Spies have always been an interesting protagonist for any tale. Since James Fenimore Cooper’s The Spy, they’ve run the gamut from the machismo-focused kineticism of James Bond to the bogged-in-treacle machinations of a John le Carré novel. What nearly all spies have in common, however, is the idea that they die twice.
Being a spy means wearing a facade, living a lie, eschewing comfort until you can no longer maintain the pretense, tending false human connections that flower into simulacra of the real thing, and then being pulled from the field and watching it all fade behind you. Perhaps you mess up, and people die, or you nearly die yourself. Maybe you get something wrong, you’re too slow to move, or figure something out. The step you would normally take is, jarringly, abnormally missed. You can no longer be relied on. This is your first death, the death of the spy construct that was built on top of your humanity.
Credentials are pulled as you’re no longer fit for the field, and you’re sent somewhere that’s worse than death, locked away into a normality that you long ago lost the ability to exist in. You are now outside the machine that ticks away beneath the face of society, forced to slowly become human all over again, burdened with the weight of what is real until the second, truer death comes for you. We’re told former spies breathe their last in only two ways: alone and abandoned by the family and society they turned themselves into a chimera for, or in the presence of another spy, someone who still takes the right steps and makes the right decisions. They’re here on behalf of the people, allies or enemies, who need you to go away permanently.
