Grayman Book One: Acts of War
Page 40
8
October 22nd.
Matt Burke:
I can hear the music out in the corridor, even with all the concrete and steel. I don’t recognize the artist offhand—some kind of acid-industrial. Still, he hears me buzz and pops the door by remote without getting up. And mercifully, he drops the throb-and-thrash several dozen decibels as I step inside his dark little cell.
Cell: a good word for it—it reminds me of something between monastic and penitentiary, even by military standards. It’s eight-by-ten and windowless like mine, but spare in a way that it almost looks like no one’s been living here for almost a year now. The cast-concrete walls and all the horizontal surfaces are bare. No pictures, no knick-knacks, nothing personal.
Michael’s sitting—kneeling—on a thin mat on the floor, like he’s been doing some kind of Zen samurai thing (except with really loud tunes). The overheads are off—the only light is the screen of his notebook, bathing the room in an eerie blue and making him look more ghostly than normal. The ghost-thing is worsened by the fact that he’s pretty slow to melt his face from that stoic mask he locks it in, into something more human. He seems to be savoring the last bars of whatever this is that’s passing for a song right now. Then he clicks it off the player and starts to come back to life.
“Sorry,” he apologizes sleepily. “I know my taste in music has a tendency to make the average person’s brains leak out of their ears.”
“Anything but whup-ass Country, and I can deal,” I offer, looking over his little box of a room. Besides the issue furnishings, he’s got an incline bench and an exercise tower with punching bags and that’s about it. “Still haven’t gotten around to redecorating, I see…”
“I keep hearing about this hot new hole in the ground they’re planning to install us in,” he plays. “I figured I’d wait to hire the Feng-Shui consultant until after the move.”
“Sounds like you’re bought in,” I jab him, though I feel more than a little bad about it a second after it’s out of my mouth, so I soften it. “No second thoughts?”
“I took the surgery, the new ID and all the training. I figure they own me until I’m something like sixty-five. Besides, what else am I going to do?” It’s heavy, but the humor is still there under it. He gets up slowly, with some difficulty, like he’s been sitting like that long enough to go numb. He limps visibly as he goes to the fridge.
“Pepsi?” he offers. “Real stuff. No diet…”
I nod. He brings me a can, still limping.
“The ol’ war-wound?” I gesture at his left leg.
“Never been quite the same,” he tosses lightly. “Still a lot of scar tissue in the meat.”
Not wanting to screw up the military-neat bed, I take the desk chair. He sits on his workout bench. Then he takes a long, loving drag off his soda. I’ll give him this: he lives sparse, but he seems to be able to take a lot of joy in some of the simplest things. Beer. Food. Even junk soft-drinks.
“Breakfast of Champions,” he says of his Pepsi like he means it. I give him a minute with his simple joy before I finally get to my reason for coming.
“It finally came through: Live mission.”
“I heard,” he ruins the moment for me. I glance over at his screen again, at the Datascan ready-graphic, figuring I know where he gets his insider feed, but he corrects me: “Henderson.”
I gather myself and get heavy on him. “No sims, no games. Real bad guys and real dead bodies this time. I know it’s not new to you, but that was a whole different deal. You really want to get back into that shit just because the players want to prove something?”
His smile goes lopsided and dark.
“What else am I going to do?”
But the way his face slips back into that pale, dark-eyed death-mask, I know what he means to say, in that icy monotone he slips into: “Get back into it, Matthew? I never left it.”
He doesn’t, though. It means he’s still holding the real rage in check, maintaining. I can see him push it back down somewhere inside of him, but it takes focus, and he isn’t entirely successful. The real Michael—the wicked-smart but screwed-up late-twenty-something with the disarming sense of humor that’s so easy to just hang with and talk to, the one who treats me (hell, treats pretty much anybody down here) like he gives an honest shit and is actually glad to have me around no matter how ‘raqed an excuse for a human being I am—he doesn’t fully come back.
I wouldn’t say he’s got multiple personalities in there. It’s more like a switch going off that sort of floods him and over-writes the humanity bits. Then he’d blow your brains out in a hot second if he thought it would even remotely improve his day. The trouble is, his human bits know that. And when he comes back, when he’s just Michael again, he has to deal with it. And he knows that, too.
What worries me most, though, is sitting here trying to visualize what that’s going to do to him over time, how it’s going to eat away at those human bits, if he stays on this path. And I also wonder why that eats at me so much, why I give a shit about this ‘raqed piece of work I’ve only known barely a year and can’t even say that I really know at all.
It hits me then: something about him—it’s like I’ve known the guy all my life, that’s how easy I feel with him when he’s not jacked. And I realize it’s not just sinking in now: I felt it the first five minutes I spent with him, bleeding in an Athens’ subway tunnel.
“The brief is in ten,” I tell him, checking my watch. Then we just sit and drink our Pepsis until it’s time to go.