True diligence is following the improbable path. I read the sentence in a detective novel in childhood, when I was 8 or 9 years old, and then the phrase stayed with me forever after.
For a long time I wrote True Diligence in stylized curly letters on the inside page of every notebook, or sometimes on the front cover. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at 9 I wanted to work for the Internal Intelligence Service. What child doesn’t secretly wish to be a spy?
We were terrified and fascinated by Service in equal measure. Service was dark cars moving down the block, men and women in forgettable clothing stopping our parents on the street for brief random interrogations. Service was the force that made people disappear—when I was in the first grade, my friend from across the street climbed into the back of a black car with her parents, and their apartment stood empty for a year before other people moved in—but also Service carried a kind of dark glamour, an aura of power that called to us.
We played Ghosts and Agents all the time, my friends and I, but eventually they drifted off into other interests and I still wanted to be a spy, so after high school I applied successfully to the Service Academy in Los Angeles. I was talented and moved through school quickly, and afterward I was posted to Fillmore, a pretty town about 80 kilometers north of LA. My parents came to visit me there in my first year.
“This is lovely, Ibari,” my mother said, when she stepped off the train. The town made a good first impression. The central station was beautiful, one of those Southern California structures with no serious boundary between indoors and out, a tiled platform that turned into a waiting area with benches, then archways opening out to the street.
My parents had been on the train since Ohio, and they looked worn and dazed, blinking in the relentless sunlight. I was only in my mid-twenties at that point, which is to say I hadn’t thought much about the reality of aging parents, and their haziness was a glimpse into a future where I was the adult and they were confused. I didn’t like it.
“Not a cloud in the sky,” my father said.
“Do we need a taxi?” my mother asked. “I wouldn’t mind walking a bit, stretching my legs.”
“My house is close,” I said. “We can easily walk there if you’d like.”
“Downtown residency permit?” my father asked, and whistled softly.
“What can I say,” I said. “I’ve been well-behaved.”
I’ve spent a long time thinking about the nature of life in a surveillance state, which is perhaps obvious given my work, but there are observations I’ve made that I share with no one, and one of them has to do with the way in a place like this, reality splits into two.
This will seem a bit obvious—there’s your actual job, which is Service, and then there’s your cover, which is what you tell everyone you do—but for a long period of my life, at the beginning of my career, there was truth in both versions.
At the Service Academy I’d been trained in espionage and investigation, obviously, in relevant law, in the ins and outs of running down leads, interrogation, documentation, maintaining relationships with confidential informants, etc., but also I’d earned a master’s in urban planning, and this was my cover. As far as my parents and everyone else in my life was concerned, I was an up-and-coming academic with a tenure-track job at the local college. My parents didn’t know I was Service, because no one in my life knew I was Service.
Here was the branching, as I thought of it, the point where one reality split off into another: It was actually true that I was a junior professor in an urban planning department. I’d applied for and earned that position, or so I told myself—if strings were pulled behind the scenes, that was well above my pay grade—and I took that job seriously. With that being the case, was it really just cover? It was a real job, a real life. When I introduced myself as a college instructor in urban planning, it wasn’t a lie. There was an expansiveness about it. It was like getting to live two lives at once.