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Mr. and Mrs. America

By: jezzaz



This is a different one for me. No cheating. No elaborate plots. Just a story of appreciating what you have. I've been told that happiness is not having everything you want, but wanting what you have. And there is more than one way to betray someone, so here's a story about that. 

Edited by my good friend NonetheWiser, who, as usually, takes my drivel and makes it readable. The man truly has the ability to polish a turd and make it shine! 

It does start with a funeral. Sorry Ohio -- I hope it makes up for that. 

***** 

Mr. & Mrs. America 

We watched the casket go into the hole, sinking slowly out of sight to where, presumably, the conveyer belt took it to the ovens. Somber music played, Bach Suite No. 6 I think, I wasn't really paying that much attention. Strangely, I suddenly wondered why Mike hadn't taken care of the music himself. He was an organized guy -- he had to be, details were everything in his life -- so why hadn't he sorted this out? Or, maybe he had? Maybe we were listening to his selections. If that were true, I didn't know him as well as I thought. 

I glanced at Jo, who was holding my hand tight. She glanced back at me, sensing the movement of my head. She gave me a "bit lip" smile. One of those ones where you want to show support but don't honestly know what to say-- you just want to show your concern. You are just there. 

I smiled back at her, the kind of smile you give to say, "It's ok. I know you are here. Thanks". 

I looked around the room, marveling at the small turn out. There were three other high school friends, four from college, three people I couldn't place, four people I knew I'd never met and a cousin that I had met once whose name I could never remembered. And his mother, of course. With her new -- well, new to me -- husband. Mike's Dad had died twelve years ago from a sudden heart attack. No warning, no expectation. He'd been an active man, playing golf, jogging, even playing raquet ball. He'd played me and I wondered if he got any exercise out of it because he'd planted his feet firmly in the middle of the court and never moved, knocking the ball around all over the place, making me run like a humming bird on speed. And then one day he was just gone. Mike returned for the funeral. He didn't even stay for the wake -- he was away on a plane. I got a breezy excuse about "Something on the boil I can't leave" and he was gone. But that was Mike. Never in one place long. Never at rest -- always moving. Always watching around, checking things out, making internal calculations. He was my best and oldest friend, but did I really know him? There were frequently time where I kind of doubted that I did. 

His mother had remarried four years later, and it seemed to be okay with Mike. We'd talked on a flying visit and he said he was ok with it. I was glad his mom had found companionship again. She and my mom still did a yearly trip to visit the big malls in Chicago, and still occasionally had coffee. Well, that's what I was told anyway. Jo knew -- she even went with them on occasion. 

The pastor said a few words, something about "going to a better place." I almost snorted at that, but Jo gripped me harder at that moment. She knew me. She knew what I thought and what I would have expressed had we not been at a funeral. I'd have said something like, "No, not only is there no lights on upstairs, there is no upstairs. This is all we have. We aren't going to a better place. We are just ending." Or something like that. Either way, I'd have challenged it. But this was Mike's funeral and my kick at that particular groin would have to wait for a more appropriate time. 

The funeral ended, and we walked out of the crematorium, nodding at the people we knew, and me doing some unabashed staring at the people we didn't. One women of the four I didn't know caught my eye, smiled at me, and I could see her turn to the people she was with, murmur something to them and then break away to come towards us. 

Jo had seen her too, and stopped. The woman approached us and said, "Mr. Tramell? Might I bother you for a moment? You must be Jo Tramell, yes?" 

Jo glanced at me and nodded. 

"You look just like your pictures. It's so nice to finally meet Mr. and Mrs. America." 

Jo and I looked at each other again, not sure how to react to this. 

"I'm sorry, I have the better of you. I'm Madeline Walsh. I used to...work with Mike." 

I stiffened. What Mike did was never entirely revealed to me. I had some clue about it -- I couldn't not, after the youth we'd had -, but no details. Never details. None. Mike was very careful about that. He told me he was a troubleshooter for an oil company, hence all the zipping around the world he did, but we -- Jo, me and his parents -- knew that was bullshit. I knew what Mike did for a living, at least I was pretty sure on the broad strokes. We had planned it together, growing up. It's what we always wanted to be. 

I should back up, since I'm going down a path and into details that you have no context for. So let me change that. Here goes. 

I'm Jake Tramell. The woman holding my hand is my wife, Jo. We've been married for 22 years, getting hitched when we were both the grand old age of 23. Which makes us, you guessed it, 45. We met in college. Mike was the year ahead of us and was my oldest friend in the world. Our parents had been friends for years; they'd even bought land together and split it and then built their houses so the backyards abutted. My dad was often away -- he was an officer in the diplomatic service and he was often gone for a couple of days at a time, jetting around the world. I found out when I was older that he was actually a bagman. When you hear about the 'diplomatic bag' in spy novels, well, he was the guy who carried it. It sounds exotic but it's not. Dad would drone on about how he literally got on a plane, flew somewhere, touched down, got in a car, drove to either a consulate, an embassy, or in some of the really poor and small countries, the personal residence of the ambassador, drop a bag off, pick up another one and get right back in the car, straight back to the airport and on another plane. He never looked in the bag, and he wasn't supposed to. That was it. No spy missions, no exotic women, no shootouts or martinis. Just lots of air travel and no time to see the locations. But he made a living and he was happy and so was mom, for the most part. And the airmiles. My god, the airmiles. 

As I said, Mike was a year ahead of me at college. I was studying languages with a minor in history. Mike was also doing languages and a minor in athletics. We were preparing ourselves. Oh, yes we were. No question. I'll get into that more a little later. 

So this Madeline Walsh was standing in front of us, looking us over, appraising us. Neither Jo nor myself had said anything yet, so I figured it was about time. 

" 'Worked' Ms. Walsh? I wasn't aware that Mike 'worked' at anything, besides getting a tan and learning about expensive hotels". It was my attempt at levity, and frankly, it was a pretty poor effort. 

She smirked. That same knowing smirk I'd seen on Mike's face more than once, when I'd attempted a joke. 

"Oh he worked alright. I think you'd be surprised at how hard. When he worked, he put his all into it." 

"What can we do for you, Ms. Walsh?" asked Jo, in her clear contralto. Her accent was mid Boston, but cultured. She enunciated every word, a habit for which our kids and I teased her mercilessly. However, as she pointed out, at least one of had to sound cultured, because otherwise we'd all be mistaken for rednecks, or, even worse, Republicans. 

"I just wanted to meet you. Mike had some pictures of you and your family in his office. He called you Mr. and Mrs. America. 'The reason for all we do' he'd say. I can see him saying it now..." she said, wistfully. 

I was obvious to me that there was more to her the relationship with Mike than mere co-worker. I re-examined Madeline Walsh -- obviously just moving out of her prime, late 40's I'd guess. Not quite 5'9, slim, blond hair that was in a bob, and obviously bleached. Bright eyes, well applied makeup. I tried to remember what I'd read about being observant and looked her over some more. 

She saw me doing it and suppressed a smile. 

"Oh, you need to be less obvious Jake. I can call you Jake, can't I? I feel like I know you. Mike talked about you guys a lot." 

I nodded -- what else could you do when it's asked like that? 

"Am I that obvious?" I asked, wondering how she'd answer. 

"Totally. We are taught to suppress the obvious. You learn do it over time. When you get good, it's quite subtle. You make excuses to examine something specific -- 'oh, that's a lovely ring, can I see it?' and when they do, you get to examine their hands. To be honest, it's very tedious having to always act that way. It's easier to be obvious." 

"Should you be... you know, saying stuff like that? I thought you guys were never supposed to reveal...well, anything?" asked Jo. 

She knew what Mike had been. Or what we suspected he'd been. He'd never acknowledged it, but I knew. Hell, we'd both worked so hard to get that job. The fact that he'd never confirmed or denied it meant he was obviously involved in the security services. I didn't know if he was NSA or CIA or something else. I just knew he did hush-hush shit, and went all over the world and sometimes had stories to tell. . I knew because it had been what we'd dreamed of. 

"Oh, I'm not involved any more. Been retired for four years now. Well, I say retired," she said, doing the glance to heaven that people do when they are contradicting themselves, "but you are never completely out I suppose. On the other hand, I don't really want anything to do with that world any more, and being a bit blatant about it is the best way to stay out. Security risk you see. Can't be trusted not to blab." 

She gave us a huge smile. I judged it to be genuine. It looked genuine. But then, was anything genuine with these people? 

"I do have something for you. It's a letter. We all...we all write one. Mike actually had two. I already gave his mother the one to her. It's intended to be sent - well, you know when. Most people will never know what happened, and I don't think we ever will, to be honest. The letters are vetted, because they have to be. Can't have classified stuff in there." 

She rummaged around in the huge bag she held on her arm. Jo nudged me and nodded at the bag. It was a Michael Kors. I've no doubt it was expensive and I'd be hearing about it later. Jo had a thing about expensive handbags. We have the largest collection of top end fakes this side of the continental divide I think, all courtesy of Mike. It had even got to the point where Jo would send him texts with images of the real bags she wanted, and Mike would find them wherever he was. We'd get a package a few weeks later with the best fake in it money could buy. Now I think about it, I wonder if any are genuine? 

She pulled out a large letter envelope, the kind you normally use for internal memos. It was folded flat, but unsealed. She offered it to me and I took it and thanked her. 

She glanced back at her group who were waiting patiently by a blacked out town car. 

"I'm sorry there wasn't more representation at the funeral. They won't allow active agents to go to these things. Too much chance if the...individual was compromised -- and lets face it, if he's dead, he more than likely was -- that the funeral is being observed to see who might be an associate. Just so you know, there was an internal gathering, and there were a lot of people there. Mike touched a lot of lives inside. Hell, he saved a lot us at one point of another. He was a popular guy. And you are a thing of legend because of it. If Mike did it for you, what were you like? To be honest, we've all seen your file, and I'm sure you know it doesn't make for that exciting reading. Professor of dead languages at Northwestern University, three kids, two twins, married twenty plus years, own your house, published three non-fiction books and two adventure novels, under a nom de plume. You have it all. The American Dream. You've worked hard and been rewarded in the American way. It's not hard to see why Mike felt the way he did. 

"You know, he used you as his scale, to take measure of the things we had to do, and how we had to do them. He'd hold up your picture and he'd say, 'If we do this, can I look these people in the eye and tell them, and will they approve?' If he didn't think you'd understand or approve, he would tell the team to 'find another way'. That's not to say we didn't cross that line on occasion -- we did, but sometimes there is no other way. Sometimes there is no good way at all." 

She looked off into the distance again, then pulled herself together and gave us another smile. This one didn't reach her eyes. 

"Well, I have to run. It was nice meeting you. It's a shame we never got our hooks into you, Mr. Jake Tramell. You'd have fit in nicely I think. Mike was right though; I think you were better off out. It certainly seems like you've made a life for yourself. It was nice to meet you Mrs. Tramell. I love your shoes, by the way." 

And then she was gone, back to her group, who were by now looking at watches and shifting foot to foot and all the other small things people do when they are impatient and being held up. 

Jo and I looked at each other. It was like a whirlwind of knowledge had passed through us. This Madeline Walsh --if that was even her real name - knew us, knew things about us, but we knew nothing about her. 

I opened my mouth to say something, thought better of it and said instead, "Are you as disturbed as I am that there is a file on us with those people," I nodded to the car, that was just pulling away. "On us? Who'd want to check up on us?" 

Jo smiled -- the first genuine one I could guarantee of the day -- and said, "Oh I don't know. Maybe they know about my second life. Josh always said I was Supermom. Maybe they've broken my secret identity." 

I smiled back, nodding. Then I thought of Mike and I stopped smiling. Jo noticed and linked arms with me, pulling me towards the car. 

"Come on you. I know its Mike's...ending. But don't be too maudlin. Lets go to the reception and remember him. We probably knew him better than any one except his mother. Let's go tell some stories, drink some toasts and be glad we knew him. You know that's how he'd want it." 

I nodded. She was right. That is what he'd want. And he'd have insisted on bringing out the Goldschläger, Mike's drink of choice for celebrations. He made all sorts of jokes about gold plated turds, due to the gold flakes suspended in the liquid. We'd do some shots in his honor. I was already wincing. Those shots were my kryptonite. Three of them and I'd be hung over for days. But, so be it. He was my best friend. Time to raise a glass. 

I sat in my easy chair, looking alternately at my glass of Jack Daniels Single Barrel and then at the envelope in my lap. It was late. I'd done a bunch of research already on my latest project -- I had four interns doing a new translation of one of the Dead Sea Scrolls and I was running the project and double-checking their work. Aramaic was a tough language to translate, and some of the Hebrew scrolls also had tricky passages, written in a vernacular that was hard to understand, not having the cultural context to make sense of them. There are already so many mistakes in the Bible from bad translations made in the middle ages. The reality is that the translation in many bibles from the original Hebrew/Aramaic to modern languages is similar to the awful Japanese to English translations of user manuals in the 1970s. 

They are literally that bad. Imagine reciting the bible with a terrible Japanese accent and you start to get the idea. 

I wasn't really expecting any huge change in wording or meaning, but hope springs eternal. You never know what might have been mistranslated in the past. For all we know, one of the commandments might actually be "Thou Shalt commit adultery", as one of the misprints in the Victorian era had advocated. Of course, that version would have gotten very bad reviews from many people calling themselves Anonymous on certain parts of 21st century erotic literature websites. 

I'd finished my work, and Jo was in bed. She'd gone up earlier as usual. When we'd had young 'uns in the house, we had a balanced schedule-- I'd work late at home, and get up late (hey, if you are the professor, you often get to set the class time), and she'd go to bed earlier, watch one of her reality shows then go to sleep and get up early to get the kids off to school. 

Even when the kids were grown and gone, as the last of ours, Josh, had just done, we'd never really changed this. So here I was, it was 11:30, I had a drink -- and the bottle, in case I needed more fortification -- and was staring at the envelope. 

I still didn't know why I hadn't read it yet. I mean, it was probably a last will and testament of sorts for Mike. But for some reason I was nervous. I had no idea why, but I was. I felt like this would be his last communication with me, and I guess I thought that the longer I delayed reading it, the longer Mike wouldn't really be dead and gone. It was illogical, but it made sense of a sort to me. 

I took a sip of the JD -- I like the Single Barrell because it is just smoother; I prefer my hard liquor to be smooth, not sharp. Mike and I had disagreed on this mightily. Mike was all scotch single malts, with their peaty tastes, and I was all refined blends like Jameson, Jack Daniels and Southern Comfort. He used to laugh at me, and would bring me expensive bottles of Scotch when he came to visit, always with stickers on them from the duty free at one far-flung airport or other. He was always trying to 'educate me on the finer things of life' and I'd retort that I already had the 'finer things in life, and she was sitting upstairs in bed, watching Sister Wives or something else equally stupefying.' And he'd laugh and pour a shot and do a toast to Jo - in my case very definitely my better half. 

I sighed, knowing that Jo would be exasperated if she were here -- she'd already made it clear that she thought I was "on the verge of retardation" (she had such a way with words, did my Jo) for not already opening it and reading it. She'd said that if I hadn't read it by the weekend, she'd open it for me and read it aloud over breakfast. 

That was Jo. We were married so long, we had become like two sides of the same coin. I knew her and she knew me, and we were extremely comfortable. The kind of comfort that comes from years of experience, with seeing the best and worst in each other, and dealing with it - together, accepting it -together and moving on - together. No, moving forward. Not on. That sounds like we would just give up when the going got tough, and we didn't do that. We tried to change each other for the better when we could we could, and accept the remaining flaws when we could not. 

That didn't mean she couldn't mightily piss me off. My god, that woman could make me angry with just a look. And she knew it, and at times, delighted in it. Oh she'd apologize for it the next day -- and mean it too -- but sometimes she just couldn't help herself. She could be moody, she would constantly interrupt me, and she just didn't take seriously some things that needed to be taken seriously. In other words, Jo was a female; the archetype of the species. 

But then I wasn't perfect either. I was sloppy and lazy around the house in terms of doing chores. I was good at fixing things and getting jobs done, but when it came to the every day tasks, I was just lazy. I'd let them mount up -- not loading the dishwasher till I ran out of cups or plates, for example. It was enough to drive her up the wall. I was bad about tracking money and expenditure and I was often more a friend to the kids than the parent I should have been. Jo would take the kids to task and I'd be behind her making mouth movements with my hands and making the kids laugh and totally devaluing the points she was making. It was immature. In other words, I was a male. 


Mr. and Mrs. America



But we worked. She took no crap from me and I loved her for it. She accommodated my foibles, my love of Star Trek and the fact that I completely fluent in Klingon (I was a dead languages teacher, after all!), even if she rolled her eyes dramatically when I trotted it out. 

The fact is, we just loved each other. We didn't live a fairy-tale life -- no marriage is like that and any one who tells you theirs is either is lying or doesn't have a real understanding of what a truly deep relationship is. With a deep relationship, you learn where the abyss' are in your spouse, and what to do about them -- when to confront them and when to leave well enough alone. You can't fix everything and there are occasions when you just need to be wise enough to let the other person deal. 

We'd had our ups and downs, encountered and dealt with a miscarriage, identity theft, a car accident that broke Jo's leg in three places, a lawsuit over our children when the twins had beaten the crap out of a boy who wouldn't leave one of them alone. It wasn't all plain sailing -- Jo had been laid off twice, when the companies she worked for folded. Once she was promised the position of chief counsel and then had it retracted at the last minute after she had pointed out that one of the established VPs had made comments at a company Christmas party that were probably incorrect, certainly racist and most definitively actionable. He was pissed she'd done it at the table, and even more angry that he'd been brought to heel by a woman, even though she was a lawyer. And there went her chief counsel position. She was entirely in the right, but it remains a man's world at that level. 

So yeah, we'd had ups and downs. 

But we loved each other. Through thick and thin, even when we were mad at each other; even when were didn't speak to each other for days; even when there was the yelling that comes with passionate views. She was mine and I was hers. There was no other way for it to be. We made each other better. I -- the academic -- softened her lawyer's instinct for being harsh. She -- the rational lawyer -- helped settle my occasional irrational traits like stubbornness and self-importance. 

We had been like that since we were introduced -- by Mike of all people -- at college. I had made decisions about my future and walked away from long held goals because of her. And when I watched Mike go right ahead and do everything we'd planned to do together -- well, I won't say there weren't nights when I was pissed off about it. A bad argument with Jo, a few Southern Comforts and I would be looking at old photos of me and Mike growing up and my resentment would come bubbling to the surface. He was off gallivanting around -- whatever gallivanting actually was -- being all mysterious, meeting women in casinos and saying "shaken, not stirred" and I was a junior professor, spending my time in classes, trying to get disinterested people to get the right conjugation in Latin. It wasn't fair. It had never been fair. 

But she was Jo. My other half. So there wasn't any other way it could be. 

And that brings us back to the present and the envelope. 

With a sigh, I put down the drink, took a deep breath and opened it. 

Out came four pages of hand written letter. I was surprised. Mike was all about technology and gadgets. He'd come home with a new phone or camera or watch or something and I'd make cracks about "what did this one do? Does it summon a spy satellite when your press this button?" and he'd roll his eyes at me and say again, patiently, "Look, I work for an oil company, Jake. What the hell would I need a spy satellite for?" It was a game -- he knew damn well I knew what he did, but he'd never admit it. He never protested too vociferously that he wasn't involved in some kind of intelligence unit, but he never ever confirmed it. Madeline Walsh was the first time we ever really had confirmation. 

I looked at the letter, adjusted myself into a slightly more comfortable position on the padded chair, put on bifocals -- we all get old! -- and started to read. 

Hey Jake, 

So, yeah. Gone. Sorry about that. I know I always said we'd sit around in San Diego someday, watching the sun go down and drinking some decent scotch (and whatever that crap is that you drink), and I'd write my memoirs. But I guess something came up. I am sure I would have liked the other plan better. Oh, well. 

In case you were wondering, no, I'm not about to go into details here. You wouldn't appreciate or understand half of what I could say anyway. I don't mean that as a put down old friend. It's just that this stuff requires a ton of context, and you don't have that, nor should you. It's honestly not that interesting and too much of it is pretty petty anyway. In the same way I wouldn't know what the subtleties of a Klingon insult are, you wouldn't get a lot of this. 

But yeah, I do have things to say. Better get on with it. I'm writing this in San Paulo, in Brazil. I'm in a high rise, overlooking one of the shantytown cities. San Paulo is such a concrete example of the haves vs. the have not's. The haves live in the tower blocks, with guards and security fences, and everyone else lives down there, building whatever life they can. It's about as unsexy as it's possible to be, to be honest. I know you think my globetrotting life is exotic, but most of the time, the things I see just remind me of how good life really is at home. 

So, do you remember us growing up? Sure you do. I'm pretty sure you were thereJ. 

Remember the small A-Frame between our houses? 

Of course I did. We'd grown up in the outskirts of the city of Rockford, in Northern Illinois. Our fathers were old friends, and had bought property together, 3 acres of woodland, with a creek running through the middle of it. Mike's dad was an architect, and he'd designed both houses that the two friends built, on opposite sides of the land. Between them was the creek, winding through the woods, that would often overflow its banks during the brutal winters. Far back from Mike's house, there was an A-Frame two-room guesthouse. It was there when the property was bought; no one had a clue who'd built it, but the kids claimed it as our own. We'd have sleep outs in it, build fires in a brick circle and make smores and, when we were older, drink contraband beers, always being sure to remove the evidence later. My younger sister, Tina, would sometimes join us. Mike was an only child -- I never did find out if there was a reason for that. 

We were together constantly, brought together by parents, and location and mostly shared interests in spy shows and movies. Since my dad was in the diplomatic service, we used to pretend he was away on missions and was a spy, and all our games revolved around that concept. Dad didn't help that conceit either. He'd come home and give us 'missions' -- he'd have hidden something and set up clues for us to find and follow. We imagined we were being trained for something. 

It was all we wanted to be when we grew up. James Bond, Our Man Flint, The Man From Uncle. We read everything we could find and watched everything our parents would let us and decided early on that a life of derring do -- I wasn't sure exactly what that was either, but it sounded good. Something to do with swashbuckling, perhaps? -, danger and excitement would be our future. 

When Mike broke his arm, when he was twelve, I was the one that rode in the ambulance with the medics. We'd done it trying to swing across the creek, and of course, the rotting branch of the dead tree broke and down went Mike, yelling the whole time. We only realized he'd broken his arm when I slapped him on the back, laughing at the spectacle of him covered in mud as he'd climbed out. 

We'd write stories and create cover identities for ourselves, and spend the entire day pretending we were the people in our made up story, and we would nit pick holes in each other's stories. 

We were both on the debate team at school, and you can just imagine what that was like. When we were together, we were unbeatable. But when put on opposite sides, we'd tie each other up in knots using word play and irrelevant arguments. I remember one time we spent the whole debate trying to get each other to laugh. I won, when I had to retort to a particularly compelling argument he'd made about carbon footprints or something, and I just opened my mouth, and instead of arguing, I dropped my pants and mooned him and the entire debate team. It got me suspended for a week, but that particular story is still told in hushed tones at the school. 

We discovered girls, of course, when we got older. We did diverge a bit when it came to the fairer sex. Mike wouldn't let anything get in the way of his dream -- girls were objects to be desired, chased after, wooed, taken, and then moved on from. I...well, I wasn't made like that. I tried a few times, to be like Mike, but after the third girl ran from me crying at the school lockers after I dropped her and got ready for the next one, well, I just couldn't do it any more. 

That's not to make Mike out to be some kind of lothario or arrogant dick around women. He never used and abused. He never treated any one badly or led a girl on. In fact, it was partly his ability to treat every woman equally that was his problem, I think -- all girls were equal in his eyes. He didn't just date the tall hotties, he dated every girl. He wanted to try them all -- none got in too close; his control was awesome to watch. He was always up front about who he was, and never led a girl on to believe he was in love with them. I think he took to heart the lessons of love them and leave them more than most would. Perhaps the examples of episodic television, where you'd see a guy with one women one week, and another the next, may have influenced him more than me. Who knows? 

The man just loved women. All of them. Repeatedly. It was inspiring to watch. In some ways James Bond really had nothing on Mike LaPetus. Mike was the real deal. -- a player with class. You don't see many of those these days. 

And me? Well, I was more of a relationship guy. I just didn't have the energy to chase women like he did. I would date a bit, find a girl and that would be it for a few months, till the relationship ended naturally, as at that age, most relationships should. 

Mike was a year older than me. When he graduated and went to college, I was lost for a year. We had been like the two musketeers. Yes, I know there were three. Or four, if you count, d'Artagnan but we were like the two musketeers. We complimented each other. Mike found some languages hard, and I didn't; I found calculus hard, and he didn't. We tutored each other. There was never a question that we would room together and when I hit college a year later, and we did. 

I know I'm making it sound like some kind of bromance thing, or some thinly disguised homosexual relationship, but it was never like that. Never. It was more like we were brothers that rarely fought. We got accused of the gay thing a few times -- it tended to happen a lot when Mike broke up with a woman, because he'd prefer me to be around. He had this theory that women wouldn't go off on him as badly if I was there. Instead it got us branded as closet queers by some girls. Mike would laugh loudly and then say "If we were, he could do way better than me". I remember the first time he did it, I said, "Hey. What exactly does that mean? I'd make a better gay man than you?? What?" 

He'd laughed and tried to explain that I was a 'more attractive man than him to the same sex," and I'd gone on a whole "How the fuck would you know?" thing, and it all ended up with us going to gay bar and seeing who got hit on first. 

He did. 

I still don't know if that is a good thing or not. 

Anyway, I did ok in the women department, right up till I met Jo. Mike introduced us at a party. He was interested in some cheerleader -- of course it was a cheerleader. Mike couldn't go for the ordinary, oh no - and he needed me to make a foursome, so I could accompany the girl who was hanging out with Mike's prey. I was pissed at the time. I didn't want to be taking what I thought were his cast offs -- he'd done that a couple of times before and I had made it clear that I wasn't interested in that unless I was interested, and if I was, I'd make the clear to him. He understood and backed off, but I thought he'd done it again. 

So my first impression of Jo Bean, wasn't great. She wasn't that impressed with me either. We'd apparently got a bit of a reputation -- more Mike than me -- but I was guilty be association so I was a reputed womanizer too. 

Now I don't mind a bit of swagger. I don't mind having a bit of a reputation. And it wasn't like I was a virgin, not since Pauline French, in my senior year of high school. She'd educated me in the ways of the horizontal mambo, made it clear she had her eyes on the horizon, and we'd had a hell of time learning, and then she'd bade me farewell when the year was up and she zoomed off to New York to go study fashion or something. Last I heard, she was married to some author named Bob, who had a thriving career writing smutty stories on some website or something. 

Anyway, I knew my way around a woman's body and didn't need a map or have to ask directions. I was a man of the world. Or so I thought. 

Jo was a revelation to me. That night, we went from not really being that interested in each other to drinking competitions against each other. She did win (although barely) and we woke up the next morning in bed together. Don't get me wrong, neither one of us was up to sex the night before, that much was very clear. And it was embarrassing and awkward, until she just started laughing, saying, "God knows what my grandmother would say about this. She'd say," - and she put on some exaggerated New England accent -, "Now, dear, if you are gonna do that, at least get his telephone number, and the first name of his mother. And don't forget to leave with all the clothes you came with." 

We just laughed and laughed, and made breakfast and laughed some more, and I did some impressions of my paternal Grandfather, who is as red-necked as they come, even though he'd been on the beaches at Normandy, and some how she never left the small apartment that Mike and I shared. He never showed up by the way. I'm guessing he got lucky with the cheerleader. He never boasted about his conquests, and I never boasted about mine -- it was weird that way, because once I was married, he did nothing but tell me about his exotic adventures. He said once he felt it was necessary, so I could "live vicariously through him." 

The first time we had sex -- the fifth date by the way -- it was explosive. I wasn't expecting it to be as good as it was. She had experience too -- that much was obvious -- but it was more just her unbridled enthusiasm that was attractive. I've always believed that enthusiasm for anything -- be it sex, writing, rifle shooting or train spotting -- makes you better at it, and more interesting to be around while you are doing it. Jo had that. Now I'm not that much of a man of the world, despite the experience I had and the airs both Mile and put on -- the number of women I'd been with, well, you'd need to take your shoes and socks off to count them all, but it wasn't past 20 -- but I had been around at least little bit, and I could tell she was something special. To be clear though, even if it hadn't been great, I'd still be with her because she was the whole package. But as it happened, it was great. We just fit together. Same appetites, same desires, same lack of embarrassment for asking what we wanted. It was just great. 

Jo was going to be lawyer. A corporate lawyer, who did pro bono work. Hell, she was every bit as idealistic as I was in those days. Even though we were the same age, she has skipped a year along the way and was a year ahead. There was no doubt she was going to graduate with honors and go on to pass the bar. And she did. It was expensive, but her parents helped out with 50% of the costs, and she got a part time job while I got a full time one, once it became clear what my future was likely to be. 

Whatever. Hearing from Mike was titillating, listening to him tell about some of the dangerous sex he'd had, doing it in the Dead Sea (sounded painful, to be honest), or trying to do it in public in Saudi Arabia, but not be noticed doing it, since it was a flogging if you were caught doing that there. But I never really looked at Jo as second best because of his stories. She was always first best. It wasn't even a question. Mike had his life; I had mine. 

Remember all the training we did? For our glorious careers as spies to be! They were good years, Jake. I look back and think it was so much better than trying to go for football glory or any of that stuff. I don't regret a second of it. At least I didn't then. 

We had both wanted to be spies. Desperately. That's all we dreamed of. We had our careers planned out -- we'd be a team, working together and cutting a swathe through the enemies of America and democracy. I laughed - we were such naive idealists. All the movies and TV shows were so black and white -- there were good guys and bad guys, and the good guys did good things and stopped the bad guys from doing bad things. Mike and I were good through and through. We knew it and the world had just better watch out. Bad guys, you are put on notice. Jake and Mike are coming. 

We were so full of it. Looking back it was all so ridiculous. Except, for Mike, it wasn't. He actually went and did it. 

I know my father was involved. Mike showed up at our house a few times during his last year of college. He was going out into the world a year before me, and by then I was with Jo, so much of my time was being spent with her. But I knew he'd been to see my Dad a few times, and I'm pretty sure it was Dad who introduced him to the people he needed to be introduced to. Dad would never confirm it either, but I was sure of it. 

Jake, now I know better. It wasn't at all what we thought it was. Honestly, it's just not. It's mostly low-grade gossip mongering, setting people up and burning them. There are moments, but the real point here is this. I got to do it, and you didn't. 

Yes he did. I knew it and he knew it. I knew he didn't lord it over me, but he had to look down on me a bit, because I never realized our shared ambition and he did. But he did a great job of including me in the way he told his stories, without me ever having to go into any danger. Not that I would have minded a bit of danger now and then. Being a professor doesn't have many opportunities to shine in that department. Okay, you're right. It has none. 

But the thing is, my life is what my life is. I'm really happy with Jo and the kids, and while I haven't had a life of sparring with Odd Job and saying "Tramell, Jake Tramell" in menacing ways, it's not been wasted. I've been happy, made my moments count and I don't think I'd trade it. To use that stupid old cliché, I feel pretty completed. My boyhood dream was just that -- a boyhood dream. My real life was just that too -- real, and life. No one strapped me to a table and shoved a laser between my legs, saying they expected me to die. 

That doesn't mean there aren't wistful moments where I don't wonder what might have been. We all do that. Everybody. Its human nature. And it would be even worse when your best friend is doing it and telling you exactly what could have been. But Mike was never like that. He denied it all anyway, even though we both knew better. 




Mr. and Mrs. America



There were definitely times when I'd wished I'd gone into intelligence work -- particularly when some new atrocity was reported. There was a strange sort of guilt then. I should have been out there, trying to stop things like that. Not sitting in a classroom droning on about Latin verbs. A couple of times I thought I would call Mike and ask if there was anything I could do. Pass a message along; be a courier; whatever. But I never did. It just seemed stupid, in light of what I was and what he was. They didn't need my help. Although when I said that to myself, there was always a little true disappointment. But then I'd go tuck the kids in and that would make me happy. It wasn't very Jason Bourne, but I wasn't Jason Bourne, and I did my best to remember that. 

Now the hard bit. Now I have to explain why you never did what I did. And you'll have trouble with this right now. I know you -- quick to anger, but you get over. Once you've thought about it, you'll understand. I still don't think you'll like it, but you'll at least understand. I hope. You'll understand I could never tell you this in life, too. I just couldn't do that. 

Your wife, your father and I conspired to make sure you didn't do it. There was no pregnancy. There was no miscarriage. When you missed that appointment, twice, it wasn't by chance. I made it happen. 

Yeah, I can see you pissed right now. Betrayed by your best friend. What. The. Eternal. Fuck. Right? 

What? What did he just say? I read it again. Yes, the same words were there. I put the letter down and savagely finished my drink in one gulp. The next one, too. The one after that may have taken two gulps. 

I remembered the passion we'd had for being in the intelligence services. For serving our country against enemies domestic and external. We'd spent years training ourselves, going from childhood games to adult games, of a more sophisticated nature. I graduated college in 1992. The Gulf War happened while I was in school. We kicked ass in that one. And it made me more patriotic. It made my dream make more sense. 

Our "preparation" has started long before that. We'd tailed each other, trying to spot each other. We'd extended the game to the point were we'd go out in public as someone else, and meet, and get others to believe we really were astronauts or concert pianists or whatever. 

We'd even selected our majors and minors with a view to acquiring skills that would be useful once we got out in the world of espionage, and hopefully get us noticed from agency recruiters. 

Even when I met Jo, I still maintained the dream. It was still what I wanted. Maybe the path would be a little different, but it was still achievable. Until it wasn't. I had to make choices, and I'd made them. I'd done the right thing, exactly as we said we would. Only the right thing at the time was to give up the dream, at least for a time. 

Jo got pregnant. It was about two months before I was due to graduate. I was flabbergasted. My flabber was well and truly ghasted, as the saying goes. 

Jo and I were having sex regularly -- very, very regularly - by then, but we had the conversation about birth control, and she was on the pill. The pill is, under perfect conditions and use, 99.7% effective. We were part of the lucky .3%. 

So I had to do the right thing. The responsible thing. I had to marry her. Her father was religious, as was her mother, and even though Jo was not, she was still very much her daddy's girl. She didn't want to disappoint him. And to be honest, it was no hardship on my side. I knew damn well I was in love with her and we fully expected to be married at some point anyway. This just accelerated it. 

Marrying her was no hardship on me, let me tell you. And her mother was a hottie, so I knew what I was getting into for later years. 

And so if I couldn't go off gallivanting around the world right then, so what? The best spies had someone at home anyway. Someone to go home to. A reason to go home. A reason to do all the things they had to. The job would still be there when we had the baby and got settled and it's not like the world was lacking in trouble spots. It wasn't as if Mike would get out there and solve everything before I got there. He was good, but he was only half as good as he could be without me next to him. 

So I let it go. I didn't pursue it, or hit Dad up for meetings. I frantically tried to find something to do with the degree I'd gotten given that my plans for the future use of that education were now inactive. Amazingly, I very quickly got a good job working remotely for the British Museum, doing translations of recently discovered ancient documents and tablets. Ironically, I did get to travel a bit in the early years. Jo and I settled into married life. 

She miscarried, about five months into the pregnancy. She was just about to start to show, and I was looking forward to feeling the baby kick and all that. I was travelling at the time. By the time I got back, it was all over. She was just released from the hospital and I picked her up, in a panic. She was calm and collected and together - I was the one coming apart. 

I got her home and to bed and drank myself into insensibility that night. It wasn't lost on me that I'd given up my dream for something that had been taken away from me, but I had decided I needed to man up about it. This wasn't about me. It was about Jo. So I shut the fuck up, exactly as I should have, and got with the program. Jo recovered quickly, but wasn't quite the same afterwards, for the longest time. I'd catch her looking at me, partially with love in her eyes, and partially something else. She'd look away, and I'd be on my knees, telling her I loved her and it didn't matter and we could try again. It wasn't like we couldn't. There were no complications. 

She'd dissolved into tears and cling to me and we'd just rock back and forth, till she calmed down. There was guilt there, and I did my very best to assure her that the miscarriage was not her fault. 

A year later, I'd seen Mike exactly twice. He'd told me about this job he'd gotten as a troubleshooter for some oil company. He'd jet around the world, fixing problems with oil production, all the way from broken oil wells to bribing African dictators. I just went, "Yeah, right" and didn't believe a word of it. But I understood how the game was played. Mike had to say these things, as would I, when I finally got into the game as an official player. 

By now, I'd started putting out feelers of my own. I didn't tell Jo, but asked Dad for a favor. "Like you did for Mike" I said, and he just looked at me, grunted and said, "I don't know what you are talking about." 

In the end, I got to speak to some NSA guys that I connected to via an FBI agent friend who worked out at the same gym as me. They say the relationship between the NSA and the FBI is bad, but these guys seemed very chummy to me. They played racquetball and I played doubles with them a few times. 

Eventually I got a meeting with them. I had to lie to Jo about it; one of the only times I did (apart from gift giving, when you've gotta keep the surprise going). But the day I was due to meet them, my car was in an accident. I was shunted at a railroad crossing, pushing me into the car in front. The guy in front was pissed, and I could understand it, and we had to wait for the cops to come and get statements and all the rest of it. By the time we were done, my meeting time had come and gone. I tried calling but if you've ever tried calling the NSA, let me point out that you just don't. They call you. I couldn't get a message to the guys I was supposed to interview with. 

I wasn't deterred though. I managed to get in touch with them again, eventually, through my FBI guy, who told them what had happened. They agreed to give me another chance, and then I blew the second time, due a blown fuse. I had been so careful about my alarm clock. I had checked it twice the night before. When I woke up that day, late, Jo was already gone to work and it was 11:30 and there was no power in our bedroom. The circuit had blown somehow. I was half an hour late. I had no idea why I'd slept so late, and the circuit blowing was just ridiculous bad luck. I just knew that was the end. No third chances. 

I tried to go through my FBI guy again, and he said he'd try, but not to hold out hope. As it was, I just told him if there was no hope, to at least apologize for me. 

He got back to me a week later and told me the NSA was no longer interested in pursuing my application. Two missed interviews was enough. He also added that the FBI wouldn't be interested either, or the CIA. If you blow one, you blow them all. 

So it was back to square one. Mike wasn't around to talk to, and I couldn't talk to Jo because she didn't know it had happened anyway. So I just sucked it up, let the dream go, and got on with life. 

I was philosophical about it. I told myself "things happen for a reason". If somebody who never oversleeps does so on a day when there is a power outage, maybe that is the universe telling me something. 

And now I find it was all bullshit. I was never going to get that job. My best friend, my wife and my father had conspired to ensure it. There was no pregnancy. I'd been tricked into marriage. All the time I'd spent trying to get Jo over what I thought was guilt over losing a baby, it was guilt over lying to me over small stuff like babies and marriage and miscarriages. Small stuff! 

White-hot anger consumed me and I picked up the first thing I could reach and threw it against the wall as hard as I can. It turned out to be the glass my Jack Daniels had been in, and it shattered against the wall. 

"Fucking ASSHOLES," I shouted, jumping up from the chair, the pages spilling onto the floor. 

"So he told you" I heard, said softly behind me. I whirled round, to find Jo in her night gown, with a dressing gown over the top, arms crossed, leaning against the door, her head tilted. 

"You are pissed. I can see that. I can imagine why. I imagine he's said some things in there you won't be happy about. I knew this day might come, and I've been waiting for it. So yeah. I trapped you. I stole your dreams from you. So did Mike. So did your dad. But you know what? I'm not sorry. Because your dreams were bullshit from the start. And Mike knew it. He knew it because he lived them." 

It was out of the blue, and I was disconcerted. I launched into "Fuck you. You STOLE my dreams Jo. My dreams! Who the FUCK do you think you are? You manipulative shrew. Who the fuck are you? I don't know you at all?" 

She pushed off from the door and headed into the kitchen, passing me as she went and saying, "Oh get off your high horse Jake. Yeah, I manipulated you a bit. But the reality is, I manipulated you into what you wanted anyway, and you know it." 

She crouched down and pulled out a dustpan and brush from under the sink and returned to the living room, to start clearing up the smashed glass. 

"Look me in the eye and tell me you don't want and love what we have. The kids. Our lives. Go on, do it" 

She stopped brushing for a second and leaned on the brush, staring at me. 

The anger stopped for a second as I actually considered the question. I couldn't say anything. I loved my kids. I loved her. She was right. 

"That still doesn't give you the right to..." 

"...steal your dreams? I didn't steal your dreams Jake. I gave you a better one. Yes, it was underhanded. But it was necessary. You were going to go off and become as morally bankrupt as Mike became at the end. And it would have broken you, because you are a better man than he was. Yes, I said it. Don't speak ill of the dead, but lets face it Jake. Mike was a spy and he did shit you couldn't have. Not and stayed sane. He was a better spy because he could, but you are the better man. And he knew it, and I knew it and your Dad knew it. Everyone knew it but you. You had that stupid dream to follow and it was going to destroy you and none of us was going to let that happen." 

I said nothing for a moment, clenching my fists and my jaw. I was still angry. Monumentally angry. She wasn't even sorry. She was justifying it! 

"It wasn't your decision to make," I said, very slowly and softly. 

She knew the tone. She knew I was on the bad end of angry. She got up, silently and went to the garbage and dumped the glass into it. For all the studied calm she displayed, I could see her hands shaking. She knew how tenuous this situation was. This was a deal breaker and she knew it. 

"No, perhaps it wasn't," she said, wearily, leaning on the garbage can and looking at me. "But I made it anyway. I loved - I love -- you. And you love me. And nothing will change that. You know you made peace with not following in his footsteps. You know you have. You love this life and nothing about it has been phony or faked. Sure, you got tricked into it, but from then on, it was straight and true and built on everything real. Hell, it was built on reality from the word go." 

There was silence for a moment. 

"Look Jake. I know this is a lot to take in. I know you are going to be pissed at the world for a while. I dread to think what you are going to say to your father, to be honest. But like all things, you will think about it and understand. I never betrayed you. I've loved you and only you. I did what I had to make sure you understood that, but you made the decision to let it go. And I'm not for a moment going to be a hypocrite about it. I'm glad you did. Unless you forgot, you buried your best friend last week. That could have been you. But it's not and it's not going to be, and for that, I'm just going to be grateful, as are your children. 

"Yes, you lost a stupid childhood dream, one your best friend got to indulge. But you got the better deal. You got me, children, stability, love and family. Mike got a workaholic attitude, an ulcer, no real relationships that lasted more than 20 minutes and a lifelong envy of you and what you had. He got to compromise his principles and go to his grave having done things done that he can never take back or repair. He destroyed lives Jake. I know you don't want to believe that, but was part of his job. You created lives. And at some point you'll understand that. 

"Do what you need to. Go yell at your dad. Scream at me. Go live in a motel or do whatever you think you need to. But sooner or later, you'll understand we all love you, and we did the right thing, even if it wasn't the ethical thing. Your friend, that you were so envious of because he got to do all the things you thought you should, he hated his life, and the only thing that kept him going was you and your friendship and the life you made for yourself and us. 

"You think about that. I'm going to bed. Try not to smash any more of the tumblers. Your grandmother gave them to us for our wedding gift." 

And she left. Just like that. The bitch. Was she right? Probably. Did it matter? I didn't think so. 

I was trembling. I didn't want to read the rest. I was mad. How DARE they decide my life for me? FUCK THEM. 

I made a decision. I was going to leave. She dared me to do it, so fuck it. I was going to. 

I was out of there in a moment, the letter left on the floor. I'd just take the clothes on my back. Fuck her. 

And I did leave. And it was a week before I came back. 

I spent two days in a bottle, in a bar near the small airport. I lived in a shitty little motel. Jo could have found me if she wanted to; I'd used my credit card to pay for it. I wasn't hiding from her. I just didn't want to be near her. 

I'd called Dad in the middle of getting my drunk on and shouted obscenities at him. He'd grunted and said, "So you found out then. I wondered when you'd do that. For a wannabe spy, you sure couldn't see a conspiracy in front of you." 

I put the phone down then. No one seemed to have any guilt or be upset. I'd not heard from Jo at all. I couldn't decide if she was just giving me space or whether she genuinely didn't care. 

I called into work and basically told them I had a personal emergency. No one asked what it was, and I sure wasn't going to explain. 

Eventually I sobered up. And when I did, I started to think again. I looked at the issue internally and externally. Looked at all the unspoken reasons he -- they -- did what they did. Was it because he wanted Jo? That made no sense. He had never pursued Jo, and if that was his goal why force her to marry me? 

Dad, well, he had no axe to grind, apart from not wanting his son in a dangerous occupation. Obviously he had contacts way beyond what I knew about, and he knew what the life was like. He'd been okay getting Mike in, but not me. 

Was I not good enough? Jo had intimated that I wouldn't have survived the experience. Was that what Mike thought? I was angry all over again that I'd never get to ask him. 

There was really only one way to find out. I had to read the rest of the letter. 

Whether I'd believe what he had to say, I don't know. He was, after all, a professional liar. It really depended on whether I wanted to or not, I guessed. 

I went home when I knew Jo had a big deposition to preside over, for the company she worked for was being sued over an alleged patent violation, and those depositions take forever, prompting people's memories and generally trying to explore every avenue. I went back at 10am, so I'd have the day to read the rest of it, and decide what to do, without having to confront Jo. 

The letter was on the kitchen counter. The house looked the same but there was a note from Jo on the counter, next to the letter.. 

It read 

I know you are angry, and you have every right to be. Yes, we did wrong. But we did the right thing the wrong way. I stand by that. I love you, I love our life and I love the things we've done and memories we've generated. I have no regrets because it was the right thing to do. I got you for a husband and I've only ever been glad and grateful for that. I'm sorry we did the whole miscarriage thing -- we had to get you to stop going for that job, because it would have destroyed you, me, our relationship, and our children would never have been. And even you have to admit, as angry as you are, they are pretty damned awesome. 

There's never been anyone else for me but you, Jake. Please understand that everything that happened, everything I did and was a part of, it came from that place. Please stick around. Read what else Mike had to say. You owe him that, at least. 

Love you Babe. 

Jo 

Xxxxxxxxxx 

I stood, staring at the note. She even put her smiley face trademark on the bottom of it. 

After 5 minutes of clenching and unclenching my fists, I put the coffee pot on, and used the last of our blue mountain coffee we picked up in Jamaica, on our 10-year anniversary. It had been sitting in our freezer for a while, and I just wanted a good cup of Joe to go with the reading material. 

Fifteen minutes later, with steaming cup in hand, I sat down at the kitchen counter, picked up the letter and picked up where I left off. 

Don't be angry Jake. I can imagine you must be about now. Give me a chance to explain. 

All of this was done out of love. From knowledge and experience. From being able to see the life in front of you and making a choice for you. One you probably wouldn't have made yourself. Well, you did make it, but I'm going to be clear, it was me that set up the circumstances for that choice. As did your father and Jo. We set up a circumstance where your inherent decency made you choose the best thing for you. If you hadn't... if you'd gone down the same path as me...well, I barely survived and I'm about as mercenary as they come. I've done things, seen things, been a part of things and planned things that have caused tremendous pain. I'm broken inside, I know. My therapist calls it "post process guilt" -- yeah, we all have a shrink. It's a requirement. Mine comes from some outfit on the east coast that does 'clandestine therapy', if you can believe that. She's a hottie though! 




Mr. and Mrs. America



Anyway. I did what I did to protect you from that. I had only been "in" for a year, but I already felt my soul slipping away. If I was stronger, I might have left and pursued something else. But it's not that easy. My ego would not -- could not -- let me be a quitter. So even when I knew this life has an unbearable cost, I couldn't spare myself that cost. But I could spare you that cost. And to ensure you had the life that you were meant to. And you had Jo. If I owed you anything, I owed you the chance to have a life with Jo. 

Jo loves you Jake. Like I've never seen. We always said that one day that bolt from the blue would hit me. Well, it did, but you never knew it. It was Jo. I was so jealous of you. But she never loved me Jake. Not for a second. I told her once, how I felt, the night after you asked her to marry you. I'm pretty sure she never told you, but I told her I had to say how I felt. That it wasn't done to try and take her away from you, but just so I could say the words, get it out there, and stop carrying the burden. I would NEVER have tried to take her from you, Jake. NEVER. But seeing what you two had, it made me know what real happiness might be. 

You know what she said when I told her? She smiled, touched my lips and said, "I'll always love you Mike. But as Jakes friend, and nothing more. Jake is my life and my future. I love him and I feel it in every pour, every muscle, every motion and every thought. I don't see the world through rose tinted glasses, I see them through Jake tinted glassed. And hear the world through Jake tinted ears, and think about it through a Jake tinted brain. And I honestly don't want it any other way". 

So I did what I did, and Jo helped. Not because I was jealous -- although god knows, I was. And still am, although less for Jo in particular, but more for what you have in total - , but because I wanted you to be happy. To have what my own choices had made impossible for me. And because I could see the life I was going to have. One year in and I'd already seen what the life was really like. You compromise - a lot. All the good intentions, all the white hats we imagined, all the principles we belived in, it all gets discarded in favor of The End Result. In The Mission being successful. Uncle Sam doesn't give a shit about how you feel about what you are doing; only that you do it, and do it well. 

You want to know some of the things I've had to do? I've had to break up marriages, to befriend people and set them up so they can be blackmailed. I've had to burn people, let their own security services know they were betraying them. I've had to do terrible things on occasion. I try not to -- I try and use you as a litmus test -- but sometimes I'm given no choice. The situation evolves and I have to react and I do what is necessary. 

It's dehumanizing Jake. I hold it together largely because of our friendship -- yours and Jo. Do you remember me coming home for a month when my father died? I was going to quit. I didn't because I saw your family. It was too late for me, but not for you. That's why I did what I did. Because, while what I do may destroy the person doing it, it is necessary. I still believe, Jake. I can't say it in Klingon, but "the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one." 

I'm both sorry and not sorry, to be honest. I'm really sorry I did that to you -- to the one friend who I depend on to be my moral compass, even if you don't know it. But I'm not sorry I did it, because it saved you from what I have become. What this job made me. I do regret how we did it. I was younger then, and today I would have found a different way. Maybe we would have forced you into an intervention. But we didn't. We did what we could. Looking back, it sucks. But the result was needed. 

You never saw it. I made sure you didn't. I'm an adroit liar Jake. I have to be, it's part of the job requirement. You know that - you made enough jokes about it. 

Do you know that when you are in training, they actually set the recruits against each other? They give them conflicting tasks, and don't tell them, and then watch them all undermine each other. We are all taught to lie, deflect, think on our feet, to disguise our intent. And it becomes habit. You end up doing it with everyone as a matter of course. You can't be honest with anyone and you end up not being honest with yourself, either. 

That's where you come in. My friendship with you was like a lodestar. You knew who I was or at least who I was supposed to be. Who I used to be. You knew who you expected me to be. And with you, I remembered. I'd come and visit you and Jo and the kids, and spend the weekend and then I'd go back to work remembering who I was, what was important, and not only what I was supposed to do, but how I was supposed to do it. 

You represented what 'real' America was. What we were doing the things we were doing for in the first place. I have a picture of you and Jo and the kids on my desk and I call you Mr. and Mrs. America. You are the embodiment of the American dream -- the people we are doing the underhand stuff we do for. You are the many. I'm the few --or the one. 

Do you remember when the twins were born? How I showed up? 

I did remember. It was a difficult pregnancy, all the more difficult for Jo because her finals were coming up. In the end she was on forced bed rest for two months, which I still believe was the reason she passed at all. She just sat in bed, read her law books and read her notes. When the girls dropped, she literally went in two weeks later, sat for the exams and aced them. 

The twins, Jessica and Polly, were -- and are -- the light of my life. If I thought I loved Jo -- and I do -- well, this was like a nuclear explosion of love. The moment they were handed to me, as with every new father, your life and priorities take a sudden and irrevocable shift. 

Thinking about this, one this is clear to me. Jo is right, in that I love the kids and once they arrived, I never gave the abandoned career dreams another thought. Well, not in a resentful way, anyway. Mike came back and regaled me with tales of derring do around the world -- always revolving around getting oil rights, or fixing up a bad situation, and I believed about half of what he told me. Some stories were downright scary though, if true. 

Uncle Mike was a legend around our house. I know Jo looked forward to his visits -- he spoiled the kids rotten, but in the right way. He came back with X-boxes for them once, but wouldn't hand them over until the kids could produce report cards with at least 75% As on them. Stuff like that. 

He'd take them out to the zoo and make up stories about the animals, putting on voices. He'd insist on taking them to movies, and making Jo and me have a date night, waggling his eyebrows at us in a suggestive manner. 

Your kids were and are the apples of my eye. I'll never have any. One of the things I did for this job was get a vasectomy. Sometimes, the things I do, I need to be sure I cannot drop sprogs in the world where they would definitely not be wanted. I sacrificed children for this job -- how fucked up is that? 

But I lived through yours. Because they are AWESOME kids -- but how could they not be, coming from you and Jo? With you guys as parents, I could spoil them as much as I wanted and they'd still come out great. Do you have any idea of the gift you gave me? I could be the Mike I used to be around them. Free of Machiavellian entrapments. Be honest, for once. And you and Jo did that for me, and you never even knew it. 

Sometimes it was hard, coming away and knowing that would never be my life. But I made my bed. I had to lie in it. 

And sometimes it wasn't like I had to lie in it alone, 

In case you were wondering, every story I ever told you was true. Oh the circumstances might not have been, but the content? Absolutely. Finding the mother of the woman I was screwing doing it with a donkey? Completely true. The story about the nympho with the electric shock fetish? Totally true. She was actually the wife of a XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX 

The letter had been redacted over the next words. 

But the thing is, for all those outrageous stories, well there wasn't much else beyond a story. None of these were relationships. There was no love or support. By definition, the people I have to get involved with tend to be pretty isolated themselves. The women are damaged -- almost as much as I am. There's no relationship there. Even the people who are supposed to be on your side have their own agendas. Nothing is ever exactly as it seems. 

Some of the adventures I had, they sound great. You often asked how great my life was, and I'd say "I have my moments". What I didn't say was that the moments sometimes were great but my hours sucked. I had my moments, but you had the hours, days and years. 

It was a neat turn of phrase and I idly wondered if it was actually his, or if he'd stolen it from somewhere. 

But it did get me thinking -- thinking about the vacations we'd taken. Early on, we'd taken one with Mike and his lady friend of the moment, one Wendy Tritton. Wendy had been a relatively plain girl, but she sparkled with wit and a British accent that no one ever got tired of listening to. Like most Americans, I tend to think that somebody who speaks with a British accent must be -- has to be -- smarter than I am. And from all reports, she was dynamite in the sack. We shared hotel room walls with them and one night we got into a sex competition with them. We'd heard them going at it, and both Jo and I were trying not to laugh out loud. Until 20 minutes in, when Jo had had enough and looked at me expectantly, saying, "Well, are you going to let him get away with it? You know he's only doing it to get a rise out of you?" 

Well, you only have to be asked something like that once, and I was out of my clothes in a flash. 

The funny thing was, we started out being very fake and stupid and over doing the "ahhss" and the groans and screams and what not, but after a few minutes, it became real. We were just hot for each other and it expanded and we just went at each other for over an hour. When we were finally done, I could hear Mike applauding wildly on the other side of the wall, shouting "Bravo" and "Encore". What was really funny was when the room on the other side joined in the applause. 

The next morning, breakfast was a subdued affair and Jo needed Aloe Vera lotion to get the redness out of her cheeks, her embarrassment was so deep. It didn't help that Mike awarded us a plastic trophy later that day. And then he and Wendy spent the rest of the week trying to 'earn it back'. 

That was the only vacation we ever took with him, strangely enough, although I think Jo was happy about that. 

Jo and I and the kids have been other places though. We did a European tour with the kids on the twins' graduation. I got to see some of the Dead Sea scrolls in person and visited a bunch of places where there were cuneiforms and other dead language stuff for research purposes. Visiting Rome was awesome, and I even got to write it off. 

We've had some vacations on our own though. Every couple of years, we dumped the kids off with one set of grandparents and we just took off on own. We went to Vancouver, Egypt, Jamaica, Singapore and New Zealand, and had a terrific time touring. 

It's funny, but every time we'd go somewhere, Mike would send us places to go and places to have dinner and we were treated like royalty each time. It might seem old hat to Mr. Bond, but to us, it was incredible. 

I had to admit, life hadn't been boring, at least what I'd qualify as boring. I'd still gotten to go places and meet people and even better, I didn't have to kill them or blackmail them afterwards. 

It's funny to me. Your jealousy of the life you thought I had, the one you thought you wanted. To be frank, I took it as an affront, and tried my best to ham up my life. How great all the moments and traveling were. I'd recommend places for you to go, but the reality is, I'd never been to a lot of them myself. We have a list of places we could go, where we'd get support for covers if we needed to and I just called them up and set you up as covers I'd be using. 

The sad reality is that if I was abroad, most of the time I'd see the inside of a hotel room, while others did the running around and exotic dinners and the like. I'd just be there to make sure things went as they were supposed to. 

You got the dinners I never did. I got the tension and fear and the ulcer and a lifetime hatred of shitty hotel towels that never dry you properly. 

And as I watched your jealousy and envy of my life wane, my jealousy and envy of yours grew. You had the perfect wife. The most awesome daughters and son. You had a job that was interesting and no one tried to kill you or play you. You got to travel and actually see the places you went, and not spend all your time trying to shake the local agents who were tailing you. 

I saved you for a better life -- I stand by that, however underhand I ended up doing it -, and that I will never regret. I just wish I could have had more of that life. I had to live it vicariously through you. 

Why didn't I ever know this? Why could I never see this when he came to visit? Am I so insensitive that I didn't see the pain my best friend was in? 

I had taken the letter back into the den, with another cup of coffee marveling at my own lack of understanding. My best friend in the world was finally bearing his soul to me, and it was 100% a revelation to me. How good of a friend could I really have been? 

When I do student reviews, I make a point that there should be nothing unexpected in that review. If there are problems, they should have been brought up when the problems occurred, not suddenly, blindsiding the pupil. If you do that, they aren't even aware there is an issue, much less have time to do something about it. 

But here it was, in another form. I had had no idea what he was feeling. Well, that's not quite true. I had picked up on a general malaise in Mike, but it had been there for years. The melancholy had manifested it self in various different subtle ways, but never over the top. Never in sufficient quantity for me to pick up on it in large enough form to feel the need to do something about it. That was just 'the way Mike was'. It was the new normal, effectively. 

Why did you never know? Because I'm very good at what I do. Because I'm well trained not to show my innermost thoughts and emotions, but disguise them as something else. Because of our friendship. Because the only trust I ever had, was with you. 

Remember when I was shot? It was obvious what had happened. Only you were allowed near me for the recuperation. I still don't know how you got three weeks off work, or how Jo let you go. You never asked a thing. I mean, I couldn't have told you anyway, but you never asked. 

I did remember that time. It was the only time I had felt I really got close to Mike 's world. 

There had been a phone call, from a "Maddy" -- now I thought about it, I guessed that Maddy had been the Madeline we'd met at the funeral. 

I was asked if I would be able to take some time, since Mike was hurt and needed me. I would need my passport but I was not to tell anyone where I was going -- not that I'd know till I got on the plane anyway. 

I was immediately concerned and asked how bad Mike had been hurt, and was told "Badly enough. He wants you and won't let anyone else be with him during his convalesce. Will you come?" 

Well of course I would. As it happened, I was off on a research grant for a month, doing Internet and book research. I could vanish for a month and no one at work would know or care. 

I went home and explained to Jo that Mike had been hurt and he wanted me around for a bit, and she looked at me and said, "I'm glad I got you first. I swear that man could turn you gay. You are such a good boyfriend to him." 

It was meant in jest, but there was some truth to it. He was my friend. I had to help if I could. 

I was picked up by a blacked out limo, driven to hanger outside of Chicago, where I was asked to change clothes "as a precaution, we are going places where spores or seeds on your clothes might impact the local fauna." Yeah. Right. 

I never saw my bags after they were put in the car, but they magically appeared again when we got where we were going, well searched I've no doubt. I honestly don't know specifically where I ended up. I know we went through Singapore, switching from private jet to seaplane. 

I think we ended up on an island in the South China Sea, but I'm not entirely sure. It was balmy, humid, warm and there was water all around. 

Mike was in a house, all by himself. It was a modern house, with a satellite phone but no other communications -- normal toilets, which was a surprise. The house was a three-bedroom house, fully stocked with food and drinks, and, I found out, medications. They were necessary, since Mike was in a sling and used a cane a lot when he did hobble around. 

He'd obvious been shot, but I didn't ask. I didn't ask why an oil company troubleshooter was in the South China Sea, or why there needed to be such secrecy, or why I had to be there, and he'd only trust me. 

It was obviously to do with the job he wouldn't admit having, and frankly, he'd only have lied to me anyway, so what was the point in asking? 

So we just sat and drank beer and grilled and talked crap and watched endless reruns of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, debating the merits of the various ways the 'scooby gang' dispatched the undead. I showed him what little research I had brought with me and we talked about what life must have been like in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia. I discovered how jaded Mike was, and did my best to reignite his belief that people were worth saving. 

We never said one thing about consequences during those three weeks, except for the day I left, when he gripped me in a hug and said, in my ear, "I would never have trusted anyone else. Only you. Say hi to Jo for me." 

The sea plane took me and my bags back to Singapore and we zipped back to the States, stopping in New York, where I was transferred to a domestic airline with admonitions to keep my mouth shut, and the advice to buy something from the gift shop to take home, so they believed I was in New York. 

Again, no mention was made why an Oil company would be doing all this cloak and dagger stuff in the first place, but hell, I just went with it. 

The kids were glad to see me, and so was Jo, as she proved later. Three times. 

The whole thing was billed as "Dad's Adventure in New York." I told Jo about Mike, but didn't mention where he was or where I had been. It was the only bit of the life I had wanted that I had ever really gotten close to, and I was going to milk it for all it was worth. Just for a moment, I'd been in the vicinity of what I'd dreamed of doing, and I just wanted to live up to it. Not ask questions, just do what was asked without creating waves. Get the job done. 

I've never understood how you did that. Came across the world, just sat there, hung out, and never satisfied your own curiosity. I could never have done that. Perhaps I'm wrong. Perhaps this life would have been for you. I doubt it, somehow though. Going somewhere and not saying anything about it is a far cry from blackmailing a company exec because you set his kid up with cocaine. 

The fact is that my life is stolen moments, some of them across the world. Making phone calls from airports and desperately trying to remember the time difference to Rockford, Illinois. Looking at pictures on a cell phone and trying to remember what's important in life and what's not. 




Mr. and Mrs. America



It's about trying to retain your soul and recharging it through the lives of others. 

My life was nothing to write home about. At least I didn't think it was. I was a boring professor. I would never change the world or save people by taking down a terrorist cell. I just had my family and my life. Lots of dull moments interspersed with moments of profound joy, and sorrow, and silliness and seriousness. And love. How can you measure a life without taking account of those you love and who love you? Watching my kids be born and grow up. Seeing parts of me in them; parts of Jo; and parts that were neither of us, just uniquely them. Watching my students shuffle through, as the years go by. Some had some success in the world; one was a TV show presenter, trying to bring the past to life. Two had written books and one was an interpreter at the United Nations. Watching Jo become a lawyer, and a good one. She really did do the pro bono work, but it was hard to fit it in. A successful lawyer is always busy -- there are always contracts to be reviewed. She eventually got her Chief Counsel position at another company and managed to bring a few hired guns with her, so it wasn't all her, which gave her some degree of her life back. 

She was still busy, but we made time for each other. We had date night once a week, much to the vocal disgust of all our offspring. We'd make out with each other, just to annoy them and make them dramatically retch. 

We played practical jokes on each other, wrote each other notes and the sex, well, its still going and going well. Recently she's been on a role-playing kick. I quite like the cheerleader and quarterback one, although to be honest, I don't much look the part any more. She does though. In spades. 

The thing is, through all this -- through all the reflection on life, while reading his letter - I realize I'd forgiven her. And by extension, him. It was a shitty thing to do, but I understand why, at least from an academic point of view. And I had to admit, she was right about the outcome. I wouldn't give up what I had for anything. 

I was mad. I still am, to be honest. But, it was 23 years ago. Half a lifetime. The half that made me who I am today. A happy man. A loved man. A man who is far from perfect but is comfortable in his own skin and proud of himself and his family and the life he has lived. Could that man forgive a wrong done to him 23 years ago by those who meant well and ultimately were probably right in their belief even if very wrong in how they did it? I could. I wasn't going to destroy my marriage because they'd over stepped the mark. It wasn't worth it. He was dead, but she was not. I love her; I forgive her; I will not forget however. He may have been a spy, but she is a lawyer. I do mostly trust her and know, even in this huge lie, long continued, that she was doing what she thought best for both of us. So, we will be fine. We are fine. We are better than fine. We are together. 

If you are reading this, I'm gone. Please understand I did what I did for you. For Mr. & Mrs. America, who are personified in you. I thought I would have it all, and quickly realized I would have nothing. But it wasn't too late for you. You could have it all. And you did. You do. Jake, You have it all! 

Thanks for being my friend and always having my back. Don't be mad that I spiked your career. You have an infinitely better life now. I wish I had it. Live it for me, and think of me every once in a while 

I love you man. Always have. The brother I never always had. 

Mike 

The tears came then. I'd not cried once, but now they came. 

That's how Jo found me, sitting on the couch, bawling my eyes out. She saw me, dropped her bags, came over, crouched down and wrapped her arms around me, rest her head on mine. 

"Let it out Jake. Let it go. We are here and we always will be. Just be glad he was there to be your friend." 

Sometimes you never know what you've got till you don't anymore. I was just lucky to have realized it. It just took the life of my best friend for me to see it. 

So, thanks Mike. Thanks for making me understand what is important. I'll always remember you.