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We get off the elevator at a subbasement. I follow the counselor down cinder-block corridors—near the indoor range, heavy with the smell of cordite—still trying to figure out what in hell he’s just said. We pass trolleys of laundered towels and stop at a pair of metal doors framed by girders of steel. The rivets are as big as saucers.

It is an old bomb shelter, the counselor tells me, built in the fifties to save our nation’s politicians. In case of nuclear attack, they were all supposed to get in their cars and drive down I-95.

I am too afraid to laugh.

The vault smells like a thrift store, like acres of musty crinoline, packed with racks of clothing for men and women. There are even a couple of dressing tables with mirrors framed in bulbs.

“Have a ball,” he says. “Create a person you’re not. I’ll be back in twenty minutes.”

“And then what?”

“You will be challenged to demonstrate a lesson learned.”

And he leaves.

What is the “lesson learned”? I have been up almost thirty-six hours, am ravenously hungry, and tired of being hazed. Can’t we all be grown-ups? What is the point of not even telling us the rules? I stare at the racks. I am at a loss. The amber light is faint. Suits, dresses, handbags, hats—each piece of clothing holds a thousand identities.

And that, I realize finally, is the point. During the 7-Eleven scenario, the undercover identity Gail Washburn had cooked up for herself was “Ramona,” a working-class ghetto mom. She was tested on her hold over that identity, and she failed. When she walked out the door, they called, “Hey, Gail?” “Yes, sir?” “Good job.” And they cut her. The mistake was answering to “Gail.” She should have responded to “Ramona,” no matter what. She thought the gig was over, but that was not for her to judge. Believing it is over can get you killed. That is the lesson of the empty chair and the internal warning that caused me to think before answering to my own name. Gail’s mistake was a result of arrogance; an error made by a person who has always been a superstar and believes that she controls the game.

But uc work is different. It is the kind of game that possesses its own spontaneous intelligence. That is why they cannot tell you the rules. You make a move; the schematic changes. You change it. It changes with you. No past to revise, no future to predict, everything takes place in present time. Fluid. Treacherous. Addictive.

Hanging on a rack is a beat-up leather jacket from the sixties. Originally, it was a designer piece—creamy yellow, square pockets and a belt—but now it looks like Jackie Kennedy on the skids. Who would wear this jacket? From a single clue, I have seven minutes to invent another persona—someone criminal, the shadow side of me. Okay. She bought the jacket in a thrift shop. She doesn’t give a damn about the rules. Hates authority. Steals. She’s a soft touch for animals because she is a stray herself.

And more. She grew up in one of the older tracts in Long Beach, California (not far from Ana Grey)—cheap housing built in the forties for oil refinery workers, now a mixed ghetto of the unemployed. Her name is Darcy DeGuzman. Darcy because it is innocent and bouncy, although she is driven by the ruthlessness of a starving child. That’s the DeGuzman part. Ethnically ambiguous. (Filipina? Spanish?) Deserted by her parents, a pair of depressive alcoholics. Growing up, it was necessary to perform favors for boys. She learned how to use people. She’s streetwise and impulsive, lonely, young and foolish, and somewhere in a violent past, in a crumbling neighborhood where the working class has become obsolete, she killed somebody.

I slip my arms through the cool satin lining of the sleeves.

But I know it fits before I even have it on.

They put me in a van with blacked-in windows. We leave the Marine base and follow curving roads until we are at an outdoor mall. They give me forty dollars, a phone number, and an empty pistol secured with a plastic