Michael McIrvin

The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time Michael McIrvin

Literary Fiction. Sonny woke up blue one day, "not sad ... but actually, absolutely, from head-to-toe, blue." So begins the journey of this former CIA agent, now a drunken convenience store clerk, toward a perverse reconciliation of his former role in geopolitics and his destiny. First, however, he must untangle why, more than two decades after his banishment, his former employer would go to such lengths to mark him for death. His search for answers embroils him in issues of tribal sovereignty, terrorism, and the drug trade as seen from the "other side," and he is forced to journey to Mexico where he meets another former operative who doubles as a jaguar shaman, a Mayan holy man whose prophesies include Sonny, and a ten year-old boy whose role in his people's future is both mythic and bloody-as is Sonny's. He is haunted by flashbacks of his work for the CIA in Mesoamerica, including the act for which he was "excommunicated," but his darkest realization is that violence and greed are not just the facts of his former life come back to haunt him but the mechanisms of history.