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Hacker’s Manifesto), Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, and reams of J. R. R.
Tolkien, falling asleep midchapter and getting the characters and action
confused, until I was dreaming that Gollum was by my bedside and
whining, “Master, Master, information wants to be free.”
While I was resigned to all the fever dreams sleep brought me, the
thought of having to catch up on my schoolwork was the true nightmare.
After I’d missed approximately four months of class, I got a letter in the
mail from Arundel High informing me that I’d have to repeat my
sophomore year. I’d say I was shocked, but the moment I read the letter, I
realized that I’d known this was inevitable and had been dreading it for
weeks. The prospect of returning to school, let alone of repeating two
semesters, was unimaginable to me, and I was ready to do whatever it took
to avoid it.
Just at the point when my glandular disease had developed into a full-on
depression, receiving the school news shook me out of my slump. Suddenly
I was upright and getting dressed in something other than pajamas.
Suddenly I was online and on the phone, searching for the system’s edges,
searching for a hack. After a bit of research, and a lot of form-filling, my
solution landed in the mailbox: I’d gotten myself accepted to college.
Apparently, you don’t need a high school diploma to apply.
Anne Arundel Community College was a local institution, certainly not
as venerable as my sister’s school, but it would do the trick. All that
mattered was that it was accredited. I took the offer of admission to my high
school administrators, who, with a curious and barely concealed mixture of
resignation and glee, agreed to let me enroll. I’d attend college classes two

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days a week, which was just about the most that I could manage to stay
upright and functional. By taking classes above my grade level, I wouldn’t
have to suffer through the year I’d missed. I’d just skip it.
AACC was about twenty-five minutes away, and the first few times I
drove myself were perilous—I was a newly licensed driver who could
barely stay awake at the wheel. I’d go to class and then come directly home
to sleep. I was the youngest person in all my classes, and might even have
been the youngest person at the school, alternately a mascot-like object of
novelty and a discomfiting presence. This, along with the fact that I was
still recovering, meant that I didn’t hang out much. Also, because AACC
was a commuter school, it had no active campus life. The anonymity of the
school suited me fine, though, as did my classes, most of which were
distinctly more interesting than anything I’d napped through at Arundel
High.
B
EFORE
I 
GO
any further and leave high school forever, I should note that I
still owe that English class assignment, the one marked Incomplete. My
autobiographical statement. The older I get, the heavier it weighs on me,
and yet writing it hasn’t gotten any easier.
The fact is, no one with a biography like mine ever comes comfortably
to autobiography. It’s hard to have spent so much of my life trying to avoid
identification, only to turn around completely and share “personal
disclosures” in a book. The Intelligence Community tries to inculcate in its
workers a baseline anonymity, a sort of blank-page personality upon which
to inscribe secrecy and the art of imposture. You train yourself to be
inconspicuous, to look and sound like others. You live in the most ordinary
house, you drive the most ordinary car, you wear the same ordinary clothes
as everyone else. The difference is, you do it on purpose: normalcy, the
ordinary, is your cover. This is the perverse reward of a self-denying career
that brings no public glory: the private glory comes not during work, but
after, when you can go back out among other people again and successfully
convince them that you’re one of them.
Though there are a score of more popular and surely more accurate
psychological terms for this type of identity split, I tend to think of it as

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human encryption. As in any process of encryption, the original material—
your core identity—still exists, but only in a locked and scrambled form.
The equation that enables this ciphering is a simple proportion: the more
you know about others, the less you know about yourself. After a time, you
might forget your likes and even your dislikes. You can lose your politics,
along with any and all respect for the political process that you might have
had. Everything gets subsumed by the job, which begins with a denial of
character and ends with a denial of conscience. “Mission First.”
Some version of the above served me for years as an explanation of my
dedication to privacy, and my inability or unwillingness to get personal. It’s
only now, when I’ve been out of the IC almost as long as I was in it, that I
realize: it isn’t nearly enough. After all, I was hardly a spy—I wasn’t even
shaving—when I failed to turn in my English class assignment. Instead, I
was a kid who’d been practicing spycraft for a while already—partly
through my online experiments with game-playing identities, but more than
anything through dealing with the silence and lies that followed my parents’
divorce.
With that rupture, we became a family of secret-keepers, experts at
subterfuge and hiding. My parents kept secrets from each other, and from
me and my sister. My sister and I would eventually keep our own secrets,
too, when one of us was staying with our father for the weekend and the
other was staying with our mother. One of the most difficult trials that a
child of divorce has to face is being interrogated by one parent about the
new life of the other.
My mother would be gone for stretches, back on the dating scene. My
father tried his best to fill the void, but, at times, he would become enraged
by the protracted and expensive divorce process. Whenever that happened,
it would seem to me as if our roles had reversed. I had to be assertive and
stand up to him, to reason with him.
It’s painful to write this, though not so much because the events of this
period are painful to recall as because they’re in no way indicative of my
parents’ fundamental decency—or of how, out of love for their children,
they were eventually able to bury their differences, reconcile with respect,
and flourish separately in peace.
This kind of change is constant, common, and human. But an
autobiographical statement is static, the fixed document of a person in flux.

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This is why the best account that someone can ever give of themselves is
not a statement but a pledge—a pledge to the principles they value, and to
the vision of the person they hope to become.
I’d enrolled in community college to save myself time after a setback,
not because I intended to continue with my higher education. But I made a
pledge to myself that I’d at least complete my high school degree. It was a
weekend when I finally kept that promise, driving out to a public school
near Baltimore to take the last test I’d ever take for the state of Maryland:
the exam for the General Education Development (GED) degree, which the
US government recognizes as the standard equivalent to a high school
diploma.
I remember leaving the exam feeling lighter than ever, having satisfied
the two years of schooling that I still owed to the state just by taking a two-
day exam. It felt like a hack, but it was more than that. It was me staying
true to my word.

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7
9/11
From the age of sixteen, I was pretty much living on my own. With my
mother throwing herself into her work, I often had her condo to myself. I
set my own schedule, cooked my own meals, and did my own laundry. I
was responsible for everything but paying the bills.
I had a 1992 white Honda Civic and drove it all over the state, listening
to the indie alternative 99.1 WHFS—“Now Hear This” was one of its
catchphrases—because that’s what everybody else did. I wasn’t very good
at being normal, but I was trying.
My life became a circuit, tracing a route between my home, my college,
and my friends, particularly a new group that I met in Japanese class. I’m
not quite sure how long it took us to realize that we’d become a clique, but
by the second semester we attended class as much to see each other as to
learn the language. This, by the way, is the best way to “seem normal”:
surround yourself with people just as weird, if not weirder, than you are.
Most of these friends were aspiring artists and graphic designers obsessed
with then controversial anime, or Japanese animation. As our friendships
deepened, so, too, did my familiarity with anime genres, until I could rattle
off relatively informed opinions about a new library of shared experiences
with titles like Grave of the Fireflies, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Neon