Prologue
My heart is numb, though it wasn’t always so.
I used to live a normal life. The darkness I knew to reside in my heart used to be offset by a conscience in my head that made me see the world in a peachy light. My true name you will never know, but be warned of my intentions. I did not come to this city to be a hero. I didn’t set this town ablaze by mistake. It was all part of a plan, a plan that slowly grew like cancer through my mind.
Chapter 1
I grew up in the average small town. We weren’t very different from any other small, affluent small towns. A clear-cut mixture of saviours and scumbags we were, but my father stood out in my mind, like a smudged blur on the otherwise sharply defined canvas of our morality. I could never figure out if he was a scumbag or a saviour, an immoral pauper or a conscientious prince, and neither could my mother. My father’s ambiguity affected me a lot, but it affected my mother a lot more. Throughout her life I could see her lamenting this marriage but, God bless her, she was too weak to break free. One day in my tenth year, I was sitting there, with her going over her spousal issues in a hysterical manner and me trying to reason to no avail. This situation was not unique to me; indeed I had tried multiple times throughout my life to reason with her when she went crazy, but I knew by now it was a lost cause. At that moment, I had had enough of this. I prayed, only for a second, for her to have the will to do whatever would make her happy, and, in that fateful second, I think she heard me. She got up, kissed me on the forehead, and walked into the kitchen.
Looking back now, I can see that thought, that one second, that one moment where our minds were in sync. I can see these things in my mind’s eye and know that they defined my life. I never heard her slit her wrists and die on the cold floor.
Chapter 2
My father was always a paragon and a renegade. Every good thing, every kind deed would be offset by something dirty, something evil. In a way he was the ultimate embodiment of the Buddhist principle of balance, offsetting every good thing with something bad. However, this never satisfied me, and I strove to find out more about the man who’d made me, raised me, but yet was the biggest enigma in my life.
My first clue was his friend. This man, whose name I will not mention and appearance I will not describe, had never been close to me. I did not think he would talk to me after all these years and, true to my hunch, he never did. He was, however, a clue. This man was in now way connected to the life my father should have had. This man was not the kind of friend I’d expect rich, small town man such as my Dad to have. This man was deadly.
I went to meet him the next day. I didn’t know his name, but I hoped to get some information from him. How optimistic I was then, before the darkness overtook me, hoping a man like him would give information to a beardless kid who was a stranger to him. So I strode up to his door and, with my confidence peaking, rang the doorbell. And I waited.
I kept waiting. I listened to the insects and birds chirp. I watched the upstairs shutters flutter and the trees sway with the wind. I shuffled my feet back and forth. I whistled quietly to myself. I rang the doorbell a few more times. Yet he never opened the door. After about ten minutes of rocking on the balls of my feet while silently berating myself, I had had enough. I left, cursing him loudly over my back, and walked the three steps onto the street before an impact made the world go dark around me. I was thirteen at the time.
Chapter 3
Six years later, and I was crouched anxiously on the railing of a 19th floor balcony, rocking back and forth in anxiety, completely oblivious to the fact that I would die if I fell. Heights didn’t affect me much at the time; they just reminded me of my own astronomically developed acrobatic prowess. So skilled was I in dealing and dealing with death at this point that the laws of physics would have had a hard time killing me. Indeed, my morality and mortality were both moving targets: hard to pin down and extremely difficult to strike at.
I was here, wading in anxiety, because my Dad’s friend was late, and he was bringing important news to me. He was going to tell me where my father would be this weekend and then I was going to erase both my father and him from my life.
Obviously, this is still a work in progress.
