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It's all fancy dress
After years of just spending time, sometimes I wonder if ever I was anyone of note. There were so many hints, though the thing we humans are exceptionally good at is noticing patterns. Or maybe just seeing patterns.
Our pattern recognition isn't necessarily a reliable narrator, though, so who even really knows whether I've been tapped, whether I am on some sort of quadruple-secret reserve retainer. There's no evidence, anyway. Not even in my own mind to my own self.
I don't have a handler. I don't spend lonely nights on my shortwave transcribing number stations of perusing the classifieds or personals of the local broadsheet in search of secret messages. I neither drop nor do I pick.
It occurs to me all the time that I am a simple, non-elite, lonely, civilian with absolute zero intrigue, neither an unwitting dupe nor even anyone's fool. To wit, I spend half a year collaborating with the only shadowy Muscovites in the history of the world who just happened to only be ambitious young cryptocurrency entrepreneurs.
Even earnest and surprisingly threatening accusations of being a stooge for Putin or a Russian agent couldn't be further from the truth. If I were to ignore the patterns that I both see and hear all around me and through the persistent friendships of the people around me who have known me for as long as 25-years and no shorter than 15-years.
The Moldovan immigrant American who I call my fairy godmother (in ode to Mother Night), the Elliot School privateer diplomat free spirit who is always available by phone, except when he's not, and the son of a handsome, fit, native son of McLean who is like a brother (they are all my brothers) who has never had much of a believable job and has never explicitly ever denied being a secret agent (though I guess I have never asked).
Though, if I were to think about all of it soberly and after a very restful night of sleep, I guess they could just be best friends instead of government-sponsored handlers. That makes much more sense.
So, the only two actual indicators that I am a spy are the clever little things that I have bought and issued to myself: the pistols and rifle and the camouflaged boonie caps and kit bags and operator wristwatches.
It's all fancy dress. What a fool I've been. What a fool I am.