AGE OF INSANITY

Chapter 5: The broken

"What is your deal?" I rasped through gritted teeth not bothering to mask my hostility.

His face both excited and riled me like nothing else could. I had exposed his incompetence and yet he showed no reaction other than studying my face. I was about to unleash verbal hell on him when he finally deigned to speak.

"Back in the army I had a friend like you, George, smart as whip but lacked the patience to understand and overcome. He preferred to use brute force rather than employ his beautiful brain. When our tours ended and we were discharged suffering from PTSD of course he chose a more direct approach to his problem. Long story short he died from a broken neck in the ring while fighting his opponent and his demons. Violence is never the answer, take it from a man of war."

He wasn't a psychopath; he was just broken. I didn't defeat him when we first met, he had let me win. I am not sure which bothered me more; the fact that I had misjudged him and labeled him just because he had not acted the way I had expected or the fact that I had been handled like a child. He could have easily taken me down yet he had chosen not to. His reaction had not been due to lack of social skills, it had been empathy. My father must have given him a warning prior to visit. I wanted to ask if him if he knew about my diagnosis but couldn't bring myself to do it.

"Your father told me about your mental condition. Don't worry I am not in a condition to judge anyone. Whatever it is you have cannot compare to the symptoms I have when my PTSD rears its ugly head. You are smart just like your dad said, you figured out in a week what took me a month. I know this company can grow and become even more profitable as long as we work smart", he stretched his hand out at me, tilting his head, urging me to take it. I did not want to, but I still did.

He asked me to go for a drink with him to celebrate our new work arrangement. I was tired and all I wanted to do was go home but I still found myself following him to my car. As I drove out I couldn't help the bout of what I imagined were anxiety driven butterflies that attacked my stomach. I found myself glancing at him every so often. I wanted so badly to know if he found me attractive. I did not know what I was feeling, but I was sure I wanted it to stop.

Ten shots of top shelf tequila later and he was an open book with an English accent. His was a tragic tale that started when a rich black girl fell in love with a trailer trash poor white boy, his parents. The setting was in the elegant city of London. Of course being British race was not the issue their social status was. His mother's parents were of course against the idea of their brilliant baby girl ending up with an unknown ruffian who had no noticeable background and lacked a stable career. His parents had met at a race event where his mother, Gloria, had been forced to go in order to represent the events sponsors and his father, Brian, had been the winner of the race. Brian not only won a race that day but he also captured the heart of the very gorgeous and filthy rich Gloria. Grand ma and grandpa tried to break them up unsuccessfully. They finally gave in but on the condition that Brian join the family business. Gloria's family owned a chain of car distribution company that dealt mostly in imported luxury cars. They were young and passionate about one another and at the time he thought he was trading up. The transition from a race car driver to a car sales man took its toll on Brian. After a life time of living free, the office life slowly suffocated everything that made Gloria fall for Brian. In exchange for his grandparents getting the son in law they always wanted his mother lost the love of her life.

Their once passionate love lives turned into a cold, lonely, unforgiving prison that drove Brian to drinking and Gloria to working. Young Marcus was always a disappointment; to his grandparents for not being smart enough, to his father for not being athletic enough and to his mother for simply existing.

At the age of twenty-one he enrolled in the army. It took him ten years to come back home and it was only the death of his entire family that had managed to drag him from the war front. An accident, they had said nobody had survived. That is how the thirty-one-year-old Marcus found himself the sole owner of a chain multimillion dollar company. He wanted to sell at first but decided against it deciding to hold onto the last memory of his family. He came to Africa in search of peace that he had hopped the mother land could provide, his words not mine. He was still in charge of the company but I t did not require a lot of input from him and so with nothing to occupy his time and the demons from the battle field haunting his dreams he decided to get a job and that is how he had met my father. The sole owner of a fortune company looks good on anyone's C.V and an interview later he had a job. Within the first month he had noticed the discrepancies in the books and alerted my father about, who did not seem surprised or too bothered by it.