Invasion (15 page)

“I’m not queer. You call me queer and you’ll never see my business again.” I’m shaking with rage now, wondering why the fuck I phoned this degenerate.

“Okay Marky, we’ll send someone to take his picture, make him smile for the camera, then we find his history. Okay? You might need a smaller boat though, I’m done being your convenience store.”

“Whatever,” I grumble, disconnecting, sitting back and deciding the country club is in order.

I need to get a hit of the white dust and strong liquor in me, where the concierge service can drive me home.

David:

We’ve been like hormone crazed teenagers all day, now the sun is sinking and I have to duck. I’m going to have to hide out back until she goes to bed, which is gonna suck, but I have to play it cool. I’ve decided that as I can’t recall a darn thing about my life I’m simply going to make it up as I go along.

“I should go,” I tell her, reaching for my sweater and tugging it back on.

It smells like her now because she was using it as a pillow on the couch, curled over me, the two of us drinking and listening to music. She’s licked every tattoo on my body, and I have two sleeves and a chest and back full of them, and without hesitation I made up a reason for each one. I’ve discovered David Hearse has a magical gift for fabricating an elaborate story.

I didn’t know
her
. I thought I did, but a photo and material possessions can’t prepare you for the real thing, in the flesh. All things said and done, she’s a very sweet and caring woman. She fusses, and the lonely man inside my skin soaks it up like sunshine on petals.

“I need your number,” she insists, getting up and padding to the mantle, finding pen and paper in her stash of knickknacks on the marble.

“I don’t have one.”

“What?” she squeaks, pirouetting to face me, shock in her expression. “How do you get work if you don’t have a phone?”

“Easy. Like I did today,” I say, giving her a sly grin.

“Okay, so how do I reach you?”

“You don’t. I’ll reach you. I’ll stop by every weekend if you need me to.”

She looks alarmed, walking quickly back to me and sitting on the floor beside me, resting her elbows on my thighs, staring up at me like my name is Jesus and I can save her soul. “What if Mark comes back?”

I’ll be here, in the nick of time, don’t you worry about that sweet cheeks.

Instead I say, “Do you think he will? I made it pretty clear he’s not welcome.” She loses the worry, looking at me with such sincerity that my gut twists with a twinge of apprehension, “What’s up, sweets?”

“You’re a hero. You’re my hero, you’re this country’s hero. You put your body in danger to keep me and everyone else safe, and yet here you are, getting none of the recognition you deserve. It’s wrong. You should be rewarded for your sacrifices, not marginalized.”

I just shrug. I’ve got no answers for her. I have a hunch I served, in fact I’m pretty darn sure of it, but I think I was in it because it’s something that fed the beast in me, an environment where I could thrive. I don’t know if it was a hardship, and I don’t believe it was. Shit, I really hope I don’t have a wife waiting for me someplace, wondering if I died in enemy territory, pining for me to come home.

“Where are you staying?” she interrogates, pulling out all the big questions this evening.

“I’m sleeping on a buddy’s couch. I’m still trying to find my feet after my last tour,” I lie.

“No family to go to?” she asks.

I just shake my head. It’s hard to lie looking directly into her eyes, at the naive babe with a beautiful body, a woman who smells as good as she tastes, and feels even softer than I imagined.

“I need a house sitter. I honestly do, no lies. I might molest you if you stay here, but I’ll be gone a lot. I travel for half the month, most months. I’m only home now because it’s the holidays and we’ve closed for the year.” Squeezing my hand, hope in her stare, she pleads, “Please stay here. Please?”

“If I stay here you’ll be walking like a cowgirl for weeks.”

A flirtatious giggle blesses my ears and I smile at her seeming so jubilant.

“I know you’re between gigs, but I’ll pay you to be here. We’ll call you security. I’ll feel so much better having a man here with me. You make me feel so safe.”

“I don’t know, Carly. I’ll feel like your booty call if you pay me to live here while I’m sponging off you. It’s easier to just stay at my bud’s.”

“But you won’t be! The security of having another person here is more than worth it. I’m willing to pay you to stay. Please? Let me help you. Let me give something back for all you’ve done. Plus I just love snuggling up with you. I’ll give you space when you need it, but I’m gaga. I just found you, I don’t want to lose you.”

“Needy much?” I tease, and ruffle her hair, bending to kiss the top of her head so she knows I’m kidding.

It is the perfect solution. I get to be with her, all the way, out in the open without sneaking, to walk around in here without fear of discovery, and share those amazing breakfasts with her. I’m a breakfast man. Start the day right and you can conquer anything.

“Okay, I tell you what,” she says, getting up from the floor, patting my hand on her way to a stand. “Stay for dinner, digest a hot meal and my proposal. You can decide after.”

She’s so kind. I could be a serial killer and she’s opened her home and body to me. I’m beginning to feel like a heel. I went through everything she owns, jizzed in her face cream, fucked under the lining in her underwear drawer, and she didn’t deserve any of it. She has a Mark in her life, she needs a hero.

Sitting abruptly next to me Carly palms my cheek, staring into me with those pure eyes. “I need to know you’re safe. You fought for this country, you were never safe then. Now I’ve met you, and I can’t undo it. I can’t let you sleep on a couch a hundred times too short for you. There are two spare bedrooms upstairs, pick one, have your own space. Please Gavin. You made me safe today. I need to know you’re safe too. Cared for. That someone needs you.
I
need you. It’s like my soul jumped out of my body the moment we met, plus I’d go to hell if I let you sleep on a couch in the middle of winter. Let me make you safe. Let me?”

How do I say no?

Do I even want to say no?

No, I fucking don’t.

Play it cool, don’t jump at it.

Pulling her onto my legs I return the tenderness, framing her face in my hands and giving her a delicate kiss, savoring the willingness, the trust she gives without reservation.

Mark must be such a dick to hurt this. This is precious. This is rare.

I kiss her softly, then whisper, “Feed me, and I swear I’ll think about it. You should be the lawyer because you make a convincing case.”

Just the knowledge that I’ll consider her proposition has her beaming like I gave her a diamond tiara. “Yay!” Scooting off me and onto her little feet, she points at me. “Don’t move. Relax. I’m going to make you a meal that you can’t resist, and you’ll stay!”

Laughing, I shake my head. “Carly, seriously? I’d rather be in the kitchen cooking with you than sitting here with my finger up my ass.”

She offers me her hand. “Company only. You saved me twice today. Consider this your much deserved night off.”

When I put my hand in hers, it seals our fates. Destiny no longer lingers, it’s in total control from hereon out. “You have to change the locks. I’ll do it in the morning. None of his keys will fit after tomorrow.”

She hugs to my side, walking with me to the kitchen. “No talk of him. He’s history now.” But her nails bite into my waist, I felt her flinch when I brought up the locks, reminding her of
him
.

She’s scarred where no one can see. The sad thing is, I am too.

We have so many secrets holding us back, but when I look down at her looking up at me, I know I finally have one badass reason to leap forward.

Trust is earned, yet she gave me hers without condition. I wish I could do the same.

The knots of fate strangle.

Dreams are a periscope into the hidden

A fractured kaleidoscope of the whole

C
arly wants me to move in. She has no clue that I already live here. I falsely assumed that all the Aunt Jackie meals in the freezer meant this chick can’t cook for fudge, oh how grossly misinformed I was. She’s a goddess who can whip up made-from-scratch in t-minus five minutes.

I haven’t had a meal like this since before I regained consciousness in the Inner Belt of Boston, Massachusetts. Five states away from the White House, far away enough that when I regained consciousness I’d never piece together my past. Except the dreams of humping the first lady in the presidential wing constantly plague me. It’s so lucid that I no longer consider it wishful dreaming.

When hypothesizing I’ve entertained that this was the reason I have memory loss and am homeless. What kind of cunt drops a dude with amnesia in an industrial area when it’s below freezing at night?

They wanted me dead. They didn’t think I’d survive.

Whoever ‘they’ are.

Shunting the rage at the injustice down, I look at my empty plate, then at the pretty company sitting opposite me. The candlelight warms the highlights in her hair, making her look like a holy apparition.

Sometimes I wonder if I lost my mind, wonder if this is all a hallucination I’ve conjured to keep me company in some coma, or drug induced stupor in a nuthouse.

Maybe I just have a vivid imagination and spent too many hours playing Mortal Combat, so now that I’m loaded on anti-psychotic opiates I have a disassociation disorder, manifesting an alter ego which was some war hero who saved millions and secured the oil line right across the middle east for my lords and masters. I
could
have psychosis, but then when I dream, when I wake up drenched in sweat, I think maybe I just saw too much and had to block out the trauma to subsist.

Somehow I know we do that. I don’t know why I know so much random information, but I do. I know that if you survive immense tragedy and abuse you can completely suppress the memory so your psyche doesn’t shatter. It will either make you mad, or you have to isolate it like a tumor, preventing it from destroying the rest of the host. Our minds, we know so much, and we know so little. We compartmentalize. To survive we can do magic.

I recall being at war, I recall sand and dust and barren, I recall the grit drying my sinuses and getting between my teeth when the sandstorms blew in, I recall the lack of decent suspension constantly needling my tailbone because we weren’t traveling on roads – I recall detonation and the world whizzing by while we pinwheeled, men screaming.

We’re raised to think men don’t cry, that they don’t scream. In my nightmares we do both. And once the grief has waned the rage washes a red tide into your veins and vengeance is all I can taste. My nightmares are so vivid I doubt they’re dreams, I think whatever I can’t recall is filtering back in when I’m in REM, to see if I can cope with the knowledge. It’s a preview before the locked chamber reopens and allows me access to my history.

Fleeing my wake up zone, riddled with anxiety and the sense of vulnerability being left in the open, I hoofed it. Trawling the streets at night I hiked right past Mark’s esteemed university; Harvard. Nearby is MIT, and that place looked so familiar to me that I considered the possibility that I am a native to Boston. You can smell the harbor, sense the salt air, and the fog is often so thick it made me feel like a ghost strolling through the brume to my afterlife.

My first living memory is staring at the night sky, listening to trains racketing past. The world felt abandoned and cold, because it was approximately 03h00 on a Sunday night.

My location was uninhabited by anything other than bums and empty alleys, factory buildings around me looming like monoliths in a dystopian novel. The daytime high was a fucking balmy 34ºF, the nighttime low below freezing, with only five paltry hours of daylight. Do you know how fucked up that is? It was like being born into a planet without a sun, without heat, with nothing but punishing hypothermia corroding my skin, eating through the inappropriate clothing I was in.

The wind never stops blowing, the skies are perpetually gray, and I was woken with rain saturating me through. I was sodden and freezing, blue with numbness, and on the precarious ledge of an abyss. My instinct was to run, hard and fast and far, so I did. It warmed my stiff muscles, loosening them up, reheating my core, keeping me alive.

For some bizarre reason I recall a movie titled Forrest Gump, and it made me laugh because I was like a hobo in boot camp, running and running, up hills, past the Christmas lights glittering all over Boston Common, sprinting past the massive xmas tree at the Prudential Center, and hence I ran a lot of the journey, all the way to fucking New Hampshire! I spent two long weeks trying to find myself in Boston. New age chicks pay lip service to ‘finding themselves’. They don’t know shit.

No one has a fucking clue how essential it is to your wellbeing to know who you are. I literally tried to find myself, to find evidence of who I am, walking so far to see if anything was familiar, if anywhere felt like ‘I belong’.

Deep down I think I knew I wouldn’t find squat. I was dumped without a single possession. If I was homeless I’d have had something on me, if only a lucky penny picked up from a parking lot. Nothing. I had nothing.

I
was
nothing.

At first it was frightening. I checked myself for attack, to see if I was wounded, and I did have a migraine and a throbbing in the back of my head on the curve of my cranium, but it was so cold there was no way I was stripping down to inspect the damage. I needed to move just to raise my body temperature. Odds are I smacked my head when I hit the pavement. Higher odds are someone knocked me out before abandoning me in a place they hoped would see me become victim, not victor.

It took me a week of thumbing rides and endless trudging to get away from Boston, where I felt paranoia that I was being tailed, under covert surveillance. I had to lose them, I just had a crazy gut feeling which wouldn’t abate. I went to ground, traversing back roads, only traveling in the middle of the night so it was easier to detect a shadow, aware that soon I’d need to find a shower and a bar of soap.

It grew progressively colder with the daytime temperature only 33ºF, the wind chill taking me through hell and beyond. Heaven might have gates but Hell sure as shit doesn’t. When night fell it was so far below freezing at 13ºF that I began to fear for my life. I knew I was being targeted, I was under threat, but at this rate the cold was sure to end my sorry existence first.

Eventually I stopped fleeing in Lincoln, where the dude giving me a lift on his way to Canada mentioned it’d been snowing since the end of November. When I got out like I knew where my fake aunt lived, I estimated I was shuffling through fourteen inches of the white curse. It’s then that I discovered that my boots are indeed insulated and ‘all weather’ proof.

I’d travelled 130 miles in two days in my bid to outrun and outwit the shadows haunting me.

This woodland loop provided the perfect terrain for longterm survival. Tree cover, lots of it, buttressing spacious homes in an isolated and newly developed area of Forest Ridge. Big homes with swaths of space between them.

Carly’s was quiet, the only one where lights didn’t come on and off for over a week, and so little daily traffic that I knew no one would find me here, no would see me. If surveillance located me I’d see them coming because this isn’t a city, it’s a backwaters.

She’s the one house to have lights on the street, vintage affairs that Mark probably had installed. After reading her diaries I think I know why Mark moved them from Boston to here, no one would hear him ‘discipline’ his wife.

This area is picturesque and a far cry from the industrial wasteland I became coherent in, regaining awareness, awareness of frostbite and bitter misery. Mark must have had motive to move them so far away that he had a two and a half hour commute to work everyday.

Maybe it was because he was feeling up every skirt in his microcosm, I dunno. She probably drives the hour’s worth of traveling to Manchester to do her shopping, and maybe that’s why she stocks up so much. Maybe she’s afraid one day she’ll get snowed in and stuck.

The wide stretch of greenland and forest surrounding this location provided me with a pocket of warmth, a barrier from the snow, and the luxury of foraging.

It’s easier to forage in the wild than it is in the city. I’d rather risk a bit of grit in my mouth than some dodgy disease caught by eating second hand food and throw-outs behind a takeout joint in the urban jungle. This is natural.

Natural fits me. I like the connection to the wilds, the scent alone gifting a comfort my battered brain needed to find stability.

“Did you like it?” she smiles, looking a little tired.

“I did,” I nod, almost grateful that she’s pulled me out of the sinking sand between my ears.

I keep overanalyzing, overthinking, reexamining every moment I can recall, wistfully looking for a clue I missed in the hopes that it’s the key to unlock the vault.

Reaching over, playing the cards I’m dealt, I hold her hand, “You make a mean chicken schnitzel and creamed veggies.”

“Did you have enough? If you’re still hungry we can pop an apple pie in the oven?” she offers.

She’s worried I’m displeased, she’s trying to read me the way she read Mark. I’m not him. I’ll never be him.

“I had plenty,” I assure her, standing, still holding her hand, closing in on her and drawing her up from her chair, stooping to kiss her delectable lips. “Thank you for everything.”

She comes up to tiptoes to kiss me, her free hand on my chest to stabilize her balance, but she drops quickly, pouting, “You can’t go! It’s late and cold and snowing. I can tell you’re getting ready to leave and I insist that you stay. For my conscience. For my brownie points with heaven.”

“I can’t impose like this, Carly. It’s not right,” I insist, manipulating her like I do it for a living.

Lies come so easy. Easier than the truth.

The truth is that from the moment I spied her photo she made my bucket list.

“It’s no imposition at all. I understand you feeling like this is an imposition, but it’s not. I’ll sleep like a log knowing you’re in the house. It’s the hardest thing being single after being married for six years. I always had someone around, now I feel like I’m living in a museum, or a morgue.”

“Why’d he come here?” I pry.

“He does it, every couple of days he’ll just pitch, saying he needs something he forgot when he moved out, lying and saying he needed to check I was okay because he had a feeling I hurt myself and could be lying dead at the bottom of the steps. He’s an asshole. It’s all lies. He can’t let go, and I can’t move on and feel safe until he does.”

“So I’ve been dating you for two months and ready to put a rock on your finger?” I smile slyly at the sweetheart.

She blushes, an ashamed giggle bursting from her demure throat. “What the hell is wrong with me! You must think I’m a raging whacko.”

Shaking my head I close my arms around her, locking us together, appreciating the sublime joy of resting length to length, touching wherever we can, the supernatural connection already destroying barriers and melding us as a unit.

We fit, we feel good, and I can’t wait to get her upstairs and fuck her again. “Carly, what you did was normal. Women are forever making their male friends pretend to be more than that to protect their six. Your ex isn’t my idea of a decent contender for your happiness.”

Gazing up at me, her neck arched to such a degree that I’m sure she can’t inhale properly, she whispers, “You’re more than a friend. You’re my future. We’re soulmates, or something, because I’ve never wanted a man as much as I instantly needed you. I wanted to jump inside your skin to kiss your heart, to feel you everywhere, to taste you everywhere.”

“Keep talking dirty and I’ll have no choice but to stay, all night, deep inside you.”

“Tease,” she murmurs, her voice so wispy that it sounds like a prayer whispered in confession. “I’m so hot for you my panties are stuck to me.”

“Shall I alleviate you of the hardship pressing so mercilessly on you?” I laugh, imitating a snob voice.