My C.I.A. Guy
My friend Lee and I have both had C.I.A. guys in our lives. Lee’s was particularly persistant: he lived on the same street as Lee in Ypsi, and when Lee would come out of his apartment, the guy would just be standing there. Lee would go to work and when he went out to smoke, he’d see his C.I.A. guy on the opposite corner smoking.
One particularly fateful day we were discussing our C.I.A. guys on our way to the pizza place for lunch. I was trying to convince him that he was actually that guy’s C.I.A. guy, following him home and to work and everything. All of the sudden his C.I.A. guy came into the pizza shop behind us. Lee whispered “See, that guy followed us in here, how could I know that he would be coming here if I was following him?” when the guy walked past us to the counter and said “Yeah, I called in an order a half-hour ago?” That was just further proof to me that Lee had this guy’s phone bugged and that’s why he knew that his C.I.A. guy would be coming to NYPD Pizza at that time.
At that point I moved on to the possibility that his C.I.A. guy was actually him from the future, burdened with some vital piece of information and he knew that they would both be in the pizza place that day. I tried like hell to convince him to walk over to his C.I.A. guy and say “I know who you are and why you are here. I am ready for whatever information you have to give me.” but Lee wasn’t having any of it. I also tried to get him to start keeping a log of where he was at every moment so that if he did need to contact his younger self in the future, he’s already have a record of where he would be. He may in fact be doing this today.
I started noticing my C.I.A. guy in college, always riding around Eastern’s campus on his ten-speed bike: black shorts, black shirt, white socks pulled all the way up, Bruce Jenner haircut, 70s-style glasses, nondescript white sneakers. I’d see him at least once a week between classes. He looked so out of place, almost like guy in the background on Three’s Company…maybe in the Regal Beagle…on a bike somehow. I distinctly remember thinking as I was about to graduate “Well, at least I won’t have to keep seeing that guy all the time.”
After school I moved to East Lansing for a couple years and I know I saw him a couple times in those years. Part of me wants to say I saw him there, but that just seems crazy. We got married (PJ and I, not my C.I.A. guy) and moved back to Ann Arbor in 1997, and I started seeing him regularly then. Always on the bike, never interacting with me, just staring. In front of my house, at work when I worked downtown (I don’t think he’s tracked down our new office yet), just staring, and always there.
What does this have to do with kids and babies and what-not? Get this: I stopped seeing him so much this year and recently figured out why. He is now following my wife and my unborn child. She sees him all the time, when she’s coming to and from work, outside the house, downtown. I was just dropping her off at work and on our way we got stopped at a light. He was directly across form us on the bike. Staring. The light turned green and we proceeded, but not before staring right at us as he went by.
There is obviously a logical explanation: He is probably either a Terminator, or Kyle Reese coming back from the future to protect our unborn John Conner…we just have to figure out which one (or kill him just to be safe…the jury’s still out on that one).
