Children of Paranoia

by Trevor Shane

  I hated that answer. “And you were okay with that?” I asked.

  “Hell, no,” Dan said, shaking his head. “But the General also told me this.” Dan’s voice suddenly grew quiet. “He told me that in the last two hundred years, we’ve reached peace agreements with the other side on three separate occasions after long, drawn-out talks.” Dan held three fingers out in front of him for emphasis. “Everything was worked out, agreed to. War’s over.”

  I’d never heard this story before. “What happened?” I asked.

  “Each time, they went back on their word.” Dan’s voice was deadly serious now, like he hadn’t had a drop to drink all night. “Each time, they reneged. Each time, they tried to take advantage of the fact that we were willing to negotiate. Each time, good people died. No matter how much we give them, Joe, they want more.” Dan finished off the beer that was in front of him. “So the General told me that we weren’t going to negotiate anymore. Now, if you want me to tell you why the War started, Joe, you’re out of luck. That information is above my pay grade. But if you want to ask me why we’re still fighting, then there’s your answer.” I sat there in utter silence. “Can I go to bed now?” Dan asked me after waiting to see if I was going to say anything.

  “Yeah,” I answered him. My head was spinning.

  Dan got up from the table and walked toward his bedroom. “See you in the morning, son,” Dan said before closing his bedroom door behind him. I had barely touched the beer that Dan had placed in front of me when he started his story. Now I lifted it up and downed the whole thing. Then I went to the refrigerator and got another.

  I called you that night at two in the morning, drunk. You were half asleep when you answered. I told you I was in Florida on business. You sounded jealous and told me that it was cold in Montreal. After I spoke to you, I went to bed. In the morning, Jim Matsuda awaited.

  The next day, I went to do my due diligence on Jim. I got up early and went for a run around Dan’s neighborhood. It was my normal routine—get up early and run. Usually, I’d be running through desolate streets during the early-morning hours. Not at Crystal Ponds. The folks at Crystal Ponds got up early. Old, gray-haired people were already out on their morning strolls. I passed house after house of old men working in their garages, fixing fishing poles, or painting mailboxes that had just been painted months earlier. Everybody waved. Everybody smiled. The sun was bright and the land flat and it felt good to be outside in shorts, working up a sweat. I deliberately made two passes by Jim’s residence. On my first pass, the place seemed empty. As I approached his house for the second time, however, a small Japanese man with glasses and a graying goatee was standing out on the front lawn in his bathrobe and slippers. It was Jim. He looked like he had come out to get the morning paper but had stopped at the end of his lawn, still a few feet from the paper. He was standing there, holding a mug of coffee, gazing off into the distance. His robe was undone in the front and underneath he wore light blue boxer shorts and a white T-shirt. He must have heard me running because he turned his head toward me when I was about a half a block away. When he saw me, he lifted his hand in a wave. I tried to act casual. I waved back just like I had waved to everyone else that I had passed. Mr. Matsuda’s eyes followed me as I ran. As I neared him, reaching a point no more than three feet from the man I was planning to kill in the very near future, he made eye contact with me. There was recognition in his look, like he had come out that morning just to wait for me to run by. That look frightened me. I began to think that maybe this new Allen character at Intel was more careless than I’d thought. Maybe Jim Matsuda had been tipped off that I was coming. I tried to ignore the ideas in my head. I told myself that if Jim knew that I was coming for him, he wouldn’t be standing outside in barely more than a bathrobe and slippers. Everybody waves here, I thought. Everybody. He’s no different. I broke off eye contact with him. He had still been staring into my eyes. Then I looked down at my feet and ran past him.

  From what I saw that morning, my job should have been easy. Mr. Matsuda had no security. Not only that, but he seemed to have no concern for his own safety. I decided to tail my target for a day anyway. I couldn’t afford to blow another job. Beware the easy target—another lesson from early on in our training days.

  I spent the rest of the day following Mr. Matsuda. Dan lent me his car. I stayed just far enough away as to not be seen by Mr. Matsuda again. I was afraid that he might recognize me. I was afraid that he might recognize Dan’s car. It all seemed unnecessary, though. Mr. Matsuda simply went about his day’s business. It was a day full of nothing. No danger. No urgency. No fear. Mr. Matsuda’s life seemed ordinary—terribly, frighteningly ordinary. We went to the grocery store. We stopped at the pharmacy. We stopped for gas and he got out of the car to wash his windshield. We stopped at a local diner for lunch. Jim had a tuna melt. I had a cheeseburger. We went back to Crystal Ponds for a bit, dropping in on a few friends. We stopped at the bank. There was an ATM machine outside but Jim didn’t use it. Instead, he walked inside, flirted with the tellers, deposited some checks, and took out some cash. Then we headed home. I could have easily taken him out at any point during the day. At around six o’clock, I decided I had seen enough. I wasn’t learning anything. There wasn’t anything to learn. I headed back to Dan’s. That’s where things got complicated.

  When I got back to Dan’s house, Dan was sitting in a chair, facing the front door. His face was blank, expressionless. The chair he was sitting in was out of place. He had moved the chair that way, facing the door, so that he could sit in it and wait for me to come in. God only knows how long he’d been waiting. In his lap, Dan held the manila envelope containing the details about my mission. He must have found it in the desk and taken it. I stepped into the silence. Neither of us said a word for a moment. Dan just sat there staring at me like you’d stare at an animal at the zoo. Eventually, I broke the stillness. “You know you weren’t supposed to look at that, Dan,” I said, reproaching the old man as if he were a misbehaving child. It didn’t feel right but that’s what I did. “It’s not safe.”

  “I know,” he replied to me, his voice warbled and weakened by the phlegm in his throat. He held the envelope out to me. “Take it. I’ve seen enough.” I took the envelope from him and placed it under my arm.

  “What did you see?” I asked. The man in the chair in front of me was a deflated version of the one who had picked me up at the airport the other day. Dan looked smaller.

  “I didn’t want to cause trouble.” Dan spoke softly, speaking as much to the air as he was to me. The sun was setting around us and the rich colors of dusk were seeping through the windows. “It’s just that the days here, they all run into each other. I wanted to feel like part of the action again. I wanted to remember what it felt like.”

  “What did you see, Dan?” I asked, looking down at the opened envelope, trying to see if the papers were organized as I had left them. “What were you doing?”

  “They killed my daughter, Joe. They killed my wife and my daughter.” Dan looked up at me, his eyes swollen but dry. Dan had cried all his tears ages ago. He kept looking at the envelope out of the corner of his eye. “I wanted to know who it was. I just wanted to know who the big shot was that they sent a professional killer down here to kill. I wanted to see the name of man you were going to end and I wanted it to feel good. I wanted it to feel like revenge.” He spoke the last few sentences through clenched teeth.

  “So you looked in the envelope?” I asked, knowing full well there wasn’t any doubt.

  Dan nodded. He unclenched his teeth. “I just wanted to feel good again.”

  “So you looked in the envelope and now what do you feel?” I was mad. He’d had no right.

  “I knew that it couldn’t bring my wife and my daughter back to life, but I thought that maybe it could do it for me.”

  “Do what for you?”

  “Bring me back to life, Joe. I wanted it to remind me what it was like to be alive.” Dan began wringi
ng his hands together in his lap.

  “So what did it do, Dan?” My anger passed quickly. “It’s just a name, Dan. He’s one of them. I’ll take him out. The world will be a better place for it and you’ll have done your part. Isn’t that something? Didn’t you tell me last night that there was no negotiating with them?”

  “You don’t get it, Joe. I don’t care about doing my part anymore.”

  “Then what’s the problem?” I asked. I probably should have figured it out, but reading people was never my forte.

  “He’s my best friend, Joe.” Dan took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes. “He’s one of the few friends I have left. And you’re going to kill him.” If he’d had any tears left, I think he would have cried.

  “Jim Matsuda?” They were friends. Fuck Allen. Fuck him, that bastard.

  “Yeah,” Dan responded. “It started as an old military thing. Army versus navy. But when you get to be our age, all the bullshit fades away and you just see each other as old soldiers. We bonded over that. I guess we have more in common than I realized.” Dan looked down at the floor. “Honestly, I don’t know what I’m going to do without him.”

  “I didn’t know, Dan,” I said, not that it mattered.

  “He fought for this country in two wars, you know. Two wars. I fought in one of those wars. He and I, we were on the same side, fighting those bastards together”—Dan smiled a little as he spoke—“fighting against the bad guys on the same team, defending our families together. That’s how we bonded—old war stories.” Dan began to shake his head. “I thought I knew him.”

  “What do you want me to do, Dan?” I didn’t know what I could do. I couldn’t take myself off the job. Dan knew that. But if Dan had asked me to, I would have tried.

  “He defended our country, Joe. Our country. I play poker at his house. He’s been in here, in my home, standing right where you’re standing. I’ve shared my scotch with the guy. I celebrated my seventieth birthday with him. He’s a good man. How can he be the bad guy?” He didn’t expect me to answer.

  “What do you want me to do, Dan? Tell me what you want me to do.”

  “This War has taken a lot from me, kid.” Dan closed his eyes and shook his head again. I thought he was going to rub the skin off his hands the way he was wringing them together.

  I got down on one knee in front of him. I pried his hands apart and held each one of his hands in one of mine. Once Dan opened his eyes again and looked at me, I asked again, “What do you want me to do?” Whatever he said in that moment, I would have done it, no matter what the cost. I just wanted someone that I trusted to tell me what to do. I didn’t want to have to make the decisions. “What do you want me to do, Dan?”

  “Your job, Joe. Do your job.” He didn’t look at me when he answered. Instead, he just stared at the floor. Once the room grew quiet again, Dan got up out of the chair, grabbed a beer from the refrigerator, and walked into his bedroom. He closed the door behind him without saying another word.

  I considered going right over to Jim’s immediately after my conversation with Dan and getting the whole damn thing over with, but then I thought better of it. I had to stay disciplined. I had to stay under control. I had to stick to the plan. I couldn’t afford any mistakes.

  Dan didn’t come out of his room in the morning, at least not at first. I got up early and went for another run. This time, I steered clear of Jim’s place. I kept my head down and kept my waving and my hellos to a minimum. The web was already tangled enough. I didn’t want to risk making it any messier. When I got back to the safe house, I showered. When I got out of the shower, Dan was standing in the kitchen. “Morning, Dan,” I said to him.

  “Morning, Joe.” Dan stirred his cup of coffee in his hand. “You didn’t go out last night, did you?”

  “No,” I replied. “I thought about it, but decided not to. I decided it would be smarter to stick with the plan.”

  “You’re probably right.” There was no emotion in Dan’s voice. It was flat, monotone. “So when are you going to do the job?”

  “This evening. As soon as it gets dark.” I didn’t ask him again what he wanted me to do. He’d had his chance. The fates were sealed. He knew it too.

  “Okay.” Dan nodded. “You know, he knows you’re here,” Dan said.

  Somehow, I wasn’t surprised. “How so?” I asked.

  “I mean, he doesn’t know who you are or why you’re here, but I told him that I was going to have a visitor.”

  “Okay. That’s good to know.” It really was useful information.

  “He was happy for me.” Dan swallowed his last gulp of coffee and put the mug in the sink. “He was happy that I was having visitors.” He had aged ten years overnight. When I first saw Dan at the airport, I could tell that he was old, but he looked old and sturdy. Now he looked frail.

  “Does he have any reason to suspect that you’re on the other side or that you know who he is?”

  “No.”

  “Then everything should be fine.” I felt horrible using the word fine. Nothing was fine. Nothing ever was fine. I could count the hours in my life that had been fine on one hand.

  “Right,” Dan responded. “I’m going to be out all day. I probably won’t see you until this evening. You’ll be okay without the car?”

  “Yeah, Dan. I’ll be fine.” There was that word again. Dan took the keys off the hook on the wall and walked toward the door that led to the garage. The same door I had first entered two days earlier. “And, Dan . . .” He turned to me as I spoke, but I didn’t know what I wanted to say. All that came out was “Be okay.”

  At some point during the day, I walked to the hardware store and bought a length of rope with cash. On the way home I picked up a sandwich. I spent the rest of the day sitting on Dan’s porch, staring at the pond in his backyard. It wasn’t crystal. It was more of a murky green color. When the sun began to drop below the rooftops of the surrounding houses, I walked into my room and got ready. I put on a pair of long pants and a light, long-sleeve T-shirt. I was trying to leave as little skin open to scratching as possible. I couldn’t dress too warmly for fear that I’d arouse suspicion. I packed my backpack with the rope, a pair of gloves, and some Wet-Naps in case I needed to clean anything up once the job was done. I left everything else—the rest of my clothes, the ski mask, the gun. I wouldn’t need those. This job would be hard for all the wrong reasons. Once the sun had completely disappeared from the sky and the incessant chirping and croaking that haunted the Florida night began, I stepped outside of Dan’s house and began my walk across Crystal Ponds to Jim Matsuda’s.

  By the time I got near Mr. Matsuda’s house, the sky was dark and colorless. I didn’t have much of a plan. Frankly, I didn’t think I’d need one. I stopped on the street in front of his house at roughly the same spot where he and I had made eye contact the morning before. I stood there and peered inside his windows. The lights inside his small house were on, and I could see a shadow moving inside. If he wasn’t alone I’d have to come back later. If he was alone, I figured the whole job would be finished within the next half hour. Finish this awful job, I thought, and I could head back to you. One step at a time, Joe, one step at a time.

  Unfortunately, from where I was standing on the street, I couldn’t really make out whether or not Jim had company. After about ten minutes I got sick of waiting and decided to go ahead with the plan anyway. I could always abort and regroup if need be. So I stepped forward, walking up the gravel path that Jim had leading to his front door. The plan, if you could call it that, was to knock on the door, tell a few lies, get inside, and then wring the life out of him. After that, I’d clean up and go home. War hero or not, for my purposes he was just an old man.

  I walked lightly along the path to the door, not because I was afraid that Jim would see me but because I didn’t want to attract the attention of his neighbors. The whole neighborhood was quiet; the only sound came from the crickets and frogs. I stepped up to Jim’s door and rang the bell. I
could hear some noises coming from inside. I could hear people talking. Then, Jim clicked off the television and the only sound that was left was that of a small, elderly man shuffling toward the door.

  Jim answered the door wearing a pair of light blue pants and a striped polo shirt. He wore the same slippers that I had seen on him the day before. He pulled the door wide open without first checking to see who it was. He sized me up quickly upon opening the door and then asked, “Can I help you?”

  “I’m not intruding or interrupting anything, am I?” I said, trying to peer inside the house to be sure that Jim was alone.

  “No. No. Not at all. I was just catching up on some television. What can I do for you, young man?”

  “You’re Jim Matsuda, right?” He nodded. “My name is Joe. I’m staying over at Dan’s place for a few days.”

  “Yes. Yes. Dan told me that he was going to have a visitor. Pleased to meet you, Joe.” Jim held out his hand for me to shake. I had never killed a man after shaking his hand. I looked down at Jim’s extended hand for a moment and paused. Then, not wanting to draw suspicion, I shook it.

  “Pleasure’s all mine, Mr. Matsuda. Mind if I come in?”

  “Of course, of course. Where are my manners? Please.” Mr. Matsuda extended his arm into the apartment, welcoming me. After I stepped inside, he closed the door behind me and shut out the rest of the world. Mr. Matsuda had all of the windows closed and was blasting the central air conditioning. Unless someone was standing right outside the front door, no one would hear a sound. Mr. Matsuda’s impeccable manners doomed him from the start. “So, how do you know Dan?” Mr. Matsuda asked as he led me toward the sitting room in his house.