CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

When morning comes, Soileau leaves to find a doctor, a hundred dollars of my money in his pocket. Maybe he will find a path to usefulness and redemption; I can only hope.

An hour later, when the sun is well above the horizon, I send Bourque out with the rest of the money. He returns three hours later. His greasy dark hair has been washed and combed, and his beard shaven off. He wears new clothes: casual slacks, a short-sleeved dress shirt, and loafers. He looks like a completely different person, not someone to be afraid of.

Borque hands me a sack with a fast-food breakfast in it, still warm. I eat and we discuss my predicament. Joanna is widely recognizable with my blonde hair and attractive looks. Borque has bought a motorcycle, though he does not have a driver’s license. He has also rented a motel room.

Placing a motorcycle helmet with a tinted face shield over my head, we leave the house and get on the bike. The motel is a half-mile away, three buildings facing a square around a parking lot. The open end of the square connects to Highway 2. Once in the room, I make straight for the bathroom. First a shower to scrub away the sweat and dirt of the past week, then an hour-long bath, soaking away the aches in my muscles. My hands and feet are wrinkled by the time that I come out of the bathroom.

Borque has bought me a set of new clothes, a pair of scissors, and a kit for dying my hair red. My complexion works for a redhead, though I am short on freckles. I sit on the bed, still naked from the bath. My hair hangs in soggy ropes, dripping water on my shoulders and back. Borque approaches me and we touch fingers. Borque is aroused by the sight of me, but my fragmental pushes him back into his corner.

Perhaps a disguise is not the right solution. Perhaps there is an advantage in being recognized. While enjoying the water, my mind was active. It has been two weeks and I am still alive. The enemy has pursued, but not caught me. There is something to be learned from this. Though I am quite good at hiding, it seems to me that he should have caught up by now. My mind races with the implications.

I know that the enemy is driven by lust, a need for dominance, power, and control. He is bound by no internal controls. He is what I would be if I did not hew so closely to my conscience. Such an entity should have easily come to dominate the entire world. I can fragment a dozen times and if he could do the same, appropriately placed fragmentals would dominate everything. One in the President of the United States, others in a few key world leaders, and he would run the affairs of the planet. I see no evidence of complete global domination. True, he does what is necessary to pursue me, but that seems an ad hoc arrangement.

Maybe his lusts are so strong, controlling his whims so completely, that he is incapable of the rational thought necessary to completely dominate the world. Possible, but unlikely. The most likely explanation is that he is but one entity, unable to fragment, but capable of jumping from carrier to carrier. I do not know if my own fragmentals are capable of that, since I always collect them back into my core before dispatching them again. If he was actually capable of fragmenting like me then I probably would have run into him before. This reasoning allows me to convince myself that I am the only core, and that he is still only a fragmental. Feeling more confident, my thoughts turn to how to contrive a situation where we come together and I can overcome him.

“I’m hungry,” Bourque announces.

“We can think over food as well as stay here,” I respond. “But I cannot be seen, so go get us some take-out.”

* * * *

Bourque stands outside the motel room door, carefully scanning his surroundings. Cars whoosh past on the four-lane highway. Patches of wild pine trees surround the motel. There is an automobile wrecking yard next door, cars scattered among thick grass waiting to be cannibalized. Their room did not seem to be under any sort of surveillance.

Across the highway, two waitresses stand near the side door of a café, passing a cigarette back and forth. A simple act of sharing. The sight makes the fragmental inside Bourque feel a bit better about the situation. People still care for each other.

Bourque walks across the highway to buy some sandwiches and coffee.

* * * *

After Bourque returns, we eat while watching television. CNN Headline News features a report on the hunt for Joanna Prall, using a photograph taken when Joanna was admitted into Jenkins State Hospital. There is a bit of irony here. Jenkins always photographed new admissions. The most recent photograph of Joanna before that one was probably taken before she entered the medical system, when she was still a child. I could move around with impunity if the Jenkins photograph were not available.

There is little new information to be gained from the news account. It ends with the Director of the FBI, Jonathan Franklin, at a news conference, assuring the nation that progress is being made in the manhunt.

Perhaps I should just continue to flee. I can go to Europe or any of the other continents, far away from my enemy. No. I am becoming like him, concerned only with myself and my own survival. My fear is turning me into a monster. I cannot flee knowing the misery he causes, and the deaths of everyone that I have ever touched.

So how to kill him? Perhaps we can touch and I can insert a fragmental inside his body. Can two fragmentals exist at once within a single body, other than within the host I have claimed for my core? I do not know. The fragmental loyal to me would not have to coexist long, just long enough to force the body to kill himself, then the two fragmentals would die and my enemy would be gone.

Is this suicide? Certainly in the most literal interpretation of the word, but is it also suicide in the moral sense of the word? I am not a Catholic, but I have been part of the Catholic community for too many centuries not to feel a tremor of mortal terror at the thought of suicide.

I have Bourque call around to find a church offering an evening mass. The Church of Our Lady is not far away. The effect of the hair dye kit that Bourque already bought will last for weeks if I use it, so Bourque leaves again and returns with a temporary hair dye to change me into a redhead. I scrub the chemicals into my hair, working expertly and efficiently; after all, I have provided therapy to many cosmetologists and absorbed their skills. Bourque also buys me pumps and a flowered dress, a basic cut, thin and comfortable.

It is not very ladylike to ride on the back of a motorcycle, but I do not have much choice. Once at the church, we cross ourselves and sit in the rear. The mass begins, and I find comfort in this familiar ritual, though a certain mystery was lost, never to be regained, when they stopped saying mass in Latin. This is a curious opinion to be had, since I know the various flavors of Latin as well as any language. But to know that Latin is a dead language, spoken only by scholars and precocious schoolboys, a relic of long past, lends the language a certain mystique.

The evening sun pours in through the rows of stained glass windows set in the gallery that overlooks the nave. Multihued images of angels and the Virgin Mother look down upon us, a testament in etched glass of faith and artistry. For several centuries, I thought I was an angel. It seemed like the best fit among the available explanations. I had already repressed my past to prevent any conflicting notions from destroying my exalted fantasy. Killing that girl in England disabused me of my delusion. While I am capable of great good, I am just as capable of great evil.

Certainly I am not an angel, for I am about to commit a murder or suicide, even though I feel the act is just. Is it suicide to kill that which used to be part of myself?

As the priest speaks, I pray for forgiveness from God. I think that there are certain actions that so upset the harmony of the universe that we cannot forgive ourselves and we must seek absolution from the author of the universe. Only God can forgive us.

Forgive me, Lord, for what I am about to do in a most deliberate manner. Oh, dear Lord, faith is so hard to come by and keep.

I choose to believe in a god because I cannot bear the thought that existence has no meaning. My prayer is a hope that God is kind and generous and cares about humans. I pray for God to care about what happens to me.

Why am I so preoccupied with forgiveness? I have appointed myself judge, jury, and executioner of thousands of people, yet now that I intend to slay part of myself, I feel qualms. The reality is that I have always felt qualms, even when the person to be slain was obviously evil. After all, I am arrogantly assuming the authority of God’s judgment for myself.

The mass has reached its climax and I move forward to accept communion.