She imagined that Michael was dead and it didn’t matter. What if she found him and it was just a sad grave? What would she do then? She didn’t know what to think. Nothing in her life had prepared her to think about such things. In college they never trained her to troubleshoot her boyfriend disappearing because of political reasons. She kept thinking about what Nevitsky said, how we became Soviets. She realized that was probably a hint as to what kind of situation Michael was in, but she had never studied Soviet history. She knew the Soviets were the communist government of Russia from the beginning of the last century to the end of the century, but she didn’t know the specifics. She realized that because she didn’t know history she could not troubleshoot the situation. She didn’t have the power to think about what was happening to her. She was ignorant. She decided that if she lived through this situation she would find out how all these things came together. Then it occurred to her that was why she and so many people are so easy to controclass="underline" because they didn’t know history. They couldn’t place all these events together to make sense of their reality. She realized that her reality made no sense. That her mind couldn’t make sense of what she was feeling. She was putting every effort into understanding what she was seeing and feeling, but she couldn’t because she did not contain enough knowledge.
She realized she might die. The fear of death crept into her body and made her want to vomit. She had barely thought about her own death her entire life. She didn’t like to think about death. She pulled over on the side of the road and took more Xanax and Adderall. She realized she had not slept in two days. She went into a gas station and bought a large coffee and sucked it down with donuts. She felt sick. The idea of dying kept coming back to her. Was it even worth it, dying for a man? Dying for love? Dying for good sex and laughs and a possible future with children and a nice house. But if she was dead, she would enjoy none of that. She became afraid. But she wanted Michael back. She wanted to hold him again. She realized she had a reason. For the first time in her life she had a reason to do something. Up to that point she had spent her life doing what she was told. She was told to go to school, she went. She was told to go to college, she went. She was told to get a job with health care, she did. She realized her whole life was founded on the Five Pillars. She was nothing but a little robot, controlled, a tame little animal. This thought screamed in her head. They had taken her power as a human. They had locked her out of her own power. Her power was there since she was born but the government and the media did everything they could to divert her away from her own power. Her own primitive power of feeling and poetry.
Monica had spent her life doing the logical thing, believing that if she did what she was told she would be rewarded, that if she kept her head down and charged ahead in life, life would give her what she wanted. But life had not given her what she wanted. It had actually taken what she wanted from her. She had taken pills her whole life to reduce this feeling, to make the anxiety go away, pop another Xanax and it will all go away. She decided not to take Xanax anymore, but she would still take Adderall. She wanted all the anxiety now, she wanted to feel it all, to be submerged in her feelings, into the poetry that blasts and beats, resounds and trumpets in her heart. She wanted to hear the war drums pounding in her soul. She felt so extreme, she wanted to scream. She wanted to smash everything and shoot cars driving by. She wanted to shoot herself. She considered pulling over on the side of the road and blowing her brains out. She imagined slowly stopping the car, putting the car in park, turning the car off, leaning back in the front seat, pulling the gun out of the holster, then putting the gun in her mouth and pulling the trigger. It would all be over, all the fear and anxiety, all the stupidity and absurdity, all the meaningless life she had lived and was forced to live. But she had to get Michael. She had to solve this problem. She punched the steering wheel, she began to cry, she popped another Adderall and screamed. She had to push ahead.
She felt scared to die. But it made sense now. Up to that car ride across America to find Michael, her life had not made sense. But there was a reason now for her life, for her behavior. She believed she was even having fun.
She made it to the diner where she was supposed to meet the CIA agent. She didn’t want to meet any CIA agents. She didn’t want to be at a diner in a giant cornfield. She didn’t want her life to be changed so radically. She got out of her car, looked around and saw empty fields stretching for miles. She realized that she had never been to a place like this. There were people wearing overalls and cowboy hats. There were pickup trucks with rebel flag stickers on the windows. She walked into the diner. The diner looked old and sad. The servers were overweight women who had spent their lives in these fields, underneath giant skies and pounding rain storms, with amazing sunrises and sunsets.
She saw a man wearing a cowboy hat. It was true. Nevitsky had not lied. There he was, the CIA agent.
The CIA agent had been in the CIA since his early twenties. He went to college at Yale and got his master’s there. He knew three languages: English, Spanish and Arabic. He had worked many twelve to fifteen hour days for the agency. At the beginning it felt like a beautiful dream come true. He was a CIA agent, something unique and special and awesome in American society. It was tantamount to being a movie star or the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. But instead of having fame or money he had secrets and the ability to wiretap people and sneak around the planet doing whatever he liked. He got to work in Iraq, Egypt, Peru and Colombia. He had lived his childhood dream of being a CIA agent, of seeing the world, of protecting his country. But one day he became bored with it. He didn’t know why he was protecting America. The depression got worse and he didn’t even know why he made a sandwich to eat it. Most of the time he would vomit the food he ate. He would eat a bowl of soup and vomit it up ten minutes later. He would get food from McDonald’s and vomit. He decided to buy organic food from Whole Foods but he was still vomiting. He couldn’t keep any sort of food down. He bought an I.V. and started running nutrients through a tube into his veins. He was in his mid-forties and had never married or had children. He had a big house but no one lived in it but him. He couldn’t even get a cat because he spent so little time at home. He started to think, sometimes before he went to sleep, that the cause of his depression was all the traveling. He had gazed upon the pyramids of Egypt, upon Saint Sofia in Istanbul, upon the castle ruins of Europe, the Wailing Wall of Jerusalem, and he even made it to the Great Wall of China and the Forbidden City. He would look at those structures and be amazed by their beauty and how they were once built by great empires, full of vigor and strength. He imagined himself to not only be CIA but one of David’s Mighty Men, a Janissary, a Samurai, a Praetorian Guard or a Persian Immortal. Sometimes the CIA agent would think, “Who were these people, these Janissaries? Weren’t they just deluded men who defended their leaders blindly, without reason, just because they thought it was their duty, no other reason?” He started to wonder if he had any reason to defend the government, the free world, he started to wonder what the phrase ‘free world’ even meant. He started to question language and when one starts questioning language, everything they know becomes corrupt. He started to feel like America was just another predictable empire. They got their chance after the Second World War to become an empire and took it. They didn’t even question it. They built a giant military, created the CIA, and they were off, never looking back. But what was the point of becoming an empire? To create peace, to protect your self-interests, to bring your ideology to the world whether the world wanted it or not? He felt predictable, even trite, that he was part of a government and culture that got sucked into the empire trap so easily. He realized this while sitting at a table drinking tea in Cairo. He went to work every day and said nothing about his feelings. He didn’t know what to do with his life. He didn’t know how to do anything else but be a CIA agent. What else could he do? Go work for a local police department and be bored out of his mind. He’d had offers to go into various lines of business, but that all seemed boring too. He decided to put his skills to a different use: espionage of his own government.