I have no idea why Tripp invited me to his 69th birthday party. He was an old hippie, the last of a generation, biking down Telegraph Avenue in a blur of tie-dye and Tibetan prayer beads.

One afternoon, I was walking home from class when Tripp rode up behind me, ringing his bell. I turned my head just in time to see him flash by. He let go of the handlebars and waved at me, tossing a crumpled up piece of paper at my feet.

I knew Tripp from work. I was an usher for the Berkeley Symphony Orchestra and he was a regular at our afternoon concert series. He always showed up fifteen minutes late, stoned out of his mind, begging to be let inside.

“Have you ever heard Stravinsky on acid?” he would wheeze. “Please, you’ve gotta let me in.”

I would remind him that late seating would have to wait until intermission. He would stare at me in disbelief, scratching at the skin under his scraggly beard. Then, he would start to whimper. A loud, anxious whimper carrying up the red velvet steps and echoing around the gold-foiled ceiling. The only way to get him to stop was to pull back the curtains and let him dash into the concert hall, a jingle of amulets, keychains, and apologies trailing through the dark all the way to his favorite seat in the middle of Row D.

After the concert, he would come out with tears collecting in his beard like dewdrops on a spiderweb.

“Thank you,” he would whisper, clasping my hands and bowing his head. “Thank you.”

I uncrumpled the paper.

There was a drawing of a rat holding a bong, with the details for Tripp’s birthday party handwritten inside a cloud of smoke escaping from the rat’s mouth. It looked like it had been drawn in crayon. I could already see the party in my mind: a handful of old hippies rolling joints on the coffee table, smoke drifting through the beaded curtains. I promised myself I wouldn’t go, but the night of the party I found myself stressing about what to wear. I threw on an old T-shirt from the Bolshoi Ballet’s North American tour of Swan Lake and drove to the address written on the flyer.

I parked in front of a large, Victorian house. The front gate was covered in trumpet flowers, and I could hear someone playing the oboe through an upstairs window.

An old woman threw open the door; she was tall and serious, with long gray hair, wearing a black cashmere sweater and a set of bracelets made from abalone shells.

“Where have you been?” she demanded. “Oh. Oh, dear. I thought you were Tripp. Come on in.”

I followed her through the living room and into the backyard, where the entire UC Berkeley mariachi band was standing under an arbor draped in string lights and wisteria vines.

There were a lot of other students there—smoking weed, drinking kombucha, eyeing each other. A couple of old hippies were holding court on a green velvet fainting couch that had been carried outside from the living room and a friendly middle-aged woman was grilling corn and spare ribs on the barbecue.

The only person who wasn’t there was Tripp.

We waited almost 45 minutes, sitting uncomfortably on splintering wooden lawn chairs as the twilight turned to night. After an hour, the mariachi band started packing up their instruments, and just as they were saying their goodbyes, Tripp stumbled through the side gate, covered in dirt and blood, dragging a mangled bicycle behind him.

“Sorry to be late,” he said in a high, cheerful voice. “I was hit by a car.”

We all clustered around him, supporting him over to a lawn chair, peeling back his clothes to look at the scrapes and cuts that covered his arms and legs.

“It’s worse than it looks,” he laughed, wiping the blood off his forehead with a paper towel. “So, what are you going to play?”

The mariachi band shifted their instrument cases. Didn’t he want to go to the hospital? No. He wanted to hear “Cielito Lindo.” There was an uneasy pause. The band looked at each other, smiled uncomfortably, and took their trumpets, tubas, and violins back out.

The music drifted across the dark lawn, warm, and rich, and freighted with the image of bloody paper towels accumulating at Tripp’s feet.

“Ay, ay, ay, ay,” he hummed, his eyes shining with wonder and adrenaline. “Little sky, little sky.”

It took three more songs, two bottles of beer, a plate of spare ribs, and a chorus of happy birthday around a carrot cake (lit with a ring of six candles burning inside a second, larger ring of nine candles) to convince him to go to the hospital.

I drove.

“Did you have a good time?” Tripp asked anxiously from the passenger seat, dabbing at a spot of blood that had gotten onto the strap of his seatbelt.

“Yeah, it was fun,” I said, turning onto Telegraph Avenue.

“You know, I used to live on this block,” he said. “Way back in the ’60s.”

“Oh, really?”

“I had this cute little craftsman. Two bedrooms, beautiful backyard.”

“Oh, yeah?” I laughed. “How did you swing that?”

“I worked for the FBI.”

I hit the breaks. Red light.

“You mean like an agent?”

“Not a very good one. I was slick, don’t get me wrong, but I’ve also got this romantic streak. When I got sent to Berkeley, I couldn’t stop sleeping with the college boys. I wanted to enroll.”

“What were the FBI doing in Berkeley?” I asked.

“Looking for communist cells,” he laughed. “Student protestors, union organizers, the Panthers, you name it. There was a lot of stuff the federal government was anxious about.”

I struggled to form my next question. We drove for a couple of blocks in silence.

“So, what happened?”

“With the FBI? They fired me. Sent me to prison, actually.”

“Why?”

“What else?” he grinned, his lips shiny with blood. “They found out about the boys.”

I first interviewed Tripp Donnelley three days after his 69th birthday, two days after he was released from the hospital. I interviewed him again six weeks later, and one other time, a few days before his disappearance.

My hope was that the story would run in my campus newspaper, The Daily Californian. I had just become a senior staff reporter, and I was anxious to cover a big news story. The only problem was that I wasn’t in the news department. I was a theater critic. Still, my editors were interested in the story and encouraged me to follow the lead as far as I could.

Tripp had an extremely lively memory of his work as an FBI agent, describing, in vivid detail, the sound of the metal desks and chairs scraping against the floor of the San Francisco headquarters where agents worked in a large, open-concept office space known as “the bullpen.” He described the office culture as highly regimented, mechanical, and surprisingly sexual. For example, the director of the FBI was obsessed with the physique of his agents and would have them weighed on a scale once a month. Their weights were recorded and sent back to Washington DC for his review. I never learned what the director of the FBI considered to be an ideal weight, or what happened if an agent gained too much.

During our second interview, Tripp showed me a photograph taken of him around the time he moved to Berkeley. He was a trim, almost boyish man with light brown hair and a friendly, unprepossessing expression. He wore a gray flannel suit, unbuttoned; a thin silver belt buckled around the small of his waist; and a dark pocket square. It’s easy for me to imagine him at the Bureau, taking off his shoes, his belt, and his suit, grinning as he stepped onto the scale wearing nothing but his socks and boxer shorts.

Tripp described it as love at first sight. A student, sitting on the roof of a house on Frat Row. Lotus pose. Eyes closed. His long brown hair lifting off his shoulders, falling across his face, blowing in the wind.

Tripp, down on the lawn, tossing around a football with a couple of fraternity brothers. A cooler of beers. A bad throw. The sound of the ball going through the living room window. Stained glass. Historic. Cursing, laughing, footsteps on the stairs, windows being thrown open. The whole house coming alive to see what happened. But not the boy on the roof. The boy on the roof didn’t move, didn’t open his eyes. He just sat there. Meditating.

“Who’s that guy?” Tripp asked.

The brothers told him the kid’s name was Wesley, a freshman, renting a room for the summer.

“You wanna know what’s in his bookbag?”

Tripp shrugged.

“Dig this,” they grinned. “It’s full of cigarettes. And crayons.”

Tripp started stopping by the house a lot. The fraternity brothers were some of his best informants. They would give him lecture notes, syllabi, exam questions, anything that could be construed as having communist undertones. He would show up to the house in the late afternoon, always with the cooler of beer, the football, and they’d talk for hours.

One afternoon, he found Wesley making tea in the kitchen. They struck up a conversation, and Wesley invited him up to his room. There was no place to sit. Books everywhere: the desk, the floor, the bed. Wesley went across the hall to get a chair, and while he was gone, Tripp noticed his bookbag lying on the floor. He knelt down and looked inside. There were at least three packs of cigarettes and five boxes of crayons.

They took off their clothes. Tripp told himself that he was just doing it to recruit Wesley, to get him to be an informant. But that was a lie.

Wesley was the smartest kid he’d ever met. He was also completely off in his own little world. Tripp once watched Wesley put a crayon in his mouth and light it with a match. Wesley didn’t realize it wasn’t a cigarette until the crayon started to melt, leaving a green trail of wax down his shirt. Tripp offered to get the shirt dry cleaned, but he couldn’t bring himself to have the stain removed. He hung the shirt up in his own closet. He would take it out from time to time, turn it inside out, and smell the armpits. He never gave it back.

Tripp had been with men before, during the war, but this was different. After thrashing it out in Wesley’s bed, Tripp would hold him for a while. Wesley was studying Ancient Greek, and he had all kinds of ideas about the birth of democracy. He’d talk about how all the famous philosophers—Plato, Socrates, you name it—had been obsessed with boys. He once smuggled a big picture book out of the library so he could show Tripp a photograph of a painted vase. There was a man with a sharp, pointy beard and a boy wearing a laurel wreath painted directly onto the pottery. Their faces were inches away from each other, like they were about to kiss, and the man’s hand was reaching up into the folds of the boy’s tunic.

“That vase is over two thousand years old,” he whispered, resting his head on Tripp’s shoulder. He told him that the courtship between men and boys was an elaborate and very public ritual that took place in gymnasiums and public baths. The man would bring the boy little gifts, a quail say, or a leopard cub, and try to steal him away from his other suitors. Once the boy accepted, their affair was treated as something respectable, they didn’t have to hide it, not even from their wives.

“How’d they get away with that?” Tripp snorted, putting the boy into a headlock and kissing his ear.

“Democracy,” Wesley wheezed, wriggling free. “The idea was that the older man would teach the boy how to vote, how to debate, stuff like that.”

“So am I gonna have to get you a leopard cub to see you again?” Tripp asked.

The kid thought for a minute.

“Yes,” he laughed, and stuck his tongue in Tripp’s ear.

As it happens, I’ve been to the house where Tripp and Wesley first met. I’ve played beerpong in the backyard, thrown up in the gravel driveway, sat on the roof and stared out at the laboratories up in the hills, glowing with government secrets through the cold, foggy nights. I’ve stood in front of the stained glass window in the living room. There is one panel of glass that doesn’t match the rest. It looks newer, cheaper, brighter.

The brothers drove us down to the lake in the middle of the night, told us to strip naked on the beach, wade into the shallows, and start doing pushups. Ten years later, I ran into the fraternity president at a gay bar in San Francisco. He came up to me on the dance floor and pulled me into a hug. I could see his lips moving but the music was too loud to hear what he was saying. I realized he was trying to apologize for locking me in a room with ten other pledges, a single safety pin, and the instructions to sign our names in blood. I’d forgotten about that. And something else. The morning after we got back from the lake, I woke up on the floor of the frat house next to a boy I’d been secretly hooking up with. He opened his sleeping bag and I crawled inside. I thought he was going to tell me not to make a big deal about what happened at the lake, but instead he blinked up at me and said: “I love you.”

I dropped out of the fraternity the next week.

The students started flooding back in August, just as the leaves on the sycamore trees were curling in on themselves and Strawberry Creek was running dry. Tripp was constantly confronted by the physical beauty of the campus: the marble steps, the redwood trees, the wild turkeys roaming through fields of mustard grass. The air was purified, deliriously clean, utopic even. It was funny to watch the Berkeley students storm buildings and strategize behind locked doors like they were living under a police state. It occurred to Tripp that those students were the children of California’s middle class, and like middle children, they wanted attention and were prone to throw tantrums when they didn’t get it. The students seemed to regard their time in the UC system as a four-year gag order. He couldn’t have been more jealous. They surrounded cop cars and stood on top of them. They laid down on the floors of buildings and refused to leave. They always had a list of demands. They were ready to march at a moment’s notice. They were ready to sit for days.

At first, Tripp worried a lot about blending in. Wesley would take him to movement meetings and he would sit in the back, really sweating it out. But he quickly realized the trick was just to act like the most jaded, disaffected intellectual on campus. I’ve read Das Kapital, he would think to himself, though he’d never opened Marx in his life. I’ve registered voters in the Deep South. You think this is a revolution? I once put Allen Ginsberg’s cock in my mouth.

By the fall semester, Tripp saw Wesley almost every day. They would go to mass demonstrations together. Nobody could tell we were holding hands in the crush of bodies. Tripp had never protested before in his life, but he really enjoyed the inertia of the crowd. He kept telling himself it was all an act to get Wesley to trust him, but sometimes, he found himself singing the songs of the movement in the shower, in the car, at work. Once, he even caught himself humming “We Shall Not Be Moved” in the elevator, surrounded by other agents.

After demonstrations, he would sneak Wesley into one of the bars on Telegraph Avenue. Wesley would go hide in the bathroom while Tripp ordered drinks, and then they’d sit in a discreet pair of armchairs behind the fireplace. They drank cheap bourbon until they got their voices back; they debated politics until they lost them again. Then Tripp would go home and type up a report on everything he’d observed that day.

It is surprisingly easy to stop seeing other people as human. The director of the FBI was careful to remember that his agents in the field were more than the machinery they operated; more than the typewriters they used to describe the people they shadowed; more than the hidden microphones they taped to the inside of lampshades, and blackboards, and bookshelves.

Which is another way of saying the Bureau has always been vulnerable to human error, or more simply put, emotion.

The situation at Berkeley disturbed the Director greatly. The situation with Tripp Donnelley became an almost personal obsession. He continued to talk about the case long after Donnelley had been terminated, and Wesley had graduated from Berkeley, and the university had lifted its restrictions on free speech. There was one question he asked repeatedly, late at night, especially when he was speaking with agents on West Coast time.

Imagine the director of the FBI sitting behind his desk with the telephone in one hand and a glass of bourbon in the other, his eyes closed, gazing beyond the largest intelligence network in the history of the United States to consider the migratory patterns of the human heart. The question on his mind had nothing to do with the workings of an internal investigation, but the poet in him wanted to know: Was it love?

Wesley got arrested at a sit-in the week before final exams.

He called Tripp from jail, asking if he could bail him out. Tripp grabbed his keys and his wallet and stopped with his hand on the doorknob. Bail bonds are a public record. If he showed up to the station, the police would ask to see his ID. There would have been a record of his name connected to Wesley’s arrest. He wanted to bail him out more than anything, but he couldn’t. He turned around and punched a hole through the wall of his living room. He sat down on the floor, and for the first time in his adult life, Tripp started to cry.

He called Wesley every day during finals week, but Wesley never picked up. Winter break came and Wesley went home to the Central Valley without saying goodbye. The guilt was eating Tripp alive. He started going to movement meetings by himself. They were small and sad, five or six students without homes to go back to sitting around someone’s kitchen table, talking strategy. Tripp started feeding them bits of information: how to tell if someone in their lectures was an informant, if they’d been wiretapped, if they were being trailed. He went to a used bookstore and bought copies of the Communist Manifesto and Plato’s Symposium. He read them cover to cover. That’s how bad it was.

Then, one afternoon in early January, Wesley called and asked Tripp to meet him in the city. Tripp drove across the bridge to San Francisco and parked downtown. Wesley wanted to meet at a place called the Hurricane Bar. The decor was like a mosquito bite, all tiki torches and taxidermized parrots and miniature volcanos and potted banana trees. There were masks from the Pacific Islands mounted on the walls, frozen in grimaces of pure expression. Terror and rapture were indistinguishable to Tripp by that point in time. He sat at the bar, waiting for Wesley to arrive. There was a party of career girls standing around a table, tugging at their sweaters and flirting with the waiter. One of them laughed so hard she knocked the paper umbrella out of another girl’s cocktail. He watched it parachute down to the floor where it lay, discarded, until the girl shifted her weight and crushed it under the heel of her shoe.

Wesley walked in the door wearing a beautiful navy blue suit. His hair was completely gone. He nodded to Tripp and immediately turned to the hostess, who showed them to a table. As they walked, Tripp stared at the back of Wesley’s head. Cropped, conservative, tapered at the neck. They sat down at the table and Tripp stared at Wesley’s face. He looked ten years older than the last time they’d seen each other.

A waiter floated by. Tripp ordered two martinis. Wesley ordered a steak. They didn’t speak for a long time.

“I think I’m being followed by the FBI,” Wesley said.

Tripp carefully set down his fork and asked Wesley why he thought that might be so.

“Well,” Wesley said, reaching across the table and picking up one of the martinis. “There’s this guy who’s been following me around campus for months, jotting down notes, physical descriptions of people, that kind of thing.”

“He doesn’t sound very subtle,” Tripp said, “whoever he is.”

“No,” Wesley agreed coolly. “I’d say not.”

He knew everything. Tripp tugged at his collar. Had Wesley been using him for sex? Information? He didn’t care. All he wanted to know was whether or not they had any kind of a future together. Would he ever get to see him again?

Tripp tried to brush his leg against Wesley’s under the table, but Wesley moved away.

“What is it like?” Wesley asked, stroking the stem of his martini.

“What?”

“Working for the FBI.”

Tripp looked down and realized he was hugging himself, his arms shoved into his armpits like he was trying to put himself in a straitjacket.

“It’s evil,” he said.

“How so?”

Tripp looked deep into Wesley’s eyes. His expression was sharp, alert, emotionless.

“I think you had better tell me everything,” Wesley said. “Start from the beginning.”

The last time I interviewed Tripp, he asked me to take him to In-N-Out. His health wasn’t good, and he wanted a strawberry milkshake. We drove around the Berkeley Hills, listening to Chaka Khan and Judy Garland. We ended the afternoon walking around campus. We leaned over the bridge near Sather Gate and watched minnows ripple through the creek bed like a hand of silver fingers running through the shallows.

Tripp disappeared a few days later. He stopped coming home, his phone went straight to voicemail. For weeks, I passed by his mangled bicycle, chained to the front porch of the Victorian house where he lived. I asked around for him everywhere I could think. I talked to his housemates, his landlord, his friends in People’s Park, I even got in touch with the Berkeley mariachi band—but no one knew what had happened to him.

There are a lot of things I would have liked to ask him. Inconsistencies that didn’t occur to me while I was interviewing him, but which my editors noticed immediately.

For example, Tripp told me that he was arrested by the university police in 1965. Back in those days, the Berkeley Symphony was a popular cruising spot. There was a men’s restroom down in the basement, poorly lit, sound proof, out of the way. Tripp explained that you’d go down there and wait for the guy in the stall next to you to tap his foot three times. That was the signal.

One afternoon, a university police officer caught him down there with two students. Butt naked. Tripp was taken to county and charged with public indecency. For weeks, he waited for the FBI to get involved but they never did. The Bureau knew everything, he was sure of it, but he gradually started to realize that it was cleaner for them just to let the local police handle it. He had become what the special agents in charge liked to refer to as “a disposal problem.” He received his termination in the mail, care of the county jail. He told me that after he served his six month sentence, he had the letter framed so he could hang it up on his bathroom wall. He offered to show it to me once, but he disappeared before I ever got the chance to see it.

The problem is that the Alameda County court system doesn’t have any record of Tripp’s arrest. And then, there’s his age. Tripp told me he was born in the year 1950. If that’s true, how could he have been working as an undercover agent in Berkeley in1964, when he should have been just starting high school?

I thought that the story hinged on one last interview, believing, as only a college reporter can, that there are answers to every question.

Wesley Molina is a retired FBI agent. He lives in Petaluma, about an hour North of San Francisco. I have written to Molina at his home address. I have called him more times than I can count, but he seems to be perpetually away from the phone. The voice on his answering machine is warm, encouraging. I’ve listened to it so many times, I know the entire thing by heart:

Hello, you have reached Wesley Molina. I’m afraid I can’t get to the phone right now, but if you leave your name and number, I will get back to you as soon as time allows.

It has been months and Wesley Molina’s answering machine is still promising to get back to me as soon as time allows.

I did manage to speak with him once, not over the phone, but in the men’s bathroom at the Berkeley Alumni House. It was the fifty year reunion for the class of ’69, and I was working the event as a caterer. There was a table covered in name tags, and I found his by chance, under the letter “M.” I floated around the patio for hours with a tray of desultory mushroom caps, waiting for him to arrive. Finally, I spotted him, a handsome, silver creature in a pale blue suit, chatting with a few old ladies under a redwood tree draped in string lights.

I hovered nearby, hoping to catch him alone. After nearly two hours of circulating, he broke away from the party and started heading toward the men’s room. Without thinking, I set down the tray and followed him inside.

“Cigarette or crayon?” I asked, zipping down my fly.

Molina froze.

“I beg your pardon?”

“Cigarette or crayon.”

He fumbled with his belt, stepped away from the urinals, and hurried over to the sinks.

I followed him.

“I don’t smoke,” he said, waving his hand under the soap dispenser.

“That’s not what I’m asking,” I said, trying to make eye contact in the mirror, but Molina was fixated on the water running over his hands.

“He’s disappeared,” I said.

“Who?”

“Tripp Donnelley.”

The faucet turned off.

“So that’s who you are,” he said, breaking into a slow, comfortable smile. “You’re a reporter for the Daily Cal, isn’t that right?”

“Yes.”

“You’ve been calling me rather a lot.”

I shrugged.

“And now you’ve got me cornered in a bathroom.”

“It appears so.”

Molina reached for a paper towel and began drying his hands, devoting considerable time to the finger where he wore his class ring.

“Your name is Blue, isn’t it?”

I started.

“Is that your real name? The one your parents gave you?”

I nodded.

“Were they hippies? No? Well, either way, it’s beautiful,” he murmured, dropping the paper towel into the trash.

“Thank you.”

“You seem like a bright kid, but there’s no way I can go on the record with you.”

“I understand,” I said carefully, “but since I’ve got you here, I was wondering if perhaps I might ask you for some career advice. You know, as an alumnus.”

Molina raised an eyebrow.

“As an alumnus?”

“Yes.”

“All right.”

“How did you end up on the career path you did?” I said. “Working for the federal government, I mean.”

Molina studied himself in the mirror, smoothing back his dark silver hair, brushing an imaginary fleck of dust from his lapel.

“When I was about your age, I had a friend who worked for the government. Our politics were very different, I was to the left and he was very to the right, but the more we talked, the more I began to understand my country, and myself. How we fit together, the one inside the other. He taught me what it meant, not just to function, but to exist in this society. I suppose you could say he inspired me.”

“Inspired you.”

“Yes.”

“So you’re not responsible for his disappearance.”

“No,” he laughed. “I assure you he’s perfectly capable of disappearing himself.”

I braced my arms against the sides of the sink.

“May I give you some actual career advice?” he said. “About networking in the men’s room.”

I straightened up, wiping my forehead on the sleeve of my catering uniform.

“Always wash your hands.”

He nodded toward the sink in front of me and walked out of the bathroom.

I turned on the faucet and looked up at myself in the mirror. My face was tired, my hair disheveled, and I had a sudden premonition of what I was going to look like as an old man. I stared down at my hands, soap between my fingers, and listened to the sound of the bathroom door shutting behind Molina.

I stopped at a gas station on my way home. I found myself wandering the aisles, running my fingers along the cans and bottles that lined the shelves. My fingers landed on a box of crayons. I carried them to the register, where the cashier was restocking cigarettes. I bought a pack of those, too.

I got back in the car, but I didn’t start the engine. I opened the box of crayons, pulling out a green one and laying it flat on the dashboard. I opened the pack of cigarettes, shook one out, and placed it next to the crayon. They were the same length. I rolled them between my fingers, feeling the texture of the wax, the paper, the filter.

I closed my eyes.

I put them both in my mouth and breathed in.

What did state surveillance look like before the internet?

Imagine a pair of hands running a length of wire along the inside of a lampshade. Imagine a pair of hands working a hidden microphone along the backside of a picture frame. Imagine hundreds of pairs of hands wiretapping schools, universities, newsrooms, offices, homes, all across America. Imagine thousands of voices caught on tape. Thousands of voices playing over each, talking to the government in their sleep.

Blurry photographs, taken from passing cars. Students massing on Sproul Plaza, barricading the doors to the Chancellor’s office, being power hosed down the steps of City Hall by the fire department.

Imagine Tripp Donnelley. In August of 1964, he believed he was on track to become a senior agent. By November, he believed his colleagues were wiretapping his bedroom.

Imagine Wesley Molina. As a college freshman, he participated in one of the largest student movements in US history. At his 50 year reunion, he described his decision to pursue a career working in government intelligence as “inspired.”

I used to think I cared about the truth. Now, I see the only thing I have ever cared about is Berkeley. Not Berkeley in the ’60s. The Berkeley I knew.

I knew someone named Sonnet. I knew someone named Sailing. I fell in love with a boy named Ben who lived on Benvenue Avenue—three doors up from the apartment building where Patty Hearst was kidnapped. I lived, in those days, on a steady diet of rumors and onion rings. There was poetry all around me, but I wasn’t writing any. I was writing about state surveillance, which was all around me too. Every morning, before class, I would look at myself in the mirror and say: “You aren’t as smart as you think you are.”