Leaving Salt Lake City

by Matthew Timion

  The only people “allowed” to talk about the stillbirths in her family were her brother and sister-in-law who also had two stillborn babies, approximately six and nine months along as well. It appeared to me that there might be a genetic issue with her family, and this would easily explain why we were having such a difficult time conceiving. I knew it couldn’t have been me, because my brother is so virile he could get women pregnant by shaking their hands. So we kept trying, but we also looked for a backup plan.

  After hearing a segment on the radio called “Wednesday’s Child,” a segment where they feature a foster child once a week, Jessica came home with an idea. We were going to become foster parents and adopt a child. The more I thought about it, the more I liked the idea.

  We wanted a child, and we lived our lives in a socially responsible manner. Adopting helped us build a family, and it reflected our values. It was exactly what Don Quixote would have done. He would have rescued and helped children who needed a home. We began researching and quickly registered to take the classes needed to be licensed foster parents. This process involved completing a background check, drug test, and a home visit (called a “home study”) where the state not only would inspect the safety of our home but also interview us to obtain a mini-biography.

  The foster training was complete and the home study was upon us. We sat with the interviewer in our living room waiting for the questions to begin. The interviewer wasted no time, pulled out her notebook, and began.

  “Have you ever done drugs?” was the first question proposed.

  “Yes, but years ago, and just pot,” was my honest answer. I had the feeling the questions being asked by the interviewer were routine questions.

  When the same question was asked of Jessica, her answer baffled me. I just had admitted freely that yes, when I was a teenager I had smoked pot. My admission should have been no more shocking than a young man admitting he had once looked at Playboy magazines.

  “What about you Jessica? Have you ever done drugs?”

  “Nope,” she said.

  I distinctly remembered Jessica calling me when I was still in California. She was scared because she had smoked pot that night. The military does random drug tests and if you “piss hot” (test positive) you were immediately kicked out of the military. She was scared for her job. I also heard numerous stories about her life as a rebellious teenager where she would have wild parties in her house when her father was away for work. These parties involved sex and, you guessed it, drugs. Why did she feel the need to lie about it all? It wasn’t like she was still the same person that she had been years before. I was convinced she was either nervous or always afraid anything she said would go on record and could somehow come back to hurt her with her job in the military. She was playing it safe. That had to be it.

  After a barrage of questions, we both concluded that the home study went well, even though they never went through the checklist to ensure we had everything done properly. They didn’t ask to see where we kept alcohol and cleaning supplies to ensure that they were in a locking cabinet. The interviewer didn’t ask to see the fire extinguisher in the kitchen and the fire extinguishers in each car. We were not ask to show how we childproofed the doors and the cabinets. I felt like a kid who had just made a masterpiece with my play-doh only to show a parent who clearly didn’t care. I wanted to show off! The interviewer really wanted to ask us about drugs, previous marriages, and why we wanted to foster a child.

  Being married opened the door for us to foster a child. In Utah at the time there was a law that said one could not foster children if he or she had other adults in their home that were not part of the immediate family (unless they were married to that person). This law was just the Utah State Legislature’s way of preventing gay couples from fostering children; everyone I talked with at the Utah Foster Agency confirmed so. Another by-product of this law passed by the 80% Mormon legislature was that live-in straight couples couldn’t foster children either. The only people who could foster kids in Utah had to be straight and married or single and living alone. This was just one more way morality was legislated in the Beehive State.

  We awaited our response from the state, checking our mail box every day. By this time it had been almost a year since our wedding and the idea of a family was something we both wanted. We had both worked hard towards our shared dream of a family. It was though the results of a lifetime of planning and heartfelt emotion was finally taking place. Everything seemed to be finally looking up. Our mistakes from the past were forgotten. We were living in the moment. One day while checking the mail, Jessica came into the house looking as white as a ghost. Was it the response we were waiting for from the state? Could we be foster parents? Perhaps they rejected us. What was it?

  “It’s the CIA." She spit out the words like they were poison.

  “The CIA?" I was certain I misunderstood her.

  “Yeah, they want me to work for them again." Her statement was so matter of fact I was thrown completely off guard.

  “What?" Seriously, what?

  “They sent me a letter, written in a way that only I would be able to understand. You wouldn’t have even known it was from them.”

  “So they sent you an encoded message in a letter telling you they want you to be a CIA agent?”

  “Yes. It’s something I used to do.”

  “What?”

  | TWELVE |

  My Wife the Spy

  Late Summer 2006

  I should have seen this coming. She had been dropping hints about her “other job” for years. Truthfully, I don’t come from a military family. I don’t understand how the military really works. In my mind members of the military go to boot camp, shoot at the enemy, and then get to wear camouflage. Due to my admitted ignorance of the workings of the military, Jessica was my guide and my teacher into this unfamiliar American subculture.

  She had told stories for a while, all small stories, about her experiences in the military. She was a member of an intelligence squadron in the Air Force before her and I met. Their job was to fly in planes and eavesdrop on people’s phone calls, radio signals, etc. They gathered intelligence. I knew for a fact that she was a part of that elite military unit because I met a number of her coworkers who were still a part of her former job.

  Jessica eventually left her job in intelligence because she was sick of traveling ten months a year for work. She also let slip once that she shot a man while on a work trip in Colombia. Her racially ambiguous features and fluency in Spanish made her a perfect candidate for her covert operations.

  She recounted while in Colombia she was undercover and a suspect started to run. Pulling out her 9mm pistol, she shot the runaway suspect in the leg. Her accuracy in shooting was no surprise to me since she had described her recent munitions requalification for her Air Force job. During her test, she showed off by shooting a heart in the target. Her boss was so impressed with her she was asked to join the Air Force shooting team. She declined.

  I didn’t doubt her past. It kind of all fit together, and besides, when your wife tells you that in the past she worked for the CIA doing clandestine missions, it’s kind of cool. We had been watching the television show Alias and she told me that it was the most realistic version of how the CIA really operates. I wondered how she knew, but after learning about her past, I understood.

  Her revelation to me also answered another question I had concerning a story she told me. She never gave me details but she said once she was on a work trip (“work trip” means an undercover operation) in Miami. While on this trip to Miami she saw her brother, who was also on a “work trip." “It’s something we don’t talk about Matt, but my entire family is involved in the intelligence community." She told me under an oath of secrecy that her brother and her father were also CIA agents. Her father was so high up in the ranks that he had as much influence as a United States Senator.

  She told me one story, straight out of Meet the Parents, where she overheard her father tal
king on the phone in some Asian language. “I am certain he speaks five or six languages, but he won’t admit it." His job as a currency broker for the Mormon Church was apparently just a cover job that allowed him to travel the world and do his real job. Her brother was the same way. His frequent business trip to Miami had nothing to do with work. He was clearly involved in something bigger.

  I was floored.

  I looked at her with a new sense of awe. She had done something dangerous and fascinating. My new family was also involved. I was told that if I ever discussed what she had told me we could be arrested. The only reason she was telling me this other side of her was because I was her husband, and I needed to know so I wouldn’t worry. It all made perfect sense.

  If anyone else had told me this exact same story I would have called them a liar, but knowing her and remembering the stories she told before clamming up (realizing she had said too much) it kind of all fit together. I had become part of a spy family, and my wife chose to disregard espionage for a chance to have a family with me. I had never felt as important as I did at that moment.

  We shared conversations about her history for a while. Apparently she was on the ground during George W. Bush’s infamous “Shock and Awe." She was on the ground collecting intelligence to relay it back to the bombers. Her father apparently had so much money and influence that just being related to him would make our lives dramatically easier. Jessica worked for six months on Capitol Hill and almost every senator she met had asked if she was related to her father. It was like I was married to some underground secret royalty.

  Finally getting to know the real Jessica also put her martial arts training into perspective. I remembered her stories of being a professional fighter and having a third degree black belt in Brazilian Ju-Jitsu. A skilled and trained CIA agent would naturally have extensive martial arts training. A government operative would have spent six months learning Greco-Roman takedowns, as she later told me. It was like she had been giving me pieces of who she really was for so long, and now, finally, I could put the pieces together.

  I suddenly realized this new information explained why she had lied to the foster agency about her teenage drug use. Of course she would lie about that. Of course the CIA would have access to that information. She was intentionally avoiding having that information recorded anywhere. The CIA could never know she smoked pot, no matter how long ago it happened. Knowledge of her past transgressions would affect her, her brother, and her father. The much larger picture of who she was became crystal clear.

  I will admit that I felt rather clueless around her again. She had had all of these experiences. She had seen and done so many things. I left Mormonism, and she was there to show me how the

  real world worked. She did. She showed me that there is secrecy and espionage. Her life and presence showed me just how grand the world was and how it, together, built a bigger picture. It was a beautiful picture, one I was thrilled to be a part of. Especially with her.

  | THIRTEEN |

  Harassment

  Summer 2006

  Armed with this new knowledge, my enthusiasm for being with Jessica magnified. Being fun and beautiful was one thing. Knowing she was trained in intelligence operations, however, made it easy to follow her lead on life’s adventures. Perhaps she would rub off on me? In following her lead, we began harassing people on the Internet again. This time we had a new accomplice: Vince,our strikingly attractive friend from out of town. The new target was a man named Chris, who was raised in a fundamentalist polygamist offshoot of the Mormon church. Chris had numerous mothers all married to his father. In some ways this made him an easy target.

  Chris’s unique upbringing set him apart from the rest of the former Mormons, making him the only resource we had if we wanted to ask a question about polygamy. What made him frustrating, however, was his insistence that he was a philosopher. He would post on the Internet long drawn out philosophical tomes about the most random things. He also once confessed to me that he had a fetish for hairy women, information I had a difficult time keeping to myself, especially during heated Internet “debates.”

  The formula for our harassment went like this: Chris would post some philosophical rant about some topic reminiscent of something a stoned hippie might say. Promptly Vince, Jessica, and myself would read his posts, find a few things he said incorrectly or misstated, and then proceed to tell him why he was wrong. Chris would then have a meltdown for all of us to see. Personal attacks would go back and forth and then the three of us would laugh and give each other high fives. We thought we were the funniest people in the world. Some people loved us for it, others hated us. After all, Chris was just trying to share something beautiful. Why did we need to tear him down? I can admit I did it simply to receive validation from Jessica and Vince. I was no different than the scrawny kid who pushes the other kid off of the slide in order to win favor with the cool crowd.

  Months later Chris was in a car accident and suffered brain damage. He kept posting and Vince kept baiting him. It was sad; Chris’s brain damage made his long rants completely incomprehensible, even more than before. Chris’s accident eventually resulted in his wife kicking him out, and Chris was sometimes seen on the street, homeless. The thought of a homeless, brain damaged Chris posting on the Internet from a public library was enough to make me back off. Vince and Jessica did not share my sympathy though. To them nothing was sacred and sometimes the easiest target was the damaged one.

  ***

  Getting sucked into Jessica’s world was often times exhilarating and frightening at the same time. We did things that should have ended numerous relationships. Why was it so easy to do these things with her? I am certain that there was an issue with impulse control on her part. She was doing stuff that we all want to do but restrained ourselves from doing. Clearly there was an issue with impulse control on my part too. Why wouldn’t I just stand up to my wife and tell her she was being cruel? Well, telling someone you love them is always so much easier than telling someone they are behaving like a douchebag. And people you call douchebags usually won’t have sex with you.

  Jessica was my wife and my soulmate. I trusted her without question. She trusted me without question. We did not have to worry about infidelities, lies, distortions, or the need to fact check each other in our marriage. I had had enough of that the year before with the whole Bryce incident. When she told me that she was in the CIA previously I believed her. Why would she lie? She probably could have told me anything, any story, and I would have believed it. I refused to live a life with her riddled with doubt or distrust. Dishonesty and distrust had no place in our marriage. Our perfect marriage was filled with hopes, dreams, and endless possibilities.

  ***

  A few weeks after Jessica had told me of her CIA background, we heard from the Utah Foster Agency. They told us we were indeed approved to be foster parents. The news was fantastic. It was even slightly more exciting than hearing my wife was a former spy. I was going to be a father, and I was elated.

  When I was a child, I was asked what I wanted to be when I grew up. They were expecting an answer like “astronaut” or “fireman." I always replied, “I want to be a father." This had a lot to do with my alcoholic father, who I know loved me, but was always emotionally distant. He said he would put the energy into getting to know my brother and me when we were teenagers. According to my father, the teenage years were when children needed their fathers the most. Unfortunately this never happened as my father died when I was sixteen. My wildest dreams have never been about fame and fortune, but rather about being a father. Our attempts to have our own baby were not working and fostering with the intent to adopt made perfect sense.

  By this point Jessica had stopped harassing homeless Chris and turned her attention to an online community where a number of Mormon housewives would gather and post pictures of their biblically named animals and discuss quilting and cake recipes. She took on a new alter-ego to gain their trust and then started questioning the
Mormon Church’s teachings. She wanted to make her character’s loss of faith seem legitimate so she could see how many other people she could make question their own religion.

  Jessica tried to convert people away from Mormonism under her new alter-ego, but it was ultimately fruitless.

  While busy harassing people online and waiting for a possible placement from the state’s foster agency, it was time for the annual ex-Mormon Conference again. It was the middle of October 2006, and friends of ours from all over the country were coming into town to listen to other former Mormons talk about why Mormonism is a farce. This is not unlike the time Jessica and I attended a local Atheist meetup. The Atheist meetup went like this: We all met at the Sizzler in a back room. Someone got up and told us the happenings of the National Atheist Conference. They then literally passed around a collection plate. We watched Guns, Germs, and Steel, and then someone else got up to talk about why religion is stupid. It was as if we were in an Atheist Church (complete with a collection plate). At least at this church I was allowed to eat lobster.

  The ex-Mormon Conference happened once a year, usually scheduled near the same time as the Mormon Church’s semi-annual “General Conference." While the content of the two are vastly different, they otherwise mirror each other. The General Conference is where Mormon leaders talk to the entire church body. They discuss spirituality, lifestyle choices, and try to instill a faith promoting message in their flock. The ex-Mormon Conference (run by the ex-Mormon Foundation) is where people who are all former Mormons gather and listen to authors, celebrities (Tal Bachman, a former Mormon, was a keynote speaker a few years back), journalists, and otherwise inspiring people who will inspire you to dislike Mormonism. Their goal is also to uplift, but to uplift disbelief. They would discuss their personal experiences leaving Mormonism, have entire lectures about the absurdity of the Book of Mormon being factual (backed up with historical evidence and science), discuss the possible secret political agenda of the Mormon Church and other topics against the Mormons Church.