Chapter 1

It all started with a dream, or rather a nightmare.

Have you ever had a dream so utterly vivid that it just stays with you just like a recent past memory? You awake and feel as if everything in the dream had really had happened to you, but then slowly realize it hasn't – and that it was just all a dream?

I do ... often. I wake up and roll over to my wife, saying excitedly, "Anne, do you remember that time...", but of course, there was no Anne. There is never anyone in my bed, or almost never. I am alone, same as usual. It was all just a dream. Again. Damn it!

Awake and overcome with regrets, I shut my eyes, but it was no good. That dream feeling lingered on with me and only a hot shower was going to clear my mind enough to kick start me into the day without looking and acting like a zombie. Uck. This was the third night this week I'd had this particular darker dream and it was time to put an end to this once and for all. Unfortunately, I still had some very grave doubts as to whether the cure wasn't going to be worse than the symptoms, but it would at least be some closure.

My dreams of her, my phantom wife, used to be pleasant and sweet, but they have grown increasingly darker as of late, with my bride of Morpheus now seemingly to be lost to me forever, taken in terror each night by spectral figures into a gloomy and sinister world of shadow.

Looking into the bathroom mirror, I saw just what I expected to see, a scruffy fellow in his mid-thirties starting another day all alone – just as I had done for pretty much my entire life. Perhaps now I had one last chance to find her again, after all these years. But would she even remember me or remotely care? We were only together those three short hours; did they mark her soul as if by a brand as mine had been? Brought together by chance and then separated by thousands of miles, an ocean and the caprice of others. It was cruel then and still apparently heartbreaking nearly twenty years later.

At last, after all of this time, I firmly decided that I needed to attempt some possible means of finding her again, if for no other reason than to put my dreams to rest, and my life of regret might even perhaps begin to change, but I digress. Perhaps I should begin this tale at a more appropriate beginning.

I was born and raised an only child into a quite comfortable middle-class family. I never lacked for anything in material terms, I always had new clothes and pocket money for baseball cards or the latest comic book or whatever game I wanted, but love and outward affection were rare commodities. My parents both taught at the local State University and their jobs were by far the single most important aspects of their lives. Their marriage might have come in second, but it actually fell probably a good bit lower. Alas, I fell in somewhere between 5th place (the new color TV) and 9th place (an adopted dog named "Missy" which no one seemed to particularly like, but she didn't like any of us all that much either, so I guess that was fair).

My mother taught five different foreign languages and could read or speak more than a dozen more fluently, but her academic true love was classic English Literature. She could expound for hours on some trivial aspect of the Elizabethan era poets, but faced with any issue requiring an emotional response she would freeze up and then dither. She would rather have received a new book of poetry rather than a bundle of flowers or even an article of jewelry. Normal human emotions confused her, especially garden variety standard male behavior.

I'm absolutely certain she was utterly unsuited to become anyone's wife, let alone a mother. If I had to guess, I say that she felt that a successful career in academia in the mid 1960's (especially in our very conservative mid-western state) still required of women professors that they at the earliest opportunity acquire a husband and a child (definitely in that order, please), so she got them, much like getting a passport stamped ... and with about the same amount of emotional commitment. She must have had sex at least once in her life, as I was born two years after they married, but I doubt they repeated the experience much as they slept in different bedrooms. She was a committed lesbian and stayed firmly in the closet long after it became socially and politically acceptable to do otherwise.

In today's modern era, I'm sure she would have never bothered to marry at all, let alone my father. In fact, if I were to wager on the outcome, I'm nearly certain she would have been a happy and probably tolerably well adjusted lesbian, and probably all the rest of us would have been much happier as a result.

My father was equally complicated, and extremely bisexual and he also found the academic social protection he needed to appear to be a good family man while otherwise privately fucking everything that walked on two legs. Active and restless, he stormed about acting the pure alpha male, albeit with an increasing waistline, decreasing hairline and standing all of 5'6" even in shoes. He was the terror of his students and the eternal bane of his unfortunate graduate students and me, his only child.

Today, he would have been diagnosed as being manic-bipolar and (hopefully) medicated, back then he was just considered an intense perfectionist who could not tolerate the slightest flaw or imperfection of anything around him. His specialty was Paleo-Sociology, but invariably he was the one drafted to teach most of the various freshmen Humanities courses within the College, as most knowledgeable students invariably avoided taking any of his advanced courses whenever possible.

He had the reputation (entirely deserved) of being the #1 feared professor of whose classes should be avoided at all costs. At the start of a new term he would begin a course such as Western Civilization I with a fairly full auditorium of 100+ innocent students, and by mid-term he would have already failed about half of the class out of spite and driven most of the rest into dropping the course entirely (the smart ones usually quickly transferred to a different section and professor after his first lecture). By the end of the term, it was common knowledge that he would be regularly screwing at least five of his students (fucking for grades was apparently quite common even still in the 1960's) and there were rumors that not all of his victims were female.

When not in the classroom, he was invariably bullying somebody else; trying to get his name added to other researcher's publications, belligerently scheming for more grant money, fighting the faculty and the Dean of the College, etc. By every account he was a complete utter asshole who only kept his tenure due to his skilled success at obtaining grant money for himself and new donors for endowing the University and College of Humanities, some said by nefarious means of blackmail. His scholarly publications were frequent, well-researched, precise and ultimately very forgettable. If anyone remembers his name today it's only as a footnote.

Both mom and dad were rarely home before dark, and that suited everyone in the household just fine. Dad certainly never, ever came home before 10 p.m., usually displaying the effects of several stiff drinks and irregularly displayed obvious smudges of second-hand lipstick. Mother, with similar liaisons of her own, never noticed, or else she was really good at not caring. By the time I was old enough to really remember things, they were already encamped for good off into separate bedrooms and living quite separate lives, where they stayed apart like very indifferent roommates for the remainder of their lives. The only time they ever touched each other was during faculty cocktail parties, feigning an affection I'm certain was nothing but a well practiced act.

Both of them also smoked like chimneys, chain smoking one cigarette after another from dawn until bedtime, and both even smoked in bed – it was a wonder the house never burned down. Both developed and died of lung cancer not long after I left home, but that was an irrelevance – even slowly dying together probably didn't them a inch closer in their faux marital relationship.

We were all alone, together. Each of us having their own life, and with only minimal social contact with the others in the house. A house without human warmth or love. I can count all the number of deep, intimate conversations I ever had with either of them combined on just one hand, with a thumb left over. When I was younger, I was extremely resentful of this lack of 'family intimacy', but as I grew older I became somewhat more resigned to things. My parents were who they were, wishing for anything more was like wishing to touch the moon and stars, and equally unlikely to happen. I had pocket money, a few decent neighborhood friends and went to a fairly opulent summer camp for two months every year so I can't complain that my childhood actually sucked. A lot of kids had it far worse!

Enough about my parents. My regrets here are few, only that I wished I had belong to a real family and not a life-long cover for their then social unacceptable sexual preferences. As a youth, it certainly made the entire idea of sex disturbing, rather than attractive, and I learned that love was indeed very different than sex.

When I became a teen, I fared not as well with my increasing interest in the matters of courting the fairer sex. I had dated a few times in High School, but I was extremely shy and unfortunately appallingly inept in social affairs. I wasn't bad at all at most sports but I just didn't relate well to most of the jocks and preferred to remain outside of their locker room conversations. My few attempts at attracting a girlfriend were usually both laughably inept and occasionally emotionally disastrous. For this I definitely blame my home environment, as I had little experience in even mundane matters of interpersonal communication, let alone the gentle arts of seduction.

Eventually I discovered a similar small group of other misfit guys and gals, each also from fairly dysfunctional homes. Our little club of bookworms and nerdy social outcasts was popularly known as the "Library Losers', but we sort of referred to ourselves as "The Other Club". We met every day during lunch in the school library and again right after school when we went en-mass to another local public library for more books. We supported each other, learned (sometimes) from each others successes and failures, and more importantly learned to rely on each other as someone we could trust. We had friends, real friends – and we were no longer alone in the world.

During those high school years, The Other Club was probably more important to me than anything else I might have learned in a classroom. During my three years there our membership fluctuated a bit as older members graduated and new kids joined, but I can name from memory alone a good twenty regulars and another dozen or so kids that hung out near our fringes. My two best friends were Brian, who always doodled drawings into his everpresent notebook and Phil, who really hated school and wanted to get busy making money.

Our school group lasted for nearly another decade until post-Columbine school administrative politics pretty much broke up the club for good. By that point most of our true descendents were just gothy dressed kids acting out their angst and couldn't care less about shooting anyone, but the school didn't care ... and frankly neither did any of us original founding members. A couple of our more socially inept descendants were in fact beginning to study the Columbine High School massacre as a 'how to' lesson for the future and we all disavowed ourselves as mentors for our young more belligerent descendents.

As a statistical measurement of our post-school lives, most would say we have enjoyed tremendous success. Our ranks have created a Nobel nominee for Chemistry, a Pritzker award winning architect, two successful authors, a real estate tycoon, and a furniture store mogul. I'm none of the above. Most of the rest of my old acquaintances work for these more successful folks, but not me. I wanted to leave home (also with few regrets) and find my place in the world.

In fairness, I should also mention the four suicides that we know of from our numbers, and another four of our old friends that just disappeared and that no one has heard from in about a decade. Maybe they took that alternative career path to oblivion too. Money or not, most of us were all pretty damaged folks and despite what they say time (and money) don't heal all wounds. My richer friends often seem to be the most miserable ones in their personal lives. Actually, the reason a few of them got so rich was by working 18-20 hours per day so that they didn't need to acquire a personal life - like me.

Ok, I did pretty well at school; I was smart but uninspired. Thanks to my linguistically gifted mother, I could read and speak at least eight different languages before I was even in kindergarten, and this list rounded out a near dozen by the time I left High School. I had plenty of scholarship offers to go to college but I was just too scared of ending up exactly like my mother, or worse my father. Besides, I knew exactly what the academic world was like and it had little appeal to me. I would have gone straight into college and probably gotten a Doctorate of Linguistics in my sleep, but I couldn't pretend that I had even the slightest interest in spending the rest of my life trapped in academia – and risk becoming just like my parents.

I skipped my High School prom and graduation ceremony and let them mail me my diploma, while I began a long and very half-hearted search to find something to do with the rest of my life that wouldn't totally suck ass and make me regret waking up in the morning and going to work. I've never found that job ... but I did find two jobs that each temporarily suited me for a little while.

First, I worked for my Other Club friend Phil for about a year, as he started to work his way up the real estate selling ladder. We cleaned houses for showing and ran paperwork until I was bored to tears and walked into the first military recruiter's office that I passed, signed my name to anything they put in front on me, and asked them to send me anywhere but here! Phil stuck with it and had his own license a few years later and his first million the year after that. Then he got serious about making a fortune.

I think the Army bastards signed me up for 11B Infantry, but that was fine by me at the moment, until the day in Basic Training when we all had to take the DLPT, the Defense Language Proficiency Test. Naturally, gifted with my mother's linguistic talents, I scored the maximum '3' on both phases of the test. A few days later I had orders to bypass the rest of basic training and be sent instead to the Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California.

I had nearly completed my course in Russian (not my choice) when the impending start of Gulf War I (Desert Shield) made my already existing 3/3 proficiency with both Arabic and Farsi far more valuable to the Army than yet another Cold War language trained one-striper. Assigned to a front-line intelligence unit, I spent the Gulf War doing interrogations, interpreting and document translations. As I had learned both Middle Eastern languages from my mother, who was half Lebanese and had an authentic accent from northern Lebanon from her own mother, I soon put my keen ear to work and picked up the nuances of several different Iraqi regional accents.

This simple achievement alone was more than enough to gain the attention of the Army's elite Intelligence Support Activity unit, where I next spent the majority of the following four years performing various infiltration and uncover intelligence gathering missions that will probably remain classified long after I'm dead of old age. The pay still sucked, the danger was rampant, but still I enjoyed (sometimes) the thrill of gaining vital intelligence information that might otherwise cause a lot of decent people to be killed. Sometimes I'd make the coup and escape easy-squeezy, and sometimes I needed patching up afterwards, but I was apparently so useful that they patch me up and send me right straight out again, gaining desperately needed intelligence about terrorists, rogue Iraqi military officers and various other hot-headed nutjobs that wanted to light a powder keg under a lightly occupied Iraq still under the command of Saddam Hussein ... at least for now.

Certain that my ISA bosses were going to get me killed, infiltrating larger and more dangerous Iraqi political organizations, I decided I'd had enough of the Army, and despite the minimal bonuses of hazard and Foreign Language Proficiency Pay, I was making ready to make a clean escape into civilian life ... until 9/11 happened. Then I leapt right straight from the frying pan right into the fire, leaving Army ISA for the CIA, accepting an offer to join the elite Strategic Support Branch. With the Company, once again my superior language skills, and ability to pass as a native anywhere in the Middle East, soon earned me even more frequent trips to some of the dodgier and unfriendly places in the world, locating and infiltrating terrorist camps all over the Middle East and even Asia.

After several close calls too many, I demanded and received a promotion to a safer senior analyst position in Langley, Virginia, where now mostly reviewed reviewed reports and intelligence with my more than seasoned eye gathered by the computers and the poor shmucks still out in the field. There are sometimes loud hints that they'd like me to check out something in the field once more personally, but I'll usually pretend deafness until they go away. But once in awhile every month or three, I'll find myself with one of their elite strike teams, hitting some hotbed of Hadji misbehavior, to gather and review the intel in real-time, on-site.

Sometimes, when the weight of dealing with the terrorist world gets too much for me I'll fly back home and help out Brian, my old nerd friend from the high school 'Other Club' days, with his architectural design and construction business. He calls his company "The Other Builders" and is the go-to guy for any new commercial or residential building project that is decidedly non-cookie cutter. Brian has a taste for the avant-garde and his designs have won innumerable awards. He has turned down at least three different million dollar offers to join various big international architecture firms that I know of, but it wasn't even a slight temptation to him. Frankly, he hates the outside world even worse than I do, and has even less tolerance for idiots wearing suits. The number of people that Brian can stand to be in the same room with can be numbered on one hand – all are Other Club alumni, and many now work for him in some capacity or another.