conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me a description for a story titled A Geography of Secrets about Noel, Leonard, Defense with the genre: Mystery, Thriller & Suspense, Thrillers & Suspense.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: This is a tale of two men connected only by different secrets. Noel Leonard works for the Defense Intelligence Agency, analyzing satellite images to map targets in the Global War on Terror. Not even his wife knows what he does. Then, when he learns that his error has caused a school in Afghanistan to be atomized, he realizes how heavily secrets weigh on his and his familys lives. A parallel plot concerns another man, unnamed, who is a mapmaker and comes to suspect that his late fathers foreign-service career also harbors secrets. He travels to Europe to uncover them. Deeply evocative, the author novel offers a vivid portrayal of the lives and doubts of its protagonists. It is a confusing and constantly obfuscating world, characterized by the mind-numbing nomenclature of weapons systems; by what the author calls bureaucratic jujitsu; and by the governments penchant for secrets masked by rhetoric about transparency. All that cloudiness is contrasted by the acute awareness Noel and the mapmaker have for their surroundings. An often beautiful but challenging story that will engage thoughtful readers with both the authors characters and his ideas. --Thomas Gaughan
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the first five paragraphs for this story.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A Geography of Secrets
  Again, the woman beside me took notice. "It must be very funny," she said, unwrapping a sandwich, half of which she offered.
  An hour after he spoke with Hannah on the phone, the Kritsicks arrived riding brand-new bicycles. They coasted into the driveway wearing brightly colored helmets and shoes with clips. All the latest gear. "We've started bike commuting," Steve said, removing his helmet with a satisfied swagger. "Totally carbon-neutral. The commuter package. Panniers. Safety lights. Gel seat." He pushed a button and startled them with a loud blast. "Air horn." He laughed.
  They rolled their bikes into the garage and went around to the back patio, where Pat had put out food and drinks. The Kritsicks' bike shoes clicked on the flagstones. The sun was setting, and the air was pungent with freshly spread mulch. Dark beds, emerald grass. Pat had gone to Costco and come back with twenty-ounce ribeyes, artichokes the size of grapefruits, mixed organic greens, a wedge of Stilton, bottles of cabernet sauvignon and pinot noir and a twenty-year-old port. Noel understood right away. It was a backhanded peace offering, protein- and alcohol-rich for full soporific effect. If it went pleasantly enough, maybe even an erotic finale, after which all would be disremembered and forgiven—mother-daughter conspiracies, hotel whores, marital fissures, and fault lines. The works.
  Kritsick was his usual talkative self, complimenting the yard and describing the various bike routes he was exploring into downtown. Margaret and Pat were discussing the wisteria overhanging the fence. Noel's mind wandered, as it always did with Kritsick. Almost immediately, he became suspicious. Then alarmed. Had Pat said anything to them? It sickened him to think so. He sipped his bourbon (the rest were drinking wine), half listening to Kritsick, watching Pat talk to Margaret. Finally, he tossed back his drink and stood up. "Time for a refill. Can I get you anything?"
  Two days later, Pat left for Charlottesville. It was as if a weight had been lifted. A few hurried phone calls the night before had confirmed that, yes, Hannah had gone ahead with the "procedure"; yes, she was fine and didn't mind if Mom wanted to come visit; no, she still didn't want Dad to know.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me five more paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She set aside the frames and suggested we start with the eye exam. I hadn't anticipated any of this and felt completely unprepared. We sat at the desk, where she took down my basic information. Name, address, date of birth, medical history. No allergies, diabetes, hypertension, major illnesses, medications, or surgery. She ran down the checklist. I watched intently as she entered the information. She finished, gave me the forms to sign, then stood up and gestured to the examination chair.
  It all felt completely, totally wrong. On the desk in front of me was a small dispenser with her business card. I took one. "You're Bettina Lüneburg?" I asked.
  I followed her to the examination chair and sat down. Each step of the exam deepened my sense of unwholesome loitering. I submitted quietly, brow to brow, eye to eye, to stabs of light and puffs of air and a test that depended on flipping lenses—this or this—and narrowing choices until, at last, she found the precise correction. "Your eyes are healthy," she pronounced when it was over. "Your vision is normal for distance. Perfect, except for a slight ocular variation in each eye—totally normal for your age. You only need glasses for reading."
  She rolled over to her instrument table and jotted some notes onto a form. Even the way she held her pen! Thumb and three fingertips!
  I went back to browsing the eyewear display. There was a knot in my stomach, something wrong in the whole situation, an absence of sympathetic magic to steer and make everything turn out grandly. The moment should have been bursting with it, and yet it was precisely the opposite. There was no magic at all, just an everydayness, acute and real and evocative of nothing beyond each of us simply being ourselves. Suddenly, the letter in my pocket, which I'd imagined producing in a flourish of proof like a fairy-tale slipper, seemed a sinister thing, not lost and returned but dredged up.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Delete the last sentence.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: She set aside the frames and suggested we start with the eye exam. I hadn't anticipated any of this and felt completely unprepared. We sat at the desk, where she took down my basic information. Name, address, date of birth, medical history. No allergies, diabetes, hypertension, major illnesses, medications, or surgery. She ran down the checklist. I watched intently as she entered the information. She finished, gave me the forms to sign, then stood up and gestured to the examination chair.
  It all felt completely, totally wrong. On the desk in front of me was a small dispenser with her business card. I took one. "You're Bettina Lüneburg?" I asked.
  I followed her to the examination chair and sat down. Each step of the exam deepened my sense of unwholesome loitering. I submitted quietly, brow to brow, eye to eye, to stabs of light and puffs of air and a test that depended on flipping lenses—this or this—and narrowing choices until, at last, she found the precise correction. "Your eyes are healthy," she pronounced when it was over. "Your vision is normal for distance. Perfect, except for a slight ocular variation in each eye—totally normal for your age. You only need glasses for reading."
  She rolled over to her instrument table and jotted some notes onto a form. Even the way she held her pen! Thumb and three fingertips!
  I went back to browsing the eyewear display. There was a knot in my stomach, something wrong in the whole situation, an absence of sympathetic magic to steer and make everything turn out grandly. The moment should have been bursting with it, and yet it was precisely the opposite. There was no magic at all, just an everydayness, acute and real and evocative of nothing beyond each of us simply being ourselves.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Give me the last four paragraphs.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Before setting out on the trail to the mansion, Noel returns to the car and puts on his windbreaker. After some initial indecision, he takes his three iron and a souvenir ball marked with the DIA insignia, which he bought in the DIAC gift shop years ago and has never used. With maps, binoculars, and, compliments of the gentleman volunteer, a brochure guide to local wildflowers, he starts up the trail to the mansion, using his three iron as a walking stick.
  It is less than a quarter mile from the grave to the house and just two miles to the birthplace in Shadwell, a one-to-one relationship as impossible for Noel to conceive in life as it is for a mapmaker to draw. There is a grand modesty in the proximity of those three points: birthplace, hearth, grave. He takes out his map showing local elevations. The house sits at the highest point: eight hundred sixty-seven feet above sea level. He follows the gravel walkway called Mulberry Row along the southeastern side of the mansion, passes by the excavated foundations of several buildings. This entire side of the hilltop is terraced and serves now as a museum of vegetable varietals and a small, well-tended vineyard evoking Jefferson the horticulturalist and connoisseur of the good life. A brick pavilion is the only manor-house feature on the tilled ground, and the excavated foundations of the slave quarters just beyond are the only evidence on the landscape of the people and the secrets that were kept here.
  He leaves the gravel path and walks down among the beds of newly turned earth. At the end of the planted rows, the terrace drops off steeply, supported by a stone wall. The view is glorious. Gleams of sun and puffs of cloud cast dappled shadows across the valley floor and up and down the Blue Ridge. The map names all the old farms at the foot of the hill: Slate Field, Franklin's Field. At the far end of the garden, a groundskeeper in overalls pushes a wheelbarrow heaped with dung. Noel glances over his shoulder toward the mansion, where the tours are just beginning, and tries to think of a proper salutation, some words to convey the portion of the story he will keep to himself and the portion he will leave me to tell.
  It is the portion that has fallen to me, what I am given to pass along, that preoccupies me back here in Washington, where, at three o'clock in the afternoon, sitting at my desk, looking out the window, I am still struggling to find the relevant order among all the parts and pieces. What to put here, what there. Most important, what to leave out entirely, those things we must keep to ourselves. There are ways of illuminating them obliquely, by refraction, bouncing light. Paradoxically, a fuller view often emerges by concealment, the way character is revealed in the shading of a face. I had the first inkling of it in Munich and the second when I returned home and went to see my mother. When she asked if I'd found what I was looking for, the only answer I could give was yes and no, thinking of you, Bettina, and of Monticello and Sally Hemings and the secrets forced upon generations of children and wondering what possible good could come from learning of another secret patrimony story involving my father, your mother, and my own concealments. A thing revealed only adds another mystery. There is a world we inhabit and a world that inhabits us, and both largely pass us by without our ever knowing. How is it that we can know so little of ourselves and of the world, yet have so much to answer for? Secrets, and those who keep them, must always be pardoned when truth comes to light. For me, it's still an open question whether we are relieved of anything when we come to know the truth about ourselves. Is it always a relief to find out who we really are?