Broken Back - Ch. 12

Broken Back Ch. 121

what've you got for me, tony?2

i had a moments hesitation while disembarking...
i didn't want to leave that safe, cozy place i spent the last 5 hours in. it was like a little bubble in space where everything that was real wasn't real anymore. it didn't even exist. there was laughter and fun. talking to tam...it was like,...for a few hours,...i felt like a better person than i knew i was. like a dream. how i wish it could last forever. 'but all good things must come to an end, right. yeah. bad things too. 3

you were right. bein' held in the same place. sources tell me it's locked down tighter than an old nun. you could drive a tank in there, buddy and she ain't lettin' her panties down.
you let me worry about that. i'm not goin in stars and stripes, waving flags and bangin' drums, tone...this is gonna start "CQQ"
i know.....cold, quiet and quick...it's just that..
what?
tim...i don't think it's gonna be like, ahhh...well ,, like the old days
are you thinking i've lost my touch, old buddy..
well ..it's ...it's just that it's been a long time
yeah. i know
listen ...
and i could see him shaking his head as we spoke, running his hand over his face, like he had just washed it, trying to wake up
uhmmm...you know your game, man. i....i don't doubt that. but...you gotta factor in the reality that there's been a changing of the guard to a degree since you've been around ...and...well...they don't hire older guys, filled with junk and one foot in the grave. sorry, man...i just...
yeah. look. tone....i know. but you gotta trust me. remember the inter-tel merger?
yeah....that was one hot show, man. whoa!! thought I was gonna see you in the morning obituaries on that one. whole damn thing went sideways right in the middle.
so, that's what i'm saying
saying what
trust me to adapt
i got us out alive, we got the drop on it, locked down the ipo and scooped the market. i think you're still flying on some of that cash base, huh?
yeah...but..
well...so am i. and it went wrong. dead wrong....and i adapted - fast, ...yes?
yeah
ok...so look...i'm in the car now. i don't want anybody seeing my face so, as much as i'd like to kick a few rounds down with you at our fav bar, old buddy...you're gonna have to meet me in my suite. same suite as usual
nothin' but the best, right
same suite....under the name "Davids". you still got that "locke" id.
yeah
you haven't used it since
no
good
use that one. i'll be there in a half hour. you come in an hour. oh....and check your cayman account.4

so with that, i slapped the cell shut, dropped it in the inside pocket of my jacket and pulled out another silver cell...except this one had a handful of coke in it instead of phone guts. yeah...batteries dead, officer.5

in the midst of a simple drive, staring at my champagne glass, i began to wonder where was life. what was life? like looking into a crystal ball, i seemed transfixed by the movement of the car, the dim hum of all the noise from outside and the small capsule i was in - like a coccoon. everything left behind in a moment - what was to come, my state, and all the things i knew. an odd numbness floated over my body, not drug induced,...rather a seperation from reality. it seemed to last forever as the limo lumbered along.
i felt empty
sad...
like a hollow shell that missed the essence of being somewhere along the way. Part of me didn't want what was going to happen. The people. The faces. History...goddamn history - didn't want to face it. Feeling insecure in that realm was not something I was use to. But if I was honest with myself, i'd remember, that was part of my "depart". I did start to feel insecure...or...unsure. Something. But there was so much more. As soon as she left, as soon as she was out of my grasp...that was it. Losing everyone else and departing the world i knew. hell, ...even losing myself didn't matter. She mattered. That ever present thorn I couldn't run away from. The haunter of my dreams. The bringer of a dark, shadow cloud that followed me with a cold, heavy rain everywhere I went. 6

So what was it? I searched relentlessly in my mind for the answer. She yelled it at me before she left. That one painful line that sung it's song in my mind like Poe's raven, perched on the door, over and over again. My internal tormentor that would not be silenced...even by the death of me. Not by every drug...or how far away I could go. It followed. I was branded and I knew it. 7

"Why don't I make you happy??!! - Why?? - Why aren't I good enough?
She covered her hot, red face with her hands, the tears form a sheet of wetness that came out under her hands. I just stood there, frozen. Not knowing what to say. I was a different man then. I often did not respond to the emotional at the moment...with everyone...including her, even though she had the power to touch in places no one else could...I was steel. Pure steel. I calculated. Evaluated. That's the way I moved. There was no room for the emotional.
Cold
Calculating
I played the overlord...even at home - in which I rarely resided. Part of the problem - part of my protection.
Action
Re-action.
Given territory demanded a calculated response every time. In the war zone outside and inside. If something sought to break the barriers I had so successfully built within, ...i'd retreat to other ground. I could handle just about everything except my own heart.
Vulnerability was not an option.
Weakness
Loss
I saw nothing of value in that....then. And when I came to realize that, actually...it was the only thing that mattered...that's when I began to run. To bury it.
Denial.
Refusal.
The white zone is for the loading and unloading of passengers only. My family made visits - not permanent residents. My "wife" found that out years before. She was wise. She left. No sweet goodbyes from me. Not even a blink or change of expression on that day. Coming home from the largest merger I had ever done, I walked through the front door and saw her suitcases at the door. She, as usual...was at the bar. Drunk. Always drunk. In those days, as impossible as it seems now, I touched nothing. I would not allow anything to break my concentration or steel. I looked at her as though she were a variable in an equation. An unwanted necessity that was calculably handled. There was no love anymore. Was there ever? I didn't know. It was a business deal to me, I think. Just another deal - another piece of the puzzle for representations sake. Ofcourse I had to have the full circle. Wife, children. They were "useful".
I turned, went down the long hallway, watching the ocean, carrying my bags. Didn't say a word. ...and the soft sobs behind me and the clink of the martini glass being put down a little too heavy on the bar. When she looked at my unflinching face...to her, absolutely unmoved and empty. I think she saw what I came to experience and hate later. Judgment. I had an innate ability to put everyone and everything under my feet. Looking back, I know it was fear that drove me. Fear my father gave me. "Never lose, Timothy", ...he would say. "Never lose. There is no place for losers in this world. No place for the weak." Hmmm...my father was pathetic. The weakest man I ever knew. It was then - a little boy looking up into the face of his "god", seeing the same expression that would adorn my face for a good part of the rest of my life. Unmoved. Unflinching. I was my fathers son - and totally determined to be the exact opposite of him. Poor.
Failed.
Weak.
Never attained to anything more than a sweeper on the floor of an old fabrics factory. I hated him. Hated the tears of my mother ...and the constant fear of empty cupboards. So I took, what I thought then, his hypocritical words...and made them my life. What I didn't realize for so many years, is that he was confessing his own failure and speaking of himself. I thought he was just a fucking hypocrit. Embarrassed at school because of him. Dirty clothers always...old...shoes that made my feet ache because they weren't replaced fast enough. My mother, working night and day to compensate for his drinking what little money he brought home, away. Yeah...my fathers son, I was. ...and then some - but on the flipside....
...at first.8

I think it was to spite him, that I made my scholarship to Harvard - joined the special forces - said yes to the OPS program. No one said governemtn "spook" in those days - atleast not inside of OPS. In conjunction with the Navy Seals, we were the utmost covert team of killers assembled. A pack of the hardest, coldest dogs that walked the earth - and there's for the training. Training,experience and contacts that offered a far quicker route to the financial empire I was going to build, than heading down to Wall Street to become a junior sales rep at E. F. Hutton. Fuck that. Another one of my calculated moves that came from this in-born, hyper-sense of "knowing the way". That, combined with a heart of steel, encasing anger, bitterness, rage and pride...that moved myself across the chessboard of life, like a dragon does a village in a medieval tale. And on that day, that's all she had...was the dragon. Nothing more. All the toys, the trips, the homes in multiple countries - she travelled them alone, lived in them alone and played with them alone. Problem was...she had a heart, after-all. Like most people. And she'd had enough. I denied the reality of that sliver of white hot pain shooting up my backside, attempting to force forward regret and loss to tears. A sudden paradigm shift out of the dragon into the real.
I smashed it in the fucking face damn quick - until it was dead.
in a moment
in a flash
So...in a moment,..in a flash...she was gone. The door clicked shut...and all I did as I heard her footsteps towards it was unfold my shaving kit, all neatly packed with the precision of german engineering....paused, picked up the blade and stared at it...seeing the distorted reflection of my indifferent face in the steel. Irony,...i think then, I blinked once and smiled a little with the slightest of a laugh. 9

So that was it. She was gone. As for my father, who..oddly, at that moment I remember his face coming clear in my mind, I would not speak to him again after leaving for school. Not once. Fifteen years to the day my mother was found beaten to death by his dragon. And then, my face was his - cold, calculated and unflinching, as I, myself called the police and had him imprisoned for the rest of his pathetic, weak, unnatural life. Yeah...i burned him. burned him good. and then burnt down the pathetic excuse of a fucking house of demons down to the ground as his jail cell slammed shut. As what remained of my heart slammed shut. It was in that moment, that I joined the forces, instead of taking my business degree to the "Street". Fuck that. Fuck him. Fuck this world. Fuck you all. And that's exactly what I set out to do. To fuck them all and crush, kill, rape and pillage. to burn alive the village. To see the screaming bodies of women, children and all, flail about in a tortured agonied frenzy of a death. Death. Death is what I wanted. What I always wanted. He made me feel like dying since I was born. So I killed him over and over again in everything I did. I was going to be the toughest motherfucker this world had seen...and watch him die in everyone of them...under my feet, on every stage I stood. God, himself, couldn't have designed a better formula for the perfect killing machine. I was ripe for the picking. Driven by emotion, thinking myself emotionless. What a fucking joke. How goddamn blind we are - and can be...or whole lives. So, it wasn't until the small entrance to my heart left too. The only thing I ever really loved. The only reason for my wife being. For me not killing her in her sleep, the few times I was home, the weak, pathetic fucking drunk. Had everything in the world, and did nothing with it. But she could give birth to my baby. My girl. The only thing I would allow in to the chamber to challenge the demons nest that lay within. It was a tormenting love. It contradicted everything I had worked so hard to become. If she had only known how much I loved her. If she had only known, that behind a closed door in the middle of Tokyo, on the eve of the largest merger I would ever do - and the deadliest...that it was her picture with that pup she loved in the dream I held, and the tears that ran down my face. I felt hope for myself and disgust at the same time. But...mostly....fear. I feared weakness more than anything in the world. I was fearless in the face of man, machine and mayhem...but utterly useless in the face of her. My weakness. My vulnerability. And it was, because I saw her eyes to me. loving me the way she did. wanting me, ...unlike my so-called wife, more than anything in the world. my only time of smiles and hugs and freedom. the alternate me. she had that place and she alone. my wife envied it. was sickly jealous of it. she hated her. took my hate and made it hers. so, everywhere i went..when i came home from a warzone...there was no peace. the warzone was there too. in unbroken tension and unapproached silence. deadly. sharp and ruthless. we had become the killing team to her. and i wanted that. my resentment ot her was absolute. my pathetic failure of a wife. and my fathers face and voice everytime I saw her passed out on the floor. it wasn't until years later too, that i realized she died of a broken heart. that my mother had already been dead of a broken heart. my bastard of a father was just the closing act, to bring the curtain down on the physical.10

and all that made me want to kill all the more. so kill, i did. killed and killed and killed. i had a thousand bullets fly at me. a thousand fights - waged war in war, hand to hand, face to face, the best in the world i beat. i had to. i couldn't fail. wouldn't dare be pathetic enough to die. so i out-thought them out-fought them, and came rising to the surface like a blazing phoenix everytime. i had no god. i built my own god,...and it was me. it was my father. it was my hate and anger...masked ...all wrapped up in a face of cool, cold, calculating indifference. it held up against the hardest storms, the most vicious of attacks, and every enemy that threatened - but did not hold up to that moment. the moment my only love - the only thing i ever loved. spat in my face the moment she heard her mother commited suicide in an insane asylum and i had been lying to her all along. it was for her protection. didn't want her to know. didn't realize that she wasn't me. she had a heart...she did love her mother...she was broken by it...and ...she ...was ...weak.
in an horrid instant, she was me, and I was her....and the pain. the pain was unreal. hurt more than the beatings i got from my father. more than the trained fists that landed the odd blow, more than the bullet wounds that left a constant ache in my left shoulder. more than the knives that left their marks across my chest and back. more than the icy-cold of a russian ocean in winter. more than my mothers death. ...and...i stood there, ..not saying a word again. looking at her like she was her mother. and never before had i felt that way towards her. she was like me. strong, driven, unflinching. an absolute success in everything she put her hand too from the moment she was born. daddys pride and joy. not that i would ever show it around her mother. another reason for my babygirl leaving me in the ashes of what I thought, was an unbreakable, if not non-existent, heart. i was way too far away in myself to see any care she had..love..to the thing i despised and didn't think she could. but when she died...part of her died too...and she wanted revenge. because, once again...i was the bringer of death. the author of her demise...and my little girl, who played and laughed and loved me like a god, turned and left my life...what was left of me...any part of that heart that was alive..died too. ...or so I thought at the time. died. brutally. i never stepped back into my office building i forged, shaped and fed, with my fathers bitterness as fuel - my bitterness. the tallest skyscraper in the city- and just the tip of the iceberg of a kingdom I forged to the forsaking of heart, mind and soul - and her, that spanned a globe. the world was mind. ...but she wasn't. everyone that claimed they had loved me was dead. she lived, but she was dead to me..because i was dead to her...or so i thought...again...at the time. 11

with that, i decided, unknowingly...i was going to join them. i had too. and with a shocking revelation even before the last echo of the slammed door, as my daughters form vanished in the same coldness i had wrought in her, i realized i was the thing i feared most all along. weak. pathetic. failure. and the beginning of the end started. i went to the bar and drank an entire bottle of scotch in one night. drank until i couldn't see. the pain had finally superceded my barriers, unlocked my worst fear - that i was my fathers son...in a different form. the thing i hated and despised, loved and cherished, fought and lost ...all at the same time. she did that. but it was me in her that did it. there was no fucking escape. no steely refuge. i was alone with me. had been all along, except for the golden moments, like an out of body experience, that remained on a higher plane, with her. my baby. and now she was gone. she was me....and she was out there..beyond my reach. had i realized then that all it would have taken was for me to hold her in that moment, fight like a man for her...that that would have broken down the resistance, no matter how hard she struggled, i would have saved her a world of pain she would have to live with for the rest of her life...and a world of pain i didn't know if i was going to escape from, with my life. i was weak. pathetic. a failure.12


as i came out of this daze with a bump of the limo and time warped back to the present, i felt the wetness on my chest...soaked right through my shirt. all that time, the streams of memories flowed out of my eyes, ...and the reality of it all, covered my heart in a cold, wet sheet. ..and that..woke me up. i pushed myself up on the seat and in the re-formed state of my old self in part. the ressurection of the killer. of the ace. of the one who was going to war again. so i shook it off. all of it. yet..at the same time...driven by it. my weakness. my failure...became my last enduring strength. everyone was gone, ...except for her. and i was going to get her back. rip her from the death grip i placed on her with every ounce of what remained in me. and i wondered...wondered if it would be enough. it was, damnit. it damn well fucking was going to be, ...and there was no counting the cost. i didn't care. i now fully despised myself - counted myself dead anyway. i had done it. i had fulfilled my mission. i watched in latent relief, with every kill...and now, i was going to kill and bury him for good. my father couldn't save me....and i was going to do the opposite again, but by him. so i just shook it off and opened the window...and all was drawn out in a moment. i was back...and cleared for attack.

I practically felt free. damn, it's been a long time since i smelt that smell. Chicago - gotta love it. Cubs, deep dish, and half the cities real estate owned by me....and the rest...by the one fucker who, live, die or fucked by a monkey....i was going to have his fucking head on a stick, and slam it right down into the cement in front of city hall. a personal gift from me to the mayor and the good people of this grand city. yeah. semper fi, motherfuckers.....here I come. ahhh...that air smells great!!13