Charlie was a likable enough fellow, for a psychopath. He lived in the bowels of a broken-down building in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn, just two blocks from the 3 Line. Upon entering a tight alley through a wrought iron gate, he led me down a short path to a pair of heavy, rusted red doors protruding out of the ground.
“Are you coming?” Charlie asked, unlocking the giant doors and throwing them open. I followed him down the stairs into the dark. The smell of mold was everywhere. Charlie flipped a switch, and the room filled with light and noise. It took a few seconds for my sixteen senses to adjust. (It was going to take some time to rebirth the other 1,644.)
“Welcome to the bat cave,” he said, all traces of humor lost.
“What is all this?”
“This, my newfound friend and companion, is my control center.”
It wasn’t terribly impressive. Several walkie-talkies lined up on a shelf were tuned to emergency channels. A small television set was tuned to News 12. The weather was on.
“Looks like no storms for at least a week,” he said. “That’s good.”
He went to the ratty, broken couch in the corner and took a seat. He didn’t offer me one.
“Why is that good?” I asked him.
“Less accidents when the skies are clear. Safe weather doesn’t necessarily mean safer drivers, mind you. But on sunny days, folks’ angels can watch over them better.” He winked. “Catch my meaning?”
Was he saying he was my angel? First he was my savior, now he was a soldier for the Lord?
As whacked out as I still was, I was at least able to see now that the man before me was unstable. I turned to go. I didn’t make it far.
“Where you going, Marcus?” Charlie crossed the room and impeded my path. I sensed a danger. Late. But at least there was still a part of me left — a glimmer of the hunter’s sharp acuity.
“Clear the road,” I said, ready to strike.
Charlie was too fast for me. At that point in my life, anyone would have been. He swung his left as a diversion and it worked. My fist shot up and stopped his punch. But as my better half struggled with his worse, his good arm flew out and wrung around my neck. He managed to twist me around and clasp me good.
“You need help,” he said as I withered away to nothing under his sleeper hold.
When I woke, I found myself a prisoner in a cage. It was immediately clear that my splitting headache was boss, and the boss was unrelenting. Pieces of my skull were throbbing to an unheard tune, and I felt every last thwomp.
I stumbled, slowly, to my feet. The bars held my balance. Through them, I saw my captor, sitting on a stool and smoking, not five yards away. Through the haze of pain, I tried to calculate how I could kill him. No plan came.
“This is your idea of help?” I asked. He was unmoved.
“It’s detox, Marcus. Phase one. You’ll thank me.”
Would I? Fat chance. Whatever I told him in confidence and under extreme duress shouldn’t be used against me. That wasn’t fair.
“I imagine your head feels like a bowling alley right about now. Balls dropping on lanes. Pins crashing. Children screaming. Lights flashing. Pretzels churning. Everything is hot. Am I right?” He leaned forward through the smoke and studied me as I studied him right back.
“I know pain, Charlie,” I said to him as I brushed my hair back and glared. “This is nothing.” And by the power of self-healing, it was suddenly true. The pain of a thousand horses’ hooves retreated to the back of my broken head and then vanished. Charlie watched them go, through my eyes.
I stood up and grasped the bars.
“You are truly a unique specimen, aren’t you, Marcus? What I wouldn’t give to know your story!” He wasn’t crazy. I sensed that now. He was just lonely. “Where have you been hiding out all your life?”
I considered my options. Shut up, fade away into the corner, and give him nothing, or woo his trust with words. I chose the latter. The right choice is always the one opposite of backing down.
“Zambia, mainly,” I answered.
“Fascinating,” Charlie said, and turned from me. “You’ll be sure and tell me all about it sometime.” And he walked away, flipping the main switch and locking the door behind him on his way out.
In the darkness, I found my claws again. The throbbing shot back. And not just in my bowling ball brain. This time, it struck all over. I fell to the ground and kissed it, accidentally, with my gums and some teeth. I spit blood and clutched my stomach. The nausea swept over me and my groin was … inverting? The razor-toothed claws of my inner savagery burst out. I screamed, I howled! I was an animal encaged, and all of my paws were pricked by pins and needles. Who was he? How dare he? But the worst thought came next: How dare I? How had I fallen so low I couldn’t even spot a predator? My heart clanged in my chest and I rolled over. I rolled again. I rolled again. I rolled up onto a raggedy mattress, one of only two items Charlie had placed for me in my cell. The other thing (besides myself and the pain) in that steel-barred cell was a foul-looking aluminum bucket.
I don’t know how much time passed as I tossed and turned on that filthy mattress. My legs kicked and flailed to no end. At one point, my foot struck the pail and sent it flying into the bars. It struck and crashed to the ground with many loud, metallic clangs. These were the sounds that split my brain open.
The next hours were dark.
The next hours were very, very dark.
And then Charlie was there, holding me as I vomited a universe of disgust into his damned bucket. I tried to land one mighty punch across his jaw, thereby crushing his demon face. But I was too weak and empty. The punch was a non-thing. It never happened. It was just an illusion. My whole life was just an illusion.
The single-engine jet plane roaring high through the sky.
It was a clear blue day.
Some small thing was falling.
I was standing on the beach. I was Kuwajii, watching the plane. Looking up, it spouted forth a golden egg — no! It was a golden boy! He fell fast and his parachute wasn’t working. I, Kuwajii, ran, all dark-skinned and doomed, headfirst into the water. The golden boy was still falling, and falling hard. I wouldn’t reach him, not before he crashed to the river. And then he plummeted more, always more, always falling. He never hit. Instead …
My eyes splashed open and I was Marcus Fox. Was I not?
Charlie paced outside my prison. He stopped to offer his hand through the bars. I spit and curled back into bed.
The next hours or days were frightening. I thought I was through it. I thought I was coherent. Charlie had to change his shirt because, as he told me somewhere along the way, I had thrown my own excrement at him. I smelled my hand. It was possible.
“I’m good now.”
“No, you are not.”
“Why do you think …?” I trailed off. A large cockroach was scurrying up Charlie’s pant leg, onto his belt, up his chest, and into his face. It burrowed there, and Charlie didn’t move a muscle, not even when the cockroach ate his eyeball from the inside out.
I crashed to the floor and became one with the unfathomable.
This is the life of a wasted specimen, the dead all said. This is the life you deserve.
“No,” said Charlie, answering some question I may have uttered but did not know. “Try some water.”
His arm, through the bars, held a small wax cup with butterflies on it. They transfixed me. I could have broken my captor’s arm. It would have been so easy. He was practically begging me to do it. This man was a fool. But instead of pulverizing his bones, peeling the pieces out of him, and using the splinters to pick the lock, I reached out and accepted the water.
“Thank you,” I said, and poured the contents over my face. A few drops went into my mouth and I swallowed. Those were all I needed. Even though I was parched.
Then I was sleeping. Or maybe hallucinating again. Maybe a little of both. But if it was a hallucination, it felt much dreamier than the past ones. There was my original bitch mother, glowing, right there in my cell. She had wings and she was weeping. Was she begging my forgiveness? I’d never seen her like this. Never anything like this — all pristine and shining within her sadness. She shook her head and told me to “shush.” For a moment, I thought I’d make amends, for no other reason than to see what would come of it. To see if any weight might be lifted. To see if forgiveness mattered. But instead, I closed my eyes and she was gone.
The next hours, I think, were restful.
When I woke, the cage door was open, the lock was on the floor, and Charlie was dead in the far corner. No. That was a final mirage.
Charlie doesn’t die. Charlie saves.
The basement was empty.
I didn’t feel anything, which was better than feeling pain. I sat up slowly. Evidence of my detox was everywhere. I had turned my cell into a self-mocking bulimic artist’s life’s work.
Slowly, I shuffled through the basement, noticing more than before. On a small table next to the ratty, broken couch lay several magazines. Men with rifles. Interesting. On the heels of this visual discovery, I realized that I was able to see. Charlie had turned the lights back on. Charlie had left the cage door open. Charlie was up to something. A moment of panic was replaced by my body’s desire to survive. Another natural instinct returned. Maybe Charlie had helped me.
There were weapons everywhere. A shovel, pieces of lumber, a walking stick, a glass bowl, rocks of all sizes, table legs, broken glass in the corner, dark, discarded light bulbs in the mesh-wire trash container, the mesh-wire trash container. I grabbed the shovel by the handle and headed toward the light that was streaming down the stairs.
At ground level, the doors were flung wide. Charlie was sitting outside on an overturned bucket, looking out toward the front gate, the street, and the world beyond.
“Welcome,” he spoke without turning. I had the shovel raised high to strike. “Good to be back in the land of the living?” I lowered my weapon. “You are very welcome,” he said.
I sat down on an upside-down bucket beside him.
“You’ve been sleepwalking your entire life, Marcus. But you’re awake now. I’m sorry you had to go through that bit of unpleasantness down there. It wasn’t too bad, I imagine? Not for a great white hunter like yourself?”
He turned toward me and then reached into his pocket, pulled out a cigarette, and lit it. I wondered how much I had divulged during my cleansing and confinement.
“I told you,” I said. “I have known pain before.”
“Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes of course you have, yes.” He was shaking for emphasis. Some hot ash flicked from the tip of his cigarette into my lap. I minded it not. “You’ve known the pain of abandonment. We all have. Everybody leaves.” He was speaking the truth. I knew it all too well.
“What makes you think I was abandoned?” I asked, wondering if my detox babbling delved that far into ancient history. “My pain has always been physical. That’s the only pain I allow myself to know. I turn my emotions into rotting open sores, and I feed off them.” Liar. “Can you imagine the excruciating pain of taking a bullet in the arm? What if you were to have to dig that bullet out of your own arm with your bare hands? That is the sheer, physical anguish I have felt. For starters. Nothing more. No emotions.”
Charlie’s face revealed that he believed none of it.
“Can you fathom this?” I shouted, and ripped off what was left of the ragged shirt I was wearing. I turned my wound to him. “Do it.” I said, indicating his cigarette. “Burn it into my scar. See if I whimper.”
Charlie called my bluff without a flinch. His thin torch seared my flesh. I let this new terribleness settle. Feeling water bubble up behind my eyes, I held in the screams. At last, he relented.
“Well that was a wasteful, baseless experiment,” he said. “Look at you. Now you’re burned.”
My eyes left his and followed the tracks up my arm to the place where Kuwajii had shot me. The old scar was charred with tar.
“It’s obvious you can handle any amount of physical pain. It’s everything else inside you that is seriously damaged. And that is going to take some serious healing.”
“I’m not even a person anymore.” I hung my head. “I’m not sure I ever was.”
“I doubt that’s true. But I’m not one to judge. Look, in my book, everyone has the potential to be something great, even if they believe themselves to be nothing at all. I can help you, Marcus. I can help you help yourself by helping you help others. Do you follow?”
“Get to the point.”
“Do you want to be my first mate?”
“First mate of what?” I asked.
You are the one, Marcus. Shumbuto’s damned prophecy rang in my head. But it wasn’t a prophecy about saving the world. It was limited to, as far as I understood it, preserving the Shakasantie name. Telling their story. But all I knew was my own and how it fit into theirs. What an egomaniac!
“We live and we die and all we can hope is that, along the way, we make a few minor differences,” he said. Crazy or not, Charlie did want to help people. He didn’t seem to have any personal gain in the matter.
“What about your last partner? Where’d you dig him up?”
“Who, Frank? Ah, that was a mistake.”
“You certainly risked your own life to save that mistake.”
“That 50,000-volt, electric wire stunt? Bah! That was nothing. Child’s play. I did it for the kicks. And he walked away. Actually, he ran, didn’t he! All thanks to me.”
“How long have you been at this? How many drivers have you been through?”
“They all lived, man! All right? Jesus Christ! Do you want the job or not?”
“I’ve killed men,” I said.
“Who hasn’t?” he said.
“What’s our next move?” I asked.
“Wheels.”
He flicked his cigarette and we rolled out.
By nightfall, Charlie had sold me on his entire philosophy. He explained in meandering detail his multitiered mission to save the world, one soul at a time. He said he’d saved Frank from a life of crime and shown him the way. He was just the last in a long line of recruits. I was the latest. If I stuck with him, Charlie reiterated, even if for just a while, I would be quick to learn that helping others can help you help yourself. Charlie said he was living proof of that. When I asked him how many people he’d helped, he answered with an unbelievable number.
The New York streets, of course, were lined with cars. Charlie passed them by, giving pause only when he neared the vans. He peeked inside windows, kicked tires, assessed, reassessed, and diagnosed each automobile’s value. He dismissed van after van after van after van before finally cozying up to the right one.
“This is her,” he said, beaming with anticipation.
While he was busy picking the driver’s side lock of this particular, newer streetwise model, I asked him how stealing someone’s means of transportation fit into his philosophy. How could turning a person into a victim save them?
“Don’t be smug,” he answered, scanning our area for pedestrians. “This is a war we’re fighting, Marcus. A war against fate. People are supposed to die. That’s just God’s way.” The lock bent to his will and he cracked the door. “But God also wants us to challenge him. He wants us to give him a run for his money and stand between life and life everlasting. It’s all one big, crazy power trip, and God plays both sides. You see? He wants us to help others because he made us in his image and he wants us to evolve. And by stealing this innocent guy’s van, we are helping the poor victim to evolve too. He doesn’t know it, and he probably never will, but his van is going to help us help a lot of people. And in that way, Marcus, we are helping him too. Do you see? He’s now a part of it.”
I nodded. As self-serving as the justification was, it did make a few ounces of sense — if you looked at it in the right, deranged light.
“Hop in,” he said. “You’re driving.”
“What makes you think I can drive?” I asked.
“I have an instinct for such things, Marcus. I feel it in my bones.” I climbed into the van and he shut my door behind me. He walked over to the passenger side and got in. “Plus, you told me during your detox you flew a fucking plane over the Indian fucking Ocean.”
“Not the entire ocean. Just part of it. Mostly we soared high above the Mozambique Channel.” I named you up there. “You don’t remember?”
“What? You lost your senses again, man? Why would I remember a thing like that? A thing you did? I wasn’t there.”
Weren’t you?
“Forget it, Marcus,” he said, unfazed. “It’s all in the past, brother. All behind you. Your true life begins now.” He leaned down under the wheel, ripped off a panel, and tweaked some wires. In zerotime, the van purred to life. “Like candy from a baby, baby! Now let's see if you can drive as wild as you fly.”
The déjà vu was so strong that for an instant, I thought I saw that old mutt Charlie sitting there in the cockpit. But it was a new mutt named Charlie in his place.
“Gas is on the right, brake on the left,” he instructed as I eased into the job. “You know how to read, don’t ya? Well, that’s not important, as long as you can see that the D is right there on the shift. Put your foot on the brake and ease the stick to that spot.”
“I can read, motherfucker,” I said, jamming it into drive. I pounded the pedal to the floor and the vehicle took off like a leopard after a bunyoro rabbit.
“Marcus! Jesus!” Charlie shot his arm straight up, but with nothing to hold on to, he pressed his palm firmly against the roof.
“Not so fast!” he shouted.
“You wanted another renegade, didn’t you? Well this is what you get.” I kept my eyes focused on the road. We were on a straightaway at night and the driving was easy. Having never done it before, I didn’t see what the big deal was. Then we came to a bend in the road and I did at last have to brake a little. But I braked too much, and the van jerked forward so fast it almost jackknifed on itself. Almost.
I slammed the gas again.
Some crazy old lady with no business being out at this time of night nearly got her death card punched when I sped past her at ninety-two miles per hour. Missed her by mere inches.
Charlie shot his head out the window and looked back to see the elderly woman I just nearly annihilated.
“She’s fine,” I assured him as I checked the rearview. She was shaking her cane at us from the sidewalk. The van plowed onward and the old woman disappeared into the past, as people do.
We’d been at it for four months. Eat, sleep, save — that was our motto. Words to live and die by. At first, a CB radio was our guide, but it proved to have its own faults. The CB was hot-wired to provide us with immediate rescue calls. It was our burden/prerogative to arrive at the scene before any paramedics, police, firemen, or caped crusaders. And not only did we have to be the first responders, but then Charlie would, more often than not, administer FIRST first responder life-saving tactics to whomever needed his help lickety-split, so that we could make our swift exit before any true authority arrived.
“The CB system is flawed, Charlie,” I said as he futzed with its dials for the millionth time that fateful night. “We only manage to get to about a quarter of the victims we hear about, and then only a couple of minutes before the EMTs and cops show up. And that’s being generous.”
“I wish there was another way, but there isn’t. At least I’ve got you, Marcus. I swear, I have never seen a better, faster, or more recklessly accurate driver in my life.”
Ignoring his praise, I drove on, as always, either toward danger or fleeing from it. The roads were slick from a fresh rain, but my steady control held our wheels to the ground.
“I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in this profession,” he said. Charlie always acted like saving lives was a real career. If only it came with a paycheck and health insurance. The CB continued to emit unrecognizable squelches.
“Have you ever tried listening to the city from within?” I asked. He turned off the squawk box; it was giving him nothing but irrational static.
“What in the world is that supposed to mean?”
I had his attention. Good. I aimed to keep it. All those years in Zambia had to have taught me something, right? Despite all the horrors I’d faced and family I’d lost, I was sure I picked up something that could be beneficial to mankind. I could sense that there was reason in all of this. I could just feel it.
“Just feel it,” I said. “Feel the beating heart of the city. Just breathe. Breathe it all in. You’ve got the lion’s blood in you, Charlie. You’re a predator. Just like me. You seek out your prey and you fix them. Let your life’s quest guide you.”
His eyes were closed and he was doing it.
“What do you see?” I asked softly.
“I see a thousand people dying tonight if I can’t get this damn CB working again,” he said, snapping out of it. But he was there — he was in it — for a brief moment.
I pulled the van over to the side of the road. I ripped the CB out from under the dash and chucked it out the window. It bounced under an oncoming car and smashed to pieces under its tires. The driver just kept on driving.
“What in the blue fuck did you do that for?”
“We don’t need it. It’s a crutch. Think it through, Charlie. Start at the beginning. Why do you find it necessary to be on this mission? If you look at it from an outsider’s perspective, it’s insanity. Where did you get your training? Huh? How do you know the things you know? Did you go to medical school? No. Were you ever an EMT? No. Do you have any education whatsoever? No. You’re a high school dropout. So what does that qualify you for? It certainly doesn’t make you a certified lifesaver by any stretch of the imagination. Have you ever asked yourself how it is that you can do the things you do? No. You haven’t. And I’ll tell you why. Because you’re scared to death of what the answer might be. You’re terrified that you just are the way you are and there is no answer. You are a gift from God, Charlie. That is the answer. You bring people back from the dead. You heal those that have no right being healed. You healed me. You saved me when I was unsavable. I was done. I know that now. After what I have seen you do to others — to Frank, for fuck’s sake! — I’m telling you, man, from one renegade to another, what you have, my friend, is not talent. What you have is a gift. There’s a difference, an insurmountable difference between those two things.
“Me? I’m just the driver. I shouldn’t be here. I shouldn’t be anywhere. Sometimes I wake up in the morning and I have to convince myself that I even exist. It’s impossible to imagine that I do. But then, it’s even harder to conceive that I don’t. So that’s what I come around to every single godforsaken day. I arrive at the more plausible truth. I believe in me. I believe in everything I have seen and done. And I believe in you too, Charlie. I believe in this incredible power you have to save the ones who, by all rational counts, should not be saved. And when I see you perform your miracles, I don’t think, ‘Hey, this guy is making miracles happen,’ I think, ‘This guy is a fucking miracle.’ Do you know that, Charlie? Do you understand? You are an honest-to-God miracle. I can’t explain it any better than that. And if a true-to-life miracle needs a goddamn CB radio to help him find our next person to save, that to me is insane. Use your gift, Charlie. Explore it. Feel the life forces all around us. What are they telling you? Where do we go from here?”
It was the longest, most impassioned speech I’d ever given in my life, and it seemed to have an effect. Charlie opened his door and stepped out into the street. He closed his eyes and sniffed the air. He followed his nose around to the front of the van and he pointed to the sky above lower Manhattan.
“Up there, Marcus,” he said, smiling at me deliriously from in front of the van. “That is where we will find it. That is where the true danger lies. In the heavens.”
He put his hands on his hips and puffed out his chest. If he had ten more seconds to live, he might have unfurled some hidden cape and flown away.
“Let’s go save ourselves!” His declaration boomed out to the sky beyond the skyscrapers.
In that, his last moment, I know Charlie found his inner bliss. Lucky bastard.
When I came to, I was laid out on a stretcher. Some real EMTs were hoisting me up into an actual ambulance. At least, I think they were real. Hard to say if there were more phonies like us out there.
I couldn’t move. My entire body was numb.
“You’re all right,” a woman said. And then her gorgeous black face was my entire universe. She was Shandra-Namba. “Can you tell me what day today is, please?”
“Shandra-Namba?” I asked.
“That is not a day, sir. What is your name, please?”
“Mother?”
I was overwhelmed with emotion. My blood-soaked face was washed clean by my tears. My Shakasantie mother was alive and well, and she was taking good care of me. Everything was going to be OK. I hoped that tomorrow I could go hunting with Shumbuto.
I went back to sleep and dreamed of the great Zambezi.
When I woke, chained to my hospital bed, some nurse explained in a not-so-soothing bedside manner that I was lucky to be alive. The driver of an eighteen-wheeler had lost control on the slippery road and crashed his two-ton rig into the back of our van.
The police interrogated me endlessly. I gave them nothing. I was done. Yeah, yeah, I know I’ve said it before, but this time, I meant it. Life could go get fucked.
After three days of not talking, I decided to give them some minor thing to gnaw on. When Sergeant Dickface asked me my name for the hundred-thousandth time, I gave it to him.
“I am Marcus Fox,” I said. It was this and this alone.
“What did you say?” Dickface asked and then turned to Doctor Fuckstick. “Did he say something?”
“I think he said his name.”
“Is that right? I thought I heard it too.” Dickface came up close to my bed and put his dickface in my face. “Say it again, boy. Tell me what you said.”
“I am Marcus Fox,” I repeated.
“That’s good! Now we’re talking! OK, then, Marcus, let’s try this again. Can you tell me what you were doing driving a stolen van?”
Dickface had no idea about anything, and there was no reason to give him any insight into my world. Other than …”
“I am Marcus Fox.”
“Yeah, we got that, Marcus. Look, we just want to help you now. We can make things go easy for you. Easier, anyway. Just tell us what we want to hear. We’re on your side.”
What did he want to hear? And why was he calling himself “we”? There was no one else in my room. Doctor Fuckstick had left, and it was just us two.
“The van belonged to a man named Cody Bryant. Did you know Mr. Bryant, Marcus? Did he owe you some money, maybe?”
It went on like that for infinity. Mostly I drowned out the voices with my mantra: I am Marcus Fox. Sometimes I spoke the words. Other times, I thought them. But that was all. During all the dark times I’d lived through, I always had a (mostly) sound mind and rock-solid body. Neither was the case anymore. It came to a point where the phrase I kept repeating, those four words, lost all meaning.
Word 1 — “I”: a standalone descriptor as impossible to comprehend as nipples on a female platypus. (Fun fact: Neither the male nor the female platypus have nipples. The female secretes milk for her babes through her skin. When I look at my own nipples, sometimes I think of the doofy platypus and wonder whether either the male or female look at other species and have nipple envy. Also, there are no platypuses on the continent of Africa, as far as I know. I just happened to come across this juicy tidbit somewhere along the way. I’m not sure why it’s always stuck with me.)
Word 2 — “Am”: “to be,” “exist,” “occupy space.” Of these three definitions, I suppose I embodied the latter. There was no existing anymore. In a shell of myself, I was not to be.
Word 3 — “Marcus”: a nobody at best. A non-entity in a world of entities. My name meant nothing and I was named for no one. Shumbuto boasted long ago that his name meant “peace by blood.” My name probably shamed him with its frivolousness.
Word 4 — “Fox”: You know that sorry story.
In articulating these four meaningless words, in thought and in speech, over and over again till my mouth and my mind went dry, I was training myself to embrace the sheer nothing of what I’d always been. The inane nature of the self-deposing declaration appeared prideful when spoken in my robust voice; clearly, it was anything but.
There was no record of a Marcus Fox in any database. Of course there wouldn’t be. My parents never fingerprinted me or got me a birth certificate or registered a social security number. I was an American ghost, off the records, off the map. I was a non-entity. A nobody. A crazy person.
After six months of physical rehabilitation, there was a trial and I was charged with seven so-called crimes.
1. Destruction of public property.
2. Interfering with police business.
3. Endangering the lives of others.
4. Impersonating emergency responders — for the record, we never did that. We were entirely up front with every wounded person we came into contact with (the ones who were still conscious, anyway).
5. Being a public nuisance.
6. Operating a vehicle without a license.
And the final and irrefutable blow:
7. Unintentional manslaughter caused by illegal parking.
Yes. Believe it or not, I was being held partially responsible for the truck driver’s death. That was fine. Everything was just sunshine and fucking lollipops for me. I was definitely guilty of killing many others, both man and beast. I would do the time for this poor bastard’s wrongful death as my punishment. Like I have probably said before, I’ve never been alive anyway. Not really.
I was brought up on no charges for Charlie’s untimely demise. In fact, he was never even mentioned at the trial. After all the good he’d done (or tried to do, anyway), the poor bastard didn’t even receive an honorable mention. No one gave a good goddamn about his life or death. It was too depressing a thing for me to process. All I could do was file his sad history away in the back of my mind, in some deep, dark, inner void where I would not be able to access it. Goodbye, fair friend.
As chance would have it, a court-appointed forensic psychologist declared me non compos mentis (not of sound mind). The world at large saw me as a drooling idiot who could do nothing more than repeat four words on an endless loop. And I guess, since I had no identity on the books, in the law’s eyes, I was a John Doe. A John Doe with a Marcus Fox mentality.
I might as well have been brain-dead.