DISCLAIMER: The following discourse has no basis in reality and anyone implicated or implied is nothing more than imagination far away.

Father Wracker was a distant father.  He never said much and when he came home from teaching disadvantaged students Business at LACC, he would sit and smoke cigarettes and have a red can of Coca-Cola.   Sometimes the Wracks would wake up late at night and tell him to go to sleep put out his cigarette and lead him to his bedroom.    He was a part-time insurance broker and no one ever thought so much of him.  He had few friends and when they appeared, he and Mother Wracker would fix them a fine dinner and then sit in the green living room and drink brandy.   He was never there much unless someone needed him; the Wracks wondered where he spent all his free time.   He would disappear on business trips for a week or more and show up again and begin again.   The family would celebrate Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Easter and go to midnight mass sometimes on the Navidad.   The Wracks wondered where all the time went and then it was over.  

The holidays are here once again, bringing poignant memories that one cannot forget and the alone are morose.  Everything has changed.   Sometimes he would come home early and ask the Wracks to borrow his CO2 bb pistol and he would practice in the yard shooting a soda can, the yard with one white rose.   Grandmother passed away and, in his mind, the Wracks see here in Finland, she now is on her own.   When the Wracks returned from his education, he got an aneurysm and the Wracks rushed him to the hospital, and he was saved.  The world would get twenty more years from him.  He wouldn’t go on business trips anymore, and the endless years of eating amphetamine and smoking cigarettes while on assignment finally caught up to him.   The powers that be gave him an assignment as an analyst at a firm with a standard name so he could derive a pension and retire with some money.  A friend of his got into a jam in a far-off place and Father Wracker gave his entire pension to an unscrupulous jailor and that man came home.  When he retired, the firm gave him a gold Rolex watch and he never wore it, and the Wracks inherited it and it stays in his drawer today.  One holiday dinner while the Wracks were clearing dishes, he sat down and Father Wracker stuck his index finger into his forearm and said, 

Never join the CIA, let someone else do it.  

He never said anything more and his greyish-black eyes focused and pin pricked and that was that.

Years go by and the Wracks has gone away and visit his parents from time to time with his blond-haired wife.  They left tranquil hills because the location was too hot and moved to Indian Wells, near Indio to watch a house for a gentrified man who needed someone to live in his mansion.  When he was down there, once, he asked the Wracks to take him for chemotherapy.   He developed skin cancer of the head and face from witnessing countless atomic explosions and the Wracks waited as he vomited into a brown grocery bag after a treatment.   He also developed hypertension and nothing in the allopathic armory works.   The elite decided that Father Wracker needed a kidney transplant and he died, and his wife didn’t want to live alone and cursed everyone around her.  They say that they use you as long as you are effective, and when you know too much, they get rid of you.  So it goes.

The time has gone away, and another generation is safe from the ravages of the bad guys.  Whatever race or religion they are or what they think is immaterial.  We were saved and the world goes on like nothing ever happened, and there is no money because they cannot acknowledge your existence without admitting coercion.   The Wracks wonders if there is anything in Swiss bank accounts because, for a wage earner, everything helps.   Before he died, he said to Wracks in passing, “For a long shot use a 7.62”.  The Argentine national government would never let him emigrate because he didn’t have enough money.

A long time has passed, and The Wracks sits looking out a window. The holidays are upon us and the Wracks have a son.    All seems good.   There is one thing and one thing only the Wracks has on his bucket list.  He doesn’t want to see the French museum or the holy city of Saint Petersburg.   He doesn’t want to visit Cambodia and view the resting place of the beloved Borte Kalel at Angor Wat.   He hopes the government will give him access to the tomb of the Unknown Soldier, and kneel, and say a prayer and thank God that his generation was delivered from evil.