I’m not like other people. I’m not like anyone you ever met.
Little backstory first. I went from high school into the military. Trained special ops and then went higher up the food chain to Delta Force. Worked a lot of bad jobs in a lot of shit places. None of it’s going to earn my way through the Pearly Gates. Guys like me know that. And there was one gig that burned me out. Bad intel put us on a kill mission in a small village. We were told that there were zero friendlies and that it was what they call a target-rich environment, meaning if they aren’t on your team then they were to be put down. But, like I said, the intel was bad and it turned out the village had only civilians. We killed them, but in a lot of ways we killed ourselves. I opted out and returned to the States when my tour was up. But … life likes to kick guys like me in the dick every chance it can.
My sister—the only relative I really cared about—got sick and her shitty minimum-wage job was part-time. No health care, and her medical bills were skyrocketing. I knew how to make some money, a lot of it, and so I became a PMC. Private military contractor. What they used to call mercenaries. I had a certain reputation and there are groups willing to pay through the nose for that.
I worked a bit for oil companies protecting their interests in the Middle East, then my team got hired to work freelance for Uncle Sam, for a department under the umbrella of the CIA. The Agency has very deep pockets, especially if they’re drawing funds from the black budget. We ran ops all over the world. Some of it was for the good, too, taking down some cartel assholes, ripping up a human trafficking ring. But most of it was way into the gray area. Let’s face it, if you’re cashing checks from the CIA you are not wearing a white hat, no matter how much you want to think you are.
I was really good at what I did. Work flooded my way, and my sister’s bills got paid. That’s how I justified it, you see. The people I was taking down may not have been evil, but they were dirty. They were in some part of the game, and someone like me showing up in the middle of the night was a possible consequence. I took them off the board and kept my sister on her meds, paid for the chemo and the surgeries for someone who was clearly an innocent. A true innocent.
But then I was on a job in Taklamakan Desert region. Bunch of small villages near poppy fields. The villagers swore up and down that they had no choice, that they were forced to harvest the flowers and process the heroin and opium. We felt sorry for them because we could see disfigurement from torture, and some of the women had that evasive look they get when they’ve been raped but aren’t allowed to go to the authorities. The black marketers owned the cops, and any woman who made too much of a fuss would be either shot in front of her family or shot with her family.
We were trying to disrupt the drug flow and were spending weeks cultivating assets from among the villagers. But we had to fight through all that fear, and the certain knowledge that one day we’d leave and some other drug gang would come in and take over. We weren’t affecting any long-term change. Not a chance.
Then one day this kid from our team was driving a couple of other guys out to relieve sentries when their vehicle blows up. I was asleep at the time and heard the bang. I didn’t know what was happening, but by the time I had my pants on and was out of the place where I was staying everyone was shooting. The villagers were running all over the place as my team was hosing them with automatic fire. I saw teenagers throwing rocks at them and thought that this was the village rising up on the orders of the drug lords, and I started cutting them down.
How long did the firefight last?
I don’t know. Two minutes. Maybe a little less. Two of my guys were dead, apart from the ones in the truck. One with a smashed head from a rock, the other stabbed with a bread knife.
And the vil?
We killed thirty-seven people in those two minutes.
Now here’s the kicker. When we picked apart the wreckage of the vehicle, we figured out what happened. Someone in that truck accidentally set off a grenade. Don’t know how. Maybe just fucking around with it. But they killed themselves. My guys panicked and … I guess I did, too. The villagers fought back with knives and sticks and stones because what else should they do? Stand there and just die?
The CIA spooks came in and cleaned it up. That town is gone like it never existed. No charges filed, nothing on the news. Any lingering traces were made to look like the drug lords did it. Funny thing was, that probably helped them keep the other towns in line, so not only did we murder those people, we actually strengthened the strange hold those drug runners had.
And me? Well, I was done.
Twice now I’d been party to massacres, and more times than I can count there was blood on my hands that I knew was at least partly innocent. I mean, who am I to judge?
You hear people talk about burning out, about losing their shit? That was me. I’m telling you the short version, and believe me there is a lot more to the story, but after we slaughtered all those people I felt like I’d killed part of myself, too. Maybe the most important part. I felt gutted and lost, and I was drowning in guilt that ran so damn deep. I didn’t even try to trick myself with the arguments soldiers use. I know every one of them, and I wasn’t the audience for it anymore. I was nothing. I sure as hell wasn’t former Staff Sergeant Gerald Addison. I was no one who mattered, and I was no damn good to anyone.
You see, I thought I was damned. There was just enough religion in my head to sell that. I believed it with my whole heart that day, and I believe it now. Maybe not as much, but enough that I’m pretty sure there aren’t wings and a halo for me when I finally go down. I think I’m going to fall, like one of Lucifer’s angels. I’ll drop off this world and fall forever.
So, I reviewed my options. The one that looked best in the moment was going out into the desert and sucking on the barrel of my gun. But … there was that whole damnation thing.
Option two was to suck it up, shut off all power to my empathy, and go back to the job. And maybe I would have, but there was enough in the bank to keep my sister going for a year or so, and some investments she could cash in if I died.
The third option was more vague. Basically, I dropped out of the world. I went away. Left my equipment and weapons and all of it and walked off. Don’t know if they looked for me or just wrote me off as MIA, or more likely KIA. Don’t know and don’t care.
I spent the next few years looking for answers to how a man gets to repair his soul. Not some Sunday confessional whitewash, but actual redemption. We’re not talking Christian, either, or at least not exclusively. I wandered through mosques and temples, prayer huts and sweat lodges, cathedrals and caves where silent monks sit year after year. I told my story to priests and pastors, rabbis and imams, shamans and witch doctors. I held nothing back. They heard the horror stories. Some of them passed judgment on me. Some of them actually told me to leave. Some, the better ones, sat with me and taught me how to let go, to allow, to strip away my ego and lay myself bare to whatever the universe needed from me in terms of balancing the checkbook.
That’s where the nickname came from. I ran into a guy I’d known back in Iraq. He was on his own pilgrim road, and we talked. He started calling me Monk, and it stuck. Now it’s who I am.
Which is where this circles around to the shit we’re in now. I was working my way through Southeast Asia and found myself in Vietnam. I know it’s supposed to be officially an atheist state. That whole Communism crap. Whatever. There are a lot of believers of one kind or another. Buddhists, Taoists, and Confucianists are the most common, but there are some older religions there, too. Way older. Caodaism, Hoahaoism, and some belief systems that don’t have names. Religions that exist only in remote villages and predate the Hồng Bàng dynasty. Primal beliefs that don’t get tied up in doctrine. I spent a few weeks with one old woman, she had to be a hundred if she was a day. She remembered the French and Americans and all the other soldiers who came through in the fifties, sixties, and seventies. She remembered Hồ Chí Minh and the Viet Cong. All of them swept through the land. They all raped and stole and brutalized. She’d been raped half a dozen times, and she’d buried children and grandchildren. I told her I was no better than any of them and said that if she wanted to cut my throat, it would be fair. I gave her my knife and told her to do it. Kill me, let me fall through the floor of the world. I mean, here I was, a killer like those other men, asking her for help. The audacity of it, the hubris. Fuck me. She was worth ten thousand of me.
She said that she didn’t need revenge. She was too old for it. Killing me wouldn’t bring back anyone she lost. I broke down. I grabbed the hem of her robe and begged her to tell me what I could do for her, to make even one thing right for her. That old lady gave me the sweetest smile I’ve ever seen. She took my face in her hands and kissed me on both cheeks, and said that there was a way. It was hard, very difficult, and it would hurt, but there was a way.
I told her I would do anything, and I meant it. Anything. No limits.
She smiled and took a piece of paper and a pencil and wrote two things down. One was an address of a family of tattoo artists living in the town of Tuyên Quang. Below that she wrote huyền bí, which means “mystic.” She said go get that tattooed over my heart and the path would open to me. From then on I’d be following the road out of darkness. Then she took another piece of paper and wrote something on it and sealed it in an envelope, making me promise to give it to one of the women in that family. Made me swear I wouldn’t open it, and I did swear. Then she gave me something so I could sleep.
When I woke, I was in a whole different part of the jungle and I knew that I shouldn’t go look for her. I didn’t. I hitchhiked my way to Tuyên Quang and found the Trang family. I showed the paper to Patty, who was the only one in the shop when I knocked. She said she understood and that it would take her a few days to get the right kind of pigment for the ink. I hung around. Patty and I had some meals, got to know each other. Became friends. The day I was supposed to get the ink, there was a huge commotion because a gang had broken into the Trang house. They killed Patty’s grandmother and took Patty’s little girl. Tuyet.
The things they did to the old lady were bad enough. But when they found Tuyet … God. You’re all looking at me funny, because maybe Patty told you that I forgot Tuyet. And that’s true up to a point, but other people remember her. They remember her story. I’ll get to that in a second.
Before I walked the pilgrim’s road I was a hunter and a killer. I’d said that I never wanted to hurt anyone again. Ever. But I saw the old lady and I went with Patty when she had to identify what was left of her daughter.
I stayed in the village for a while. Stayed with Patty. Helped her as much as I could. Doing stuff around the place. Being a shoulder and an ear. And I tried looking for the men who killed the little girl, but I had no way to find them. She’d been dumped on the road, and the cops didn’t even know where she’d been held.
One thing that I skipped, and it’s important, is that when Patty went to identify Tuyet, she brought along a few little glass vials. She asked me to guard the door, which I did. I watched her scrape up her baby’s dried blood and mix it with water and then put it away. I didn’t ask why. This was Patty’s need.
I kept trying to find the men, and failed every time. But while I was looking I started feeling connected to the little girl, like I’d actually known her.
Maybe two months later Patty found the old woman’s letter and remembered that she had the ink. I told her that I didn’t want the word mystic tattooed on me. I said that I wanted Tuyet’s face inked right over my heart.
Patty said she understood, and that she realized it was why the old lady sent me to her. She went and got one of the vials that had some of Tuyet’s blood in it. She said that she was going to mix it with ink so that I would always have some of Tuyet with me. And maybe I would learn to laugh again, because her daughter had always been happy.
She mixed the ink and did the tattoo, and something happened. Something really goddamn weird. First off, it hurt. Not just in a physical way, but way down deep. I felt like my nerve endings were actually on fire. Worst pain I ever felt in my whole life. Savage pain, worse than getting stabbed or shot.
But that was just the start of it, because the moment Patty finished the tattoo, when the last detail was done, it felt like a massive hammer smashed me out of my own head. I was falling—literally falling—out of my body. And then I was in someone else’s body. Connected to all five senses with hyperawareness. It hurt even worse because I was being hurt. I was being beaten and raped. Over and over and over again.
You see, in that moment I was Tuyet. I was her as she was being tortured and abused. Every single thing that she felt, I felt. Every degradation, every bit of inhumanity inflicted on her was inflicted on me.
I can see from the looks on your faces that you don’t believe me. Or don’t want to. Either way I don’t care. I was Tuyet. I was her from the moment the men abducted her to the last second of her living awareness, and when she died, I died.
Then I was me again. In my own body, in Patty’s tattoo chair, writhing and screaming. Patty held me all through that night.
In the morning I went hunting. Those memories that had been forced into me were still there. Details the girl saw. Places, street names, signs, all of it. Tuyet’s memories were my guide and I went to find those men. I have never hated anyone as much in my whole life as I did them. They destroyed that child. Fuck. There was no gray area here. This was evil.
I killed them in very, very bad ways. I won’t ever tell anyone what I did. That’s mine to know.
Now … I don’t know if I chipped even a fleck of guilt off my soul by what I did to those guys. Almost certainly not. But I felt I had to do that. To honor the Trang family.
See this bare spot here? That’s where Tuyet’s face was. That’s where it should be. She was the first face inked onto my skin. And these other faces? Most of them girls or women? They are other victims. That’s what I became. Chasing bail skips pays the light bill, but this is the work of my soul. Funny, huh? A killer lays down his gun to go and find spiritual understanding and redemption, and the universe decides that this end is best served by making him keep on killing. And killing and killing.
How do I remember all this if the tattoo was stolen? See this face? And this one? And this one? All of these? They are alive in me. In a way. There’s a price for what I do. Not one I impose, but it’s there all the same. If I find the person or persons who killed someone—not for revenge but to keep that person from killing others—and I take them off the board … there’s a price. For the dead one who comes to me and asks me to do this, and for me. They are stuck here. Ghosts haunting my life. I can see them right now standing all around me. There’s an old lady who was murdered in Amsterdam standing next to you, Crow. And Dianna, maybe you’re psychic enough to see the twin teenage girls on either side of you. They haunt me. They’re always here. Murder, even if it’s done to prevent more harm, is out of balance with the universe, and those ghosts and I share purgatory right here.
So, that’s my story, and it’s fucked up and if you don’t believe me, who cares? I know it’s true. Patty knows. And I think most of you, maybe all of you, actually do believe me.
We’re all in this mess together. Someone is stealing memories, and maybe making people commit murders. Like what Spider did. Now, folks … what the hell are we going to do about it?