056. Feds & Martyrs

“Did you ever find anything worth dying for?"

The boy leans forward. He stretches towards me and the chain that links his handcuffs to the tables rattles a little.
"All those places you went to, the years you spent travelling, the people you spoke so fondly of when we first met. Were any of them real? Did anything ever inspire you to think beyond yourself?”
“Sure”, I say, “I’ve got a family”
I brought him in. Betrayed him after three years of living on that farm of guns and pot.

“Wife? Kids?”

“A sister.”

“Blood, then.”

He leans back in his chair and stares at the ceiling as he takes a long drag on the cigarette that’s turned to ash in his hand for the last four minutes. “Blood is an obligation”, he inhales. Exhales “but you can’t pick your family”.
I lean against the one-way mirror.

“Tell me about Rose.” 

“Smith met her in California, I think. Which makes sense, right? The weird ones always has the best pussy.” He smiles at me. Genuinely. It's not a leer but it lingers on his lips a second too long before he continues. “I killed Rose with a hammer”, he says. “In the orange groves. Three years after she first came to stay with us.”

“Why?”

“Doesn’t matter.” He's not smiling anymore. He stares down at the table and I stare down at him. I've been staring down at Will for so long that it's starting to feel like up.

“The details they matter and I remember the details." He turns one hand over, the one not holding a cigarette, so that the back rests on the table and he stares dead-eyed at the palm. 

"There was blood", he says, "There was so much blood and Smithy wouldn't let me wash up before we buried her so the blood mixed with dirt and I had her underneath my fingernails for weeks afterwards. Whenever I saw that streak of black I thought of when she'd rest against me and I'd smell the top of her head and forget where I was. But I killed her because Smithy said I should. That's all there's to it. Rose was no one special when she lived.

“I mean, I loved her but she was no more special than you or me. No more than any of us can ever aspire to be. Rose was just a human girl and Smithy said she was about to ruin everything. When we see each other again she'll thank me. She'll understand. Tomorrow everything will be alright again”.

“What happens tomorrow?”, I ask him.

He grinds the cigarette out on the table and looks up at me.

“Tomorrow we bring her back”

He says it with such conviction I almost believe him. So I stay quiet a little longer than I should and I worry he'll catch me wrong footed.

“You can’t bring her back, Will. Rose is dead. You said so yourself. You killed her. We dug her body up a week ago. It’s been in the ground for more than two years”.

“Vessels”, he says with a hiss and an air of dejection that suggest I’m the stupid one.

“Vessels?”

He shoots me a look of disgust and when he takes a deep breath I can almost see how he’s counting to ten in his mind. To calm himself down. He really wants to explain himself.

“We’ll bring her back and this time she’ll be different”

“Different how?”

“She’ll be like you. In fast forward”

“Me?”

“Well, you in the grander sense. Mankind?”

Obviously not the word he's looking for. But close enough. He doesn’t consider himself a part of us anymore. But to him he’s the human and we’re the monsters. I think he sidetracks that debate because he knows how little time he has left here.

“Everything you could have become. Every potential of you fulfilled. She’ll come back and she'll be you. But complete. Without all the bullshit. She'll rise above it. Get it? Rose. She who rose. Rose will rise. That's poetry, man!”

“You’re going to have be a little more specific than that”

“I cant”

“Because you don’t know, right?”

I feel my temper escape me.

“Giving up where Rose was buried was the last card you had to play. If you can’t give us Smith you’ll be gone a week from now. We'll lock you up somewhere no one will ever find you and then we'll kill you. And no one will ever tell your story.”

This time he doesn’t say anything and I wonder what else we can get from him. I don’t think he’s lying. I just think he’s batshit-crazy. Most of what he says could be true, given who he represents and what I know about them (what I’ve seen them do) it could be true but the context is all wrong. Give them small truths and they can't see the big lie. Wilson used to say that at the Academy. Poor doomed Wilson.

“Can I ask you again”, he says just when the door opens and the men in black come to take him away.

“Have you found anything worth dying for?

They pull him out of his chair.

“A friend? A girl? A cause?

They drag him out the doorway. He struggles just enough to be able to twist around, look me in the eyes and let his last words slip through.

“Because it’s not until you have that you’ll know how to really live.”