Saprogenic Greetings: WHEN YOU CARE ENOUGH

The theme's darkest joke: feeling itself commodified into a service, printed on the letterhead of a company — Saprogenic Greetings, "a proud member of the ACMÉ Family of Gags 'N Notions, Pre-Packaged Emotions, Jokes and Surprises and Wacky Disguises" — whose whole business is caring on your behalf. And it's the perfect stationery for the exchange it frames: Steeply's letter is a manufactured human-interest pretext (an interrogation dressed as a family profile), Bain writes greeting-card sentiment for a living, so both correspondents are professionals saying it for someone else, emotion-as-a-service on both ends of the line. Sincerity so thoroughly outsourced that even the frame around a spy's lie is a firm that sells pre-packaged feeling — and "Wacky Disguises" sits on the same product-shelf as "Pre-Packaged Emotions," disguise and manufactured affect billed as adjacent goods.