Shades Of Obsession

by JR King

  That’s the point. I wasn’t a puzzle wanting to be solved. I was what I believe I deserved, and no one but me could relate to what went on in my head—so bear with me.

  Let’s quickly assess me. I know what people saw when they looked at me: a tall, disgustingly fit, mean, educated man. Maybe they even thought my skin was too smooth for adult years. Well, that’s why I had a strict diet, a few lines of coke included on a monthly basis. A ritual, if you will.

  Why didn’t I, they also thought somberly, wear something else than designer suits? It wasn’t about looking good, or worse: sexy, or rubbish in the same vein. The right type of bespoke suit screams power. Plus, I knew that the arch of my dark left eyebrow troubled most people who looked intently at me. Mostly, the same arch wore a suitable curve of arrogance or, better—like when in the presence of a good woman, an unsuitably obscene invitation. My hair was groomed short enough to look professional but long enough to offer a decent grip to a girl when I ate her out. Then there was that slight crook at the corner of my mouth. What about it? It was excruciatingly irresistible.

  And that’s how my mouth was currently employed. But enough with the details and descriptions, I don’t want to bore you further. God knows readers hate reading gratuitous footnotes at the end of a paragraph. Details are just like that. I’ll try to be good to you. Scout’s honor.

  I surmised that most of us weren’t wired to take human life. I’m not talking about killing for survival, or to protect your family, or to serve your country. I’m talking about normal people who deal with everyday shit in a humane way. Do I have the right to take a fellow human being’s life?

  Robert said, “Aleks?”

  I blinked twice, realizing I had been waging some eternal war with myself. I despised weakness, in me or in someone else. It’s like an insult to the face. The question I posed answered, I dropped the blade. Show’s over.

  We all wore black ski masks, and I removed mine. Without further ado, “Forget Megan’s Law, get rid of the weasel,” I ordered. “I don’t want the details.”

  “The building?” Robert’s scrappy Eastern-European colleague asked me. Unmasked, as well, he grinned, running a hand through his thick shock of hair. He had a face that only a mother could love, the kind of bum I could easily imagine driving a hammer into Peter’s skull. It would bounce roughly off the first time, and with a dull crack the next blow would splinter the bone into the flesh.

  I straightened the collar of my spiffy Loro Piana Strasbourg overcoat. “It’s yours when finished. Hang out a shingle to stay under the radar. And for fuck’s sake, if you plan on polluting the puritan city with your people, make sure they learn to speak the local language and become salaried workers. Fewer babies, too, teach your brethren to wear a fucking condom once in a while. And I better not see any clothes hanging on balconies when I drive by.”

  He smiled widely as he glanced at me. “Anything you say, boss.” Surprisingly, the crooked canine made his smile look kind of charming.

  “PS: try extended pleasure,” I added.

  Robert chuckled.

  Before leaving the derelict factory grounds, I stole one last glance at him. In my mind, I saw the bum striking again and again, gasping with effort as he got his jollies from smashing Peter’s face and bad cropped haircut away, breaking teeth, bone, hair, and flesh into one ghastly scarlet mixture. Splattering the graffiti covered wall. He would also use the same knife I’d held to slice away each of Peter’s fingers, until nothing identifiable was left.

  Disgusting…really disgusting. I can see your face turning away from the book in disgust, assuming the same eyes my father scrunched up while twisting his lips when I cried over killing my first white-tailed deer.

  Out the corrugated steel door I went. Closed it behind me, and checked for passerby. Flurries of dust swirled in the cold air as I walked to the waiting Bentley limousine in brisk trot. I shook the sandy grit from my shoes before stepping inside the car. From the outside, this abandoned petrochemical plant looked like a poor farm out of a Dickens novel. Could even qualify as a shantytown.

  They say that behind every great man there’s a great woman. I neither had a woman nor was I a great man, but there was a great girl behind me: Elena Anderson. And when they say you can’t choose whom you fall in love with, boy ain’t that the damn truth. That’s how my obsession with her started. Obsession is a young man’s game, and my only excuse is that I never grew old. I couldn’t have said it better than Michael Caine.

  To clarify, when I’d seen her the first time, I knew she wasn’t good for me. Not just an enemy, she was too young. Yet thoughts of her and musings of the dark things I might do to her grown-up body tormented me. Little by little, romanticism grew miserly, and I knew I was doomed. There was no going back for me; I wanted her, only her. Peter, by the way, had raped her, that’s why my blood was up. I wanted him dead.

  Is that dreadful?

  Between William Goldberg, Neil Lane, Lorraine Schwartz, and Harry Winston, they all wanted to design my engagement ring. Well, this isn’t Chasing Harry Winston, so settle down. Remember Kafka’s A Hunger Artist? The short story about the guy who starves himself for a living and people come to see him get thinner, amazed at his discipline and the ability to deny himself. It had very little in common with The Hunger Games. Essentially, the guy’s a fraud because not eating is the easiest thing in the world; he couldn’t find anything he wanted to eat. Before seeing Elena, I’d fallen in love. I’d pursued long-term relationships. After the fact, I couldn’t seem to find any girl appealing enough, being a bachelor was easy. At first, having this obsessive craving for a young girl bothered me. I guess I’d gotten used to it, accepting the slight madness.

  Turning Elena into a Patty Hearst, or a joke of a captive, would be easy. I could make her love me. Train her to feel that way. In no time she’d be cuddled against me, all soft and trusting while knowing my true nature, yet she’d still feel safe with me. I’d have to start out with a basic kidnapping, do some Fear Conditioning and Traumatic Bonding, then finally ease the situation with Capture Bonding…and voilà: Stockholm Syndrome.

  But honestly, where’s the frigging fun in that?

  You tell me. I didn’t get the appeal. I craved novelty, not psychopathy.

  My approach, to get the girl, came close to how to boil a frog. Folk wisdom says that if you drop a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will instantly jump out. Practicality demonstrates that if you put it in cool water and gradually increase the temperature, it won’t notice. Predatory games up your sleeve, eventually, the frog will be your bitch without ever realizing it was potentially in danger. Clever, isn’t it?

  I pigeonholed the fret about Elena and conveniently used my phone to answer work emails while listening to Led Zeppelin’s bass-heavy Whole Lotta Love. One of the best sex songs ever, in my opinion. Due to chronic insomnia, I usually tackled the day before the city flooded with sunlight. Perhaps it had something to do with watching Elena’s beautiful face every night before I fell asleep.

  The morning blossomed like a rose, its tightly curled petals opening, revealing the beauty within. Soon, the brick pavement turned into a glass-smooth macadam road as we neared insistent urban sprawl, and photogenic Boston rose up out the earth. Traffic on the Big Dig was thin. I watched the dreary borough transition into Victorian epoch. Diurnal or nocturnal, the city’s skyline was magnificent.

  The way my world moved? You wouldn’t approve now, would you? I was both a good and a bad man who got away with a lot, so right now is the second time for you to turn away and find a lighter, more romanticized read. I’d love to suggest darling authors in a parting speech, but at this very moment I couldn’t care less.

  Last but definitely not least, my mantra was to do as I desired, not as society expects me to act in order to enforce normative conduct. Those of you who can stomach this and choose to keep me company, follow me. This coldness—this depressing opening stanza—means absolutely nothing. Fear not, I have warm sights a
nd charming places to show you.

  Alexander Turner

  The Man at Work

  Of course my office was located in a tower. Except it wasn’t just any tower. This one was designed and constructed by I.M. Pei’s firm, still remembered around the city for minor engineering problems when it erected. Teething troubles, really. The glass panels kept detaching and crashing merrily to the sidewalk below. Don’t you just hate it when that happens? There you are, walking by like the coolest superstar, and then it lands—wham!—in proximity, almost giving you a shit-fart. Boston had quite a few code brown situations, then. As soon as that stopped occurring, my father acquired way too many floors at the top. Better yet, it could all be mine if I worked hard enough. Try to imagine a 60-floor corporate skyscraper; that’s how big my obsession with Elena was.

  Catch up or catch the exit train, was one of my dear principles. Career was the one thing in which I was successful. I excelled at closing business deals. Locally, I was the youngest prodigy and the sharpest up-and-comer and the meanest of them all. My suits were made to order and freshly pressed, mentioning the cost would be pointless. If you have to ask the price, you can’t afford it outright, so there. Hell, even with all the speculation about my anger issues, I was fucking legend. Men wanted to be me and women wanted to bear my offspring—several ones that is. Why? I’ll get to it—in a second.

  My parents always wanted two children. Mom had fertility issues, and just when they gave up on old-style insemination, guess what happened? Shocker, I hitched a ride, a miracle child—a gift from the heavens, if you will, and a son at that. I was spoiled. There was nothing I wanted that I couldn’t have. I was the finest—cutest, brightest, strongest—of all children, doted on and catered to beyond imagination. So don’t hold my arrogance and selfishness against me, it wasn’t my entire fault. If we must get into it, yes, there’s such a thing as nature versus nurture; I was a product of how I was raised. Deviant sex and work were perfect outlets for someone like me. I had anger issues. I had obsessive tendencies. I fought dirty. I used every trick in the book to get what I wanted. Break your glasses and kick your cane out from under you. Without blinking an eye, I first made colleagues cry then cut—not in the literal sense here—and eviscerated the ones that couldn’t get their shit together in the boardroom, then I went on to explore the limits of angel-faced girls.

  Let’s back the fuck up, shall we?

  My name is Alexander Turner, twenty-eight years old, only son born to a father who ruled with an iron fist and mother who ruled with a feather’s touch. And don’t judge me just yet because earlier I mentioned dark fantasies and even darker habits, okay? Philosophers prefaced it time and again; everyone possesses colors that hold all of the things they are, they could be, they wish to be, they fail to be. Every human is really an illegible, shapeless drawing on a blank canvas, and no one is ever as you think they’ll be.

  See, here’s the thing, I also happened to be pretty simpleminded; I didn’t believe in luck or chance. Had I pursued lit to become a writer, perhaps I would believe in gravity-defying luck. I would be successful or not because of luck, so there’s no damn choice but to believe in it. Had I pursued ecclesiology to become a priest, maybe I would believe in getting chances. Though I had the required intellectual brawn, I was far too rough to be a writer and too horny to be a priest, by the way, so now you know why I switched majors. To tell you the absolute truth, Valerie played a hand in it too, but that’s a story for later.

  I was a born-and-bred Beacon Hill child, raised dominant—all Turner men are. Our motto: whether it’s an encounter in a boardroom or a bedroom, someone always has to lead. It even passed muster with Turner women. Didn’t mean I dated submissive women. I liked dominant women so I could break them down in the bedroom. I majored in business, and the harder I worked, the more luck I seemed to get. No horseshoes, or rabbit-feet, or four-leaf clovers, it really came down to hiring the right people and exceptional leadership skills. Not to sound too Machiavellian, but consider Thomas Edison, Harvey Firestone, and Henry Ford. Firestone aced it by acknowledging that the growth and development of people is the highest calling of leadership. I know this right here, the whole I don’t subscribe to luck shtick, stinks of a self-righteous Republican, but you’re wrong. Hoity-toity wasn’t my style. I was a practical person, and prim and proper appearances were only for show. As such, whether I dealt with foes or played hardball, I remained a dirty bastard and a proud Democrat.

  Another thing about me you should know is that I loved Boston. Loved the vibrancy of an ambulatory city. I guess I could tell you all kinds of smart shit and even quote Mark Twain on the infamous subject. Never mind the rich history, best schools, brownstones, and food. Unlike the West Coast, I liked having four distinct seasons, and in some regard, I’d probably wither and die if I had to look at cheap stucco and red-tiles everyday. Simply put, I liked this city because it was windy and cold to the perfect degree, which made for good drinking and classy dressing weather. Fashion was one of my vices, coffee another one. Surely you know that the taste of coffee is directly impacted by the weather, the cold allows for the flavor to bloom inside the mouth rather than cleave the taste buds and corrupt the saliva. Don’t get me started on bourbon. As for the hot, muggy summers, my dick couldn’t complain—all’s fair in love and war.

  If you want to know more about me, know that my cleaning rituals bordered on OCD, and I never fucked highly manipulative women. I’m not talking about women who try to convert evil ways; I’m talking about the kind of manipulation that urged one to become someone different from who they were. I couldn’t fool myself to even have a sliver of respect for people who changed for the sake of others, so avoiding them like the clap came naturally to me. I wished more men were like me, but crap, we all know that the world is a sad place. For the sake of my own ends and to achieve success, I, too, was manipulative sometimes, but I’d never tried nor would I ever try changing someone’s personality. Before we embark on this journey, I’ll lay my cards on the table. I was the type of dangerous man on whom you could smell the push-me-and-I-push-you-over-the-edge madness at first sight. Girls apparently liked that, but get this, the wickedness rising off me in fire-laced streams wasn’t a laughing matter. In laymen’s terms, I was a bad boy. I had a big story. Of course I did, all experienced, flawed men do, and further on you’ll see the clichés stacking up higher than a batch of your grandma’s Sunday Brunch pancakes.

  For the fainthearted, my advice would be to walk away. Walk away just like I was walking purposefully toward the entrance of the sheet glass skyscraper that towered in front of me. Earsplitting sirens of waste collectors and lumbering street sweeping vehicles resonated in the background. There was always a lot of foot traffic, so my eyes were cast through and through on the black and beige floor tiles as I strode to the bank of elevators. Throughout the ride, silence surrounded me, the only sound being the hum of the elevator as it ascended. Though OTIS elevators are purported to be the fastest ones worldwide, the ones located in this tower discredited that claim.

  I called my secretary when I reached my office. “Good morning, Meredith.”

  “What’s wrong with your voice?”

  My lips twisted wryly. “Nothing an aspirin wouldn’t put right.”

  “I’ll send someone.”

  Being an introvert, the kind that could blow up the MBTI scale—ever took the test when you got hired by a Fortune 500 company?—mostly, I worked and fucked and gymmed and wrote when shit stirred in my head. Before getting caught in the rush of responsibilities that comprised my day, I wrote down a passage about a man on a train. Just the act of writing fed my mind. Lately, though, I was itching to share what I’d produced, not only to transcend my own writing, but some stories shouldn’t be kept under wraps. Uniquely doing short stories, I had been fully influenced by Guy de Maupassant.

  The writing whittled down my frustration a little, and the girl I selected online would bear the brunt of what was left in me. Timeout. I was
n’t the type of asshole who had a profile on a dating site to trick women into sex, I was thoughtful and gallant enough to pay for it. Do I look like someone who wastes time reading cliché-ridden, please-like-the-fake-me online profiles to you? For those who’re dating such scum-of-the-earth, dump the asshole, fist bump, and go find yourself a real man.

  I was mapping logistics and verifying the changes Meredith had made to my agenda in Lotus Notes, and barely heard the repeated raps on the door.

  “Come in,” I approved, my voice tight.

  A moment later, a longhaired brunette entered gracefully, bearing a silver tray with a tall glass of water and a blister pack of tablets. “Good morning, Mr. Turner.”

  I vaguely remembered seeing the girl in the reception lobby. My mother had taught me that courtesy costs nothing when I was a child, and since then I tried to hold true to the proverb. She’d abandoned me more than a decade ago…but not totally of her own volition. “Serena, right?”

  Putting down the load on the solid mahogany desk, she smiled. “Yes.”

  Of course she was a tall, classic American beauty, but then again, all Turner Holdings’ receptionists were ex-models who had a natural upper-class English accent that fit nicely with the ambience. Large brown eyes, well-defined cheekbones on a slender face that had just a hint of something exotic were tickets to a promising blowjob.

  I punched two chalky white tablets from the printed foil coating and reached for the highball. There was a slight wobble in my hand, and it annoyed the hell out of me. I needed release and I needed to compartmentalize the encounter with Peter. Not particularly in the aforementioned order, because one would end up following the other either way.