“Of course,” I said to her as I briskly swept the room for bugs, “your government will have to pay me quite a bit of money to sabotage this magazine.” I offered her a seat in the chair by the corner, where the streetlight fell through the blinds in a matter that seemed so becoming of this genre.

“It won’t be easy,” I continued, pausing to pour some orange juice into my seltzer bottle. “I’ll need to assume a false identity and become a sleeper agent for years before I’ll get a chance to bring it down. I’ll need to enroll in the University, get a costume. For gods’ sake, I’ll be a 43-year-old man posing as a 20-year-old!”

The blonde in the fedora didn’t blink as she wrote a number down on the back of a Frisbee, and then flung it over the table towards me. I let it clatter to the floor before I stooped down to read it. I stood up so quickly that my collars popped. “I’ll do it.”

The next morning, I went to my office to prepare for the assignment. I gathered and burned all of my papers, covered over the “Private Aye” sticker on my door (the office had previously been assigned to a reclusive voter registration office), and locked my secretary in the closet. I was ready to go.

As the train waited patiently at the station for the two young lovers to part, I began to formulate a plan as to how I would bring down the magazine, which culminated in a soft wipe and scene switch into me filling out the forms marked “Application for Editor in Chief of Gravity Magazine.” “Name.” I wrote out my assumed name, “Jonathan Zornow,” and looked up to wink at everyone in the waiting room. I’d have to work on that. I tried to compensate by smiling at the receptionist, hoping that my jowl tape would hold up to the stress. I glanced down at the notepad I keep tucked away in my right breast pocket, giggling at the word breast. I, again, winked at the other people in the room.

My notes read as follows:

• Travel to Brandeis
• Get job as Editor for Gravity
• Launch a kickass new website, GravityMagazine.org, where readers can submit and vote for their favorite professor quotes, participate in hilarious forums, and read our frequent updates to the site, as fresh as the articles are written.
• Somehow leverage this into the destruction of the magazine.

I somehow suspect that by writing this all down and printing it in the very magazine I was meant to destroy, I may have somewhat compromised my position. Oh well, too lazy to rewrite my letter.

Enjoy this issue,

Jonathan Zornow

(And, hey, check out GravityMagazine.org!)