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.