Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (free books to read TXT) đź“–
- Author: Aaron Dunlap
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With the benefit of hindsight, the events of the past few weeks became perfectly clear to me. It was that we both started missing our daily training sessions that got people worried. Comstock feared that we had somehow found out, and that Schumer was angry with him. He hired Dingan, Schumer’s apparent go-to guy, to track us down and see what we were up to. Dingan took the job a little too seriously, and made the mistake of threatening my life. After I killed him, Comstock really got nervous, and apparently tried to flee to Austria, where he’d stowed away most of the insane amounts of money Schumer was paying him. After our little encounter in his hotel room, he assumed that I was a messenger from Schumer and that I hadn’t killed him must have meant that Schumer wasn’t too angry.
After that, though, things get a little unclear. Schumer must have found out that I was working with the FBI and feared that I had found out the truth and would help them raise a case against him. He must have sent the men to my house, and he must have had Comstock killed and put the hit on me that almost killed Amy. It wasn’t as clear-cut, but it was the only thing that makes sense.
The biggest surprise was that it wasn’t just me. I had a stack of nameless folders of kids, ages ranging from barely seventeen to just over six. Children, who, like me, were designed at a genetic level and taught the art of soldiering daily.
To find out that one’s entire life is a lie is not an easy thing to just deal with. I, it seemed, was taught to suppress trauma and distractions as part of my specialty. People who pull triggers for political gain need to be able to wash themselves of the guilt, they need to be able to see their friends slaughtered and still pull that trigger. They need to march over a field of butchered innocents to get within range of the warlord whose proclamations ended those lives. Mental compartmentalization was a part of my programming and, ironically, was the only way I could handle learning of it.
Amy wasn’t so fortunate. She seemed to take most of it in stride, until she figured out that the reason her mother had left was because she’d found out somehow. She couldn’t be around Amy or her father knowing what he had done and what Amy really was.
I didn’t see much of Amy after that.
When Rubino gave me the recorder and microphone, he had been expecting some kind of confession out of Schumer to tie him to my father’s killing, not a giant box of evidence. All of it was enough to open a formal case within the FBI to investigate the entire history of Schumer’s program and hopefully bring charges against others responsible.
Like all government bodies, though, the FBI moves slowly.
In all likelihood, the entire operation would be swept under the rug and forgotten about until anybody could be brought to answer for it. With Schumer gone, those who had been taking orders from him would disband and wander aimlessly until finding new jobs. There would be no way to guess what would happen to those kids who had been in the middle of their programs. Would their hypnotists and instructors be there when they showed up for their nonexistent classes? Would their unconscious training stay buried without daily intervention to keep it so?
Dead men couldn’t be convicted, and for this, I suppose, Carl Dingan, Chuck Schumer, and the Irishman, later identified as Thomas McMahon, got off easy. It was likely that one of those three had killed my father for trying to expose Schumer.
In the end, I’m left with too many unanswered questions. There was no evidence at all to suggest who Schumer’s new sponsor was. Nothing connected me with deaths in Austria. There was no telling who those people were who’d come to my house and, ostensibly, blew it up. None of Schumer’s records actually outline, detail, or even mention the specifics of my altered training program.
It almost seemed if Schumer wasn’t the top dog he made himself out to be. Everybody takes orders from somebody, they say. I once thought this was all about Comstock and was quickly proven wrong. How long until my belief that this ends with Schumer seems just as laughable.
Confronted by confusion, the best thing to do is to look at facts. Nothing I could learn will bring back my father. No amount of revenge would justify his death, or that of Bremer or everybody else who. My mind was very nearly lost to one invented for me, the mind of an unquestioning killer. Everybody said I acted different after Schumer died. I never smiled.
I hoped, above all, that there would be a way to free myself from the weapon inside me. Perhaps time would wash him away. Perhaps, after a lifetime of solitude, he would simply die of atrophy. Perhaps, whatever happens, he’ll always be in there. Perhaps I like being him better than I liked being myself. Perhaps I’d be of better use to the world as an agent of chaos than as a simple kid who just wants his life to be normal again.
What say should I have in my own destiny, after all, if I was built to be a weapon?
Built, all that I am.
Mind, and body.
Time, like water, flows on.
Also like water, time acts as a diluting agent. Given enough time, even the most serious of issues can seem mundane.
As time pulls us away from the events by which we measure our lives, all we can do is look back and observe them as we inch further and farther away. When time draws us apart from these events, our view of them fades, the edges go fuzzy, and fine details are lost entirely.
The only way to combat this is to kick against the current. You can try to stay in the past, refusing to let go or to allow time to carry you beyond it. Like fighting a river, fighting time is an active process. To move on you need only let go and let the waters carry you, but to remain still you have to fight. It’s tiring, and the longer you keep it up the harder and harder it becomes.
You can only learn to let it go, or die from the struggle.
It was a month after my eighteenth birthday, three weeks since the last time I’d talked to Special Agent Rubino, two and a half since I’d talked to Amy, just over a week after my mom and I decided on a smaller house around Argyle Heights, and three days after I’d received my school diploma in the mail when I’d decided to let go.
Before then, I’d repeated the events over and over in my head and obsessed over the details I hadn’t yet understood. I’d made dozens of crude flow charts trying to demonstrate the chains of events and command. I’d called Rubino every day for updates; he’d begun to ignore my calls. I grilled my mother on anything my father had ever said before he died, when I was born, before I was conceived, and when I was young. I pulled any event from my early memory I could reach my fingers around and tried to insinuate some meaning, some relevance.
Did my dad refuse to introduce me to any sports because he simply feared I might be hurt or because he always knew that high stress and my fight-or-flight response might break down the walls between my two personalities?
Did he simply take the fact that I was to become a government guinea pig as the price of having a child, or did he see it as a bonus?
His gravestone didn’t answer my questions.
I went into the FBI building in DC twice to make statements. Once, a brief written statement for Rubino’s benefit; the second time, a formal inquiry in front of a review board of five people whose names and ranks I purposely did not observe. The FBI wasn’t interested in satisfying my toxic need for satisfaction, however; they just wanted to waste time and look as if they were doing their job.
I’d nearly driven myself mad before that day when I finally let it all go. It was the beginning of summer, there was green all around, the air was warm but not uncomfortable. I got in my car for the first time without feeling anxious or that I needed to go shoot someone or do anything illegal; the first time I hadn’t considered whether or not I should bring my gun and the first time I hadn’t looked at myself in the rear-view mirror for a few seconds and wondering who was looking back.
I drove with the windows and the t-tops from my car down, felt the air on my face, found a foreign serenity in it.
I was halfway up the sidewalk to Amy’s front door when she opened her bedroom window upstairs and called out, telling me not to ring the doorbell. My last conversation with her father hadn’t ended well; she probably didn’t want him to know I was there. While I waited for her to come down I looked at the trees I’d never noticed and watched the clouds cascade through the sky.
Amy came out the front door and followed the sidewalk to where I stood. Her hair had grown out a bit and was pulled back behind her ears, no stray locks in her face. She’d also stopped using eyeliner under her lids. She looked her age, for once.
She stopped a few feet from me and crossed her arms. “What are you up to now?” she asked, her voice betraying the annoyance her face hid.
“Just going out for a drive,” I said. “You want to come?”
She glanced at my car in the driveway. “Where?” she asked, her voice flat.
“North.”
She let out a quick breath and shook her head. “I’m not going to the FBI with you and I’m not going to Quantico again, why can’t you just—”
I cut her off, “I’m done with that. No more adventures, no more banging down doors. Just a relaxing drive,” I paused, “to clear our heads.”
She looked up at me for a few seconds with cautious eyes, then said she’d tell her dad she was going out.
After I’d navigated my way out of suburbia and onto I-95, I glanced at the silent girl in my passenger seat and asked, “So how are you doing now, with the thing?”
Amy looked out the window, “Fine, I guess.”
“It doesn’t bother you, knowing what’s up there?”
“I don’t know,” she started, “it’s different than with you, because it’s all staying put. Nothing’s leaking out. I guess sometimes when I think of something, I’ll wonder how I know it and try to remember when I learned it. I don’t remember exactly when I learned how many feet are in a mile, though, but I know it. I guess I’ll always have to deal with that.”
“Your training was just basic training type stuff. You don’t have to worry about knowing or doing things you’d regret,” I said.
She turned away from the window and looked at me. “Do you regret any of the things you did?”
I
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