blot, you could make out of it pretty much what you wanted, and that was the point: to be pinned down, point blanc, was death, to be avoided at all cost.
Oh, the deciders over at the Department of Defense did occasionally it is true pull the trigger and actually invade somebody someplace, which made State's divine quibbling a little more of a challenge, but the great spinmeisters of Foggy Bottom always rose to the occasion. It's not that they didn't stand for anything -they stood very much for their careers, and their sense of rightness, and rectitude and diplomatic decorum- it's just that they were very uncomfortable if what they stood for ever got stuck in one place; it needed to be a portable, flexible, -stick it where most pleasing to their immediate superior of the moment so he/she could most look good in its light- sort of a moral absolutism.
But as I said, much too distinctly I think for anyone's taste, he was a: a junior officer in trouble who b: wanted to find out why he was in trouble, and c: how much trouble he was in so he could d: get out of trouble and f: keep his job so he could g: feed his two adorable children. To accomplish this he decided he needed to talk with someone who wasn't a practitioner of the Very High Art, but could instead tell him in a rather straightforward if humiliating way, what the hell was going on. So he schemed to waylay Madame LaFoux at lunch one day down in the cafeteria at Main State. She was a secretary to a Deputy Director to an Assistant Secretary to an Undersecretary to the Secretary, and as such she was a very important person. She was important, not only because she was a real secretary capable of doing real secretarial work, but because she actually knew these people, in the flesh, knew what they liked and disliked, and so for those clawing themselves up the slightly maggot-ridden body of the corpus of State, she was a very important rung I mean person indeed.
2.
Madam LaFoux of course, knew she was important, and being both smart and important, made damned sure she was never seen in the cafeteria in the basement, no, she, and all of the other Really Important People made use of a parallel system of elevators, transportation systems, corridors, offices, floors, eateries, bathrooms, etc., mostly confined to the Upper Levels of the Department of State's neo-Stalinist edifice, clustered around the Divine 7th Floor, so that their sedate scurrying would never intersect with the not quite sedate scurrying of lesser mortals.
The Junior Officer knew this of course, the separation of the cream from the whey that was the inner game of the Department of State -Town Hall appearances of the occasional diplomatic star not withstanding- for he had been taught it from Day One in A-100, the State Department's Introduction to Statecraft, Diplomacy, and Visa-Denial Class that all entry level graynesses had to take. Over at the Foreign Service Institute where a statue of Ben Franklin sat hunched in somber rectitude over fond memories of his French whores, the proto-acolytes to greatness had had to post watchers at every bend of the corridor to their classroom, watchers whose sole job was to "Spot the Ambassador" then, like the cauldrons on an ancient spartan mountaintop warning system, they would indicate breathlessly to the next spotter down the hall that an Ambassador was on his or her magisterial way. When the Presence actually entered the classroom, they had all been instructed to leap to their feet as the least they could do to honor the Magic Mage. Some in fact leaped so hard and so fast they hit the ceiling.
Yes, the Department of State was what was called a False Equalitarian/Veiled Hierarchical organization, or something like that. Even above the extraordinary mortals of the upper rungs, there was the Senior Foreign Service, and above them, it was sometimes whispered in hushed tones, was the Senior Senior Foreign Service, mostly mummified it is true, and above them were essentially the Foreign Service equivalent of the Illuminati, the Obsurimanti, who only appeared at times of great national crisis to utter Delphic piths of absolute inscrutableness.
All of this of course was known to anyone whose little shadow was ever crossed by the far larger shadows leaning from the upper parapets of Foggy Bottom. The Junior Officer knew it would be no easy task to actually have a brief tete a tete with LaFoux, but he had to try, for his children if not the wife who was about to leave him.
3.
