WRECKING BALL
My fingers were aching and swollen after two straight hours.
My knuckles were raw, ripped to shreds, bleeding through the tape.
My fists struck the bag in a ceaseless bombardment, a steady blitz of punches and uppercuts that left behind a smattering of four blood-red circles with each hit.
I embraced the pain like an old friend.
The girl’s face entered my mind again. I pounded the bag with renewed intensity, despite my screaming muscles.
She’s an idiot.
She’s beautiful.
She lives in a delusional, fairytale world.
She’s honest and innocent and everything I’m not.
She’s a foolish little girl with silly, inconsequential dreams.
She’s refreshingly real in this bleak life of deceit and deception.
I hated her for it. For this.
For making me feel.
For making me question everything about my existence which, until this point, I’d been perfectly content with.
Never stopping, never settling.
No friends, no family.
Avoiding attachment, uprooting every few months.
It’s how I’d lived, how I’d survived. Not just since I took this job, but for as long as I could remember. Since the day I realized they were never coming back, no matter how long I waited on that cracked asphalt gas-station stoop.
I’d been alone for an eternity. An old man since I was a child.
Twenty-five years was a lifetime when you spent it in total solitude.
Exhausted, I collapsed against the punching bag. My breaths were coming quick and my pulse was pounding beneath the skin, faster than I was comfortable with. Breathing deeply through my nose, I counted the seconds it took to regulate my heartbeat again.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
Five.
And, just like that, I was back in control.
The tense coil of anxiety unfurled deep in my chest. I welcomed the pain radiating from my battered knuckles. I’d rather feel that than this other shit. Physical pain — at least it was manageable. You could overcome a fractured finger or a bruised bone. Lacerations could heal, bullet wounds could be stitched closed or cauterized.
But pain in your head? Pain in your heart?
That was the shit that fucked you up permanently.
When I was first recruited to the agency, I thought things might finally be different. For the first time, someone wanted me. Needed me.
I wasn’t just joining an organization, I was joining a family.
Yeah. It took me about three minutes on the job to realize that was just another line they fed potential recruits. They didn’t seek me out because I was special, or unique, or because they recognized some kind of latent possibility within me that they wanted to tap.
I fit a profile.
Loner. High IQ. Unemotional. Unattached. Aptitude for weaponry combined with a lethal appetite for vengeance. Enough anger at the world and its shitty circumstances to channel into something productive.
Nothing more than another shiny, savage tool in their arsenal.
I suppose I couldn’t put all the blame on their shoulders. After five years of doing what I did best, they offered me a desk job. Back in the States, filing paperwork and handing out orders. I could’ve had a life, a family, if that’s what I’d wanted. No more of this covert, chameleonic, undercover bullshit.
Most guys I know would’ve jumped at the chance for a little stability, considering our work circumstances. The job paid well, sure. I had more money than I’d ever know what to do with. But it was also notoriously hazardous to one’s health. Too many of my comrades had learned the hard way that you can’t exactly spend that heaping fortune from six feet under.
So, when you finally got your chance to get out, you took it. Unless, of course, you were me.
I didn’t want the stable life, with the sprawling mansion and the Stepford wife. I didn’t want to be Agent Weston Abbott, settled nicely in a corner office at Langley.
I had no use for that life, or for him.
People with permanent positions at the agency, who’d never done deep cover missions or stepped so much as ten feet from their comfortable desk chairs, didn’t — couldn’t — understand.
It must be exhausting — leading a double life, they’d say, shaking their heads in sympathetic disbelief. Constantly putting on a show, never letting your mask slip.
But it wasn’t. It was a million times easier to live my life as someone else. To look in the mirror and see a total stranger. To slip into a new skin and slither around for a while, only to shed it for another when the time inevitably came to move along.
I liked my new life of limitless identities and ever-changing characters better than I’d ever enjoyed being Wes Abbott.
So why did one stupid, insignificant, staged conversation with Faith Morrissey have me wishing I could, just for a single moment, be him again? To look into her eyes, to talk to her, as the real me, rather than the asshole who was about to take a wrecking ball to her life?
Disgusted by my own weakness, I took a step away from the punching bag, lifted my aching fists, and began another round, hoping this time it might drive her from my thoughts for good.