Three Boxes

 

CHAPTER SEVEN

195.

Resting comfortably I decide to process, to examine, the events in three parts. I will categorize them into three boxes, the known, the unknown and everything in between. This format quickly reveals itself to be more challenge than initially suspected. I might as well label the boxes mind, body and spirit. Or objective, subjective and inert. Or democratic, republican and independent. Or high priority, low priority and irrelevant. Or for that matter, good, bad and ugly.

I am alone in my room. The medical staff have gone to, I assume, make their rounds, Julie to a meeting and my security agent to stand outside the door. I am left with my thoughts.

In box one, the objective known intelligence of democratic high priority good, I add (in slightly smaller font) 'includes moral, jurisprudence and ethical considerations', the reality that my physical self is a wreck. An accurate metaphor, painfully appropriate, is of my poor body feeling, looking and acting like a once finely-tuned muscle car - I envision my old Formula 400 Firebird - that is now, after a grand of hard miles, in the junkyard, totaled. I put the fact that cars labelled as totaled by the seedy auto insurance cartels are not always so, into the number two, the subjective, unknown, red-zone, low priority bad box.

My limited intel on the state, if there is one, of Operation Firecracker, leads me to believe that several questions need immediate answering. Moreover, that if Julie is fighting, as I suspect, an overwhelmingly impossible skirmish with the Senatorial committee that once funded our clandestine operations, I need to know about it. Now. Fucking pronto Tonto.

Central to the formulation of any feasible response, if indeed we need one, as the mission - always protected by the black cloak of plausible deniability - never existed as a political budgetary line item, is the mysteriousness of TOM's demise and the whereabouts and situational status of the Queen.

The flip side of every question, the yang, the shadow-side of the myriad possibilities of a thousand scenarios, I toss into box two. I give all these the about the same indifferent treatment I do all things in the middle, telling them that to have a voice they must get off the fence and commit. One way or the other, brother.

Box three I truly care about. It is the soulful, the spiritual, the magical and mystical, the sacred and the profane. Box three, the hut of the misunderstood superior man, asks only one question in return for the secret of its power:

'What are you going to do?'