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" *****       &amp;quot;My Father, the Spy,&amp;quot; by John H. Richardson, read aloud by the author.   Click the link above to hear the story.     Click here to view Esquire&amp;#039;s archive of stories on iTunes.    ***** This story originally appeared in the March 1999 issue of Esquire. Mom calls. Dad is in the hospital, on oxygen. It&amp;#039;s his heart. I fly down. They live in Mexico in a big adobe house with cool tile floors and high ceilings. Servants move quietly through the rooms. Mom greets me at the door, telling me through tears that she found him last night flopped across the bed with his legs hanging off the edge. He couldn&amp;#039;t lift his feet onto the bed, so he just lay there like flotsam for an hour before he started calling for help. When she finally woke up, he apologized for bothering her. Then I laugh, and she smiles through her tears, because it&amp;#039;s just so Dad. He&amp;#039;s always so polite, so maddeningly self-denying. Sometimes my mom cries out: &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t ask me what I want! Just tell me what you want!&amp;quot;  I go into his room, and his face is puffy and red, and he looks so very weak. With his dentures out and his head back, he looks like a cartoon of an old codger, lips sucked back over his gums and grizzled chin jutting out. One yellowed tooth stands out in the black hole of his mouth. He&amp;#039;s like an apple that&amp;#039;s been sitting on a shelf for months, all dried out and sucked down into itself. But when he sees me standing  there, his face brightens. He&amp;#039;s so grateful to see me, so relieved--and he immediately starts worrying that I&amp;#039;ve abandoned my important professional responsibilities to come. A few minutes later, he gets up to go to the bathroom. I&amp;#039;ve seen him hobbling around the house for years now, and I&amp;#039;m used to frail--he&amp;#039;s been juggling congestive heart failure, osteoporosis, cirrhosis, and about a half dozen other major illnesses for almost a decade. But now, the nurse takes one arm, and I take the other, and he leans over so far he&amp;#039;s actually hanging by his arms, chest nearly parallel to the floor. He goes three steps and pauses, rests against the bureau, then takes five more steps and rests again. Glancing sideways, I see gray in his cheeks, a whitish gray like dirty marble.  He makes us wait outside the bathroom. He won&amp;#039;t be helped in there. So we stand right outside the door, and when the toilet flushes I peek in and see him shuffle to the sink. He&amp;#039;s wearing blue pajamas with a tissue folded into the breast pocket like a pocket square. He leans down with his elbows hard against the yellow tiles and washes his hands. On his way out, he stops to put the toilet seat down. My father was a spy, a high-ranking member of the CIA, one of those idealistic men who came out of World War II determined to save the world from tyranny. Like so many of his colleagues, he ended up bitter at a world that mocked and frustrated and finally vilified him. His bitterness was the mystery of my childhood, turning me stubborn and defiant. Like most sons of unhappy fathers, I had a hole inside me cut to the shape of his sadness, a hole I tried to fill in all the usual ways and never did, because happiness would be too much of a betrayal. My miseries were a tribute to his own--a fucked-up gesture of fucked-up solidarity. So I was always leaving home and coming back and leaving again and coming back again, and often on these visits I would interview him, trying to bridge the gulf between us in the only way I knew. But whenever I pulled out my tape recorder, he would remind me that he had taken an oath of silence. That was always the first thing he said: &amp;quot;You know, son, I took an oath of silence.&amp;quot; In bed at night, he&amp;#039;s wheezing and gasping so hard I think he&amp;#039;s going to die with each breath. But he goes on as always, worrying about Mom and whether she&amp;#039;s adequately covered by insurance and his pension, ground we&amp;#039;ve been over a million times before. He gives me advice on renting the house out af-ter he dies. He philosophizes for my benefit, as he has all his long life.  &amp;quot;Accidents play such a large part in our lives,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t mean accident like car accidents. If it hadn&amp;#039;t been for the war, I would have had a very different life.&amp;quot; I&amp;#039;ve heard this a million times before. Then he asks me if the doctor thinks this &amp;quot;slump&amp;quot; will get better. In my family we tell the truth, always have, sometimes more than we should, so I say I don&amp;#039;t think it will. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s always a chance, but I don&amp;#039;t think so.&amp;quot; He seems relieved at that, seems to relax. Behind his breath, there&amp;#039;s a rattle deep in his throat or deeper. This life began eighty-four years ago in Burma. His father was a wildcat oil engineer from Louisiana (a proud man&amp;#039;s way of saying he learned his trade on the job), and his mother was a tough Texas farm girl named Annie Strelsky--Dad never knew if she was Jewish or Polish or Russian and always told me it didn&amp;#039;t matter because we were Americans. After the Burma oil boom ended, they moved to Whittier, California, a Quaker town surrounded by orange and lemon groves. Richard Nixon was one class ahead of my dad all through high school and college. Although Dad&amp;#039;s parents seem to have been freethinkers--his father was a Freemason and fumed around the house about the night riders who attacked blacks moving into the area--Dad became pious at a young age, teaching Sunday school at a Baptist church. He studied Greek and Latin and by high school graduation could read Cicero in the original. At fourteen, he saw his father die, and he would remember until the day of his own death the sound of his father&amp;#039;s last cry and the sight of his body giving one last jerk on the bed. Around that time, he discovered Will Durant&amp;#039;s books on philosophy and plunged into study so deeply that within a few years, he suffered some kind of library-induced nervous breakdown and lost his faith in God.  So he transferred from Whittier to Berkeley and the Romantic poets--his letters home mention Pater, Shelley, Keats, Byron, Wordsworth, and Swinburne. He began wearing a &amp;quot;flowing, multicolored tie.&amp;quot; He tried to join the Communist party, but they wouldn&amp;#039;t have him. He swore to live the life of the mind at whatever cost. &amp;quot;Most of us are satisfied with too little,&amp;quot; he wrote a friend, &amp;quot;and we never live even though we think that we do. We&amp;#039;re pygmies, we&amp;#039;re all the hateful, disgusting things that Swift said that we were, and the damnable thing about it all is that we seem complacently, oily content about the whole matter. By the Lord I&amp;#039;ll escape this pygmy state if I have to spend the rest of my life doing it!&amp;quot;  After finishing his degree, he went to Paris, where he studied at the Sorbonne and earned pocket money by cataloging the pornography library of a wealthy French homosexual. After a year of that, he bicycled around Ireland and moved to Germany to study at the University of Heidelberg, where he lived in a ka-meradschaft house with a group of athletic young men who tried to pump him with the glories of national socialism. From his letters home, I get the impression that he was attracted by their health and vigor, but then he saw Hitler speak and was so disturbed, he went back home to study sociology. As he told me years later, he felt that literature hadn&amp;#039;t given him &amp;quot;the vocabulary&amp;quot; to argue with those vigorous young Germans. But then his younger brother died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound that was or was not suicide--Dad always believed it was--and Dad drifted through a teaching certificate and a year as an English teacher before moving to the University of Chicago to work on a Ph.D. in anthropology. When the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, he tried to sign up right away, but his glasses got him listed 4F. In 1943, his mother died of cancer in his arms and the Army noticed he spoke French and German and asked if he&amp;#039;d mind &amp;quot;wandering the battlefields at night taking papers off of corpses&amp;quot;--which is when he began the long transformation from that romantic young boy in the flowing tie to the complicated and difficult and decent and cruel and tender man I knew as my father. This afternoon, Dad&amp;#039;s pulse goes down to 50 (from 80), and he gasps down lungfuls of air with his head back and lips wide apart, like someone getting mouth-to-mouth. He starts complaining about pain in his chest and pain in his right arm, and then his face seems to slacken into a death mask, his lower lip retracting over his gums almost to the back of his tongue. The nurse shows me the pulse on the chart and goes to call the doctor. Then my sister and the nurse and I all sit around him, stroking him--something we learned from the nurse, a squat young woman whose inward calm is very soothing to us all. At first, I felt awkward about it, stroking his arm for a long time before I got up the nerve to take his hand. I can tell my sister, Jennifer, feels awkward about touching him, too. We are the kind of family that never touched until we said goodbye and then gave each other a hard and awkward hug. Later, when Jennifer leaves and we are alone in the room, he apologizes. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sorry this is taking so long.&amp;quot; We did not get along when I was a kid. He was distant and preoccupied, and I was (I am told) a natural-born smart-ass. By the time I turned fourteen, I was sneaking out to take drugs, shoplift, and commit acts of petty vandalism, which on at least one occasion prompted the intervention of the local constabulary. That was also the summer he told me he worked for the CIA, but I can&amp;#039;t claim high political motives for my rebellion. The only possible connection is that in 1968 he was the kind of guy who would work for the CIA and I was the kind of guy who wanted to drop acid and listen to the White Album over and over. That summer, we moved to Korea, where he brooded on the world&amp;#039;s most rig-id totalitarian state (just twenty-six miles north of our house!) and I dated Korean bar girls and smoked bushels of dope. Military intelligence officers wrote reports on my activities and sent them to my father, who gave me lectures on being a &amp;quot;representative of my country.&amp;quot; Which seemed rather comical to me, since all my fellow representatives were just as whacked as I was; my friend Adrienne had a habit of carving her arm with a razor, Karen was dabbling in heroin, and Peter dropped out of high school and into a reefer haze. So I would bait my father at dinner by defending communism--all your better hippies live on communes, don&amp;#039;t they? He would get insanely angry, sputtering his way into a lecture on totalitarianism before leaving the table in disgust. Once I called him paranoid and he exploded into the most gratifyingly paranoid rage I have ever seen. It all came to a boil the day I got beat up by an MP--he called me a girl; I gave him the finger--who charged me with the crime he had committed, assault. When Dad came to get me with his chauffeur and his big black car, he took me to the office of the army general in charge of all Korea and made me apologize for forcing that poor MP to beat me with his club. Not long after that, those helpful men at military intelligence sent Dad a note saying I was a &amp;quot;known user of LSD,&amp;quot; and then the army psychiatrists had a crack at me, and before long I was on a plane back to the States--sixteen years old and on my own. If I couldn&amp;#039;t get into a college early, I was going to have to support myself. Thanks a lot, Dad. And fuck you very much.  The nurse keeps examining Dad&amp;#039;s fingertips, which are turning blue. This is a bad sign. She takes his pulse and goes to call the doctor. Meanwhile, Dad keeps asking the time, which seems ominously significant. Then he keeps trying to tell us something, and Jennifer and I sit close on the edge of the bed, convinced that these are his last words. &amp;quot;Gee fi ohf,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Gee fof.&amp;quot; Finally, I figure it out. He&amp;#039;s trying to say G505--the satellite setting for the Evans and Novak show. &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re here with you,&amp;quot; I say. He smiles sweetly.  In Italy, Dad spent his time rounding up spies with his two best friends, Gordon Messing (&amp;quot;the sloppiest soldier in the U. S. armed forces&amp;quot;) and Gordon Mason (&amp;quot;handsome, debonair, witty, sardonic, a great lover&amp;quot;). He also fell in love for the first time, with an Italian baroness whose husband was a fascist officer. And managed to stop an antifascist riot in a small mountain town by climbing onto the hood of his jeep and lecturing the mob on &amp;quot;Aristotle&amp;#039;s iron law of politics, to the effect that the anarchy and lawlessness of violence leads to tyranny.&amp;quot; But by the end of the war, his romanticism had burned off completely. A letter he wrote to a high school friend shows him changed right down to the rhythms of his prose: &amp;quot;I feel older than the three years would have normally caused, sadder and very tired. I drank hard, played poker and shot craps, made love indiscriminately like all soldiers do. In three years I have hardly read a book, and feel now almost too restless to spend a single evening at home.&amp;quot; Transferred to Salzburg, Dad began arresting Nazis at the rate of fifty a month. (Later, the Austrian Ministry of the Interior officially declared his county &amp;quot;the best and most thoroughly de-Nazified county in all of Austria.&amp;quot;) After each conviction, he sat his prisoner down in his office and handed him a scrapbook he had compiled of magazine pho-tos of the camps at Ausch-witz and Buchenwald. &amp;quot;I had come to hate the Nazi system,&amp;quot; he wrote me years later, &amp;quot;and I mean hate it emotionally as well as intellectually. You will remember that when you were a boy I took you to the Jefferson Memorial in Washington and asked you to remember the words he wrote, carved out above his statue: &amp;#039;I have sworn upon the altar of God eternal hostility against every form of tyranny over the mind of man.&amp;#039; No better sentence has been written in the English language.&amp;quot; One day, a Soviet official came to Dad&amp;#039;s office to bluster against America&amp;#039;s recent refusal to repatriate White Russians to Soviet camps, shouting at Dad in &amp;quot;a bullying, overbearing manner, typical of the Soviet style.&amp;quot; When Dad lost his patience and threatened to have the MPs drag him away, the official&amp;#039;s attitude immediately changed to wheedling conciliation. That made a big impression. &amp;quot;All subsequent experience has convinced me that you can deal with the Communists and the Nazis of this world--and all bullyboy types--only from a position of strength. Their basic human philosophy, if you can call it human, is that of the bully--despise and abuse weakness, defer to strength.&amp;quot;  Dad never stops giving me instructions. The doctor told him that fruit is good for you and he wants me to know, too. &amp;quot;Remember that, son--fruit is good for you.&amp;quot; He gets obsessed with a lost pill; it was in his bedclothes, he keeps saying. Did he drop it? Did he forget to take it? Should he take another one? A minute later, he worries if the nurse has taken a lunch break. I send her off and help him to the bathroom, and when I hear the flush, I open the door a crack and see him leaning over to wipe off the edge of the toilet bowl. He apologizes for taking so long. From Salzburg, Dad went to Vienna. Those were the Third Man years, when Vienna was a free-for-all of spies, smugglers, and escaping Russian royalists. The Soviets were rushing into the vac-uum left by the Nazis, and their tactics were so brutal that despite the size of Dad&amp;#039;s operation--two hundred agents covering half of Eastern Europe--spying on them proved bitterly difficult. Austrian agents often disappeared to firing squads or prison camps. One was stabbed and thrown off a train. Ever the scholar, Dad began reading anticommunist writers like George Orwell and Arthur Koestler. He bought complete sets of the works of Lenin and Marx (still in our library to this day). Years later, one of his colleagues told me that some CIA agents just wanted adventure, travel, notches on the belt. Not Dad. &amp;quot;Your father believed,&amp;quot; he said, with a lot of respect and maybe a bit of sadness. As the forties came to a close, the revolution in China and the rumblings of war in Korea seemed to threaten fresh conflict, possibly even another world war. In 1950, a Soviet-inspired coup attempt in Austria sparked riots in several cities. In Vienna, the police almost lost control, and my mother and father--they had met and quickly married that year--were nearly trapped behind the Soviet lines. The atmosphere became so dangerous that Dad&amp;#039;s bodyguard stayed at their home every night, sleeping at the foot of the stairs. Dad wants to hear about the news. I tell him that yesterday they made peace in Ireland. He&amp;#039;s puzzled. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re in denial?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;No, Dad, peace in Ireland.&amp;quot; He still loves talking foreign policy, and when I read him the news summary from Slate magazine, he says he likes Netanyahu and feels the Israelis can&amp;#039;t ever tolerate a Palestinian state. &amp;quot;Do you think you could eat some Jell-O?&amp;quot; I ask. He frowns again. &amp;quot;Time to go?&amp;quot; Then to Athens, in those years one of the biggest CIA posts in the world. Dad and his agents ran operations against the Soviets from Kazakhstan to Hungary, including difficult targets like Bulgaria and Romania. They broadcast free-world news in fourteen languages, dropped leaflets all over Eastern Europe, maintained their own airport and air force of a half dozen planes and a few boats, too. Agent after agent disappeared into Albania, never to return. But Dad never told me about all this. It was Gordon Mason, Dad&amp;#039;s old friend and chief of external operations of the Athens station, who finally filled me in. My complaints about the old man&amp;#039;s stubborn reticence brought only a smile. &amp;quot;The chief of station in many ways outranks the ambassador in power--the number of people, the prestige, the money, the assets, the contacts,&amp;quot; he told me. &amp;quot;Your father was involved in a lot of powerful dealings with a lot of powerful people in the world. But he never flaunted it. He was very modest. You look at him now, and you wonder at the power this man held in his lifetime.&amp;quot;  He&amp;#039;s too weak to wash his hands. I can tell it upsets him, so I wipe them with a wet washcloth and dry them with a towel. When we get back to the bed, I try to get him to sit up, which is better for his lungs, but he shakes his head. &amp;quot;Why do the so-called right things, when they&amp;#039;ll just prolong this condition?&amp;quot;  He lies back, eyes closed, talking intermittently. Some of it is hard to follow. At one point, he says in a tone of surprise, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s Jimmy Hoffa!&amp;quot; I tease him. &amp;quot;So you&amp;#039;re finally giving up the secrets!&amp;quot; His eyes open, and he asks what I said. I repeat the whole exchange a couple of times until he understands. Then he gets somber. &amp;quot;It has always been off-limits for the agency to conduct domestic operations,&amp;quot; he says. Dad was ordered to Vietnam early in 1962. When he arrived, the war seemed to be going pretty well, and he plunged into work on the &amp;quot;strategic hamlet&amp;quot; program, a controversial series of armed settlements intended to slow the Vietcong infiltration. Four years in the Philippines had made him one of the CIA&amp;#039;s most seasoned counterinsurgency specialists. He met weekly with Ngo Dinh Nhu, President Ngo Dinh Diem&amp;#039;s intensely controversial brother. (Nhu later orchestrated the attacks on the rebellious Buddhists.) But toward the end of the year, the Vietcong began to win significant battles, and the Buddhist uprising began, at which point the American reporters on the scene began painting Diem as a paranoid autocrat who didn&amp;#039;t have enough popular support to win the war--just another American puppet gone bad. The portrait was a gross simplification but had a pivotal effect on American policy: President Kennedy reacted by sending in a new ambassador, who treated Diem with undisguised contempt. That was Henry Cabot Lodge, still a controversial figure in my house--my mother loathes him. By the summer of 1963, Dad was a lonely figure in the Saigon embassy, the only ranking official who still supported Diem. As he often told me later, he admired Diem&amp;#039;s courage and honesty and saw no &amp;quot;credible alternative&amp;quot; among the squabbling generals who would be king. By the time of Nhu&amp;#039;s raids on the Buddhist pagodas, Dad was so linked to the Diem regime that he was suspected of complicity in the attacks. &amp;quot;That morning Richardson was a tired and shaken man,&amp;quot; David Halberstam wrote in his first Vietnam book, The Making of a Quagmire. &amp;quot;He refuted the rumor immediately. &amp;#039;It&amp;#039;s not true,&amp;#039; he said. &amp;#039;We just didn&amp;#039;t know. We just didn&amp;#039;t know, I can assure you.&amp;#039; &amp;quot; Then Dad received a fateful cable from his superiors at the CIA. On orders from &amp;quot;the highest authority&amp;quot;--which Dad took to mean President Kennedy--he was instructed that unless he had &amp;quot;overwhelming objections,&amp;quot; he was to support Ambassador Lodge and take the actions necessary to mount a coup. Reluctantly, Dad obeyed, sending the legendary CIA agent Lucien Conein (always &amp;quot;Lou&amp;quot; at my house) to encourage General Duong Van &amp;quot;Big&amp;quot; Minh, the primary coup plotter. On August 28, Dad sent a cable to CIA headquarters that later appeared in the Pentagon Papers, a cable he would come to regret: situation here has reached point of no return . . . we all understand that the effort must succeed and that whatever needs to be done on our part must be done. The coup fizzled, and the Times of Vietnam ran a front-page story accusing Dad of trying to overthrow the government, which got him a place on the hotly rumored assassination lists. Meanwhile, someone began a behind-the-scenes campaign to get Dad fired. On October 2, The Washington Daily News ran a story by a Scripps Howard correspondent named Richard Starnes that accused Dad twice by name of disobeying direct orders from Lodge. The headline was &amp;quot;arrogant&amp;quot; cia disobeying orders in so. viet nam. Citing a &amp;quot;very high United States source,&amp;quot; Starnes called Dad&amp;#039;s career in Vietnam &amp;quot;a dismal chronicle of bureaucratic arrogance, obstinate disregard of orders, and unrestrained thirst for power.&amp;quot; Two days later, Halberstam corrected Starnes on the front page of The New York Times, writing that there was &amp;quot;no evidence that the CIA chief has directly countermanded any orders by the ambassador,&amp;quot; but he also used Dad&amp;#039;s name. &amp;quot;Outed&amp;quot; as a CIA agent, Dad was finished. A day later, he flew back to Washington, where the CIA hid him away for two weeks while newspapers all over the world ran stories about his ouster. The Washington Evening Star ran one of the few sympathetic takes: &amp;quot;The crime Mr. Richardson is said to have committed is truly fascinating. He is being charged in the bars of Saigon with declining to overthrow the government of South Viet Nam--incredibobble, as Pogo would say.&amp;quot; One month later, Diem and Nhu were deposed and shot to death, leaving my father with plenty of time to brood on the caveat the CIA chiefs had slipped into that fatal cable: &amp;quot;unless you have overwhelming objections.&amp;quot; In retrospect, it seems to have been put there just to give him something to torture himself with for the rest of his life. Tonight I&amp;#039;m testing Dad&amp;#039;s new painkillers. There&amp;#039;s mariachi music next door, the jacarandas are in bloom, and Dad&amp;#039;s blood pressure just plunged from 100 over 60 to 80 over 50. He sees Jennifer in the hall and doesn&amp;#039;t seem to recognize her. &amp;quot;There&amp;#039;s the lady who is going to give me my Metamucil,&amp;quot; he says. But he still puts on his slippers every time he goes to the bathroom, and he still insists on having a napkin folded into the pocket of his pajamas. Lying back on the bed with his eyes closed, he asks me: &amp;quot;When did this happen and how? This condition?&amp;quot; I don&amp;#039;t know what to say. He turns to my mother: &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;m sorry to be such a problem.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;re not a problem to me,&amp;quot; she answers. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s important,&amp;quot; he says. I was nine and ten in Vietnam. I remember a French school with chickens in the yard, and Buddhist monks exorcising our house, and the morning I sneaked past the guards at the gate of our house to go to the marketplace. I remember chasing a girl around a schoolyard, trying to untie the ribbon of her dress. I don&amp;#039;t remember the day my sister was watching a Disney movie in a local theater and bombs exploded in the lobby, or the day our nanny foiled a kidnapping attempt by hitting a cabdriver with her umbrella and hustling my sister and me out of the cab, or the day one of the kids at my school tried to imitate the Buddhist suicides by pouring gasoline on himself and lighting a match. But I do remember the day my dad didn&amp;#039;t come home and my mom sat around without turning on the lights and I got shushed by the servants. Years later, I learned that his helicopter had been shot down in the jungle and she thought he was dead. Dad tells me that he&amp;#039;s been hearing music--emotional music, orchestral, like a movie score. But there is no music playing. A day later, he says he&amp;#039;s figured out where the music is coming from. &amp;quot;This music--it&amp;#039;s produced by us,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a subsidiary of ours.&amp;quot; Later, he murmurs: &amp;quot;Yeah, this is the tail end.&amp;quot; He looks at me. &amp;quot;I hope this never happens to you--to be partly killed.&amp;quot; Later still, he frowns, puzzled: &amp;quot;This seems to be just a fragment of me,&amp;quot; he says. Most of Dad&amp;#039;s stories are self-deprecating. Talking about Vienna, he tells me not about how powerful he was but about mistakes he made. One time, he was crossing through the Soviet zone and absentmindedly left maps on the backseat detailing the location of military forces in Yugoslavia. Along the way, he gave a young Pole a ride, and when they got to the checkpoint, the Russians became very suspicious and arrested the Pole. &amp;quot;They didn&amp;#039;t touch the maps, which would have shown me to be a goddamned spy,&amp;quot; Dad told me once, giving me his look of mock alarm. &amp;quot;If they had looked at the maps, I might not be here talking to you.&amp;quot; Years later, an officer of Dad&amp;#039;s named Bill Hood centered a spy novel called Mole on the Vienna station. Dad appears as the savvy, tough spymaster Joel Roberts. &amp;quot;After six years in Austria,&amp;quot; Hood wrote, &amp;quot;Roberts knew every alley in Vienna&amp;#039;s Innere Stadt.&amp;quot; The book tells the true story of the first Soviet counterspy ever recruited by the U. S., but Dad&amp;#039;s version of the story is pretty undramatic. &amp;quot;As I recall, he approached some American at his car, got in, and defected,&amp;quot; Dad told me. &amp;quot;Later, he was uncovered by the Soviet service and I think executed.&amp;quot; But what about convincing him to go back? Wasn&amp;#039;t that a big feather in your cloak? &amp;quot;I suppose it was, but it was very accidental,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think we deserved any particular merit.&amp;quot; The next day, my sister comes running into the kitchen. Dad&amp;#039;s in a lot of pain, wants a shot of something, wants us to take him to the hospital. &amp;quot;I think this is it,&amp;quot; she says. But when I get the doctor on the phone, he tells me that once we go to a hospital they&amp;#039;ll hook Dad up to machines and keep him alive as long as they can, no matter how vegetative he might get. None of us want that. We stall, and the crisis passes. Dad lies back with his eyes closed, talking out of dreams: &amp;quot;The CIA contact . . .&amp;quot; I can&amp;#039;t catch the rest. After Vietnam, Dad got kicked upstairs to a desk job as director of training. He brooded and drank, had a heart attack, argued with his superiors about training methods. His friend Frank Wisner (a legendary CIA agent who played an unfortunate role in the Bay of Pigs fiasco) had a mental breakdown and committed suicide. And the war started going to hell, and the hippies started protesting, and, looking back on it now, I can see how it must have seemed bizarre to them, these idealistic men who were just trying to save the world. Suddenly, the very people they had sworn to protect despised them! Nobody cared that most of those CIA excesses were done under orders from American presidents, that it was really the sainted John F. Kennedy who spilled the blood that splashed on Dad. It didn&amp;#039;t fit into the sixties script: The hard old men were the bad guys, and, by repudiating them, America would somehow become innocent again. One day, Dad got a letter from a Vietnamese colonel named Le Quang Tung, who had been the head of Nhu&amp;#039;s notorious Special Forces troops, the ones that raided the Buddhist temples. Tung said he was facing a firing squad and wanted to apologize; he was sorry for believing the rumors about Dad and now knew that Dad had never wanted to support the coup. Dad threw away the letter. A few years ago, I harassed him about it. Didn&amp;#039;t he care about history? He gave me a pitying smile. &amp;quot;I have a feeling history is a pretty vain thing,&amp;quot; he said. We watch sitcoms in the study, then talk. Dad&amp;#039;s voice has become a whispery tissue. &amp;quot;I remember the old days in Vienna,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;Dean was the youngest major in the Army.&amp;quot; Dean is my uncle, another spy. He&amp;#039;s an ocean away, also dying of cancer. Then we watch Spin City, and Dad smiles all the way through it. When it&amp;#039;s over, the nurse helps him to bed. &amp;quot;It was a good night,&amp;quot; he says. A few years ago, I had lunch in Georgetown with a couple of Dad&amp;#039;s old CIA cronies, Bronson Tweedy and Dave Whipple. Both were age-spotted and bald, with a kind of merry irony. They remembered Dad as a compulsive coffee drinker who had &amp;quot;a slightly ponderous way of expressing himself,&amp;quot; as a &amp;quot;tough guy&amp;quot; who took controversial stands. They said he was one of the best, a &amp;quot;pillar&amp;quot; of the clandestine services. They even remembered certain improbable nights in Vienna when he danced to gypsy music till dawn. Then I asked them if they knew why he was so depressed and bitter after Vietnam. At first, they talked about his clashes with the CIA hierarchy and his impolitic but apparently unyielding conviction that the best field agents should be rotated into teaching jobs (first I&amp;#039;d heard of that). Then Tweedy sighed. &amp;quot;One of the reasons was he knew he was serving in a losing war.&amp;quot; Whipple nodded slowly. &amp;quot;An awful lot of people were depressed then.&amp;quot; At ten this morning, Dad wakes out of a nap and calls for me. As I help him into the study, my sister goes to get herself breakfast, but Dad waves his hand. &amp;quot;I think she should be in on this,&amp;quot; he says. Dad sits on his little Greek chair waiting. He&amp;#039;s hooked up to an oxygen tank, breathing through thin plastic tubes. Every few minutes, he spits blood into a kidney-shaped dish, dabbing at his lips with a napkin. Finally we&amp;#039;re all ready, and he begins. &amp;quot;I feel we&amp;#039;re not making any progress,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I feel . . . I feel&amp;quot;--he jabs a finger at his chest--&amp;quot;that this could just go on and on. So I want you to call Mike and talk to him.&amp;quot; Mike is his doctor. What Dad means is that he wants me to talk to Mike about giving him some kind of suicide shot. Dad pauses to spit into the dish, and I carry it to the bathroom and wash it out, trying not to look at the bloody phlegm.  &amp;quot;I suppose I could go off the machine,&amp;quot; he says, meaning the oxygen. I look over at my mother. As it happens, this very morning a friend of hers sent over some morphine left over from the death of her own husband. I tell Dad about this and say we could always put a batch of it by his bedside if he wants. When he frowns, I try to reassure him, because I know exactly what he&amp;#039;s thinking. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not like your brother,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve always felt bad about my brother&amp;#039;s suicide,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I wouldn&amp;#039;t want the grandchildren to think their grandfather did that.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;You put up a great fight for eighty-four years, Dad,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s not like you&amp;#039;re taking the easy way out.&amp;quot; My mother and my sister are weeping. The maid vacuums in the hallway. &amp;quot;I know you feel like it&amp;#039;s dragging on,&amp;quot; I continue, &amp;quot;but the doctors say it&amp;#039;ll just be a week or two more. You&amp;#039;re not in pain, your brain is still sharp--and Clinton still hasn&amp;#039;t been booted out of office. Why not let nature take its course?&amp;quot; He seems pleased by that. &amp;quot;Just a week or two?&amp;quot; he says. I nod. &amp;quot;And if you start to suffer or just feel you have reached the end of your rope, then know that we do have this alternative,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;Talk to me. You don&amp;#039;t have to tell Jennifer or Mom. Just come to me.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Okay, then, we&amp;#039;ll wait one more week.&amp;quot; Then we talk about dosage and doctors and make a few terrible jokes about Christianity while my mother and my sister weep nonstop. &amp;quot;Well that&amp;#039;s it, then,&amp;quot; Dad finally says. &amp;quot;I think we&amp;#039;ve covered it all.&amp;quot; But I want to add something. &amp;quot;Dad, I just want to say, I admire you for looking at this straight in the eyes.&amp;quot; He seems very pleased by that. &amp;quot;All right then,&amp;quot; he says, with a bit of the old authority. &amp;quot;Go on to what you were doing.&amp;quot; The early years of retirement were the bad years, when Dad earned his cirrhosis bruises. When the dark mood took him, he&amp;#039;d fasten on his com-pletely imaginary money problems or some social error--he was obsessed with politeness to strangers--and pick at it until we were all bloody.  On one binge, he started talking about the Diem coup. He told me that obeying Kennedy&amp;#039;s order was the biggest regret of his life. So drunk by then that he may have even cried a little, he said that he wished he had resigned instead of obeying that order. But it came from the president of the United States of America, dammit, with that terrible caveat. Digging around in my mother&amp;#039;s desk a few years ago, I found a series of cryptic notes in my father&amp;#039;s handwriting. &amp;quot;Framework of guerrilla war,&amp;quot; they began. &amp;quot;Operational involvement vs. analytic detachment. Colby &amp;amp;amp; light at the end of the tunnel. Abandonment of Meos--80,000--one of keenest pangs of defeat--fate of those allied with us. Nat&amp;#039;l interest--cold blooded. Cut our losses but written in human blood.&amp;quot; At the end of these notes, under the heading &amp;quot;Worst episode of my CIA service,&amp;quot; I found this: Why didn&amp;#039;t I protest more? Machine gunner image--carrying out orders mentality Highest authority and centralized information and judgement Excessive modesty Pension? Conclusion--lack of sufficient conviction in thesis that Diem was indispensable. After finding these notes, I asked my father what they meant. &amp;quot;I was probably thinking about that cable that said, Unless you have overriding objections to the decision of the president, you should carry out the coup plans,&amp;quot; he told me. And the line about excessive modesty? &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t have any comment on that.&amp;quot; Pension? &amp;quot;That was probably a crude self-interest consideration,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;I suppose self-interest plays a role in most people&amp;#039;s decisions.&amp;quot; I told him I doubted it played a role in his. &amp;quot;Have it your way,&amp;quot; he said. Late that night, about two, Dad wanders into the study where I am sleeping and asks, &amp;quot;What do you call those pills?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Morphine,&amp;quot; I say. Once, about a year ago, I reminded him that President Kennedy praised him on his fiftieth birthday. &amp;quot;Kennedy praised me on my birthday?&amp;quot; I had the quote right there and read it to him. &amp;quot;I know that the transfer of Mr. John Richardson, who is a very dedicated public servant, has led to surmises, but I can just assure you flatly that the CIA has not carried out independent activities but has operated under close control of the Director of Central Intelligence, operating with the cooperation of the National Security Council and under my instructions.&amp;quot; Dad frowned. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t remember Kennedy praising me,&amp;quot; he said. &amp;quot;It was on the front page of The New York Times,&amp;quot; I told him. He shook his head and shrugged. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t remember.&amp;quot; Dad hasn&amp;#039;t eaten for three days. The guy who runs the nursing service suggests a synthetic-morphine drip (Mexico forbids real morphine out of deference to the U. S. drug obsession), so I get Dad&amp;#039;s doctor on the phone, and he agrees to write the prescription for this packet that Dad can carry around with him like a cassette recorder. They stick a needle into his belly to start the drip. An hour later, Dad goes into the bathroom and tries to rip it out. I try to convince him to leave it in, and he stands there, his pants around his ankles, saying he just doesn&amp;#039;t like it and doesn&amp;#039;t want to be hooked up to anything and just doesn&amp;#039;t like it, dammit. My mother reminds him how he hated the oxygen mask at first and how he fought the catheter when he needed that last year, and finally he gives in and sits watching Crossfire. But as the day goes on, he gets more befuddled and scared. I hate what this is doing to his dignity. I get angry at the bullshit media cartoons of cold-blooded CIA agents. I&amp;#039;m still annoyed with Don DeLillo because he told an interviewer that the real CIA wasn&amp;#039;t as interesting to him as the idea of the CIA as one of the &amp;quot;churches that hold the final secrets,&amp;quot; like it&amp;#039;s all just a metaphor for the amusement of pretentious novelists. Other countries don&amp;#039;t do this. We don&amp;#039;t do it with Army Intelligence or the NSA or the FBI. But onto the CIA, we project all our anxieties about being grown-ups in an ugly world. And it&amp;#039;s so easy to point the finger. So easy to sit in an office and write critiques. What&amp;#039;s not easy is to choose between the possibility of a global gulag and the lives of thousands of innocent Vietnamese or Guatemalans or Nicaraguans and then to live with that choice--alone, as my father did. And on pile the critics with political motives of their own, which makes them just as dirty as the people who actually take action without the accompanying tragic knowledge, so they gas on and on about poor Salvador Allende because they like those Chilean folksingers, dammit, but Diem--well, hell, wasn&amp;#039;t he a bad guy? Didn&amp;#039;t he deserve to die? And if I seem a little intemperate about it right now, it&amp;#039;s because The New York Times fought this gutless paper war right down to my father&amp;#039;s obituary, finding some asshole journalist who would say that Dad was sort of a good guy after all because he changed his mind about Vietnam--changed it to agree with The New York Times!--even though I told the fucking obit writer over and over that I didn&amp;#039;t think he ever really changed his mind, except briefly in a moment of great pressure that he spent the rest of his life regretting. Fucking assholes. He sits in the study with the oxygen tube wrapped from nose to tonsure like Salvador Dal\u00ED&amp;#039;s mustache, and he raises three fingers. &amp;quot;What is that?&amp;quot; he asks. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s the morphine, Dad,&amp;quot; I say. This is our new secret code. Then he starts joking around about turning his back on our cat, which has a vicious streak, giving us that goofy old look of mock alarm--a face I now make to my own kids. &amp;quot;You&amp;#039;ve still got your sense of humor,&amp;quot; I say. He smiles. &amp;quot;Two things, son,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;The first is humor, and the second is courage. I&amp;#039;d like you to tell the grandchildren.&amp;quot; He smiles at the nurse, his face in profile so thin and no-ble. I want to draw him, to take a photo, to keep this moment somehow. Then Mom comes in and leans down for a kiss. &amp;quot;Long voyage,&amp;quot; he says, smiling at her with those bright beady death eyes. When I was reading up on the old man, I came across a cable written by David Halberstam to his editors at The New York Times, dismissing the work of a reporter who&amp;#039;d written articles defending the Diem government. she spent most of her time interviewing head of cia bracket now thoroughly discredited unbracket . . . In bed a few hours later, I couldn&amp;#039;t sleep. Thoroughly discredited? What an arrogant jerk Halberstam was! The fucking guy was sneering at my dad two days after he landed in Saigon! I&amp;#039;m not making this up. It&amp;#039;s in his book--two days off the plane, and he thought he knew more about Vietnam than the head of the fucking CIA! Until that moment, I didn&amp;#039;t realize how much I wanted Dad to be right--about Diem, about communism, about everything. It&amp;#039;s odd, given how hard I rebelled against him myself. Not to speak of my left-of-center liberal-Democrat politics. What do I care about Ngo Dinh Diem?  At 3:30, we finish watching a movie called Fly Away Home. It&amp;#039;s about a kid who learns to fly a plane so she can lead a flock of lost geese to Florida. My sister and mother and I all weep through the last half hour, and Dad smiles in perfect Buddhist happiness. When the credits roll, I smile at him. &amp;quot;You liked it,&amp;quot; I say. &amp;quot;Loved it,&amp;quot; he says. Then he sits across from me in his slippers and blue plaid pajamas, reading the paper. He doesn&amp;#039;t want to take a nap. &amp;quot;At this point, I take nothing for granted,&amp;quot; he whispers. Halberstam, that asshole, trashed my old man again in 1971. This time, it was in an article for Playboy, and without the restraints imposed by the Times: &amp;quot;I did not think of J. R. as being a representative of a democracy. He was a private man, responsible to no constituency. Later, I was to think of him as being more representative of America than I wanted, in that he held power, manipulated it, had great money to spend--all virtually unchecked by the public eye. J. R., of course, bristled over the problems of working for a democracy. He disliked the press intensely. It was all too open. How could one counter communism, which was J. R.&amp;#039;s mission--little black tricks that never worked, lots of intelligence (mostly lies) coming in from his agents--with a free press?&amp;quot; Aside from the line about countering communism, not one word of this pompous shit is true. Dad can&amp;#039;t take a dump. He goes to the bathroom and sits and sits, and it&amp;#039;s really hurting him. My sister suggests that this is because he hasn&amp;#039;t eaten for four days, so Dad weighs death against constipation and finally decides to drink a protein shake and some prune juice. The next day, he&amp;#039;s still constipated. He wants to go to the hospital, but then decides he doesn&amp;#039;t want to go to the hospital even more, so he drinks another shake and more prune juice and starts vomiting almost constantly, spitting up a foul mixture of shake and prune juice and phlegm. Carrying the kidney-shaped dish to the bathroom, I gag and almost vomit myself. I&amp;#039;m starting to hate that infernal little Frankenstein pacemaker that keeps ticking his heart over and over, no matter what the rest of him wants and needs. I can see it under the mottled skin on his chest, hard and round like a hockey puck. Sometimes we joke about passing a magnet over it and putting him out of our misery. Dad nods out, forgets what he&amp;#039;s saying, vomits again. Meanwhile, the TV news prattles on and on in the background like an evil guest who won&amp;#039;t go away. Once, I called the CIA public-information office and asked if I could see the old man&amp;#039;s personnel records. CIA kids do stuff like this--one (who became a producer for Unsolved Mysteries) actually sued the agency under the Freedom of Information Act. A pleasant man named Dennis Klauer called me back with the official response: &amp;quot;Not only no, but hell no--and if you pursue this, we must contact John Richardson Sr. and remind him of his secrecy oath.&amp;quot; At around noon, he says he wants to have another talk, so we gather in the study, and he says pitifully, &amp;quot;My bowels have shut down.&amp;quot; The idiot blathering of CNN continues, distracting him for a moment. &amp;quot;And something else--what else has shut down? My intestines?&amp;quot; We turn the sound down and try again. &amp;quot;Your lungs, you said.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Yes.&amp;quot; Then the dog starts digging in the trash can, and my mom starts fretting, and my sister says she&amp;#039;ll go get the garbage can from the guesthouse, because that one has a lid.  &amp;quot;I wish there was a lid for me,&amp;quot; Dad says. &amp;quot;That&amp;#039;s pretty funny, Dad.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Do you think there&amp;#039;s a lid for me?&amp;quot; he asks. I raise my hands to the heavens, taking the question for whimsy. But he persists. &amp;quot;Do you think a doctor would do it?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;What, Dad?&amp;quot; He dips his head, his eyes going confidential. &amp;quot;Give me a lid for me.&amp;quot; It&amp;#039;s odd how very old people get childlike when they tell a secret. For a second, I feel older than he is, and I lean forward and put my hand on his knee. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think a doctor will,&amp;quot; I say. Then he nods so wearily that we try again to convince him to go to bed. But he won&amp;#039;t. Never would, never will. Back in the binge days, I would see him walking to the kitchen at dawn with his tequila glass in hand. Sometimes he dropped it, and we would find the bloody footprints later. Now, when his hand droops, I try to pry loose the prune-juice glass without waking him, and he jerks back like I&amp;#039;m trying to steal it. Finally he drinks it down and I say, &amp;quot;As always, Dad, you drank it to the last drop.&amp;quot; And I can&amp;#039;t help feeling proud of him. In the kitchen, my mother and I marvel over how tough he is. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a lesson in tenacity for me,&amp;quot; I say. And she says, &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a lesson for me that I won&amp;#039;t go through that. I&amp;#039;ll have my bottle of pills.&amp;quot; And I put my hand on her neck and rub, and she shakes it off. &amp;quot;Don&amp;#039;t do that!&amp;quot; I went to his high school once, looked through his old yearbook. There was Richard Nixon looking like a young Richard Nixon. And there was Dad in a basketball uniform. He played on the varsity, never told me. The caption on the photo seems right to me even now: &amp;quot;Never flashy, but always in the thick of the battle, he proved in satisfactory manner to be a very capable guard.&amp;quot; Mom in bed. I say it&amp;#039;s getting to be so hard on him. She says it&amp;#039;s hard on us, too. Which is a sentiment worth honoring, I think. Weeping, she says she didn&amp;#039;t think he&amp;#039;d wake up this morning, talks about maybe calling the doctor. A doctor put her friend Mary to sleep and would wake her up every few days to see if she was still in agony and finally just stopped feeding her through the tube. Maybe Mike would put a lid on him like he asked, put him in a deep sleep. Jennifer says the vet would be the best, and we laugh. And I think, Maybe it&amp;#039;s up to me now. Maybe I should just do it and spare them the choice. So I go on the Internet and search for the Hemlock Society and discover it&amp;#039;s all philosophy. &amp;quot;Where&amp;#039;s the fucking how-to section!&amp;quot; I say. Jennifer laughs. She&amp;#039;s looking over my shoulder. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s ridiculous,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;If you search for &amp;#039;terrorist handbook,&amp;#039; they&amp;#039;ll tell you how to make a pipe bomb.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Maybe we can use a pipe bomb?&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Might not work,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;He&amp;#039;s pretty tough.&amp;quot; When I was twelve, the headmaster of my prep school wrote my dad a letter outlining my many flaws. I found it in my mother&amp;#039;s papers a few years ago, furiously underlined by my old man: &amp;quot;His homework shows superficial, if any, preparation. He gives little thought to neatness or accuracy. He does not appear to possess the willingness to apply himself to the task at hand.&amp;quot; This morning, he finally took a dump. He feels much better. But he&amp;#039;s so tired he didn&amp;#039;t even watch the news, and when he goes to the bathroom again, he asks me to come in with him. Leaning on the edge of the sink, head hanging, he says very emphatically: &amp;quot;Remember--this--is--lung--cancer.&amp;quot; When he&amp;#039;s finished, I pull up his pants. I see his withered haunches. The pillow-damp hair is stuck wild to his head. But weak as he is, he still insists on washing his hands, leaning over the sink with his elbows on the tiles. When I was thirteen, he took me on this trout-fishing trip to Nova Scotia. He was a big trout fisher when he was a young guy. I remember it as awkward and dull. We heard the same songs over and over on the radio: &amp;quot;Crimson and Clover,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I Think We&amp;#039;re Alone Now,&amp;quot; &amp;quot;Happy Together.&amp;quot; He stopped the car a lot to pee--from booze, I assume. I call home, and my youngest daughter says she&amp;#039;s fallen in love with a book called Ella Enchanted. She loves it so much she took it to a slumber party and read it while the oth-er girls watched the Spice Girls movie. I tell this to Dad. &amp;quot;That makes me very happy,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I couldn&amp;#039;t be happier. Tell her I said that.&amp;quot; He&amp;#039;s peaceful tonight. Lies quietly, rises only to drink milk or medicine. Asleep at nine. I think the end is coming soon. When I was fifteen, he started leaving books on my bed: Waiting for Godot, The Trial, Albert Camus&amp;#039;s Notebooks. They changed my life, but we never discussed them. He just left them and never said a word. In the bathroom, he sits on the toilet for twenty minutes. I sit in a plastic chair across from him. The bathroom is all yellow. There&amp;#039;s a black-ink drawing of a rearing horse on the wall above him. I can tell he&amp;#039;s thinking deeply about something, and finally he says it. &amp;quot;If--I--need--something, ask--your--mother--first. Because--we--have--the--past.&amp;quot; I want to be sure I know what he means. &amp;quot;If you need something specific, or anything?&amp;quot; I have to repeat it a few times before he understands me.  &amp;quot;Anything,&amp;quot; he finally says. &amp;quot;Because we have the past.&amp;quot; That night, I hear the nurse pounding on his back. He sits there gasping, head hanging, breathing the oxygen from the tubes. When he recovers, he says, &amp;quot;I can&amp;#039;t take this anymore.&amp;quot; The nurse does everything she can to help him. It pisses me off. I point to the oxygen, to the pills. &amp;quot;No est\u00E1 bien; est\u00E1 malo,&amp;quot; I say in my mangled Spanish: It&amp;#039;s not good; it&amp;#039;s bad. &amp;quot;El necesita morir.&amp;quot; He needs to die.  At around four, he hisses out his frustration: &amp;quot;I--can&amp;#039;t--die.&amp;quot; Looking at my father on his deathbed, I try to picture the romantic Berkeley boy who wore that &amp;quot;flowing, multicolored tie&amp;quot; and quoted Shelley. I&amp;#039;m so sorry I never met him. I used to be angry about it, but now I&amp;#039;m just sorry. And maybe a little bitter. And I don&amp;#039;t know if Dad killed him out of shame or if he just held the knife straight while history pushed it in, but I do know that, as time passed, Dad replaced his doubts with convictions and became so absorbed in his war, he forgot that happiness was part of wisdom and that he owed it to himself and to his children to try and earn it. And that is a sad, sad thing. And a dangerous thing, too, because when you become too sure that life isa tragedy, then little by little you begin to accept tragedy, and finally something perverse in you even begins to invite it. But life is a tragedy, isn&amp;#039;t it? One last trip to the bathroom. Even now, he won&amp;#039;t use the bedpan. The toilet-paper roll is almost empty, and that&amp;#039;s when he says his last words: &amp;quot;Another roll.&amp;quot; I get one from the closet and hand it to him. Back in his bedroom, he eases into sleep. As the dawn light rises in the window, his breathing starts to change. The agonizing long pauses when you think he&amp;#039;s stopped, and then a gasp sucking the air back in for one more round. Long pause and gasp, long pause and gasp. It&amp;#039;s horrible. There&amp;#039;s something monstrous in those sucking gulps at air, something so hungry and automatic, like his self and will are just the creature of this tyrannical little spark of survivalist life that forces him to go on and on and on. Outside the birds are twittering and then the church bells ring as they do every morning here in Mexico, rolling out into the still, suspended air. Then Dad calms. His breathing gets softer and shallower breath by breath, with no more gasps or gulps, until he&amp;#039;s breathing so peacefully, so gently, just skimming off the thin air at the top of his lungs. I move up and sit on the edge of the bed. The bells are finished, and now the garbage trucks rumble by. The breaths get shorter and shorter and then he just stops. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.esquire.com/news-politics/a1653/father-spy-0399/>