Page 14 of Hellbent

“Yes,” he said.

“Are we gonna talk about what happened?”

“I can’t.”

“Because of whatever … things you’re into.”

“Yes.”

She looked at him more closely. In his childhood Evan had endured countless hours of training at the hands of psyops experts, training that involved brutal interrogation that lasted hours, sometimes days. To ensure he gave nothing away with his body language or facial expressions, they’d monitored everything down to his blink rate. And yet today emotion had left him loose and vulnerable. He felt as if Mia were looking right through his façade. He stood there, exposed.

“Whatever happened this time,” she said, “it hurt you.”

Evan locked down his face, held a steady gaze.

She gave a concerned nod. “Be careful.”

As he walked past, she caught him around the waist. She hauled him in and hugged him, and he felt himself tense. Her cheek was against his chest, her arms wrapped tight around the small of his back. He breathed her scent—lemongrass lotion, shampoo, a hint of perfume redolent of rain. He wanted to relax into her, but when he closed his eyes, all he could see was a Black Hawk spiraling out of control against a backdrop of stars.

He tore himself away and headed to his truck.

6

The Brink of Visibility

His tasks for the day completed, Evan sat at his kitchen island before a plate of steaming mahimahi, seasoned with thyme from his living wall. The plate was centered precisely between knife and fork. Offset symmetrically beyond the plate were two bowls, one filled with fresh pomegranate seeds, the other with cherry tomatoes, also plucked from the vertical rise of vegetation. His vodka tonight, shaken until bruised and served up, was 666 Pure Tasmanian, fermented in barley, single-batch-distilled in copper pots, and filtered through highest-grade activated charcoal. Ice crystals glassed the top.

He’d prepared the meal with focus.

And he didn’t want any of it.

He wondered what Mia and Peter were eating in their condo nine floors below. Their colorful home with action figures on the floor, dishes in the sink, messy crayon drawings magneted to the refrigerator. When he’d first visited them, the disorder had made him uncomfortable. But he’d learned to understand it differently, as an affirmation of lives being fully lived.

He forced a bite. The flavor was good and told his body it was hungry. He reminded himself that no matter what emotions were cycling through him, he was a machine bent to a single purpose and machines required fuel.

He ate.

When he was done, he scrubbed the plate, dried it, put it away atop a stack of others. It struck him that only the top plate ever got used.

He took the vodka over to the big windows stretching along the north wall and stared out at the Los Angeles night. He could see clearly into the building across from his, like peering into a dollhouse. A man emerged from an elevator, scrubbing furiously at his collar with a handkerchief. The fabric came away lipstick red. He folded the handkerchief into his pocket, walked down the hall. Evan watched his wife react happily to the door’s opening. They embraced. Three floors up, a family quartet lay on their stomachs on the living-room carpet, playing a board game. Next door to them, a woman sobbed alone in a dark bedroom. An older couple on the top floor practiced ballroom dancing. The woman had a flower in her steel-gray hair. They both smiled the entire time.

All that humanity in motion. Like observing the inside of an intricate clock, gears and cogs and hidden machinations. Evan could tell the time, but he would never fully grasp the inner workings.

His gaze returned to the woman crying in the dark. As he watched her, he felt something inside him twist free, a fresh shoot of grief rising up to match hers. He’d never lacked sympathy—no, that he’d always had in spades. But he’d protected himself from empathy, had withdrawn here to his Fortress of Solitude and taken up the drawbridge.

He watched the woman sob and envied her ability to release so powerfully and so well.

His release would be paid for in blood.

He took a sip of his drink, let it slide across his tongue, cleanse his throat. Hint of dark chocolate, touch of black-pepper heat.

He dumped out the remaining vodka, then crossed to the Turkish rug near the fireplace, sat crossed-legged, and rested his hands gently on his knees. He straightened his vertebrae and veiled his eyes so they were neither open nor closed.

He dropped beneath the surface of his skin and focused on his breath, how it moved through him, how it left his body and what it took with it.

He felt the grief and fury inside him, a red-hot mass pulsing in his gut. He observed it, how it crept up his throat, seeking egress. He breathed through it, even as it raged and fought. He breathed until it dissipated, until he dissipated, until he was no longer Orphan X, no longer the Nowhere Man, no longer Evan Smoak.

When he opened his eyes sometime later, he felt purified.