Nathaniel Schilpp

I used to be a self-employed reporter and a journalist, and I wrote articles for the local newspapers and magazines.  Not to be cocky or anything, but I was, and still am, pretty damn skillful with a pen.  If you don’t believe me, you can ask the New York Times and a couple of the other ‘Big Shot’ publishers, because I received offers to work for those companies.  I refused.  I was perfectly content keeping a low profile, writing about the insignificant local happenings, festivals, sporting events…shit like that.  I don’t know, I liked the privacy I guess; being able to stay under the radar and observe the world around me without so much as the mention of my name, it was peaceful.  My life was perfect and my ghosted lifestyle ideal, but my purposeful lack of connections is what put them on my trail.

 

Blogging...

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...screwed me. 

 

I am the creator and sole contributor to an extremely publicized online blogging forum.  Now, you might be wondering, “Wait, I thought you said you loved living in isolation?”, and that right there is the beauty of it.  It was completely anonymous!  I ran one of the largest blogs in the entire Western Hemisphere and as far as I knew, my name was a mystery to all.  Not that anybody even wanted or needed to know my name in the first place because I was pretty irrelevant…or so I thought.

 

The United States Government is a black cloud in a seemingly clear sky: looming over the land until it blocks out the sun and traps people under its menacing glare.  It blankets the sky and then leaves without a trace of ever having been there.  And that’s exactly what happened…I woke up with a gun pressed against my head and a hand over my mouth with the assumption that my brains were about to leave my body.  In other words, I was dead.

 

“Don’t yell.”, I heard a voice say from somewhere in the room.  The hand was removed from my mouth and the gun was pulled from the side of my head, although still pointed at me.  I sat up in my bed to find a group of three men.  There was a man stationed at the door to my room and another at the window across from the bed, both heavily armed with what looked like military combat gear.  The man who had woken me up wore a black uniform and carried a pistol, aimed directly at my face.  As I continued surveying my dark bedroom and the intruders, I noticed a fourth man, standing off in the corner in the darkness.

 

He stepped from the shadows and his flashy suit made it clear to me that he was the one who had spoken.  He was unarmed, but I still had a pistol in my face; I don’t know if you’ve ever had that happen to you or not, but I promise you that it is not a reassuring feeling.  Looking back on it, I couldn’t tell you the reasoning for why I was so nonchalant about the whole situation.  It could have been just an acceptance of fate, because from my position it appeared as though my time on Earth was running at an all-time-low.  It also could have been that the suddenness of my arousal from sleep left me in a dream-like state of existence; and because of the absurdity of the situation it only made sense to think it was some sort of bizarre dream.  I have no clue, but whatever the reasoning I thought it best to say, “Look man, if you’re gonna kill me, just do it already.”

 

The guy with the suit apologized for waking me up in such a rude, violent way and he told me he was in the CIA.  He also told me that I had a duty to perform for the United States.  I didn’t know what to think, and who would?  Being woken up by armed men in the middle of the night wasn’t exactly something I had planned for that weekend.

 

“I don’t know who you are or who you think I am, but I’m not going anywhere other than this bed.”

 

He responded by telling me I had no choice in the matter and that they would have to use force if I refused to cooperate.  And if you haven’t noticed by now, I cuss, and of all the times for that sort of language, this was probably the worst time for it to make an appearance.  But I just have a knack for making things worse than they need to be and without thinking, I said “Fuck you, fuck the CIA, you guys have no right to do this there is no way in Hell I will…”

 

I felt a sharp pain in the side of my head and then nothing.

 

I woke up next to the guy with the pistol in the back of their black SUV with a pounding headache and dried blood on my face. 

 

“Sorry we had to do that James, but we had no choice.”

 

“You guys better tell me what the fuck is going on right now.”

 

“We will.”

 

That’s it.  That’s all the explanation I got out of this prick and I wasn’t even sure he was telling the truth.  All I could do was wait.  The only reassuring aspect of this whole situation was that if they had wanted me dead, my cold body would already be lying in a ditch somewhere.

 

A week or so later, I’m in Russia freezing my ass off with thousands of dollars of surveillance equipment and a pistol to be used in the “highly unlikely possibility” that I would be in any danger at any point during my stay.  My job was mostly uninteresting over there and to this day I still don’t fully understand the reasoning as to why they chose me for the job over any of the agents the CIA had at their disposal. 

 

Probably because they never expected anything real of it. 

 

But regardless, they told me that they had been watching me for months and that they saw the influence I had over people and the ease with which I acquired information from people without revealing my true intent.  I don’t know, I didn’t get it, but they offered me a lot of money so I wasn’t gonna tell them they should pick somebody else for the job.  They made the job sound safe, easy, and interesting.  I went into it with the reassurance that I would be in “no danger of any kind”.  They lied.