Our relationship started before my birth, several weeks before if truth be told, when my mother clinically died in the ER from a drug overdose. Somehow, they kept her body alive, brain dead as she was, for 15 days, on a ventilator, pumping it full of nutrients, anti-biotics, and who knows what else, to give my body just that much more time to develop. Medicine was not as advanced in 1980 as it is today. Even then, I understand, it was touch and go and I spent the first three months of my life in the hospital. It wasn't like I had a home to go to, my mother was an unknown teenage junkie who was picked up near death in a back alley, and my father also unknown. But death had had her arms around me and chose to let me live so live I did. I don't know if it was the chemical's they pumped her with or living for two weeks attached by an umbilical to a dead person, but from that point forward I was now death's favorite, and besides, who wants to adopt a premature drug baby with eyes so dark blue it appeared at times I had no iris? Even at this stage of my life adults were leery of looking me in the eye.
After the hospital I grew up in a succession of foster homes, some better than others. Despite the challenges of my birth my body grew to mostly normal size, not overly large, but not too small either. Aside from my eyes, which appeared dark blue at times and black at others, there was little to set me apart from my fellow man except for a freakishly enhanced body strength, that wasn't apparent unless I demonstrated it, and what I later determined was a complete absence of emotion and empathy. From my reading I have learned that I am, technically, a psychopath, in that I feel none of the emotions that others feel. But I am unique psychopath in that I feel no reason to hate my fellow man, to harm them, or to inflict pain on them. I feel neither love, nor hate, sorrow, nor joy, elation, nor depression. Death loved me, in her own unique way, but all I could return to her was obedience. I was unable to love death, and unwilling to do so, and the one time I did feel love she destroyed it for me.
As was to be expected I made no friends in school, but no enemies either. A succession of schools, based on what home I was in at the time, passed before my eyes. I was intelligent enough but saw little need to prove it, being content with passing grades. Occasionally, especially in a new school, I was challenged, but my strength combined with a complete lack of fear meant fights were usually short and often bloody. Yes, I lost on occasion, especially when outnumbered, but won more, and even losing the winners paid a price they had no desire to repeat. I never sought revenge but understood, early on, that putting my opponent down hard and fast created an object lesson no one wanted to chance again. I existed in my foster homes, forming no attachments, developing no feelings for the paid caretakers that provided the room and board around me. The psychiatrists the state provided, and insisted I see, found nothing wrong with me, claiming that I was completely sane, even alarmingly so. There was no neurosis, anxiety, psychotic behavior, in short nothing they could point to except a lack of demonstratable emotions that they simply bypassed when determining I was harmless. They assumed my emotions were bottled up inside and never noticed, or cared, that I didn't have any. Nor did I enlighten them. I recognized the obligations I owed to those that cared for me and I met them with the obedience and respect that their actions deserved, at the level they deserved, but created no lasting relationships. They were in, and then out, of my life, in a never-ending stream of faces. I was passed on frequently, not due to any actions on my part, but that my mere presence was unsettling.
Three days after my high school graduation I was on my way to boot camp. I had enlisted while still in high school, dependent on my graduation, and saw no reason to delay. I hadn't requested a specialty, or made a deal, my goal was to be a combat marine. There wasn't a war going on, but I knew one would come somewhere. Unlike school, in the corps my goal was to excel and excel I did, in unarmed combat, in armed combat, in conventional and unconventional warfare, in everything. I learned how to parachute, went to sniper school, spent time with explosives. With my body strength, and inner discipline, I excelled in unarmed combat. I never got angry, or flustered, or scared. I felt no empathy for my opponent, or rage towards him. If he bested me, I learned from it with no need to revenge, I felt no insult, as I had no pride to soothe. If I won, which was often, I had no need to humiliate my opponent, so I simply beat him in the most efficient manner with the minimum of effort required. That others took this as a sign of my maturity, or benevolence, would have amused me if I felt amusement. I did learn how to laugh, attempting to provide cover for my emotional lack, but for some reason it only frightened others.
I had been in for three years when 9-11 hit and a week later I was alone, riding a horse, deep in Afghanistan near the Pakistan border. I specialized in single missions, working alone, without a partner or team. It wasn't something the corps liked but there were occasions that required it and when it was necessary, they often called on me. I reupped for four years and spent them in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Kuwait, and Iraq. Then another four years where the corps lent me to the CIA and I bounced from the Middle East to South America. Wherever they needed someone killed I was there. Everywhere I went death was with me, embracing me, protecting me, loving me. She didn't need me to kill for her, she had so many ways to kill without me, but she seemed to take a special joy in my kills. I think it was Stalin that said the death of one man is a crime but a million men a political act. To her the death of a million men was blasé so she focused on the individual kills I had. When faced with an overwhelming buffet, or an overabundance of sensations, it is often best to focus on just one or two items to keep the taste buds from being overcome. Too many sensations dull the senses and too many experiences overpower the ability to process them. She learned to savor my kills, to bask in their warmth, to take delight in an act that left me unfeeling and cold. I was the single item on the menu she chose to consume, the one she had selected before the menu was even written.
After twelve years I had had enough and was tired of it. My contact at the company seemed surprised when I told him I was not reupping. He suggested I take a few months break, but he misunderstood. I wasn't tired of killing, just killing for minimum wage. I wanted to go into consulting with only one client. He immediately saw the benefits to the company which included me not being a marine, so they could use me on jobs that the marines officially frowned on, plus not being on any government payroll, so they had plausible deniability if anything I did became public. Also, I could now do domestic jobs which I had been banned from before. I formed a consulting company, chartered in a foreign country, which only existed to launder payments to other bank accounts in other countries. I was the sole employee. My needs were simple, having no desire for a home or family I lived from hotel to hotel, acquiring possessions and discarding them as each job required. I formed no identity of my own, carried no possessions, had no individuality, but developed each persona as the assignment required until I discarded it for the next one. Perhaps I was still a psychopath but as far as the company was concerned, I was their psychopath, one they could point at their enemies. I didn't kill for fun, or pleasure, but only for profit, and lived by a code of right and wrong I developed myself.
Sex was, to me, a commodity, one providing neither emotional or spiritual fulfillment, but simply a form of physical release I found beneficial. Oddly enough I found my almost complete indifference to sex, and to the physical attraction of women, to act as a form of aphrodisiac to many of them. I wasn't attracted to men, of that I was sure, but neither did I find one girl more desirable than another, except in the broadest terms. I wanted them simply for sexual release and found, to my surprise, that many were attracted to the cold, clinical, style of sex I provided. My only mistress was death, she still held me in her embrace, she jealously guarded my interactions with women, and would brook no breach in that wall. But she allowed me dalliances, either amateur or professional, as long as no commitments were formed. She fed off the fear I created in others, not in the pleasure I provided to a few.
I had accepted an assignment in NYC, to eliminate a socialist professor from a South American country that was in self-imposed exile from the new leadership there. He had come to raise money among the darling of the academic set, so he could go home and stir up more trouble, and the job took some time to set up as it was supposed to be an unimpeachable accident. It was on this assignment I met Tracy. She was a peripheral player on a political campaign for a local politician who was shortly to move into office and was aligned, at least superficially, with my assignment.
I met Tracy at a cocktail party that had been arranged as a meet and greet for the visiting professor and felt an immediate attraction to her. Yes, felt, for the first time in my life I felt love for another human being. Emotions were as foreign to me as my world would be to her, if I had told her truthfully of it, but I knew she needed to be a part of my life from that moment on. I wanted to possess her, to own her, to protect her, to keep and love and cherish her. We defined the word whirlwind romance in that within a month I had married her, having arranged with a contact in the company to have a federal judge perform the ceremony, in secret. Although I wanted her, and needed her, my assignments kept me away from her, except for the odd times I was able to spend with her. I had disposed of my current assignment shortly after the wedding and was immediately sent to South America for another job. After that I detoured through Iraq, to dispose of a tribal leader who was giving us trouble, then home to Tracy for a week's rest.
