Mind + Body by Aaron Dunlap (best adventure books to read .TXT) 📕
- Author: Aaron Dunlap
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“Do you remember everything from when it happened?” I asked.
She rolled her eyes upward slightly, looking pensive. “I remember your zombie theory, and a headache, then my jaw not working, but after that it all kind of blurs together.”
“Like you were passed out, or just not aware of what was happening?”
“I think I was aware; I remember being aware, but not what I was aware of.”
“So how did you know about the Brita filter?”
She grinned. “My dad told me. He says some FBI agent told him about it, and about what happened at Comstock’s house but none of the other stuff. Was that one of your FBI people?”
I nodded. “Rubino came here.”
“What for? Just to tell my dad?”
“No, I don’t know. I didn’t know who else to call. I needed a ride because my car was still at Costco.”
“A ride where?”
I dropped my eyes again, turned around and moved one of the chairs closer to the bed so I could sit down.
“To go… see Schumer,” I said after I sat down.
Amy was silent for a few seconds, and then said, “Oh. Did you?”
I shook my head. “No. It was good that Rubino was here, though,” I said. “When the doctors heard it was strychnine and that I magically knew exactly what to do for it they called the police on me. Rubino smoothed that over, and told your dad just enough of the truth for him to hate me forever.”
Amy rolled her eyes.
“Where is he, anyway?” I asked.
“My dad? He went back home to get me some clothes after they moved me in here. They cut up the shirt I was wearing.”
“I know,” I said, “I was there.”
“Oh,” Amy said, blushing slightly. “Well it was stupid; it was a button-up shirt. They could have just unbuttoned it.”
“They’ve got those shirt-cutting scissors and they like to use them,” I said.
“I liked that shirt.”
The hospital gown she was wearing had rather short sleeves that were being scrunched up because of the position she was in. On her left arm, just below her shoulder, I could see the long, thin scars I’d seen before. It looked like there were four of them. She saw me looking and perhaps too quickly drew her right hand upward and pulled the sleeve down. She winced from the movement.
“What?” I asked, carefully.
“I didn’t want you to see those,” she said. Her eyes seemed to be watering, perhaps from the pain in moving too quickly.
I’d seen scars like those before, mostly in pictures on the internet but a few times on girls in school. Depressed teenagers who wanted the rush of cutting themselves but couldn’t bring themselves to cut at their wrists would often use straight razor blades to cut very thin lines just below the shoulder. Same rush, less risk. People who cut at their wrists were usually just trying to get attention. Doing it below the shoulder, where few people would notice, means you’re doing it just to feel something. Using a razor blade also made a very fine, almost invisible scar; another sign that it isn’t so much a cry for help as in other forms of self-mutilation. People who do this to themselves are called cutters, and doing so is practically a cliché among “emo” and “goth” subcultures.
My silence seemed to frighten her. “Not because I think you’d judge me,” she said, looking away. “I just don’t like what it says about me. I think it tarnishes me.”
“I don’t care about it, Amy.”
She looked back at me, her eyes heavy with tears, then she leaned back and pressed her head against the pillow.
“Do you still do it?” I asked.
“No,” she replied after a few breaths. “When I was, like, fourteen.”
I tried to remember when Amy had said her parents split up. I thought it was younger, but it seemed to affect her later. From what I could tell, she was just coming out of a punk phase. I felt a bit of empathy for her, though my parental drama was much more recent and not as deep-seated as hers. Parents split up all the time, driving millions of teens into depression. The thought of it somehow made Amy seem more real.
“It doesn’t tarnish you,” I said. “Not unless you let it.”
She was silent.
I went on. “Earlier I was trying to figure out what defines a person; is it the mind, the body, the sum of his actions, and so on. I think it’s more than that. I think it’s how we take our experiences and our actions and move forward from them. A bum isn’t a bum because he lost his house and all his money, he’s a bum because he doesn’t do anything about it; he gives up and begs for spare change. Whatever you did before, it’s not who you are. What you learned from it, and did to move on from it, that’s who you are. That’s something between the mind and body.”
She was silent for a few seconds more, and then rolled over slightly to look at me with her head still on the pillow. “You were trying to figure that out because you said your mind and body weren’t yours. If your dad and a team of geneticists designed your body, and psychologists and drill instructors designed your mind, like Schumer says, what does that make you?”
I thought about it. “I wish I knew,” I said.
“Keep fighting until the answers come?” she asked.
“Or until there’s nobody left to fight.”
I thought about this guy who’s coming after me. If I, the police, or the FBI can stop him — what will that solve? If I knew who had hired him, would that lead me to the end of this mystery or just up another dark alley? Will a few more words answer all my questions, or just raise further ones? How many more people would have to be hurt before I felt safe, or before I had the truth? How much more of myself would I have to lose just to find out who I am? My dad, Schumer, Rubino, Bremer, Pratt, dead Austrian guy, Comstock, Dingan, Scottish guy, how do they all fit together? Don’t ask questions, don’t ask questions.
“Wait,” I said. “You said Irish guy, before. I thought he was Scottish.”
Amy blinked twice. “Umm,” she started, “the accent sounded like Irish to me.”
“Not Scottish?”
“No, Scottish is more… Fat Bastard. That guy was more Colin Farrell.”
“Huh.”
“Does that answer anything?” she asked.
“No,” I said, truthfully. “Absolutely nothing.”
A nurse came in to shoot Amy up with another dose of hydromorphone, which Amy described as feeling like being squished with a rolling pin from head to toe — in a good way, before falling asleep again.
I figured I should get out of there before her dad came back, and that I’d probably be in trouble for sneaking away from the hotel anyway.
I was right. When I parked my car and walked past the officer sitting in his car he gave me a funny look and brought his radio to his face, and when I walked into the lobby I almost ran into Special Agents Bremer and Rubino coming around the corner from the elevator bank. They both looked annoyed.
“Where the hell have you been?” Bremer barked, his jowls flapping with each syllable.
“I had to get some clothes,” I said, realizing I’d left everything I’d bought back in the trunk of my car. Rubino and Bremer eyed me suspiciously.
“We thought you might have been nabbed,” Rubino cut in before Bremer could continue yelling.
I took a quick look around the lobby. A man in a suit was standing at the front desk, flanked on all sided by expensive luggage, probably checking out. Two people were reading newspapers on the couches set up around the front door. Across the lobby I could see a few people scooping hot food from the breakfast buffet, reminding me how very hungry I was.
“All right, look,” I said, breaking away from the two-man FBI huddle and heading toward the food, “if there’s ever a situation where the options are that I’m either in mortal danger or just doing something reckless and self-serving, it’ll be the second one.”
“Noted,” Bremer said, falling in step behind me.
Forgoing any fears that everything probably had strychnine in it, I grabbed a plate and shoveled a bunch of fruit on it, then opened one of the two waffle irons and dumped a carton of pre-measured batter onto it, closed it, and set the timer.
“We need you to come with us,” Rubino said while I waited for my waffle to manifest.
I looked at him, then at Bremer, then back at Rubino. “What, like, I’m under arrest?” I said.
“No, we have some photographs we’d like you to look at on the computer. People suspected of murder-for-hire in the States who come from Western Europe. Maybe one will jog your memory so we can ID your newest fan.”
“Couldn’t you have printed them and brought them here?” I asked.
“There’s two hundred and thirty seven,” Rubino said, crossing his arms.
“Huh,” I said just as the waffle iron beeped behind me.
Seated at a table now, I jabbed at sliced strawberries with a fork while Bremer and Rubino sat opposite me and sipped water from plastic cups.
“Where is your office, anyway?” I asked. “Is there a field office in Fredericksburg or something?”
“No, we’re in the FBI headquarters in DC,” Bremer said.
“DC? That’s over an hour away,” I said. There goes my whole day.
Both agents nodded.
“But you’re always ten minutes away whenever I call,” I said, trying to recall our past meetings. When I’d called Rubino from the hospital he was there in under five minutes.
“We’re usually in the field during the day,” Rubino said.
“Investigating.”
“That’s what the I stands for,” I said to myself before finishing off the waffle.
“So that’s as far as you are with leads?” I asked. “Pictures from the computer?”
“You could say that, I guess,” Bremer said. “Other departments are doing most of the legwork, we’re mostly just liaisons between them and you.”
“Fancy,” I said, thinking. “Come to think of it, I think that guy’s accent might have been Irish, not Scottish. Scotch. Scottish?” I hadn’t thought of that before. Whiskey from Scotland is Scotch, the tape is Scotch, so are people Scotch or Scottish. Maybe Scottish is the language. No, that’s stupid, they speak English. Well, they try to…
“Okay,” Rubino said, “that doesn’t really change anything.”
“Absolutely nothing,” I said for the second time in an hour. “Though if he’s Irish he might be ex-IRA. He might have fled to another country, so he could be working out of anywhere. If he’s IRA, you or the Brits should have a file on him.” Yes, perfectly normal thing for a seventeen-year-old to say.
Rubino and Bremer were both squinting at me, like I was casting blinding light.
“Y-yes,” Bremer said, “hence, the pictures.”
“I know, I know,” I said. “I’m just trying to work this out from my end. If he expatriated from Ireland to somewhere else, he could possibly be from whatever country my dad was trying to sell Schumer’s program to.”
Rubino and Bremer blinked, almost in unison, looked at each other, back at me, and said, entirely in unison, “What?”
I looked up at each of them and shrugged. “What?”
Rubino squinted again. “What did you just say?” he asked, incredulous.
“That this Irish guy might not be from Ireland, he might be from whatever country my dad was trying to leak national secrets to.
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