David Miranda Is Nobody's Errand Boy

David Miranda Is Nobody's Errand Boy

David Miranda and I are debating whether or not to take off our shirts in the middle of a throbbing dance floor inside the heart of gay Rio de Janeiro. Silvery blue lights and men the size of sparrows swirl around us as we gauge the euphoria of the crowd. “It’s not that kind of party, honey!” Miranda shouts hoarsely over the Brazilian dance mix of Ke$ha’s “Die Young.”

We opt instead to gulp the night air. We pound our cocktails and bound out of the split-level nightclub to chat and smoke on the cracked Portuguese-style pavement. A thin white man in his mid-thirties with birdy lips, piss-water blonde hair, and uncool jeans follows us out the door. Miranda and I bullshit with some fellow revelers on the patio: a pudgy art dealer, a redhead, and a bespectacled line cook who has a “thing” for Rhoda Morgenstern. The man with the bird lips lingers close by. Miranda, 28, dusky, pillow mouthed, chiseled, with dark wine eyes, is too fine a specimen not to be cruised tonight, but Bird Lips is standing a little too close and appears, by the jutting of his chin and the self-conscious tilt of his head, to be eavesdropping on our conversation.

Miranda and I shoot each other a wary glance and move back inside. Just as we are about to lose ourselves in a Cher dubstep-banger, Bird Lips perches behind us, unmoving, and begins to stare. We traverse the dance floor; he follows.

What do you call someone who believes they are being spied on? Paranoid? What if that person’s not only been spied on, but also already detained by an intelligence agency? When they hush their voice in a crowd or hold a waiter, cabbie, or a stranger at a dance club in a prolonged gaze of suspicion, do you chalk it up to being traumatized or just overcautious?

If you are David Miranda, then on Nov. 3, the British government classified you in legal brief as a terrorist and a conduit for espionage. You’ve been detained in a Heathrow Airport bunker under the Terrorism Act of 2000 and interrogated for nine hours without a lawyer by unnamed U.K. officials for transporting classified documents between Berlin and Brazil. If you are David Miranda, there’s reason to believe the CIA has broken into your house and stolen your laptop. You’ve been called a spy, a hero, a lawn boy, and a drug mule. Your husband is Glenn Greenwald, MI5 agents have the passwords to your smartphone, and British border agents have probably logged on to your Skype account, so you have every reason in the world to worry why this guy is standing so fucking close to you.

Miranda whips around, squares his shoulders, thrusts his face to Bird Lips’ ear, and demands to know: “What are you doing? Are you following us?” Bird Lips gets ruffled and bolts out of the club not to be seen again. “That wasn’t just me, right? He was following us!” Miranda insists over the pounding techno, “I’m not crazy, right?”