Pain And Espionage
I don’t wanna be all about the pain. There’s more to me than pain. “It,” she said, “is part of you. You can’t pretend the hurting away while it carves itself into your soul,” and left me thinking on that for awhile, gulping down coffee and granola to keep me both from needing to lie down murderously across the futon and to fill the emptiness the agony left as it gouged at my hip and kidney. Yeah, it’s become that, part of my soul. But I don’t want it to become my soul. I’d like to have soul and for it to come from a place that’s a joy to visit, at least on occasion, without my coconut being hurt into nothingness, into doing nothing and being it. Meanwhile, shouts were evident from the frontier – great chants for justice – begging for the CIA to step in and do its thing. I don’t think they understood what its “thing” is or ever was, but it’s probably quite happy that what’s happening is, the CIA, as it’s exactly what it would’ve done in some other country and did, waving bananas and swastikas about like six-shooter talismans held before them both threateningly and sexually, putting both in the faces of the crowds that gathered to protest – or support, maybe? Whichever event it was there for, the crowd, that day, never bargained on these cats doing their thing and when its time had come, that thing built shit from question marks, unwittingly fueling younger men with visions of Marxism in their heads to one day come around to slap these casual coffee mugs from our faces and, yes, I’d be going to bed, soon, as a condemned man goes to his death, knowing already the approaching hateful hours in which neither rest nor productivity was possible.
“He,” she’d once confided of me to a friend while lunching at another table across the coffee shop’s dining room, “used to actually be in the CIA, actually.” To which I turned my face to her, slack-jawed and unable to believe what I’d just heard, and- I’d really wanted to hear more, but nothing she’d had to say, that afternoon, could top the accusation.
I’ve done my best to- Ugh. Again, I’m missing words. Losing my words, my vocabulary. It disappears mid-swing, going and returning and taking off, again, leaving me completely unable to put forth a notion that thought – any thought – ever meanders through my mind. Dressed, here – affecting the very look of and like a CIA man. Utterly forgettable. Someone you’d not turn your head twice at. Militantly ordinary. And the town, it fucking bought into it. Took it and ran with it.
“He’s as dumb as-” followed by whatever. Any “whatever” they had, it suited me fine. Helped along by the natural gift granted me to stammer along in conversation and, as I aged and put on weight, my face turned just as stupid and the CIA, it couldn’t have been happier with me, had I actually ever been a member.
Perusing the “want” ads, I can see the proles are restless with the current administration, dearly wishing for somebody to come along and take it off their hands, inviting the CIA to step itself up and perform its magic, but – Jesus Christ – can’t you all see where that puts you? At a time like this we’re in, you (and any of us, really – the rest of us, all of us) tempt strings of boxcars along to ship the whole gaddamned show eastward! “That’s my take on it,” I told the guy as he eyeballed me suspiciously from the gutter.
“I never knew the fucking guy,” I swore to them. “Okay?”
They didn’t seem convinced. I mean, he’d gone unseen since our run-in. And when they found him, he’d been carefully buried away from anyone asking too much of him to divulge.
“I’m no killer!” I screamed. But we’re all killers. Each and every one of us. We were born to die and it was always our responsibility to die and if any of us failed to follow it through, the next guy would let the clown have it. I’ve actually not been alive since Warrenton and even then, who’s to say.
“He’s probably not even sitting there in that seat,” she whispered to her friend, there, of me over at my table. “And probably never was."
A sharp stab went through my side as I typed this. Eventually, I’ll have to lie down and get me some kip. But sleep won’t come and I’ll be left in fits, trying in vain to get comfortable-enough to drift away to Nod.
“That’s where the agents live,” she told her friend, tipping her head in my direction.
Fuck it. I can’t work like this. Not with my brain messed-up so, progressively at a loss for sleep. This is as good as you get at the moment.