Papaya at Midnight

The papaya was overripe, its flesh weeping golden tears onto the chipped Formica table. Elena watched it oxidize in the humidity, the same way her cover had been slowly exposed these past three months. She'd been a spy for sixteen years, had lived six different lives, but this retirement—this forced exile in a coastal town where nothing happened—was the first role she couldn't maintain.

"You're going to eat that?" Marco asked, not looking up from his newspaper. He was a hypothesis she'd tested three years ago in Cairo, a variable she should have eliminated but hadn't.

"It's gone bad," she said.

"Everything goes bad eventually. That's the point." He turned a page, the rustle like dry leaves.

She thought about the goldfish bowl in the center of the room, swimming in lazy circles. Three identical fish, each convinced it was discovering new territory with every lap. She'd felt that way about her work once—each assignment a fresh mission, each cover a new world to master. Now she saw the pattern. The glass enclosure. The repetitions disguised as novelty.

"Do you ever wonder," she said, "if we're just answering the wrong questions?"

Marco finally looked at her. His eyes were the color of strong coffee, the way she took it when she was still pretending to be someone who slept at night. "What kind of questions?"

"The sphinx's riddle wasn't 'what walks on four legs then two then four.' That's easy." She leaned forward, the humidity making her skin prickle. "The real riddle is: what remembers four legs, walks on two, and dreams of flying on none?" She paused. "The answer is anyone who's ever wished they could be something else."

The goldfish surfaced, its mouth breaking the water's surface in silent gasps.

"That's not a riddle," Marco said. "That's just being alive."

"That's why the sphinx ate people who got it wrong. Not because they were stupid, but because they were boring." She stood up, the chair scraping against the floor. "I'm going out."

"For cigarettes?"

"For the last time." She didn't say which last time she meant.

The papaya continued its slow decay on the table. In the morning, there would be fruit flies, inevitable as consequences. In the meantime, the goldfish kept swimming, each lap a fresh discovery, each turn a revolution they'd forget by the time they completed it.