Nathan van Dakker, Close Personal History

Nathan van Dakker was born to Helena van Dakker on a boat, midway between Amsterdam and New York. He always assumed his mother left Amsterdam due in large part to him, and his absent father's lack of interest in raising him. The truth is more prosaic: Helena consumed American television and magazines like some people pray or look at the stars; she believed New York was where magic happened. Helena found a cramped closet in the Bronx which she shared with two other unwed mothers, both black. She left her son to be raised by a succession of elderly dying Jewish grandmothers of other people, while she worked 17 or 18 hours every day to make a small living cleaning offices in downtown Manhattan. It is entirely possible she believed the promises of a house and a secure future made by the sad string of married men who found brief, yet flaring, passion between her thighs. However, she would inevitably return to their tiny hole, after spending the weekend in Albany, or the Catskills, or the Plaza once again, alone. By the time he was three, Nathan spoke English and Yiddish, and his best friend was the daughter of a Congolese refugee who told her daughter in a language only the both of them understood that she was a great witch who would one day burn herself and all these other pale old witches around her. In 1990, lured by the promises of booming trade, Helena relocated to Chicago, where she hoped to make money selling short-term security bonds over the phone. After losing all her money in an unfortunate pyramid scheme, she worked, briefly, as a pawn-shop owner and a door-to-door make-up and perfume saleswoman. After losing the condo she rashly bought (and would still pay the mortgage for years later) she was offered a small, yet comfortable, flat in Shelby St., Chinatown, by Mrs. Wong, the woman who employed her in the sales business. Mrs. Wong was the local arbiter, money changer, loan-shark (and probably Triad boss), and being childless herself (Nathan would discover Mrs. Wong lost her oldest in Korea, and her youngest in Vietnam; a factor in his decision to join the army years later) she took a liking to Nathan. He would spend most days hanging around the Lucky Dragon Gaming and Tea Parlor, where elderly Chinese gentlemen gambled and spoke of spirits and fortunes and young rash men drank too much and talked too loudly of courage, crime, and blood. Nathan's childhood there was unusual, but happy, safe, and constant three qualities which made him always comfortable around criminals. Mrs. Wong close scrutiny meant Helena had little time for adventure, a fact she resented, and so when opportunity presented itself, they moved again this time, to Australia. In 1993 the government of Australia passed a law allowing indigenous lands to be nationalized and sold to private interests, in exchange for promises to develop the area and reinvest a portion of the proceeds in certain welfare programs. The general idea, born of the godless marriage between condescending nearsighted officials and greedy heartless businessmen, was that rich mining companies would pay the government a lot of money to take Aborigines communities that didn't pay taxes or bought clothes off the government's hands and turn them into nice capitalist white people.

One person hitching his wagon to this idea was Alfred Louis Anderson, the third son of the wealthy industrialist Roger Anderson Jr. Unlike his famous father, Alfred was a stupid, drunk, philandering buffoon; all qualities his father detested. Unknown to his business associates, who counted on his father's money and connections, Alfred was broke. But he loaned, stole, and cheated his way into getting a deed for a small stretch of land called Roguecork Country. Hilly, hot, and lacking in anything remotely worthwhile, Helena and Nathan nevertheless spent two years there, during which Nathan found more in common with the Aborigines than with the Europeans, a fact that earned him little love and many black eyes in school. He learned of the Dreaming, he learned to paint, to read the skies and the ground. They tried to teach him to listen rather than speak, but Nathan found, next to his natural panache for languages, a natural panache for running his mouth. His sense of humor and lack of respect for white people (brought about, perhaps, by being raised up to this point by Jews, Blacks, and Chinese) landed him in a lot of trouble, none more than with his hated father-in-law, Alfred Louis Anderson. While Helena and Alfred didn't marry (Helena didn't want to, and Alfred didn't care), they lived together, and Helena presented herself as Mrs. Anderson. Since Nathan wasn't that big, his age was degraded to 5, and he was presented as their son, a fact he hated and chose to contest, loudly, on several occasions. This earned him severe beatings from Alfred. Nathan now believes his mother knew that she made a mistake; the worse things were in the mining business, the worse things got for her and Nathan; Alfred probably beat her up, and perhaps worse. Helena would sometimes spend days in bed, blaming the hot weather, while in fact recuperating from Alfred's rare nightly "attentions". Nathan also assumes Helena simply had nowhere to go: Alfred didn't have any money to steal, and she didn't have a job or any property. He's not sure what happened; one night he was woken up by his mother, and was taken by a ranchman to a pickup truck that took them to Adelaide. The ranchman didn't say anything, and neither did his mother. He was so shocked, it took him few hours to realize he would never again see his friends or read his books. All he has from Australia is a lucky charm, a small, round stone hung around his neck, adorned with a simple painting of his nickname "Many Springs". Helena spent a few months in Adelaide, gathering the money needed for a boat to SanFrancisco. Adelaide was the first time Helena and Nathan worked together: relying on his knowledge in Mandarin, Nathan ingratiated himself with the Chinese workers and ship-owners, helping them deal with white landlords, fill out forms, and deal with loud complaining costumers. Meanwhile, Helena went back to her old trade, selling beauty products to young Chinese women who wanted to look white, usually using Nathan as a go between. Even then, his crooked smile, warm brown eyes, and sincere compliments were enough to melt a woman's heart, young or old. Nathan wanted to stay in San-Francisco, used as he was to the company of Chinese; Helena, perhaps worries Nathan was becoming "yellow on the inside", or perhaps guided by her usual lust for creature comfort, moved them a year later to Los Angeles. Though Nathan was 9, Helena chose once again to lie and put him in the third grade, Nathan still being small enough to pass as younger than his was. Living in the worst part of the Los-Angeles projects, right on the doorstep of Hell's Kitchen, Nathan would take an hour long ride home, changing two busses, spend his afternoons playing in the street or simply sitting on the stairs, waiting for his

mother to come home. Money was tight, but Helena found work, appearing in small films, sometimes a little naughty, dancing in some nightclubs, and in general eking out a living, waiting for the big break that never came. Things could have been worse; they were worse, back in Roguecork. They didn't have anything much, but Nathan didn't need much: he had cloths, food, and a place to sleep. He would play outside, go for day long trips in the city, get into fights, steal from candy stores and shopping malls, get caught, and sent back home. His mother didn't care much about what he did: she didn't have the energy. In the winter of 1998, something happened. Nathan doesn't know what, and could never find out. He thinks it had something to do with a private party, a movie filmed as a joke, or maybe something that went too far he didn't know. Hit mother got a large sum of money, but wasn't allowed to perform anymore. No club or studio would touch her, even when she changed her name, and, for the first time since he could remember, dyed her beautiful blond hair. Blackhaired Thelma couldn't get a job, and neither could red-haired Louise. Helena went into depression: money was never what she wanted; it was just a means for an end. She wanted to "be somebody"; and that was taken from her. Forever. Though those two years were hard for Helena, Nathan remembers them fondly: they formed a large part of the man he would later become. He considered the long, quiet, ride from Roguecork to Adelaide as his passage from childhood to the beginning of adolescence. Thinking himself a man, Nathan tried everything he could think of to cheer up his mother. He bought her things, he and his friends performed rap songs and hip-hop dances. He took her to movies and to plays, but those would depress her more. He came back one day, and found the house empty. Helena came back five hours, found him crying and hysterical, but wouldn't say where she was. Nathan started acting out, stealing bigger and bigger things, and both would probably have ended in a sorry state if it wasn't for Officer George. Sergeant George Charles, Officer George to the neighborhood kids, was the cop on the block; he was the fuzz. He was also a very good man, a closeted homosexual, who loved kids but would never have any. Nathan stuck out to him like diamond in a coal factory; he knew the kid was special, and he knew his mother's depression was killing them both. When Nathan stood before a judge who seriously contemplated charging him at age 12 with Grand Theft Auto as an adult, Officer George stepped in. He took Nathan and Helena to the Farm. The Farm, a 350-acre in northern Oregon, was owned by Mathew St. Patrick, a man Officer George knew for many years. Nathan would later learn Mathew was the brother of Peter St. Patrick, George's lover for 6 years who died of AIDS 10 years earlier. Though the two didn't become friends, they were the only family either one of them had. And so, they stayed in touch. Mathew agreed to have Helena and her son with him for the summer, to help around the farm and try and bring a change to their lives. It wasn't Officer George's plan, but Helena and Mathew fell in love. They spent the summer in the Farm, and then stayed. Nathan never went back to LA, and started homeschooling with Mrs. March in the neighboring farm. Next spring, Helena and Mathew were married.

Between the summer of 1999 and the Spring of 2002, Nathan lived in the Farm. Those were the best three years of his life. Officer George would drive up to the Farm most weekends, and spend time with Nathan, teaching him to fish, shoot, play basketball, to love the Lakers and to hate the Suns. Meanwhile, Mathew taught him to cook (something Helena had the technical knowledge of, but not the feeling for), sing, hunt, and fix things. Nathan never met a man with more technical knowledge or a deeper love for fixing things. It was, perhaps, what drew him to Helena. For a time, it seemed like they were doing OK: they had a strange family, but it worked. In April 2001, when Nathan was celebrating his 14th birthday, Helena and Mathew had another celebration: Helena was pregnant. Officer George took a leave of absence and came to help with the Farm, and Nathan exploded with excess energy, running between his mother and the men, torn between wanting to stay by her side and help at the Farm like a grown man. When the sonogram showed it was a girl, Nathan started dreaming about her: a girl with Helena's golden hair and Mathew's green eyes and laugh. He loved her, maybe more than he loved his mother. She was a fresh start. On September, 11th, no one in the St. Patrick household was home. Before dawn, Helena's screams woke up Nathan and Officer George, who drove everyone to the hospital. There, the doctors identified severe internal bleeding, and attempted an emergency C-section. Helena lived, but the baby was lost. A week later, they returned home, but things changed forever. Helena went back to her depression, and Mathew didn't have the energy to raise her from it once more. It was then that Nathan discovered that Mathew lost both brother and wife to wasting diseases: his brother to AIDS, his wife to ovarian cancer. A month after the operation, almost as soon as she was able to walk on her own, Helena was gone. Nathan wouldn't see her again for twenty years. Nathan's life was saved, once again, by Officer George. Mathew wouldn't go out of bad for three days, and seemed intent on starving himself to death. On the third day, Officer George went into Mathew's room and spent four hours screaming at him, cursing him, calling him every damning name he could think of in the English and Gaelic languages. But it was Nathan who took him out of bed. He refused to eat as long as Mathew wasn't eating; Mathew was willing to abandon himself, but not the boy he came to see as his son. Over the next year, those three men slowly rebuilt their lives. In a way, the Baby (Helena had thought of names, but no one dared mention them) was Officer George's as well; he would have been her uncle the same way he was Nathan's. Nathan could cope with losing his mother; he was living without her for long periods in his life before. But perhaps he couldn't have coped with losing another home. When the first 9/11 Memorial Day came, they chose to honor the dead on their own, in a small ceremony where Mathew set aside a plot for wild flowers. Officer George read from Ginsburg, Nathan told them about the Dreaming, where the spirits are eternal and joyous, and Mathew sang of the hills and the dead of the long forgotten homeland of his ancestors. Through the sorrow and grief, they survived, and out of the long winter they emerged, stronger, united as a family again. They dared to be happy. It is a cruel turn of fate, then, that in

June 2002, a lawyer visited the St. Patrick farm. Mr. Postlethwaite, bony, exact, quiet, and always polite, who Nathan hated on first sight, came to the Farm to take Nathan to Amsterdam, via London, England. Confronted with such fierce resistance, he was apologetic; but he nevertheless had every intention of completing his mission. He was loyal to a fault, an attribute inspired in all his men by Generaal-majoor Pieter van Dakker of the Koninklijke Luchtmacht, the Royal Netherlands Air Force; Nathan's grandfather. Though Helena and Mathew were married, the State of Oregon doesn't grant automatic guardianship in case both parents are alive when the marriage takes place. Since Helena never claimed Nathan's father was dead, Mathew had to adopt him, which he never did. It honestly never occurred to any of them to wander about Helena's family: she never spoke of them, and acted as though they were dead. The General was a grey, grim, quiet man, who demanded obedience and afforded no forgiveness. He treated Helena as though she was dead, and would probably have continued to do so, had Helena not contacted her mother, Sophia van Dakker, ne Spinoza. Not surprisingly, Helena wanted money, which Sophia would have provided; however, the terms of their divorce, draconian and in favor of the General, just like their marriage, required Sophia to report her spending to the family lawyer. Mr. Postlethwaite (Nathan called him Mr. PastelWhite, to be annoying; his habit of distorting people's names comes from this period of his life) reported the unusual large sum to the General, who demanded explanation. When one was provided to him, he asked Mr. Postlethwaite to find out what his daughter was up to in the decades since he saw her last. When he found out he had a grandson, he sent his lawyer to get him. Nathan is certain the question of whether or not it would be a good move for Nathan himself never crossed the General's mind: Nathan was his issue, and therefore, his responsibility. He wasn't able to leave his care to strangers anymore than he was able to fly, stop breathing, or leave the house unshaved. Mathew and Officer George fought the warrant Mr. Pastel-White brought with him from Salem, the state capitol, with everything they had, but they eventually lost. The conclusion was forgone: the General had money, political connections and, though unusually for him, the law on his side. Nathan wasn't Mathew's son, no matter what the heart and soul said. Blood won. Mr. Pastel-White took Nathan to London, where he met Sophia Spinoza, his grandmother. The name "granny" was strange for them both, so he took to calling her Sophia, and when he was taller than she, Sophie. Sophie registered him in St. Paul's, the most prestigious school in London, where he studied with the sons of sheiks, ambassadors, generals, and business tycoons. His natural gift for languages, and his habit to fight dirty and bite, helped him manage, and he excelled in school, at least in sports, Latin and mathematics. When it came to history, Nathan tended to treat the subject matter as just another story: he didnt care much for dates or names; he cared about the soul of the narrative, and wouldn't believe books or his tutors over his own imagination. At first, Mathew and Nathan kept in touch. But the distance was great, and Nathan, though he loved Mathew dearly, was young. Young people forget. When the first Memorial Day came,

Sophia quietly paid for Mathew's visit to London. When the second Memorial Day came, they had a long phone conversation. On the third Memorial Day, Nathan wasn't home; he forgot Mathew was going to call. In the summer of 2003, Nathan visited his grandfather, the General. The two instantly disliked each other, but the General insisted that Nathan spend two full months with him. As Nathan would discover, the General always got his way. Food was to be eaten during regular dinners only and so the pantry was locked with a lock Nathan, with all his expertise, never managed to open. Rudeness to guests was followed by locking the library from him (the General discovered Nathan could read in English, Chinese, French and Latin, and that he fell in love with his vast collection of first editions and rare volumes). The General never raised his hand or his voice; but he could pin Nathan to the wall with a stare. To this day, he is the only man Nathan is genuinely afraid of. Nathan graduated from St. Paul's in 2006; he would spend those years in constant travel and education: his grandmother took him to the best museums, concert halls, and palaces of Europe: they visited Edinburgh, Dublin, Paris and Berlin. His Grandfather took him to Bonn, Brussels, The Hague, and Warsaw. They didn't visit museums or concert halls; they met with retired diplomats, with old spies, with NATO officials and Russian generals. During Nathan and Sophie's visit to Paris in honor of his 17 th birthday, Nathan learned that Officer George was killed on the line duty. When summer came, he begged his grandfather to allow him to go back home to Oregon to see Mathew for Memorial Day. The General allowed for one week, as part of their trip to Washington, his gift for graduation. Nathan spent a few days with Mathew before cutting the trip short and returning to the General sooner than expected. He found only shadows and echoes where his love for Mathew used to be; the whitehaired broken man he saw in Oregon seemed like a distant relative to the man who taught him how to fix engines. Children sometimes grow up too quickly out of their parents' reach, and Mathew couldn't keep up. That visit severed Nathan's last connection to his old life. If he planned before on finding his mother or what happened to her, he didn't anymore. During all their time together, Nathan never asked Sophie if she was in touch with her daughter, and neither she nor the General ever mentioned Helena. When the light touched Nathan's hair from behind, turning it into the glorious gold of his mother, Sophie would sometimes get a sad, longing look, what Nathan called "your memory eyes", the same look she would get when she spoke of her family. The Spinoza family was one of the oldest Sephardic families in Amsterdam. They were rich merchants in Portugal before they were exiled, and they were rich merchants in Amsterdam. They loaned to princes and kings, they insured expeditions to the Far East, the Americas, and even Australia. They built a synagogue in Zephath, where a man prays for their souls every morning, even today. When the Nazis came, they thought they could buy their freedom just like they bought it from every other tyrant for the last 500 years. "We never knew such hate for us, for our very essence and being" said Sophie, with her deep, dark, memory eyes "what could we have done to them, that they hated us so?"

Sophie had four living grandparents, six aunts and three uncles when the Nazis came. When Ohrdruf was liberated, she was the only one of her family who survived. Mr. Pastel-White's father, the old Pastel-White, spent 30 years in court before he managed to retrieve the last of the family's fortune for her. Nathan, who always assumed the General was the one with money, was shocked to discover his grandmother was one of the wealthiest Jews in the Netherlands. It was a different time when they met, and the General took command of her finances as he did of everything, and everyone, else. Sophie met the General when he was a young cadet, working as volunteer in a field hospital for former POWs and Jewish prisoners in Belgium. She said he brought her fresh flowers every day, and complimented her eyes. Nathan couldn't imagine how the cold stone-faced man he knew could capture the heart of the lovely little lady he slowly learned to love and revere. But in 1946 they were married, and moved to South Africa. The General was a descendant of one the earliest Dutch colonizers of South Africa, and had a great love for his homeland; but he was also loyal to the British Crown, and disliked what he saw as the insidious independence of the National Party, early supporters of the Nazis. While he didn't agree with the policies of the National Party, when they came to power in 1948 it didn't stop him from joining the Air Force and doing well. Investing Sophie's money, and his own, in early land development deals, the General was building a small fortune to his name. In 1961, South Africa left the Commonwealth, and became an independent republic. The General left with his wife to London, where they bought a house, and the General joined NATO, accepting a rank in the RAF. Sometime during this, he was able to issue a Dutch passport, allowing him to join the Koninklijke Luchtmacht when he and Sophie were divorced, in 1975. It seemed he was always moving up and ahead, leaving behind anything that might create drag: wife, daughter, loyalties, country. All this Nathan learned later; he gathered bits and pieces from Sophie, and from his rare conversations with Mr. Pastel-White. Some things he was able to learn from the General's file, made public against in wishes by the Public Information Act of 2001. Others he discovered on his own. He was a spy, a mole inside his own family. He found his mother's old school records in the attic one day, and a whole trove of information was opened to him: pictures, diaries, letters he learned she had a pen-pal in New York, who became her boyfriend for one joyous summer when she was 16, and that he was much older; the General had him deported. He learned she always wanted to be an actress, and that her middle name was Rachel, after her maternal grandmother. He learned she left the University of Berlin after two years because she was pregnant. He didn't learn from whom, or why she left for New York, since her old pen-pal was married by then, and living in Arizona. Mr. Pastel-White hinted several times he could track her down for Nathan, if he wanted him to, but Nathan never asked. After his graduation Sophie wanted Nathan to take a year and travel before going to the university; he easily got accepted to both Oxford and Cambridge. But the General wanted Nathan to join the RAF, and the General always got what he wanted. Nathan took to flying like dogs to running or monkeys to climbing trees. He took a savage joy from harnessing enormous amounts of energy, unimaginable only a few short decades before, to be his own personal fiery chariot. When he flew, he could see why people imagined places

like the Dreaming or the Celestial Kingdom the world was too vast, too powerful, for just men alone; behind the clouds, they had to see the face of God. Flying jets was almost a mystical experience for Nathan, and he was a great success at it. Then war came. For some people, it might seem weird that a man, who grew up around career soldiers and joined the RAF almost as soon as he was able to, would be averse to killing. One must remember, however, that career soldiers always prefer peace. They are the first to kill and the first to die, two activities which are wholly objectionable and abhorrent. Only monsters enjoy killing, and they soon find themselves out of the modern army and in other, darker, lines of work. Nathan didn't enjoy the messy topic of death, but he was good at it. He flew 20 combat missions before the war was over, and was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross for his "acts of gallantry and valor, above and beyond the call of duty". He sent it to Sophie, who kept it in a drawer with his old football shoes and swimming trophies. Peace brought boredom. The General suggested the new NATO, but Nathan had enough of armies and war. He wanted to see the world, his world, the one he helped defend. He travelled to Israel, to Turkey, to South Africa, to Portugal, and New York. He studied, spending a semester here or there, never spending more than two months in one place. He was hungry to know more, to understand why the things that happened to his world happened: the mysteries of his family and the mysteries of his world were the same. The Last Man of Munich was death, who took Sophie's family, who took Mathew's first wife, who took his sister and Officer George. There were forces, faces behind the clouds, who claimed they knew everything, but their eyes were mirrors and their hearts empty. Nathan knew he was lost, stranded in the ocean without a map, with no heading or safe harbor in sight, and no idea what to do. His trip came to sudden stop when Pastel-White Junior found him, kicking back in Puerto Rico: his grandmother was sick. Cancer. Lymphoma. She had months, maybe less. Come home. Back in London, Nathan found Sophie somehow smaller than before, her skin transparent, her black, luminous eyes as big as saucers in her shrunken face. She still laughed, though, and would force him to rent a different movie every night and sit with her, though she would be asleep usually during the first ten minutes (and would be cross with him if he dared not pretend she watched it with him to the end). They sat together in a giant house filled with things, paintings, statues, mementos; he read to her, and saw her giving away a small fortune in donations and gifts, to schools, hospitals, museums. She was the last Spinoza, she knew; she was terrified that when she'd be gone, so would the memories of the people who built this great fortune: centuries of wise Jews, their hands soft and smooth, their beards well trimmed, eyes hidden behind glasses and souls behind tradition and fear, who erected huge walls of wealth, proved as solid as cobwebs when the Penzers came. The General moved his offices and affairs to London. He didn't stay with Sophie, preferring the comforts of the City, but he wasn't a stranger. He visited a few times a week, and his secretary made an appointed for a lunch at least once every weekday and every Saturday. He always asked how she was, and she always said "fine", but he didn't ask for the details, and she didn't provide them. A different man, standing in the General's shoes, so formal with his dying wife,

even if they were separated for 40 years, would get his teeth broken. But Nathan still feared the General, and said nothing. On Memorial Day, his mother came. They were sitting outside on the back balcony, Sophie cocooned in a soft down blanket, gazing at the Themes and laughing at Nathan scathing critique of last night's trashy romantic comedy when Nathan saw an old woman walk up the gravel path around the house. He didn't recognize her at first; he was sure she was a friend of Sophie's, or someone from the British Museum, coming to see if Sophie would finally give up that Trojan Mask they so desperately wanted to buy; but the sun was setting and her rays hit her hair from behind, and Nathan couldn't stop the memories from coming. Sophie, it seemed, invited Helena the same time she invited him; but Helena waited. They spoke little. Sophie hoped her death would bring some peace to her family, but she was wrong in even thinking the war was still raging. The General lost his daughter the day she defied him and stepped on the boat, and she dared not see him, not knowing if she feared his rage or his indifference more. It was his specter that kept her away for so long. As for Nathan, he barely recognized her. When he told her Mathew died, she didn't know at first who he was referring to. He realized somewhere between boat and ocean, he lost his mother a very long time ago. Maybe it was when she let Alfred hit him; maybe when he grew up alone in LA, or maybe when she left the Farm. He didn't know, then, and still doesn't. Some people stay connected to their mothers, through everything; Sophie saw her mother's eyes in hers every time she looked in the mirror, and he was sure she never stopped thinking of Helena and wishing well for her, no matter how long they were apart, or how pragmatic their relationship became. But he couldn't find that longing inside him; maybe he didn't have that need anymore, or it was filled with something else: Sophie, perhaps, or flying. In the winter of 2021, Sophia van Dakker (the General insisted) was buried in Greenwich Cemetery, with around a hundred people in attendance. The General went back to Amsterdam, and Nathan and Helena went back to the house, which Sophie left to the both of them. Bothered again, either by the looming threat of boredom, or the constant irritation of Sophie's ghost and his mother's presence, Nathan chose to leave. The old woman who once gave birth to him did not object. They stayed in touch; she would call on his birthday and he on hers. They got together once, when he happened to be on assignment in Manchester around November, and he stayed in the house for the holidays. They wrote to each other, rarely, every few months. In short, they went about the business of notifying each other that they were alive, still, somewhere in the world, each dreading the emptiness on the day when that would change. Finding work, as a free-lance operative, wasn't difficult for Nathan; through the General he had connections in the military of most countries, army intelligence agencies and civilian intelligence gathering agencies in the free world; through Sophie he knew most of the Art world, mostly the archaeological departments, which suited his nosy nature. Here was a man fluent in many languages and many foreign costumes that travelled light and without much fuss, who for a modest fee would negotiate the transport of goods, information, and people, from one place to another. Over the years, he owned several small planes and boats, losing

them to accidents, corrupted (or honest) officials, and two fires, and he found in himself enormous capacities for survival. He looked at it as luck, sometimes, or as sheer unwillingness to surrender and let the other side win, a trait he would probably attribute to the General were he more honest about it. Somewhere, or so his theory claims, the truth lies; and ingenuity, courage, and persistence would be able to unearth it. The irony in that he never once dug in his own past, choosing instead to dig in everybody else's, is lost on him. When on a mission, he could be single-minded to a fault, allowing himself to completely lose all sense of boundary and measure when on leave which happens whenever he is not on a mission. On April 1st, 2024, when he was 37 (an auspicious occasion), Nathan accepted an assignment: on behalf of a bespectacled gentlemen from the CIA, he was to liberate a certain file concerning certain reverse genetic engineering procedures from a secret government lab on New Atlantis. Nathan, with his usual laissez faire attitude towards "planning ahead", broke in, and was immediately caught. The choice presented before him was simple: he could join Encounter Cuckoo, the secret government agency (an actual agency, which had nothing to do with the other secret government agency his handler thought he was breaking into, which isn't), or be executed on charges of espionage. Without skipping a beat, Nathan signed up. Though he would never admit it, Nathan had enormous fun. Time and again, Battlegroup Shadow forced him to improvise, adept, and survive; he learned more about himself and his world than he did in the previous 10 years. He was, once again, on his own, though now the whole world replaced the streets of Adelaide and LA. While living in the present, Nathan always has one eye on the horizon: he knows there are secrets underground, some his, and some belonging to others. He knows there are forces trying to pull the wool over his eyes, and he is determined not to let them. He believes in the old adage the General always lived by: that under sea-level, strong and invisible currents are pulling, and if you disregard them for a second, they would tear you to shreds.