True diligence is following the improbable path. I read that sentence in a detective novel when I was eight or nine years old, and it lodged itself in my mind like a splinter I never wanted to remove. For a long time afterward, I wrote True Diligence in stylized, curly letters on the inside cover of every notebook I owned, sometimes on the front, too, with the ink pressed hard enough to leave a ghost on the page beneath. I had notebooks for writing down clues, because even at that age I already knew exactly what I wanted to be: someone who worked for the Internal Intelligence Service. In my childhood, the Service was everywhere and nowhere. It was dark cars moving slowly down our block, men and women in forgettable clothes stopping our parents on the street for what they always described as brief, random interrogations. It 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 another family moved in. But the Service carried a dark glamour, too, an aura of power and secrecy that called to us even as it terrified us. We played Ghosts and Agents constantly, my friends and I, running through yards and alleys with our homemade badges and whispered code words. Eventually they drifted off into other interests, other dreams, but I never did. I still wanted to be a spy.
The wanting never faded, and after high school I applied to the Service Academy in Los Angeles. I was talented, I moved through the school quickly, and afterward I was posted to Fillmore, a pretty town about eighty kilometers north of Los Angeles. My parents came to visit me in my first year there, stepping off the train with the worn, dazed look of people who had been traveling since Ohio. “This is lovely, Ibari,” my mother said, and the town made a good first impression on her. The central station was beautiful in that peculiar Southern California way, with no serious boundary between indoors and out—a tiled platform that melted into a waiting area with benches, then arched openings leading straight onto the street. My parents blinked in the relentless sunlight, and I noticed, in a way I hadn’t quite prepared for, that they looked older. I was only in my mid-twenties then, which is to say I hadn’t thought much about the reality of parents aging, about the slow drift of time that would one day rearrange our roles. Their haziness was a glimpse into a future where I was the adult and they were the confused ones, and I didn’t like it. “Not a cloud in the sky,” my father said, as if he needed to name the brightness to make sense of it. “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 have 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 have made that I share with no one. One of them has to do with the way reality, in a place like this, splits into two. This will seem obvious—there is your actual job, which is Service, and then there is your cover, which is what you tell everyone else 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 had been trained in espionage and investigation, in relevant law, in the ins and outs of running down leads, interrogation, documentation, maintaining relationships with confidential informants, and so on. But I had also earned a master’s degree in urban planning, and this was my cover. As far as my parents and everyone else in my life were concerned, I was an up-and-coming academic with a tenure-track job at the local college. My parents did not know I was Service, because no one in my life knew I was Service. And 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 had 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 the 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 was not a lie. There was an expansiveness about it, a feeling of getting to live two lives at once.
In the beginning, the two lives were not in conflict. I would walk to campus in the morning with a stack of student papers under my arm, wearing the slightly rumpled clothes of someone who spends too much time in the library, and I would teach my classes, hold office hours, sit through faculty meetings where we argued about curriculum and parking. I was good at it, and I liked it. There was something steadying about the rhythms of academic life, the small satisfactions of watching a quiet student find her voice, or the way a well-planned lecture could make an abstract idea click into place. And then I would leave campus and become someone else. I would walk to a café, sit at a particular table, wait for a particular signal, and the other life would open up around me like a door swinging shut behind an ordinary day. It would be too dramatic to say that I led two completely separate existences, because they overlapped in my body, in my attention, in the way I moved through the same streets. But there was a constant hum of awareness under everything, a second set of eyes behind the first, a way of noticing the pattern of a street corner or the way a car idled at the curb. True diligence, I came to understand, did not mean simply working hard at the obvious tasks in front of you. It meant following the improbable path—the path that required you to attend to the visible and the invisible at once, to live a life that could be read in two different ways by two different sets of people.
There were days when the two lives bled into each other in ways I could not control. I would be standing at the board in a classroom, discussing the history of zoning laws, and my attention would drift to the window because I had caught a glimpse of a car I recognized, or a man in an unremarkable jacket had paused near the 7-Eleven across the street a little too long. I would catch myself and pull back to the lecture, but the split was there, the constant awareness that no string of ordinary life was ever truly ordinary. I thought about my friend from across the street sometimes, the one who had climbed into the back of the black car with her parents, and I would wonder what had happened to her family, whether they had been moved, or taken, or simply erased from our small world. The wondering never stopped me, because I believed in the Service, believed that its work was necessary, believed that the threats it guarded against were real and terrible. But the belief was complicated. It was complicated by the love I felt for my parents, who saw only the professor, and by the growing unease I felt about the way power moves through a society, often unseen, always leaving marks. I remembered the phrase that had stayed with me since childhood: true diligence is following the improbable path. In those early years, I understood it as an instruction to be patient, to pay attention, to do the small painstaking work that would lead somewhere unexpected. But there was another meaning, too. The improbable path is the one that asks you to hold two truths at once, to be both visible and invisible, to love a life that is partly a lie and yet still a life.
Now, years later, I think about that branching point more often than I used to. My parents have aged, as parents do, and their visits have become less frequent and more tender. My mother still says the town is lovely, and my father still asks about my teaching, and I still tell them about my students and my syllabi and the minor absurdities of academic life, because those stories are true, and because telling them is a way of holding on to the version of myself that belongs to them. The Service is still there, still real, still a part of me, but the split has settled into something quieter, something that no longer feels like a lie so much as a shape I grew into. What I know now is that true diligence is not about choosing between lives, and it is not about keeping them perfectly separate. It is about doing the work that is set before you, in all its forms, with enough attention and care that the improbable path becomes not just possible but real. The improbable path is the one that asks you to become a person who can be trusted with secrets, and also a person who can grade a stack of midterms with genuine interest. It is the path where you learn to see the invisible threads that hold a town together, and the invisible pressures that can pull it apart. It is the path where you learn that a cover story can be more than a deception, that diligence means showing up, again and again, to both of your lives, and doing your best in both of them. True diligence is following the improbable path—not because it is easy, and not because it is glamorous, but because it is the path that honors the complexity of being alive in a world where nothing is ever simply one thing.
