Mike O'Brien

Tomorrow, The Palace Mike O'Brien

How would you feel walking out of a totally normal life into something closer to a Robert Ludlum thriller? Everything changes. Suddenly. Real becomes unreal. Normal, abnormal. True becomes false. Fact becomes fiction... You don't know where to turn or, more importantly, to whom. Well, that's what happened to me... I stumbled, the proverbial innocent abroad, from what was supposed to be a straightforward business deal into a lunatic world populated by characters unlike any others I'd ever met. Violent, unpredictable, devious, malevolent, treacherous and, ultimately, evanescent. And, because of this it was almost impossible to comprehend what exactly was actually happening to me - and around me. The worst of all was the waiting...for people...for phone calls...for outcomes...for instructions. Waiting, always, for tomorrow... For tomorrow, and the meeting with President Marcos in Malacanang Palace, a meeting which never eventuated. Waiting until days became weeks, and the weeks became months. Then, in quick succession, my so-called colleague defected to some attempted take-over merchants, and I was placed under House Arrest by President Marcos.... It's near-impossible to convey just how psychologically pulverising, physically debilitating, and how terrifying that waiting was for an ordinary bloke... The sense of isolation, of exposure, of powerlessness and of insignificance was enormously brutalising... My days were a dreadful, gut-cramping cocktail of anger, frustration, helplessness, at-times-uncontrollable terror, bewilderment and gross confusion, lost in a Rubix-cubed maze.