I have to thank God for the remnants of my sanity. And by “God,” I mean Chris Rodke. Because without him I’m not sure I would have seen it. I’m not sure I would have come to terms with the simple fact:
I am not sane. I have not been sane for a very long time. Not since I was a young man not much older than Chris.
I know now why I was so anxious to kill that boy. It was not just that he was another painful reminder of the offspring I will never have. It ran much deeper than that. Looking at Chris was like looking in a mirror. And I was sickened by what I saw.
I saw a boy who despised his favored brother with all of his heart. A boy who felt so invisible, so ineffectual, so shunned by the family he loved that he wanted to see them hurt. He wanted to see them dead. He wanted to prove his power, and his inferiority complex grew like a cancer into a tragic God complex. It is amazing the things we cannot see in ourselves that are so glaringly obvious in others.
It had all sounded so laughable to me. A boy referring to himself as “God,” giving himself this ludicrously bloated identity to mask some shattered adolescent ego. It sounded truly pathetic. Until I realized… that boy was me. Pathetic. A man who calls himself “Loki,” the Norse god of the underworld. How small I must have felt on that fateful day in 1990 when I announced my own deification. How very small…
There were really two mirrors looking back at me in that limousine. Two young men… two images of my tragic schizoid past. Jake, God rest his soul, reminded me so much of a young Green Beret named Oliver Moore. More than I think I even understood. His unyielding strength and independence and intelligence, his uncommon command of the martial arts at such a young age, his naive ambition to transform himself into some kind of all-American “superspy.”
And Chris Rodke reminded me so much of a demented young agent named Oliver. Pride as a disease. Pride turned into megalomania and envy and a vengeful killer instinct. An insatiable need for control.
One boy was the man I could have been… and one was the man I had become-a man who needs to repair his ravaged psyche and repent for his sins. It wasn’t just Chris I wanted to murder. It was that mirror image. I wanted to shoot enough holes in that mirror to make me disappear.
But only I can make me disappear. The devil in me, that is. I have to seek help. I have to heal myself. I can’t even imagine how many lucky future souls have been spared now that Chris Rodke has been put away. I only wish I could say the same for all the poor souls who have crossed my path for the last twenty years.
They have not been so lucky. And I will never be forgiven.
I am so sorry, Jake. You will never know how deeply sorry I am for bringing you into my ugly world. You are the one who should have been-the one who should have had a future, just as Oliver Moore should have been the man I am today, instead of the sick thing that I have become.
But you were right, Jake. You were right. We wanted the same thing. All we wanted was to see Gaia safe and sound-finally out of harm’s way. And with the Agency picking up Robert Rodke at his office and me starting down the path to righteousness… I think we’ve done it. I think we’ve finally given Gaia the future that she deserves. She deserves what you and I have given her, Jake. She deserves to be free.