It's probably a good time to check out when you realize there aren't people connected to you that the loss of your life would leave a hole in someone else's. I have realized that perhaps its even a kindness to check out when one finds themselves in my situation where there is no wife or husband, no boyfriend or girlfriend equation. No person on the side because there is no primary partner nor secondary. There aren't children of my own or anyone of anyone else's that is significant in my life or lack thereof equation. There aren't family members, surrogate or otherwise, alive or estranged to worry about for there is no family equation. There is no boss, no familiar colleagues who vaguely share a life without intent in some work place environment of forced reliance. I have a life of significantly less purpose than a filling station petrol pump. And anymore than you'd miss a petrol pump being switched out and upgraded to something else - some other machine of that same purpose - if I were to check out - there would be no second glance in the equation. The question is upon doing an inventory where there aren't friends, dependencies, anymore than there are friends with benefits, f*ck buddies, not even a relationship that isn't a relationship in some no strings attached NSA equation. It begs a question - isn't it a good time to depart. Because to go on living a life with the intention to cultivate relationships where upon ones loss, chunks of a person cared about would be blown out. Isn't that almost selfish and malicious? To cultivate ties that would create future losses in others.
This of course stems from the fact that there are so many losses in my own life - that things like death and divorce have blown such holes through my being that I feel hollow, empty and vacant. Like an empty house with window sockets blown wide open from cataclysmic events so that wind blows through day in and day out year after year. Windows that were never replaced or at the least boarded up like nearly half the houses in my neighborhood. The shame of a derelict structure for which no one cares enough to at the least board up with plywood to keep the wind from blowing through. These holes in my life that jeopardize the infrastructure of my sanity have names of the missing. How many such life holes can one individual sustain and still have the integrity with which to remain standing. Where there should be an arm there was a sister. Where there should be chest and heart there is an ex. Where there should be parents there should be legs. Where there should be a groin there should be a lover, mistress or some such buddy to fall back on but isn't. Where there should be grandparents there is a vacancy light on. Where there should be a friend or a psychic guru of sorts there is a closed sign. And these missing parts do no grow back like some reptilian lizards tail will. There are just filled sockets in the cemetery covered by earth and sod and memorial stone left to be forgotten.
It seems a cold hearted calculating thing to set out to make a friend, or lover or life partner, to consider wanting children to carry on the line. Because to do so would only be to align someone in such a way that when you do depart you leave them in the cross hairs ready to be pierced, blow through and amputated. Even agent and handlers who step in to a life of a loner like mine to play some part in their own game of mystery - even they have taken not just a sizable chunk of my body and mind with their departing my life - there is even a piece of my soul now missing for having made acquaintances with such devils. Those fake friends who formed a bond of sorts to pump information in or out or to cultivate a pawn to move in a direction too dangerous for themselves to risk it all going wrong. And when you are so full of holes, missing such essential building blocks to a life from everyone being so dearly departed - and some agent of some bureau or other or perhaps even more than one latch on to a life void of such stability such as my own - only to leave. At some point there just isn't structure enough to keep a life standing.
And this isn't some pitying kind of realization. This is an actual inventory of a life. And all the glib advices to remedy such an existential locale to find one in are woefully insufficient. How do you make a friend again when you know the pain of loss from having a friend, friends, partners and lovers, family and such. In places in my life where these natural extensions of life should be I have names of loss, hollowness, holes blown through my body. Empty sockets. How does one lose all the members of a life shared. Was I really so nasty as to drive everyone away - is life so fragile that so many people depart. Is this reason enough to add one more life to a planet of seven billion or so. Is everyone really this busy with work, home and their own families and friends. Am I really so marooned as this?
To the guys I sit with in some bland cafe - with the ketchy name. Meet anonymously week in and week out. The donut shop meets, the diner meets. The times in the back seat of a car - or the passenger seat with some such agent behind. The good cop and bad cop role playing. The questions that don't yield anything to grasp. My always guessing what this is about. The only reason I see is for a job. Or some other effort for which to be later paid. And yet nothing of the sort came of it all. Sitting in a car in a parkinglot to a long since forgotten restaurant boarded up from a mid century hey day. Flanked by two agents. One in the drivers seat and one in the back. Looking out the window of the car at the restaurant and lounge from another era that somehow held on almost long enough to become current again. Watching a helicopter run right up out of the horizon line along the same imaginary axial line the car was parked along and pass over head toward us. Was there that much effort for such a display to intimidate or impress me. Or was this just some bizarre coincidence. Either way they reeked of self contentment from the momentary display. An almost North By Northwest sort of cinematic set up.
To the strange guys I was directed to meet in some beige polyester airport motel. I report to a room number in some carpeted hall, anxiously worrying what this is about. And though its nothing like a Stanley Kubrick production I got jittery and dizzy like the infamous hotel hallway scene in the Shining. There is no crazy angularity in the hallway carpets pattern as there is in the movie. In the Shining there were two young girls present - The Shining I guess the shimmering of images of lives lost - in my life there were three young girls, nieces all dead, aged 3,2 and 1. So that when I did see the Shining I literally fell apart in fear, grief and horror at the similarity and presentation of my life's own dead.
I enter this unassuming motel room - to find drapes drawn so the room too dark for the midday appointment. A single light on. I crack some nervous joke about the last time I met two strange men in a motel room for a shady business deal involving some form of something sexual. And the joke was dismissed by going unacknowledged. Ignored. We sit in chairs by a bed. Industrial lap tops are open with brief cases and travel bags on the beds. I wonder if I am free to leave. If I bolt will they grab me. I'm curious to just learn more and I want to comply because I just want a job that will give me an identity and some belonging. The two guys seeming almost uniform like in their complimentary casual attire. What do the Americans call these khaki pants - Dockers - on these two men in their casual clothes hiding a musculature that any man would envy - the cloths fitting tight - crotches packed in by the fabrics grip distract me - is this a joke. Is this a test of my sexual identity. What would these guys do if I grabbed a thigh. Is my sexual orientation being examined? I'm too proud to grab something even in this entirely inappropriate circumstance. I wanted to though just to see what this was about. Not because it was about a sexual business transaction - it clearly wasn't but to do so would have yielded a response and perhaps a breech in the formality that would have at least shed some light on meeting that to this day baffles me.
Photos on the laptop of faces some veiled over and some bearded - But all too generic that they could be anyone one sees when traveling through airport lounges on layovers. One female was particularly belabored over but it all felt like a waste a time. I knew none of the faces. And then the next thing I remember is I'm walking across the parkinglot to my car. I don't remember anything after seeing the faces. I don't remember a conversation, Or how the strange interview was closed down and how I left. I do not remember walking out. I presume I was photographed by the very device with which I was looking at images - retinal scan or what have you. I don't know. None of it makes sense now anymore than it did at the time. Beige motel, beige walls, beige pants, white men, and like I said I remember walking out to my car. I remember it as if it were a cinematic scene and I'm seeing my backside approach the backside of my car and its hatchback. The visual ketches up with the me I am seeing then I am in myself again. I remember wondering how much time was in that weird meeting in a non descript motel room out almost to the airport. You don't remember the names offered with handshakes because you assume these names are as pointless as this entire interview. But how did I go from sitting with knees touching - to seeing the laptops monitor - to being asked questions to the interview being closed down and me dismissed. Of this there is only a gap. A question of time lost and how much time was it....
To this day I wonder what was up, was I drugged, was I hypnotized, what new technology that I am unaware of seemed to capture me in that ridiculous set up. Why did the guys sit so close to me that our knees were touching. Why did my cock stir in my pants when we sat down. Why is there a blank. Did nothing sinister transpire. Did my mind just hiccup and misplace the remainder of this meeting. My mind is unreliable. I struggle with anxiety, memory and perception as it is. But I couldn't connect to these two men in this interview of a situation as I would any human. You know in ways to soften the edges. It was all like meeting a DR for a clinical procedure that would be administered. A DR with no social skills or too important to need them. Or I was too insignificant to even be related to amicably.
Their voices I don't remember them except that they weren't voices with dialects or affectations to suggest anything but anonymity. I couldn't even tell you if these men were somehow not from this country or culture because their appearance was so packaged casual it seemed like something the KGB would appear as in the 21st century. Or they could be military fit golfers from the US but with no regional influences. Just packed in to American clothes and looking like a porn star hustler sex worker/contract killer. Meeting them knowing that they, not me, know what this about. They know things about me that make me nervous knowing they know. And yet I will never comprehend what that entire interlude was about. Did I pass or fail. Was I infected. Was I cured. Was I used. If so for what. Why this carrot of a possible job being hung over my head just so I could get a whiff of some money that never materialized. A few years later as I write this I can't answer any of the immediate questions I had which remain. What was the point. How much did that entire episode cost - cost who exactly. What agency of which government or branch thereof. Which taxpayers paid for this waste of time.
Look at me - just wanting to be wanted. To be used. To accomplish something. I have no training beyond the University. No military. I just write, draw a bit, work when I can although always under employed. I write - and that got me in trouble. I wanted to find all the hidden red flags I could, trip all the wires I could stumble upon to try and understand just what was going on in the world. And write I did and travel. And yet all I wanted was to go somewhere, do something, be used. Have a purpose. Get paid so I could just be a part of things. I just did what these agents who kept materializing in my life asked because that's what I was taught to do. To respect those individuals with the power and the keys to lock you up and throw you away as it was their word against yours, and mine didn't count anyway. All I am guilty of is cooperating because clearly these weren't my employers, my peers or colleagues. They seemed to know more about me than I did. They seemed to have their minds made up about me - then what was this all about? They knew what was going on I didn't. They were getting paid - and I wasn't - why was I there doing this. Why do I not remember leaving or how much time was spent there. Why did it take so much concentration to get home in my car gripping the steering wheel too tight.
Back then when I had some family members and some friends and an employer these agents - special or not - clearly had spoken to everyone important to me. It would show up in unintended words spoken to me by each person who had come into contact with them. Even my father before he died suggested this - which meant in those few times I had with him before he passed away that he questioned who I was and who I became. That some outside agents had made him doubt me in those controlled last moments I had with him. That they forever set the relationship with my own father esckew. Neighbors giddy on the excitement of being asked by officials about who their property was adjacent to began to ask questions out of their simple characters range. Watching was cultivated I just had to observe this social net being strung through everyone around me. To speak of it just made me look crazy. Not that I am not crazy. So you just wonder about everyone who knows you. The people you work with. Have they been enlisted to watch. Needing a purpose like me they seemed to snap to attention to this new task in their life.
There was one odd day where I met this handler in the park. We sat at picnic table bench. In the distance up a little hill a mixed race couple were getting lewd in their public display of affection for each other. It seemed not genuine - it seemed orchestrated. Where I had to sit on the bench in relationship to the view up the hill to these two. The handler pulled open his casual attire expensive athletic gear coat in this way dripping with sex natural sex appeal to reveal straps for a gun. A pistol in a holster with a government agency badge on it. Again the handler seemed to slip out of character. Boyish. As if he were a young student who had recently developed and needed a jock strap for gym class and had to show me his bulging strapped down endowment. Except this was an agent - showing me his gun and his employers company logo. The couple up the hill composed themselves and walked away. The meeting ended in that way where I was caught off guard and dismissed just when I began to feel like a real person. Reminded that I wasn't.
And all because I lived overseas for what a decade? Because I traveled to countries to transport myself where my mouth was. To see that the news in the media wasn't always accurate. I just wanted to write. To get published. To try hard to write in ways that mattered by daring to risk. To take personal high risks in writing and traveling. And to write to just understand. I just wanted a job. To get published. To be somebody. At a time when everything has been written. So I just wanted to say the words and express the thoughts that were risky. I let risk guide me.
I ended up in this bizarre matrix of spies. Spies like - really? - spies. What sort of joke is this. Like some Mad Comics Spy v. Spy equation except I seemed to be caught between them. I was played with is the only conclusion. Like when you work retail and when the work is done and the customers aren't buying you take apart shelf displays to dust and clean them and put them back together. Busy work. I was just their the real people's busy work. Something to train on. That seems to be the sort of work I was for these guys. Busy work. Once again I was the unrealized, un-self-actualized low wager life providing work for real people with real jobs, careers, family and professions. I will not be told what it was about or why. I will not see any of this strange cast of characters again. All people I admired - their intellectual caliber was not that of this part of the states. It was not the caliber of my colleagues and peers, neighbors or family. I admit they were all handsome and young and real people with real professions in real life equations - probably starting families despite their line of work. And yet I the unattached loner with nothing to lose was just played with. At times you could hear contempt in their questions. Implications of contempt. Or just condescending in their dismissiveness.
To try to get a foot hold on communications with these larger than life men I'd reference TV or movies or books - you know - plot lines or characters to use as a metaphor or as small talk. Which they dismiss so fast. It wasn't their agenda. They'd steer me back so fast. It wasn't like I had a choice. We weren't going to bond in any way anyways. But I was always grasping just trying to get some understanding on what this was all about. In the end a kind of Stockholm Syndrome set in. I was somehow captured by these men and in time I grew to like and respect them, love and need them though they not me. It didn't help that they were intelligent, handsome and articulate. When the handler I liked best grew a beard or sported a very convincing fake one impressed me and I complimented him - in that way guys now are prone to with a little attention - he fell for the compliment and seemed to bask in it for a fleeting moment. It was one of the few times I saw him slip out of character. But he was back in character as if it didn't happen. As if he wasn't too beautiful to look at or listen to. As if he somehow made up for all the stinging condescension.
Fast forward a few years, a big surgery later and I had been shelved. These guys no longer called. They no longer messaged me via text. There were no odd address or locations to report to. I'd call and leave messages and eventually the handler in question called for a final phone dismissive interview. Nothing was going anywhere anymore. Again no reasons only a web of intricacy of concealment and information beyond my grasp. All I could muster was a request not to be forgotten. A request that once delivered seemed pathetic. And I knew if I were him and he me in that equation I'd drink enough to forget all that as soon as I got off the clock.
By the time I recovered from the surgery and traveled back overseas not once but twice I returned home to the gutting realization that whatever it all was that I was - whoever I became through marriage and life overseas. By whatever wrote and traveled to. That whatever these agents wanted me to account for their file on me had been satiated. That I was no longer anyone. All of my life identity and work had dissipated and I didn't matter. No amount of gin tonic and xanax was going to make me forget this absurd life I had tried to forge for myself. I would lay on the floor against the walls and in some crazed brain addled way I'd convulse in a crying fit. Scream, yell and cry again. These episodes would happen many times throughout the day. I knew I was sick. I knew I needed help. I just wanted to be dead. To be killed off. That I didn't meet the test, that I failed in my marriage and life overseas, that I failed in a career or even just plain work. That my mental health was failing. I spent day and night locked in my house. No one would come by. No one would call. Depressed as such I could scarcely venture out to buy food and necessities - and I couldn't concentrate. Somehow or other I got myself checked in to some clinical care. But you know after something like this - there is nothing you can say about it that doesn't just reinforce how crazy it all makes you. I failed. I failed. I failed. Whatever remarkable chance I had I failed and a pharmaceutically prescribed haze couldn't make it go away.
They weren't calling back. They weren't texting me addresses to report to. They didn't exist anymore as if they never had. The only evidence that they were there was in the damage to my life and mental health as some unmeasurable collateral damage. Any other country of the world I would have just been killed off I suppose. This in a way was worse. A loss of identity. A loss of confidence. A loss of money. No chance at a job. The fact that no one needed me and that worse I was just a liability of a waste of time made recovering from such a depression that much more difficult.
After all of that blew over the last person in my life passed away. I was by this point significantly better from the bout with depression and suicide. And the grieving I did over the unexpected and tragic death of my last beloved in life was very different than laying in the corner and convulsing in crying and screaming over the loss of my voice, my mind, myself. Over the loss of being dismissed by this insane inquisition of ambiguities and reflection between a matrix of strange mirrors. All so these real people could work and manipulate and slip out unseen.
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