"Please," the man begged, "please." Blood bubbled from his nose, wheezed in
his slowly filling lungs, oozed from the gash on the back of his head. More
of the blood, a darkening crimson, stained the windowless room in which he
lay, his hands raised in weak supplication. His killer kept on with his work,
silently. He didn't speak once. The man on the concrete floor continued to
beg, "Please, please," and the only noises for a long time in that room were
that same word, uttered over and over again, and the sound of flesh tearing.
After a while, those sounds stopped, too. Then there was nothing but the tiny
echo of a dripping blade, the rustle of cloth as the killer cleaned his
tools, the soft squelch of his rubber-treaded boots as they tramped through
red puddles.
Then the click and beep of a mobile phone as cleaners were called in.
The man left the room, tracking scarlet boot-prints behind him, which he
didn't bother to clean. It didn't matter, here. He took his tools and left
the room, which was cold and concrete, splashed with blood, the dead man
still, stretched out on his side.
"Do you love?" the man asked, the first time he'd spoken in hours, to the
corpse on the floor, before leaving. The words echoed oddly in the stillness,
the waiting hush. Then he was gone.
The trees shook. The green-eyed man watched them, traced their shivering
branches in the wan, dying wash of light that gleamed poorly from a nearby
guttering lamppost. It was summer time, so each twisting hook of bone had a
flesh of leaves, silvery green in the pathetic lamplight. The trees danced in
place, swaying. The dimly illuminated face of the watch on his right wrist,
his real wrist, said that it was three forty-two a.m. The man turned back to
the shaking trees, and watched them play with one another in the wind for
another half an hour, then left.
"Go to the party. Your mark will be in a black tux with a white rose in his
buttonhole. Very original. Take him in the restroom, use two bullets; one in
the head, one in the chest. Leave him there. Don't use the Glock. Use the gun
you'll find in the safe deposit box at the aforementioned bank. Wear gloves.
Leave the gun. Leave immediately afterward. You'll be contacted by the usual
means."
The shirt was a starched, gleaming white, the shoes expensive hand-sewn
leather. The tuxedo he wore had cost enough money to feed a third-world
country. It seemed to absorb all of the light in the ballroom, reflecting
nothing back. A sort of fashionable black hole. A certain color-blind FBI
agent would be very interested in such a phenomenon, he was sure. He grinned,
briefly, allowing himself that one single indulgence, before shunting the
unwanted thoughts away. His temporary companion, a sultry blonde in a sheer
red dress that also, no doubt, cost more than most nations' defense programs,
caught the look and giggled, thinking it was aimed toward her. She had the
kind of breasts that made such assumptions permissible. He grinned again, a
purely stupid, shallow, happy playboy grin, and she giggled again, sounding
like the femme-bunny at the end of "Bambi". A well-known politician wandered
past his elbow, talking earnestly with a slightly less well-known doctor. He
eyed them surreptitiously, his perusal unnoticed.
"Really, you should try the champagne," his companion told him in a low,
throaty voice. "The bubbles are delicious."
Where the hell was his mark? "Never touch the stuff," he replied in his own
phone-sex voice, giving her a polished, subtle leer. "It's like drinking pop
rocks. Gross. And the bubbles go straight to my head."
"Exactly," the vamp purred, linking her arm more tightly through his. "That's
why they're so delicious."
He laughed softly, a rich, thoughtlessly cultured sound, and strolled with
the blonde further toward a tight knot of well-groomed men, all of whom the
man knew by sight, some influential, some merely expensive pawns. There were
no women in the group. He wasn't surprised.
"All these incredibly important men," the blonde mused, slinking sinuously
along his side. "This whole soiree is comprised totally of important, rich
men." She curved a knowing, appraising look at her companion. "Only the cream
of the crop were invited to this little get-together. What, I wonder, got
you in the door?"
"My spiffy attire, of course," he replied immediately, and she laughed, a
light, chiming affair. "Nobody ever questions the tux." There. Black suit,
white rose. Silver-streaked hair, genteel carriage, smile lines about the
eyes. Finally. There.
One hour and thirteen minutes later, in the bathroom, silver taps on, water
splashing musically into the marble basin, he shot the silenced gun once,
twice, between the eyes and through the heart, let the body drop to the tiled
floor with its own sudden gravity, dropped the gun, peeled off the gloves,
left.
"Please," the important man had begged, ringed hands raised in supplication.
"My wife. My daughter."
"Do you love?" he had replied, and fired the gun.
Yes, he remembered this place. He remembered this warm, roomy house, these
expensive glass ornaments, these priceless paintings on the soft cream walls.
He traced the hard, smooth edges of table tops and armoires with his right
hand, remembering the same silky feeling from a lifetime ago. The white vase
of red roses and zinnias. An interesting combination, one that only the
inhabitants of this house could successfully pull off.
Soft lights caressed soft chairs, hard surfaces, sent white shadows over
golden floorboards. He remembered this Persian rug, which matched the cat
sleeping on the bed perfectly. The ornate fireplace. The bronze plates, the
smiling photographs. His memories of this place were as distant as old snows,
but he still remembered them. He remembered the mask that he had worn for
this particular job. He remembered. Yes.
Quiet as a panther, a ghost, he moved through the bright halls on silent
feet, disturbing nothing, until he reached a door. The lock was easily
picked. The lock to the safe was also easily picked, the documents held
within tucked quickly away. Then the computer, rifled through, passwords
coming easily to his blurring fingertips, access easily granted. A disk,
save, then everything put back the way it had been before, doors relocked,
windows reshuttered, and he was gone, a mere glimpse of movement in the
darkness.
The flat, alien landscape of Kansas streaks past the windows of the stolen
Ford Explorer and he is flying down the highway, the yellow ribbon on the
road below his tires merely a reminder, no to be taken seriously. The fields
that flash by are purple, the grass shorn bare, occasional clumps of wheat
breaking up the odd monotony of endlessly rolling plains, slight slopes,
gentle ridges and short, squat, washed-out cliffs. The colors of the
landscape are old and faded, like a hand-tinted photograph. It is mutedly
beautiful, mutable, subtle and strange, like a friend's secrets. The sky
stretches onward forever, and he is racing toward it, the speedometer
registering over one hundred miles an hour, how much over one hundred he
can't tell, the needle halts at one hundred twenty.
He is flying. His past, which he can shed at will, snake that he is, flutters
behind in the resulting wind. He loses it all, the empty rooms, the old
stains that set into permanence, the hooks and joints, the belts, the smell
of gun oil and cordite and exposed intestines. They scatter in his wake, to
settle like paper tossed to the floor in their own drifts and heaps, and the
strings that are his lifelines stretch, thin, and eventually snap.
He that would strangle an infant in its crib, if so instructed by his
superiors, but they don't instruct that.
He that dreams in neon.
His life is such a kaleidoscope of personalities, roles, masks with eyes that
blink, that he is no longer sure which facet is real; the red stone, or the
blue? The colors all tumble together, suits in a closet, waiting to be put
on. Which suit is actually bare skin? Which suit will he wear tomorrow?
Inside, deep down, an old dragon sleeps softly.
He thinks of odd things as he drives. Black oil. Popcorn in the microwave.
Checkered flags. Tulip bulbs. Trees that shake in the wind. A small redheaded
woman, who grates his nerves, an itch that needs to be scratched away. A
tall, hazel-eyed man, sharp and strange, another kaleidoscope. Blue Christmas
lights. An Uzi. A shallow grave half-filled with rain. The shine of magazine
pages. Milk in a frosted glass. A red moon.
Geese or swans arrow toward the far horizon, pointing to the next small town.
He follows them, flying in his own way. The scenery which flashes by is sere,
as if burnt away a hundred years ago.
An alleyway. A briefcase. A file. A garrote. Betrayal splashes itself luridly
across the brick walls, almost as a neon sign. The green-eyed man slips away,
briefcase and file in hand.
He punches in the number on the cell phone.
Click. "Yes?"
"Mission accomplished."
"Very good. Proceed as planned." Click.
He tosses the phone in a Dumpster, and is on his way.
Steak and eggs. He hadn't had them in a while. Years, really, if he wanted to
think about it. A low, thin fog rolled itself against the windows of the
shabby greasy spoon he ate at, hiding the building across the street from
sight. He shoveled in another mouthful of eggs, wondering if he should add
ketchup. More pepper and salt, at the very least. He poured it on.
"Refill, honey?" the bored, overweight waitress asked him, looking and acting
and speaking so exactly like every bored, overweight waitress he had ever
seen in movies and on TV that for a moment he wanted to shout with laughter.
Surreal. Life imitating art. Or, life imitating trash imitating art. Well.
Something like that.
"Sure, thanks," he replied, and watched a stray wisp of graying hair fall
over one murky brown eye as the waitress bent to fill his coffee cup, which
was a plain white, and chipped on the edge. She straightened, steam now
rising again from the cup, and he smiled at her.
"Thanks," he said, and she grunted in reply and walked away. He leaned
forward and took one careful sip, then renewed his efforts at cleaning off
his plate. For dessert, he had cherry pie. Odd combination. It was great.
Getting to his feet, he left payment and a nice tip, and then disappeared out
the door, into the fog.
Hawaii was a very nice state. Very Japanese. He'd dated a native Hawaiian
once. They'd been living in Ohio at the time. She'd told him she missed all
the Asian people milling about, buying up land and building golf courses.
Very sarcastic girl, she'd been.
"I'm probably the second-to-last really and truly native Hawaiian left,"
she'd also told him, once. "I should be put on the endangered species list."
"There's no such thing as a really and truly native Hawaiian," he'd replied,
smirking. "It's a myth. You're a myth. Like Big Foot and the Abominable
Snowman."
"Shut up, white boy," she'd replied.
That night, he slept on a beach of black sand, the surf in his ear. The dark
forest behind him rustled with animals, wild pigs, brilliantly colored birds.
His knife was warm along his arm, his gun an old, comforting friend at his
back. The black sand sparkled strangely in the moonlight, which also rippled
over the ocean's skin.
His dreams that night were lonely and hard. He was sitting at a breakfast
table, and Mulder was sitting across from him, slumped back in his chair.
"Rice Krispies?" Mulder offered, holding up a box, and he shook his head, no.
"Sure?" Mulder looked at him, then filled his own bowl, only the cereal that
came out of the box wasn't Rice Krispies, but something else. Chex, maybe. It
didn't matter, but it was strange.
He couldn't move, in his dream, or speak. He sat at the kitchen table and
watched as his ex-partner ate his breakfast, watched TV, then followed,
ghostlike, as he took a long run, bought groceries, skipped stones along a
lake. All the normal, mundane things. Taking out the garbage. Paying bills.
Washing dishes. Sleeping, even. And he had stood by, silent and still, unable
to move, to touch, to interact in any way. Mulder spoke to him, sometimes, a
question, an odd comment. But he was never able to reply.
"Please," the woman says, "please." She holds up her hands in supplication.
She is, by now, missing an eye. Hot, clean blood trickles down her cheek.
"Where's the money?" he demands, allowing a harsh, gritty edge to his voice,
instead of the usual passionless monotone. "Where's the money?"
"Please, please," she gasps, her own voice raw from screams. He is creative,
and eventually she tells him what he needs to know. This time, he has to take
care of the body himself. He isn't so creative on this. The usual shallow
hole in an old gravel pit suffices.
"Do you love?" he'd asked her, just before her remaining eye turned forever
sightless. She hadn't replied.
It was a meaningless fuck. They did it in a hotel room that shivered with
cock roaches, and it had been as uninspiring as brushing one's teeth, as
meaningless as two strangers exchanging a handful of words while waiting for
the subway. He couldn't remember what she looked like an hour after he left
the hotel.
His new arm was a marvel of high technology, nanotechs, to be precise. He
could hardly tell that it wasn't real flesh, anymore. The Well Manicured Man
had been kind in death, that was for sure, and even now, so long afterward,
the arm was still a marvel. His present employers paid well, when they paid
him. Being a spy and a professional assassin, steady jobs were somewhat hard
to come by. One month he was living at the Ritz in New York, the next he
could barely afford a place slightly better than a park bench. Where did the
money go? It was expensive, being a spy and a professional assassin. Thievery
helped, of course, but not a lot.
The order came from on high. "The information is at the following location.
Destroy it, once you've read it. Do exactly as you're told. You will find the
plane tickets at the following location. Weapons will be provided. Do exactly
as you're told. Any deviation from the plan at all will be treated with
your immediate termination. Failure will not be tolerated. Do exactly as
you're told."
The job was done exactly as per instruction. He did not deviate from the plan
once. He was a lot of things, but stupid wasn't one of them. Termination, in
this case, did not entail getting fired. It ran more along the lines of a
certain aptly titled Schwarzenegger flick.
His mother had smelled like that, he thought. Like a soft, white musk. He
stood still for a moment, lost in the crowd of people in the street, and
inhaled deeply, remembering.
Remembering.
He couldn't seem to get up. Something was wrong with his legs. His arms. His
skull felt like it had shattered, porcelain, and he needed vinegar and brown
paper to patch it back together again.
Then pain came and washed him away, like dross from a beach, rocked him as
like a boat, a mother's gentle arms, a cradle.
Yes, he remembered this room, this apartment. From the one time he'd seen it
as a junior agent, a partner, and then from the other times when hed come in
to set up surveillance, remove video footage, leave tempting breadcrumbs.
While the agent was out chasing Martians or woolly mammoths or leprechauns,
he broke in, surveyed the place: the homey, beat-up leather couch, the
disused bed, the blank computer, the swirling fish, the dirty dishes in the
sink. He set up the bugs quickly and efficiently, destroyed a few that
weren't his own, and, on the way out, decided to be perverse and fed Mulder's
fish.
All in all, a fun night.
The stray dog growled low in its throat, jaws clamped on a decaying chicken
leg. Passing the dog by on his way through the alley, he gave it only a
cursory glance, and left it alone.
a memory, then.
five years old, playing in the grass.
a bee flying up, buzzing drowsily.
see the bee, he is calling, see the bee.
is this Russia? what language
is he speaking in?
five, and a blue ball with gold stars. bright in the grass, which has clover.
eating something sweet on the porch. gums his teeth up. can't speak so well.
laughing.
a memory, then.
The African drum gleamed tan and red in the gentle halo of fluorescent
lighting, framed by plate glass and swirling snow. He tapped two fingers
against the glass and smiled at the drum, which seemed to smile back.
Snowflakes touched down on his short-shorn head, hatless; they brushed his
shoulders, his eyelashes. He smiled at the drum through the store window, and
the drum, a happy little thing, smiled back.
The dragon woke.
When he came to, there was dried vomit and urine crusting his shirt. It took
him a while, but the memories came trudging back, eventually, and he took
care of things.
He crouched in the closet and listened to his mark sing along to Roberta
Flack, and in his own mind he sang along, too. "The first time ever I saw
your face..." he silently mouthed, and his mark, banging hair brushes and
belt buckles and bottom drawers, sang lustily back, practically shaking the
walls with his rich baritone. For such a slow, loving song, the mark could
certainly belt it out. He wondered, briefly, if the fact that he was wearing
a Tool t-shirt (his favorite shirt to kill in) and miming along to Roberta
Flack at the same time was really as bizarre as he suspected.
When came the part with the joy filling the air and lasting 'til the end of
time, he stepped out of the closet, gun already raised, and fired quickly and
effortlessly and accurately. The mark's voice had made for an excellent
audial bead.
He stepped over the prone body wheezing into the carpet and got what he came
for. He paused on his way out to stand at the dying man's head. "Please...
please..." the bloody man whispered, barely loud enough to be heard over the
last strains of the song. He tried to raise his hands, but found that they
wouldn't move.
"Your face... your face... your face..." the green-eyed man sang, staring
down at the prone figure, then quickly finished him off.
Dark places, dark places. He began to scream.
The mother and the little girl were holding hands, waiting for the bus to
come. He stood a respectable distance from them and watched the girl swing on
her mother's arm, hang from it, her mother indulgently glancing down at her
daughter every so often. The child was talking, a constant stream of
balloon-like words, high and sweet, rising up into the autumn air. He watched
the girl gather fire-colored leaves and give them to her mother, who smiled
and accepted them, putting them in the front pocket of her coat. He smiled to
himself, listening to the little girl, watching the mother only give her half
her attention, the other half no doubt fixed on debts and mortgages and shoes
and what to get for dinner, whether to just eat out. The child's breath
steamed a little, and her mylar voice, high and sweet, airy, drifted his way.
"Shut that damn kid up," an old, grizzled-looking man muttered next to him at
the bench of the bus stop, glaring sightlessly at the buildings across the
street. He wore a blue yarn cap. His body, mostly just bones, sat awkwardly
on the bench.
The green-eyed man briefly considered killing him, but then decided that that
was just a little extreme.
The bus came. They all got on, and drifted away from one another, fleetingly
joined, now apart again.
And then, one day, came the order from on high.
"Agent Fox Mulder has outlived his usefulness. Take care of him."
"Ok," he said, and took the gun handed to him.
"Take care of the body. Make sure he disappears without a trace."
"Ok," he said, and turned and left.
Now, again, silent in the murky room, thin wedges of light filtering in
through the window, the rumbling, gurgling fish tank, the muted television.
Here again, only this time there were no devices to plant, no red herrings or
genuine articles to leave behind. He stood, half-crouched, in the pooling
shadows, and looked over the room. Dusty and messy, with piles of junk
splayed haphazardly all over the place. The coffee table was barely visible
underneath all the papers, books, videos, pizza boxes, and various other odds
and ends that swarmed over it. The floor was equally swamped. He knew that
the bedroom, which Mulder used as a storage facility, would be just as bad.
He gazed briefly at the computer, which was sporting an X made of duct tape,
a screen saver humming and bumping behind it.
He looked down at the beat-up leather couch and the man who slept on it, on
his side, one hand tucked under his pillow, the other under his chin, legs
slightly curled into a faint imitation of the fetal position. He shouldn't be
sleeping. Mulder never slept. Light from the TV set washed and ran over the
sleeping man's face, softening and sharpening the features at the same time.
The killer turned to look at the TV, and recognized the movie on the screen
as "The Big Chill". He watched for a moment, scenes rolling across his own
eyes, his own shadowed face. It was a video, he saw, glancing down at the VCR
softly blinking its own message: Twelve o' clock, twelve o' clock, twelve o'
clock...
The agent's face, when asleep, in repose, was soft. The hard lines
disappeared from his face, his mouth relaxed, his brows lost their eternal
downward draw. Soft dark hair fell across his forehead, his delicate eyelids.
The killer could see two-thirds of the t-shirt Mulder had worn to bed; gray,
with some sort of logo on it that he couldn't make out. The rest of him was
covered by a blanket, except for his bare feet, which poked out from the hem
below, tucked into a couch cushion.
The agent's breathing was deep and even, without sign of nightmares.
The green-eyed man pulled out his gun. The safety was already off, and this
gun didn't need to be cocked. Truth be told, no automatic needed to be
cocked, but Hollywood didn't know that. The clip, fully loaded, was already
in, and waiting, the first bullet already primed. All he had to do was aim
and pull the trigger.
The odd thing was, he couldn't seem to do it.
Behind him, the movie rolled on, building a story out of words and actions
and old friendships.
He watched the scenes play out across the sleeping man's face for another
five minutes, then left.
It didn't make sense. It didn't make sense that he couldn't pull the trigger.
He sat in the stairwell and tried to think.
So this, he supposed, was love. Or the state of being in love.
What a stupid turn of events.
He just couldn't do it. Couldn't, couldn't. He could kill the man's father,
and his best friend's sister, could torture him, hurt him, mislead him,
confuse him, enrage him. But he couldn't kill him.
It seemed a stupid sort of love, hardly useful for anything. Except to get a
certain one-armed assassin killed. And he would be killed, unless he took out
his employers. It would be hard, but it could be done, if he really wanted
it. He was that good.
He sat in the stairwell and tried to think. His body was perfectly still, a
wooden image, his eyes locked and distant. The gun rested quietly in his lax
hand, muzzle pointed down.
He tried to think, but all he could seem to conjure up was an image of a tree
in the wind, bowing and rising in slow motion, a sort of ballet. The leaves,
bright as mint and thin as tissue, fluttered, letting the sun glow through
their faint veins, casting light green shadows on the ground, on his upturned
face. The tree was laughing, its laughter the wind running through its
branches. It was playing. He longed to climb up into that tree and sit in its
branches and let the mint green leaves flutter over his face, but he got to
sit in a dimly lit stairwell instead.
The tree bowed and shook, laughing, emerald and umber, the color of his
latest mark's eyes.
The dragon smiled at him patiently, kind.
The gun rested heavily in his slack hand. It waited, too, also kind, in its
own way. It knew better, ultimately. So did the dragon.
Ah, hell.
"Do you love?" he asked aloud, and stood.
THE END
Do You Love?
by Raietta
"Do you love?"
—Stephen King
