Guardians of the Secret
copyright © 1998 by Cary Shulman
All Rights Reserved
3.
When Michael was eight years old he carved his initials into a tree. So intent on making his mark, he didn't notice that the tree was dying. The tree was gone in five years. Later Michael simply understood it as yet another example of putting his faith in the wrong place, and in his self absorption missed what there was to see. Another child in that part of the country noticed the yellowing leaves and curiosity ruled over pain. She became a botanist and reasoned that what could kill one tree could kill another.
Michael's mother disappeared when he was two. She was gone he was told, but not just for a day or two, but in a special way. She had been a religious person and a writer and she had killed herself and he was told simply that she was gone.
He imagined that she was swallowed up by a black hole. He wanted to enter it, to go into that darkness and find her. But it was a darkness that ate all light and the thought of it shook him with terror. He wished for a light so brilliant it would break that darkness. "I can't go there," he anguished in defeat. Later as he grew came the knowledge that she was dead and no one goes there.
Without her, life's joy and terror impinged upon him unabated. His mind filled with an onslaught of images. His father had reacted to the loss by becoming even more removed. His older brother was with his friends. Michael was left alone to deal with the loss. Overwhelmed he put his heart in a hidden place and with his mind by force of will he banished the images.
One day at school a boy taunted him with the story that his mother had killed herself. It was as if someone had taken a framed photograph Michael had of her and smashed it into pieces. He beat up the boy who told him. He couldn't wait to get confirmation from his father that it was a cruel joke.
Michael was devastated when he heard the truth. It was a sin, it was incomprehensible, but somehow he couldn't allow her picture to be shattered. His father's only explanation was that it just happened. His brother said only that their parents fought.
Michael gradually found his way by imagining he knew what his mother would say if she were here, what she would want him to do. The idea grew in him that she would have wanted him to be a priest. A priest would be someone who would not fear going into that darkness and save her.
Michael entered into his religious studies with dedication and passion. He was given an exegesis to do about God resting on the seventh day. He could have followed the lines offered by various commentaries, but the questions that naturally arose absorbed him personally. If God rested from the labors of creation what did that mean? Could it be that hard to turn spirit into matter? Why did God choose such a problematic creation only to have it yearn after spirit? Spirit seeking matter, matter seeking spirit. Will they meet only in heaven, or can they meet here on earth?
The questions led one to another and Michael worked diligently, driven to come up with answers, but his efforts began to be interrupted by sexual fantasies. They started with an innocent girl magically entering his life and grew increasingly vivid, erotic, and disturbing.
The more he tried to concentrate, the more intense they became. He went to see his advisor, who was reserved and conservative, but not without humor. He had a sign on his door that read, "Eternity in progress, please enter". Michael was uncomfortable telling him about his problem, but the advisor listened with sympathy. Having heard of such difficulties before he had a ready answer. Michael simply had an overly active imagination. It was a difficulty now, but could become a gift with prayer.
The encounter appeared to have ended and Michael started to get up when his advisor had an afterthought.
"Maybe it's a problem of you reaching too much. Not so much reaching for, Michael. Maybe it gets in the way of something reaching to you."
"The holy ghost."
"Be open to it."
"The only ghosts I see are not so holy."
The advisor started to think about it.
"Prayer, Michael. Be diligent."
Michael thought of Christ in the desert resisting temptation. He thought of the various Saints and what they endured. It was no use. Eternity seemed another emptiness. He dropped out in the first year.
Public high school filled him with a lonely indifference. He was aimlessly passing through the experience when he discovered athletics and the martial arts. Time became his companion. It could be as close as a step in front of him urging him on, or a distant goal to rush toward. Relentlessly pushing himself with it, he became a high school track star. And there was always someone to pursue. He was at his best coming from behind in a race, chasing down his opponents.
He idolized Woodward and Bernstein and thought about becoming a journalist. He was bright enough, but his grades suffered for lack of concentration. His high school coach suggested he think about a career in the Drug Enforcement Administration. He had the makings of a good agent and the coach had some connection.
Michael tried various other jobs for a few years before he took up his coach's suggestion. He was hired by the DEA and somewhat to his surprise it seemed ideal. It was a clear cut moral universe where he could exercise his drive to succeed and his tireless pursuit of drug dealers. He had a burning intensity beyond that of his fellow agents. Most of them shared his passion, but theirs was mitigated by other concerns, the usual ones like survival, advancement and family.
His ceaseless, single-minded focus didn't go unrecognized. He was the type of gungho agent they nicknamed Y.A.'s. Officially it stood for Young Ahabs, unofficially for Young Assholes.
Most of the others outgrew it. They got married, had kids and changed. He got married, had a kid and didn't. So they continued calling him Young Ahab, at first with some humor and then when they couldn't temper his fanatical enthusiasm, with derision. He made them uncomfortable and they regarded him as a danger. They passed along the accumulated wisdom. There were no old Ahabs, only old rehabs.
He ignored them. He knew the real danger was nebulousness. Life had to have a point, like a fire needed something to keep burning. Without it there was emptiness. It didn't matter if it was the kind that ached or just made the days drift.
In the early eighties he was constructing a career making case, building a pyramid, tying some small fry Panamanian drug dealers to their higher ups. To his growing satisfaction it was going very high up. Too high as it turned out. His supervisor called him into his office and warned him off the case. It was a matter of national security he was told.
He angrily responded that the security of the most powerful nation on earth didn't require protecting drug dealers. More probably the pet projects and egos of some intelligence officers did. "Get yourself another whale," the supervisor said with finality.
The two other agents assigned to the case agreed with Michael, but wanted nothing to do with his decision to proceed anyway. They informed his superiors, hoping they would try to stop him. They didn't and he chose the surprise of early morning to go in. The dealers were tipped off and told to clear out. Instead of leaving, they stayed around and ambushed him for fun. He was shot in the leg.
Disabled, he was offered a desk job for better pay. He was strictly a street agent. He knew the job was offered for his silence. His only interest in taking it was the chance to follow up on his own case. He pursued it relentlessly to the exclusion of everything else and wasn't silent.
His superiors responded to pressure coming from high up in the Executive Branch to take care of the situation in the interests of national security and of course continued support for their programs. The damage control included transferring the two other agents who were on the case. One had clout enough to get himself kicked upstairs to a cushy bureaucratic job in the Washington FBI office. This despite interagency animosity. Michael was let off with a disability.
The pursuit was over. The chase was over. Crippled and bitter that he was set up, he was driven to find out who did it. It was a passion that soon became an obsession. Although his reconstruction of what had happened made progress, leading him from the Panamanians ultimately to Noriega and an operative named Everett, his haranguing made enemies even of his friends and finally of his wife, who urged him to move on.
His life fell apart, his marriage disintegrated. "Irreconcilable similarities", he joked as they got their divorce.
He would prove them all wrong. He would get his man. He wouldn't let anything deter him, not his drinking, not his lack of sleep, after all the Pinkertons never slept. He was desperate for any lead and chased down the few he got. And when they turned out to be shadows, the chase would turn into a spree, and then he didn't need to be running after a lead, any excuse would do.
What he was doing and what he thought he was doing parted company. Good riddance. All confusion and agony burnt up in an all consuming passion.
It led to situations sometimes romantic, sometimes brutal. Waking up not only wondering where he'd been, but who he'd been. Living with recollections vague and not so vague. Like the one of a naked young woman over the back of his car in the middle of nowhere swearing at him somehow laughingly, angrily and lewdly at the same time. And women who wanted poetry underneath the moon and women who thought a black eye was sexy underneath their sunglasses.
It always started the same way as the sight of some woman suddenly pierced him, filling him with an impossible longing, a feeling so intensely painful it seemed like a knife wound. He imagined, when he could manage a laugh about it all, that it must be some payback for a past life as an Aztec priest who cut open sacrificial virgins.
The piercing visions multiplied, leading him on a spree from one woman to the next as he started to drink and drink heavily and take uppers. Not to fuel the fire that was raging in him. It needed no fueling. He was without a guide on this journey so the pills and booze were his friend and protector from the awkwardness and shock of the encounter of primal intensity with everyday life, the rejections, the overwhelming but alienated passion of sex, if it led to that.
Some of the women realized he wasn't there, some were as adrift as he was. It was like defying gravity he described later, cast away memory and consequence and you're so light you can fly. But for how long? It doesn't matter, gravity is in league with the ground and we'll all end there soon enough.
But the overcoming of the force of gravity or inertia involved another force, a force that propelled him to freedom. But what force or passion? And was he then not free but at its mercy? Once possessed, was possession the cost of freedom? Or could it be the road to it? He didn't know.
Six months later he was lost in the middle of a spree and missed the news that broke about the killing of Camerene, a DEA agent who was tortured by Mexican drug dealers. The outrage this produced pressured the CIA to sacrifice some of its contacts in order to reveal the dealers involved.
When Michael came to he was mortified to realize he was in no shape and in no position to add his voice to the outrage. Getting some rest would have helped if he could have stood resting. When he slowed down he couldn't get comfortable. His own body felt like an ill-fitting suit. He could only feel comfortable moving at speed and he was going nowhere.
He filled his sleepless nights with radio. He would sit in the dark listening to a montage of voices and music from different channels. It reached him like a transmission from another planet, proving to himself that there was a form of life out there, distant, alien and curious. It filled the silence, but didn't touch him.
Political programs especially amused him, they were so far off the mark. He was like a cynical chorus, making remarks to himself as the guests thrashed around in their ignorance, taking some solace that they were more out of it than he was.
His nightly montage of listening finally led to his hearing Sara's program. He was amused by her opening lines. "This is Inside America, where you the listener help uncover the truth." "The "blind leading the dame" he would joke every time he heard her intro.
He became something of a regular listener to her twice a week broadcasts. Not because of the show's content which he dismissed thoroughly. He was held by a quality in her voice. It was painful hearing how naive and earnest she was. He tuned in every so often he told himself to see if she got any better background information, but more likely hoping to see she had lost some of her earnestness.
That she didn't needled him. It challenged him in a way he didn't like. He would have stopped listening had he not heard her mention Everett.
He must have been only half listening because it seemed to come out of nowhere, said in passing in a list of names long familiar to him. It riveted him. He was shocked to hear somebody else mention Everett's name, something that seemed to exist only inside his head. He was impressed that she was able to piece together as much of his history as she did.
His private drama had gone public. He wasn't alone, somebody else was in the chase. And then he realized that she was in the chase and he was barely even watching.
This wouldn't do. He began with the limited intention to check out the information she had uncovered. But almost overnight it reignited his commitment to get Everett. He reestablished contacts he had in his years at the DEA. A good deal of his work was in using bank officials, informants, and hackers to trace money laundering, follow the money trails.
All of them were surprised and not exactly happy to see him again. He no longer had the institutional clout of the DEA. He relied on a few old debts owed him, but mainly on the persuasiveness of remaining silent about their present activities.
He created an intricately detailed hierarchy out of the photographs and data, and he watched it, the comings and goings of dummy corporations, offshore holding companies, Swiss bank accounts, wiretaps, especially anything having to do with Everett. He had an admiration for the historians and researchers he read. It was an art to reconstruct history out of meetings and phone calls, bank accounts and computer readouts. But he wanted more, to anticipate, to watch a pattern grow and intercede in its moment of crisis.
In certain operations he detected Everett's presence. But most of his information was secondhand, and the trail was cold, and he wasn't interested in adding to speculative history, but to catch him in the act. He wanted to draw blood.
It was like trying to discover a comet. You had to watch and watch and be lucky and he didn't seem to have much of that. Although he knew the saying luck came to those prepared, he held out the hope that if he worked hard enough he could eliminate chance and luck altogether.
The cost of his research ate up his disability checks. Out of necessity he started a security business. His interest in it was nil, but he did rather well anyway. It was just as an acquaintance had told him. "This one even you can't screw up. You got fear as your silent partner."
He called Sara after a program she did on the DEA and talked to her for an hour an a half. It was journalist's dream. They met for coffee.
Sara had successfully occupied an underinhabited niche as a liberal voice in radio. She was outgoing, bright, and ivy league educated. She had met her husband Jack in law school as she was preparing to be an activist lawyer. It turned out she was bored with practicing law.
Jack thought with her engaging personality she should try the media. He had friends who owned a radio station. His initial idea was a radio show with her answering questions using her law background. It was obvious her real interests were political so the idea soon became "Inside America", a talk show with a liberal slant. The politics didn't match the owner's views, but Jack convinced them it was good business.
It wasn't. Engaging in person, Sara was stiff and shy on the air. The show was kept on as a personal favor. Her improvement was slow. It didn't help that her marriage was breaking up. At her worst she thought Jack had devised the radio show to make himself feel less guilty about having his affairs. "I've got to hand it to you. You're the only person who could be having an affair and still be overcontrolling."
Not long after they separated Michael called the show. His wealth of background information helped her confidence. His intensity made her nervous, but she sensed a chemistry between them that might work on the show. She asked him to be a guest. He was knowledgeable, controversial and funny. The show clicked which led to his being a regular, almost a cohost.
They started having an affair. Michael's raw edges made for good sex, but he was too turbulent for someone trying to sort out her new life. She sensed he wasn't all there, but certain moments hinted at something inside. Nothing he wanted to deal with. "Don't you ever think about things?" she asked him. "They already bug me enough, they don't need my help." The two let the affair pass by, but they remained friends.
It was a friendship that was tested. Michael used up his backlog of information and wasn't getting much new. Frustrated and desperate that he had run dry, he took his customary way out. Sara picked him up in several adjoining states and helped him recover from these episodes.
It didn't seem to effect his performance on the show. If he was less informative he was more witty. It still worked except for Michael. Sara tried to reassure him as they walked to their cars after a ragged show. Michael shook his head.
"The show wasn't bad, I was."
"We just couldn't get beyond the flak to the real issues. All that talk about protesting the UN. By the way what was that stuff about the Gurkhas?"
"The callers didn't like the UN using US troops like mercenaries to police the world."
"I gathered."
"They're worried here will be next."
"What do they suggest? We let a fascist set up his own country in Eastern Europe? We'll be back in the middle ages in no time."
"The point is why is he acting so boldly now? But don't ask me, I'm only the person that's supposed to know. What about the call about soft money versus hard? She even quoted Bryant's Cross of Gold speech."
"And then she got stuck on 'the Federal Reserve is as about as Federal as Federal Express."
"It still could have been a natural intro to money and politics."
"It was my fault. I should have gone with our original idea of that as a focus."
"That'd be great if I had turned up something fresh. Your listeners were more with it than I was. And the election question."
"It's a long way off, and what can you say? We've got tweedledum and a field of tweedledees stretching from New Hampshire to California."
"Not if Allan March is in the picture. They asked me a simple question, do I think he's going to run? Simple if you know where the money's coming from."
"So you gave an educated guess."
"I wouldn't have to guess if I knew."
"You're working on it."
"It's a good line, I use it often. I'm not getting anything from the usual sources. Either they've gotten damn good at keeping quiet or I'm going deaf. I've got to take some time off, see if I can come up with something."
Sara knew what that meant, but she didn't say anything.
In a week he did actually produce a lead. A small one. He got a tip that a financial advisor to Everett was part of a group of investors interested in a beer company. It wasn't much, but you never know. Through his contacts he checked what it looked like on paper. Everything was upfront. No offshore assets. No dummy corporations. There were no promising signs anywhere. There was nothing here and he knew it.
He drove out to the breweries to confirm the obvious. He was as usual thorough, talking to everybody including the beermeister. Everett was thinking about retiring. Some friends of his were trying to set him up with good investments, like a string of microbreweries that could be made enticing to a conglomerate.
The beermeister offered Michael some samples of his art as the spoke. He remembered Everett and liked him and his enthusiasm. The others were interested only in finances. He was an amateur beer maker and wanted to talk about the process.
Michael left and decided to do some more sampling at a local bar. It didn't improve his outlook. He was depressed. It wasn't only that checking this out had been pretty desperate. It was hearing the words retire and Everett together.
He ordered another beer and considered his ultimate nightmare, Everett retiring. The thought of him just getting up and walking away from all this. He'd become somebody different, a stranger, even to himself. And where would that leave Michael? Even if he killed him it would be like killing another person, or somebody already dead. It gave him the shudders thinking about people changing like that. Permanent.
He didn't like the feeling. He was being ridiculous. What's the big deal about change? Hell he changes every time he takes a drink, doesn't he? No, it's like that Scandinavian warrior heaven, Valhalla, where you fight all day and wake up the next with all your wounds gone, ready to go at it again. You have a few drinks, change scenery a bit and next morning you're back the same. Or are you? He didn't linger long on that thought.
There was a woman sitting at a table nearby, reading a book. "So who am I competing with?" Michael said by way of introduction.
* * *
Two days later Sara was driving to Taos to pick him up. She was thinking about her life as she admired the red dirt mesas set off against a brilliant blue November sky. The mesas were once under water. Life's definitely about change. Just wish my life had a little less. At least Michael is picking nicer spots to fall to earth. Maybe Nimé's tape will help. Jack, it's still hard. Easier if I didn't see him, but he's great with the kids. They need it. Still hoping we'll get back together.
Parents broke up. Why I'm good at picking up pieces. Years of practice. I make a mess and then I pick up the pieces. I thought if you knew the past you weren't condemned to relive it. Must be a different kind of knowing. There's knowing in your head that fire burns and there's the kind of knowing when you put your finger on a hot stove and your hand pulls away. Must be more like that. Knowing it in your bones. How do you do that? Might have to settle for reminder notes on the refrigerator.
What happened to something working for a change? What about the show, the children? Can't take credit there. Seem to work in spite of how I screw up. There you go. She caught herself. She repeated two lines her friend Ann had given her that helped. "Today has never been done. Go easy on yourself."
Sara had wired the bail money. Michael was waiting in the shade in front of the city hall as she pulled up. It was hot and there was no soft breeze to shift the sun's focus. He seemed to stagger under its glare as he walked unsteadily over to Sara's car.
"Congratulations, you managed to get shipwrecked in the middle of a desert," Sara joked as he got in.
"We were just trying to follow a mighty river to its source. What can I say?"
She smiled as she took in his appearance. He was wearing sunglasses, a baseball cap and a D.H. Lawrence t shirt. Michael noticed her smile.
"She loved Lawrence and I wanted to be Lawrence for her." He tugged at his t shirt. "Probably the most innocent form of fetishism I've ever practiced."
"How gallant," Sara said trying to keep her jealousy in check by remembering she chose to cool off the relationship. "I remember you had a thing for my high heels."
"It's all part of my feeble mystical attempt at having a thing for everything."
"And who did you want her to be?"
"I don't know. She was southern, maybe she could have been Anabelle Lee. She was doing just fine as herself."
"Where'd you meet?"
"My mouth and her mouth, my mouth and her thighs, her mouth and..."
"Location, location, location."
"In a bar. I was sitting there thinking about this lead, but it looks for all the world like they took over a beer business, plain and simple. I kept going over it and dead silence, not a thought or idea's crossing my mind, empty and dry as that field over there. Then it begins like a few drops of rain and right away it turns into a flood. Every woman from there to here's going on in my head at once with every idea you could think of."
"Including Ms Lee."
"We made quite a fire, but I think she was disappointed it was only Michael Flaherty who emerged from the ashes."
"Were you expecting anything different?"
"I always seem to."
The two drove on. As they neared Albuquerque Sara played the tape for Michael.
"The revolutionary idea we're putting forth here is that sexual fantasy is not just something you make up that brings you pleasure, it has a meaning. Interpreting and understanding that meaning can change your life. I'd go further and say that sexual fantasy is a call to change your life."
copyright © 1998 by Cary Shulman
All rights Reserved