by James Grady
His mind knew that’s how she must have looked. His heart saw her differently.
Now as she walked through the fading afternoon in the office lair that shaped his life, Merle wore a baggy gray hoodie and a pair of stained black sweat pants with worn out sneakers that padded across the carpet toward him.
“I brought you a sandwich for dinner,” she said of the plate she carried.
“I was going to quit work and—”
“No.”
Condor blinked.
“You never quit work,” said Merle. “Today’s not over. Stay up here. Eat. I already have.”
“We never do this. If Techs haven’t dropped off dinner, usually it’s me who heats up the leftovers or burns some poor dead cow.”
“Haven’t you heard? Haven’t you noticed? It’s like I’m a new old me.”
He faced her from his desk chair as she stopped in front of his knees.
“Here I am,” she said.
Put the plate with a sandwich on his desk.
Picked a thick gray football pill off the plate and held it out to him.
Said: “And here you go.”
All of him went cold.
“Relax,” said Merle. “It’s not nose spray.”
“What made you think of that?”
“It’s not me who jumped to that,” said Merle. “It’s you, Condor.”
“You don’t have to call me that.”
“It’s grown on me,” said Merle. “Take your pill.
“What’s the matter?” she said as he stared up at her. “After all we’ve been through, don’t you trust me?”
There it is.
There it always is.
Like he told Rick Applegate. Like he told the other Condor. Like Sasha knew.
Trust.
At some point, we all have to pull that trigger.
He took the pill from her (!) polished blood-red fingers.
Popped it into his mouth, took a drink of odd tasting water from the glass she gave him.
Swallowed it all.
He opened his mouth wide like a convict to a skeptical guard: “Did it. What does it do?”
“How the hell should I know?” said Merle. “It’s the brand new superhero.”
She looked out the windows.
“About an hour of daylight left. Have Bonnie tell me when you’re ten minutes from coming down, or she’ll tell you when to come. Wait for a trace of pink in the sky.”
Merle reached under her gray sweatshirt …
… pulled out a medical marijuana vape pen.
Set it on the desk by the plate.
“Eat first,” she said. “Save that for sign off. Then go in the bathroom there before you come downstairs. Brush your teeth. You don’t want to get busted for bad breath.”
She clumped down the stairs and never once looked back.
Was a turkey and tomato sandwich. Mayo and some kind of lettuce, too. Chunks of dark meat left over from what they hadn’t eaten from the dropped-off as an extended hospitality from Techs who’d invited the two of them to Christmas dinner outside the bars.
Merle hadn’t felt up to going.
Or so she’d said.
Bad for security and command protocols.
Or so he’d said.
He stared through and beyond the screens to all that he could do with them, past the killing and the conning and the spying of the V and with it into wherever he wanted to go from the comfort of his desk chair. Like the Russians, he could download a data profile of anybody, hack the Facebook and other social media domains of ex-lovers, of friends from college or high school, but what was the point? He saw them as they needed to be with his mind’s eye.
Best not to meet the ghosts in your machine.
Wunk: the monitor screen showing images of inside this house went dark.
The outside monitors showed no threats beyond the steel fence’s black bars.
Shelby Road, quiet and still.
Only bare trees in the woods out back, no one in the gaps between him and his neighbors.
Sensors indicated no stirrings, not even a mouse.
Black screen. Had to be a command given Bonnie or through a keypad, both options control-coded to his voice or retinal scan.
Or to Merle.
She’d needed that power to command some small reality of privacy.
Was only right. Only fair. After all, she’d been trapped everywhere with him since …
Well, since Chris Harvie was shot dead.
Condor could override Merle’s orders, but …
The radio played. Two of his three screens glowed with images and data.
Condor sat at his desk and in his choice as the sky outside darkened.
Told himself the pounding of his heart and the tightening of his mind and spine were only nerves or some side effect of whatever drug Merle’d fed him.
He’d been drugged before.
Laughed at the thought of his spy agency V as vape. Or maybe V for Vin.
He hit the marijuana vape pen. Coughed and choked and wheezed.
Walked into his lair’s bathroom and minty-flavor brushed his teeth.
Walked out and announced: “Bonnie, tell Merle I’m on my way.”
Than rather than wait Merle’s “suggested” ten minutes, he told Bonnie to activate off duty protocols, seized control of the tick-tock and walked down the stairs.
Opened the door.
Fire! This place is on—
Candles. Flickering candles.
Their soft flickering glows softening the darkness in his—their—bedroom.
Acting as sentinels lighting the stairs down to this house’s main level.
Thick, long candles. Probably could burn for hours. Dozens and dozens of candles.
He closed the door up to the V’s office lair.
That click activated Bonnie to turn on music downstairs in the dining room.
Gravely-voiced, dead John Stewart singing the song he wrote that others made famous:
Daydream Believer.
Last time I heard that, thought Condor, was in a therapy session with Merle, a “confrontation release” treatment where the Top Secret cleared shrink had him rattle off songs he thought should be played at his funeral in an attempt to get Merle to articulate and go beyond her PTSD and angry trembles and terrors.
What session am I in now? thought Condor as candles flickered and that song played.
Was it a random clong—one of those moments when you’re in the street and what you see and what’s been haunting you crash together with their perfect soundtrack you hear playing in some radio or device?
Was it an algorithm-driven selection made by A.I. Bonnie who controlled so many of his breaths and who of course could be trusted?
Or is this something Merle set up?
Like the candles. Like the sandwich. Like the vape. Like the mystery pill.
Nowhere to go except down the candlelit stairs to where the music played.
The invisible smoke of those dozens of flames smelled like vanilla, like flowers.
Merle stood in the dining room, her back to Condor as she lit the last candles that warmed where they were into a comfort cave with a locked black front door and painting covered walls and a row of back windows filled with that dark night.
That day after Christmas, her hair she’d dyed blond in November cascaded in soft waves. Her sapphire eyes glistened, brushed blush brought life to her pale, high-boned cheeks. She smiled as he entered the dining room, her wide lips painted a slick glowing red he was sure matched Marilyn Monroe’s in a photograph he and Merle saw when he’d urged her to read a magazine article revealing movie star Marilyn as an intellectual, philosophical, feminist star.
“See?” Condor’d told Merle who told hi
m that her own M.M. initials for Merle Mardigian sometimes triggered thoughts of that suicided—or was it murdered?—mistress of politicians. “We can be more than who we’re trapped as.”
Merle wore a dress Condor’d never seen.
Her dress wasn’t white like Marilyn’s, was a darker red than blood, shoulder straps sliding down to a deep V between her breasts bound by no bra, the dress flaring out so she could spin and flash her bare legs and then he noticed not sneakers but angels’ well-heeled red shoes.
She let his eyes take in the all of her in as she stood beside the bare white wood rectangular dining room table, a scene lit well by flickering candles.
Merle said: “Is this who you wanted?”
“What?”
“Way before all the bullets. After you got out of the CIA’s crazy house. When you used to watch me come into the Starbucks up on Capitol Hill. When you saw some dream of us before you hijacked my life to fight off your death. Was this who you wanted me to be?”
“I wanted you to be you.”
She cocked her head with a grin that said Really?
“I want to find the you who was all the you I ever wanted you to be.”
“And this,” she said, take a step closer to him. “This what you get. What you spies call the take. And you took it. Get to take it. Are stuck with it.”
“This isn’t you,” said Condor.
“This isn’t who I was. Who I’ve been for the last, what, seems like eternity. That one good night before when I thought maybe. Then all the nights after Chris Harvie when clinging to you and doing what I could that you wanted me to do was all I could do and it was never enough for either of us, though you faked it pretty well.”
She took a step closer and he could smell musk perfume she’d never worn before.
And he realized the secret identity of the new superhero pill.
As the vape mushroomed through him like she knew it would.
He couldn’t log what songs were playing over the pounding of his own heart.
“So,” she whispered as she stood before him with no more than a thin novel between the press of their clothed flesh. “Here I am. You’re Control Function. What are you going to do?”
He trapped her face in the cup of his hands, his mouth found hers and felt her sticky lips surprisingly not hesitate as they opened and slid him into the velvet tongue of her kiss.
She pushed herself against him from his thighs to his heart, her faced turned up to his and his hands spread wide on her back, careful not to presumptuously/offensively slide where they wanted to go. She took his left hand, kissed his palm, leaned back so she could fill his grasp with the flesh of her right breast below her silky thin red dress.
Said: “Come with me.”
She led him out of the dining room, up the stairs but ahead and above him by two steps so the entire focus of his life locked onto the tremulous sway of her moon flesh inside the red dress.
Flickering candles lit their journey into the bedroom they shared.
Paled shadows of flowered light waved on the bedroom’s blue walls.
The bed was turned down to its white sheets and fluffed pillows.
Merle trailed her hands down his chest, stepped back, grinned: “Your socks are still on.”
Standing on one leg, then the other with speed and balance meant maybe his decades of practicing T’ai chi hadn’t been for mere enlightened survival after all. Not only did his socks fly off, his shoes were gone, too, then quickly went his faded black jeans, his maroon flannel shirt and the long-sleeved blue winter hiking underwear top. Part of him realized the heat must have been turned up beyond the thermostat’s normal setting and all of him burned.
“See?” she said, looking at him. “I told you. Superhero.”
They crashed together, mouths on each other, red lipstick smearing both their skins.
His right hand stroked down her spine, looking for the dress’s zipper …
“Pull it off,” she whispered.
Straps jerked down her shoulders, trapping her arms at her sides, freeing oh freeing her breasts and he couldn’t help from caressing their tipped flesh, squeezing ever so gently as Merle’s shoulders and chest heaved her breaths and he took first one, then her other nipple into his suck.
Condor jerked the dress all the way down, over her oh her hips, down her thighs as he dropped onto the carpet with both knees and oh yes discovered she wore nothing under that garment but her pride and the scents, oh the scent of her that filled his nostrils and nuzzling and kisses. “There!” she cried, opened herself to him until a scream jerked her back from the intensity, pulling him but he was kissing the backs of her thighs, kissing the wondrous roundness and secrets of her ass, kissing up her spine and wrapping his arms around her to pull her warmth against his, kissing her neck, her cheek, his hands full of her breasts. She turned to see his face over her left shoulder and before she strained to kiss him, before they stumbled to the bed, she filled her eyes with his ache, whispered: “Want, do what you want!”
And he did and then after a miracle short while, she made him do so again.
The man who’d become Condor lay with his face pressed on the bones of M.M.’s warm chest, tried to hear the beat of her heart.
“Are your pulse and blood pressure back down to normal yet?” she asked him.
“Everything’s back down to normal,” he said.
“We’ll see.”
She pulled herself out from under his weight.
Walked through the flickers of light to the bathroom beyond the foot of the bed.
Clicked on that light. Stood staring into the sink’s mirror.
Soaked a washcloth with steaming water, wrang it out, wiped it over her loins, between her legs, under her arms, rinsed it and wiped her closed eyes face. Pulled a towel off the shower bar, dried herself, hung the towel back up and …
Picked up a gold tube of lipstick. From where he lay on the bed, Condor watched her turn that metal tube and slide a dark red tip into the world.
She turned and caught him staring at her but unlike ever before, she grinned.
Slammed the bathroom door shut.
Must have been five, might have been ten minutes.
Laying there alone on the rumpled bed, staring at the white closed bathroom door, Condor heard the toilet flush. Heard the sink run.
The bathroom door flew open.
Merle stood there. Naked. Silhouetted by the small room’s light.
Her hair looked perfect and even in the dim, he saw the darkened thickness of her lips.
She threw—tossed—the hot damp washcloth at—to—him.
“You’re turn,” she said as he got off the bed. “Do all you gotta do to do it all right.”
She’d have heard the toilet flush, the sink run again as he worked the bathroom.
“Come,” she said when he joined her, and naked like her, he followed.
I can have Bonnie delete the security footage of what we did, thought Condor.
Or not.
They each held onto the railing as they walked down the stairs.
He glanced at the closed black slab front door as he followed her into the candlelit dining room: Of course the black door was still solid and locked, secure.
Their bare feet padded them to the kitchen island.
Merle pulled open the junk drawer, lifted out another vape pen, offered it to him.
Condor shook his head no: “I think I’m fine.”
“That’s your first mistake.”
Merle twirled the vape pen in her fingers like a wand.
Slid its tip between her scarlet lips, sucked longer than the recommended two seconds.
What about her other drugs—I mean, meds? thought Condor.
Spasms of coughing and choking shook her body but she never lost her red sm
ile.
Held the V pen out to him.
“You’re not going to make me go there alone, are you?” said Merle.
He hit the pen, then let the chocking shake through him and remembered the good old days of illegal water pipes that sent you smooth.
Wasn’t that he couldn’t stand straight or mistakenly thought it was OK for him to drive, was that being how he was then meant being in the wow. The dizzy high of stoned.
She took the pen back and set it on the counter.
“Bonnie,” ordered Merle. “Kill the music.”
The house that was their fortress and their prison fell silent.
“My turn,” she said.
“What are we doing?”
“You’ve got no complaints so far tonight.”
Her hand floated up in front of her grinning face, her fingers beckoned him to follow.
Of course he did—bumped into the dining room table but made it to the far end of the table and the cushioned dining room chair she sat him in and scooted him up to that ten-foot-long white rectangle. The wall of windows to the night rose on his heartside. His forward gaze held the kitchen and the stairs up. The locked black door in and out of then and there was unseen but logically where it had been moments before.
He watched her walk away.
Sit in the dining room chair opposite him on the far end of the table.
A naked man and a naked woman sitting across a white plane from each other.
His head in the clouds, Condor smiled at her.
Her lips so red, Merle smiled at him.
Her right hand blink holding/aiming at him a pistol.
Roaring rushing realization.
The pistol in her right hand—now also braced by her left hand—the gun was a revolver.
A revolver evolved from the Colt six shooters carried by cowboys of yore and lore.
The black bore of that revolver stared at Condor.
The gun close enough for him to see all the chambers looked loaded.