Page 51

51

Jonathan

I am flying past Bourges when a cop appears in my rearview mirror. He is driving fast. I am also driving fast. Shit.

I slow down. He slows down. And turns on his sirens. Shit.

Perhaps surprisingly, police are something I rarely deal with in my line of work. I am not a fan of cops. A detention center will do that to a person.

I pull over to the side of the road in the scenic French countryside. I keep my hands where the cop can see them, on the wheel. I stare straight ahead. I have a gun strapped to my torso and a knife on my belt but nothing exotic.

The cop takes his time getting out of his car, then takes his time walking over. He is a cop; cops can do whatever the fuck they want. They make contract killers look tame.

I roll down my window. “Good afternoon,” I say in French. “Sir.”

“Good afternoon,” he says in English. They always know when you are American. It is a gift God gave the Europeans. “Do you know how fast you were going?”

“Yes.” The question is, does he?

“Three hundred and fifty kilometers per hour.” He does.

“How much?” I motion for my jacket pocket, where my wallet is. I am not trying to bribe him. In France, you pay speeding fines on the spot.

“No.” He wiggles his finger. “I need your license .”

French cops are also able to confiscate your license on the spot. Your vehicle is towed at your expense. Shit.

If this were a movie, I would kill him, then drive off in his car and never hear from him again. But there is one class of people I do not fuck with. When you play with cops, you lose every time.

“Of course.” I grit my teeth and hand him one of my licenses. He steps back and allows me to get out of the driver’s seat. Looks like I am taking another train.

But first, we have to wait for a tow truck. Everything takes so long. This is Europe, a place where it is easy to fall into the cracks between things, to wait for so long that you forget what you are waiting for.

I sit in the passenger seat of my rental car and worry my hands until they ache.

In my life, I never stop. Like a shark, I keep moving. I never think about what drives me.

But right now, on the side of the road outside a picturesque French village, I realize I am terrified. I have been killing people for almost seven years, ever since I got out of prison, and I have never revealed Mas’s identity to anyone.

I do not have friends. I do not have relationships. I find that I am mostly afraid of people, perhaps ironically. I am afraid of what they might do to me.

Eva said I kill people as a way of killing myself, and she is partly right. It keeps me separate. It keeps me locked in my trauma, but there is more to it than that.

I do not trust anyone. I think everyone is out to get me. I think that way all the time. I was a child of abuse and then I was a child in prison, and as much as I might try to look normal, to look good , even—rich and flash and in control—on the inside I am fucking terrified.

Not just for myself but for Mas. Always for Mas.

I did not lie to Eva about everything that first night on the train. I did grow up in upstate New York, on a different planet—it sometimes seems—than the one we are on now.

We had locks on our bedroom doors—not on the inside but on the outside, to keep us in. That was one of my first memories, of not being able to get out, for hours and hours and hours. That was how it started.

My father would leave us locked in our bedrooms, and then, seemingly at random, we would be let out into the rest of the house. It was like an amusement park by comparison. With a TV and a recliner chair and a refrigerator. Mas and I would go crazy.

Sometimes we would be allowed in the yard, or in the woods. We would swim in the lake for hours, screaming, delirious with freedom. But we just looked dirty and wild and badly behaved.

I think at first Mas and I were just an inconvenience. I assume our mother, at least, had wanted children pretty badly. She had adopted Mas; she had gotten pregnant and kept the baby. But then she had died, and my father did not want us.

I do not know when exactly it changed—if it was upon her death or after or before. I do not know how it changed. I do not know why he kept us at all. He used to act like we were the problem, like he was heroic for taking care of us.

“You’re lucky you have me,” he would say all the time, with the edge of a threat.

He would lock us in our rooms. He would starve us and then be annoyed at how thin we were, how unhealthy we looked, how naughty we were.

He locked the fridge because we kept eating food.

He stopped letting us out because the neighbors were talking.

He would scream at us, all the time, “Why are you doing this? Why are you like this?” When we did perfectly normal child things, he acted like we were monsters.

Then he started hitting us. He slapped Mas across the face for crying and then he demanded, “Why did you make me do that?” Over and over, pleading, distressed, wild with it. Like it was Mas’s fault.

He did it again and again and again. So much that I started to suspect some perverse part of him enjoyed it. The hurt, the guilt, the blame. He would jump up and down when we were too loud, or too sick, or too whiny. “Do you want me to get the belt?” He would practically beg us. “I want you to count. I want to hear you say it out loud.”

When I got older, I started to fight back, to protect myself, to protect Mas. That was when it got messy, because I started to lose sight of who the real bad guy was. Was I bad because he was punishing me, or was he punishing me because I was bad?

It was always presented as being my fault. As something he had to do. And I believed it. I still believe it, for myself. But not for Mas. Never for Mas. I might have deserved it, but he never did.

School complicated things for our father, but not as much as you would hope. It was easy for people to just say that we were wild kids. “They live out in the middle of nowhere,” our teachers would say to one another. “You just have to put up with them.”

I would get into fights—perhaps unsurprisingly—all the time. I honestly loved fighting. The only time I felt good or in control was when I was completely out of control. The consequences of these fights seemed so tame compared to the consequences at home. You have detention. You have Saturday school. You have to think about what you did.

Saturday school was my favorite activity, especially when Mas was there with me, because then I knew he was safe, too.

Saturday school was also where Mas befriended the teacher who got us out. It took months to arrange. There were moments when it seemed like it would not happen—when our dad got suspicious and threatened to move, when he stopped letting us go to Saturday school—but the teacher did not give up.

And then it was the night before we were supposed to escape. We would take the bus to school the next morning and we would go home with the state. Our dad did not know. We just had to make it through one more night.

All day I was petrified. I was so scared to leave. So scared that I was the problem and that wherever I went, wherever someone took me, I would turn those people against me, too.

But Mas comforted me; he explained to me that it was not my fault. That our dad was an evil person, that every bad thing I thought about myself came from him.

“Once he’s gone, we’ll be okay,” he said. “Once he’s gone, we’ll be like everyone else.”

But he would not really be gone.

“What if he won’t let us go?” I asked. “What if he comes and gets us?”

“He won’t,” Mas said, but I knew he was as worried as I was. The teacher who was helping us had told us that nothing was guaranteed.

“He might try to get you back,” she had warned us. “But we’ll keep fighting.”

I could not let that happen, not to Mas. That was how I justified it.

That last night, I kept waiting for something bad to happen. I kept waiting for my dad to do something horrible so that I could retaliate. But he never did. We watched TV together like a normal family, and then we went to bed. He even forgot to lock us in our bedrooms. His mistake.

At around two in the morning, I left my room. I got my dad’s belt. I used it to strangle him to death.

I did it for Mas. It drove me crazy that my father hurt Mas—beyond crazy. It drove me as far as I could go, which it turned out was pretty far. Further than anyone else I knew.

I went to school the next morning sincerely believing that there would be no consequences. My dad was a bad person. I took care of him. I saved my brother.

Of course, the body was found. I did not even try to hide it. I just assumed no one would ever look for it. I was not a professional back then. I left DNA and other evidence. I was naive enough to think that if I acted like a god, then I was one.

I was not.

I pled guilty to a lesser charge. Mas and I were separated. I was put in a detention center. Mas was placed with a good family. He became a doctor. I became an assassin. I kill people. He brings them back to life.

And now I have put him in danger again.

I have to get to Paris as fast as I can. I try to focus on the present—on the beautiful landscape and my nice clothes and my will to kill—but instead I find myself sinking into my past while I am waiting for the tow truck, while I am waiting for the cab, while I am trying to appear normal, while I am trying to appear nice. I am trapped, and the only way out is to fight.

The only way out is to kill.