Scott C. Martin

Dear Josephine,

This letter is uncomfortable to write. Maybe by the end I'll have talked myself out of what I intend to do, but I just don't think so. I could just pop over and see you in Nebraska, but I think this might be better. Sometimes it helps to work things out on paper, and you're the only person I really trust. You're the only person who knows who I really am.

I'm struggling to write in English. I've learned hundreds of languages, and I'm still surprised that this one went international. So inefficient.

How's your Mom, by the way? Is she still living with you, helping out with Lisa and Tim? She was always so nice to me... and so angry with me for not asking you out! What a sweet lady. And I'll bet Lisa and Tim are getting big.

I know it's been a year since the funeral and we haven't been in contact, but I want to tell you again how sorry I am about your husband. David was a good guy. Seeing a strong young man waste away like that... heartbreaking.

There are some things I need to tell you that I should have told you a long time ago. But first, I want to tell you what happened to me last week, and what brought this all about.

§

So I'm walking down the street the other day (52^nd and Vine), when I see a full can of paint fall off a tall building right toward this lady's head. If it makes contact, the woman is dead. Without even thinking, I vaporize the can with my heat vision, and I manage to get most of the falling paint as well. It turns into a light dust. As an extra touch (no charge! ha ha) I give a hint of focused breath to dissipate the dust. Nothing touches the lady— or kills the lady— and she walks on unharmed.

I jog over to the lady (we'll call her Paint Woman) and say, "are you okay, ma'am?" A little false modesty, I admit. Of course she's okay. She shoots me a dirty look. She's got earbuds in, and her iPod is turned up pretty loud.

I say, a little louder this time, "I don't know if you're aware, but you almost came into a rather bad accident." Rather bad accident? I'm not sure what's up with my lingo lately.

Anyway, she says nothing, and clearly doesn't recognize me in my civilian outfit. So I decide to give her a glimpse of my uniform under my shirt, because maybe she'll think, "hey it's him! My son has an action figure of him at home, and he saved me! What a story this will make!"

I barely unlatch the first shirt button when she starts screaming and hitting me with her bag.

I say, "no, ma'am, you don't understand! I just saved your life!" Just to be safe, I close my shirt. After last year's paparazzi incident, I can't afford to be half-undressed in public anymore. "Caped Hero in Compromising Position." Ugh.

Some guy shoves my shoulder and says, "Hey, why don't you leave the lady alone?" This guy is all muscle, no neck. We'll call him No-Neck. I could send him flying with a poke of my finger, of course, but he's pretty strong for a regular human. And at the moment, he's looking like the good guy. Not me.

Why did I have to even tell her about the paint can? There was a time when I would have kept walking.

So while No-Neck is pushing me around, I get all these fantasies, you know? I imagine what it would be like to zap a tiny hole in No-Neck's brain with my eyes. I could leave him merely paralyzed, or on the ground pissing himself, or without the ability to speak. The world's best neurologists would never catch it, much less figure out how it was done. I imagine this guy sitting on the street, shitting himself and speaking in tongues.

"There's been a misunderstanding, sir," I say in my best 'good citizen' voice, the lady still shrieking.

"Yeah?" he says. "Pervert!" He definitely has me pegged for some kind of flasher or molester.

It makes me think about the first unarmed person I killed.

§

About fifteen years ago, I caught some guy alone with a little girl in an alley. I won't go into specifics, but I secured the man, and flew the kid to a hospital. I then took the man to the police. A pretty cut-and-dried evening.

But the man was released the next week due to lack of evidence. The little girl wouldn't testify. And of course, I understand that. I mean, come on, what was she? Six or seven? Traumatized for life. It's not her fault. And even though I am who I am, an immortal person of no fixed address isn't really a star witness. When the judge calls someone to the stand, they prefer that the witness not be able to fly and live forever.

It was too much for me.

I scooped the guy up off the street, and no one even saw. Up we went. The air traffic controllers might have seen me cross the airspace, but that's probably it. They know me. They wouldn't have thought anything of it.

The guy stopped screaming and punching at about 12,000 feet. He was unconscious at 16,000. He lasted longer than I thought he would. We were pretty close to space when he died, the earth between us and the sun. It was quiet, cold, and uneventful.

I took him about halfway to the moon. The effects of decompression on a normal human aren't that interesting, and it didn't satisfy me at all. I placed him back in the atmosphere above the Indian Ocean.

I knew how long it would take him to start falling again, but I watched anyway. I watched every damn minute of those four hours. I enjoyed them. He started to disintegrate, and I followed him down. I watched his skin crisp like paper. I watched his body crease at the waist as he fell and burned. I watched his unrecognizable parts splash into the water.

Who knows how many robberies I could have stopped, how many drowning kittens I could have saved, how many murders I could have prevented during those four hours? But for some reason, I believe killing that man made it possible for me to carry on for another five years.

§

The Paint Woman is still shrieking, and her new friend No-Neck throws a punch. A real haymaker. To keep up my disguise, I have to take it, which I've come to hate (another of the many things that never used to bother me). It doesn't hurt, of course, and I'm pretty good at pretending to take a punch. This guy is clearly surprised I don't fall down, though.

So I throw a dazed look in and let my knees buckle, reclining awkwardly on the pavement.

"That'll teach you, you fucking pervert!" he says.

I must not put a hole in this man's brain. I must not put a hole in this man's brain.

"Police!" yells Paint Woman. By now there is a crowd, and a couple of cell phones either making calls or taking pictures.

The second time I killed an unarmed human, there was a crowd, too.

§

Ten years ago, one particular politician, a member of the president's cabinet, insisted that we blow up this little country with which the US was having a crisis. We'll call him Senator Nuke. For him the nuclear option was the only option. I disagreed, respectfully. That was back when they used to let me into those meetings.

Senator Nuke had gotten into my face, forehead red and bulging, and poked my chest with his finger. "You... aren't one of us!" he said. I told him that I was more like him than unlike him, that every human belonged to the brotherhood of man, and that I wanted peace to carry the day. Swear to God, a couple of people in the room started clapping.

"You'll never be one of us!" he yelled, cutting off further response. "You'll never understand the stakes of being human, being mortal! What are we, some kind of passtime to you?"

I assured him that wasn't the case, and other voices of reason brought the room back on topic. A diplomatic decision was reached, and it occurred to me that this guy was always going to be at these meetings. He was never going to get his way as long as cooler minds were present.

It also occurred to me that he might be right. Maybe I never really was going to get it. What was it to die? Even the clever attempts of my most hardened adversaries hadn't been successful in killing me. I would never die at the hands of a human. Maybe I am just passing time.

I was thinking about this as I watched him at a rally some months later, where he was working a crowd into a frenzy. "Now is the time to move against our enemies!" said Senator Nuke at the rally.

The crowd went nuts. I watched from a safe distance. No one knew I was in the arena. I'm known for hanging out in a different metropolitan area.

"Your voices join together and shake the halls of justice! They shake the activist forces! And when we deal with our enemies, all options will be on the table!" The crowd was eating it up.

I thought about him having access to more than the president's ear. I thought about his finger on the button. I thought about him in the oval office, forehead red and bulging in the middle of a crisis-filled night, meeting with his own cabinet. No cooler minds in the room.

Enraged, I burst the man's appendix with a focused, imperceivable shock wave.
He collapsed at the lectern, and died horribly and painfully. I sat on the moon for weeks, surprised to find that I had become an assassin.

(I should apologize to Iceland, by the way, about the dam break. You know the one. That happened when I was on the moon, and I totally could have fixed that.)

And then, instead of forgiving myself, I came to terms with it. I am an assassin. I've broken the code. Things can't go back to the way they used to be.

§

A crowd gathers around me and No-Neck and Paint Woman, and I can hear the voices of the cops a couple of blocks away. Officers George and Alan. They won't recognize me in my civvies, but they're reasonable guys. I'm sure they'll tell everyone to just move along.

No-Neck decides that hitting me wasn't enough, and puts a boot in my face. I have to go on my back. I'm getting annoyed. It's times like this that it would help to conjure some nose blood or something, because my nose should have shattered like a plate. People notice when you don't bruise or bleed. I remember when I walked out of a battle in the Peloponessian wars unscathed, when everyone else in my unit was killed. That was hard to explain, and led to a bunch of promotions. Anyway, that's another story.

So policemen George and Alan get there, and they do their whole "what's going on here" thing, and put their bodies between me and No-Neck and Paint Woman. Everybody's yelling. Bystanders are pointing and showing the police cell phone pictures of what just happened. Alan, at least, gets a firmer hold on No-Neck, presumably after seeing video of the boot kick to my head on someone's cell phone.

Nobody's asking me what happened. I'm still reclining on the concrete, in a defensive pose. I just need enough people to look away, and I'll be gone.

§

I'm talking in circles around what I really want to say to you. I've done a lot of bad things, but I've been able to abide by my code: kill only when necessary, and never the innocent. Fight for the side I believe in. Disappear when things get too heavy. Let the mortals sort out my origin and death stories.

There are lots of stories about how I got my abilities and, more interestingly, how I have died. I've apparently been killed by an arrow to the heel, entombed alive by my apprentice in a magic cave... all kinds of made-up stuff. People can't deal with it when you just up and leave. There always has to be a story.

I've found it helpful to have an advisor, someone with whom I can confide my secret. And that's been you, this time around. Your generation prefers to see me in a cape and tight pants for some reason. Hell, I don't care. More comfortable than a tunic, I guess, or a suit of armor. As long as I get to do some good. Only you, though, know who I am without the cape.

Doing good used to be enough. It isn't so much anymore. I think I'm starting to lose my grasp of what "good" really is.

I try not to get too emotionally involved with a mortal advisor, and never romantically. So, regardless of what your mother may think, I avoided dating you not because I wasn't interested in you. I've seen countless lovers, wives, and mistresses to their deathbeds, and many more I've had to leave behind in order to protect.

You were different. If you were my lover, I knew I could never leave you, regardless of how bad my situation became. You would almost certainly be in constant danger by your association with me. So, I made you my advisor. Close enough to confide in, distant enough to be safe. I thought that would help. It really hasn't.

§

After a while, police officer George kneels down to talk to me, and asks me if I'm okay. I tell him I'm fine, and that this is all a misunderstanding.

"I believe that, pal," he says. "Look, you wanna press charges on this guy?" George gestures over his shoulder at No-Neck, who is against a wall talking with officer Alan. "Because I think both the lady and the man who kicked you are ready to walk away from this if you are. You don't look too much worse for wear."

You have no idea.

"Yeah, I'd just like to move on, if that's okay," I say.

Officer George smiles, and says "sure, kid." I can only imagine his relief at having to file less paperwork.

I look up, and Paint Woman is glaring at me. So is No-Neck. They don't even know me, and I can feel the hatred radiating out of their eyes. And it gets me to thinking.

It always ends badly with you people.

If I help you, you're happy for a moment, and grateful. But then you want me to go away.

If I don't help you, you're cursing the heavens and wondering why I failed.

Innocence? A temporary state. The pure of heart? Not for long, usually.

And even the rare grateful, gracious person only lives for a blink of an eye, then they're gone and I'm left with the assholes again.

I'm left with Paint Woman, whose life I spared by saving her from an accident. I'm left with No-Neck, whose life I spared by keeping my temper. And both of them are wishing me dead.

But I've changed, too. I'm not okay getting by without an acknowledgement. I need recognition. I need validation. For the first time, I need to be needed, and it's not working well for anybody.

My code is broken. This all has to stop.

I think of all the ways I could bring the world to an end. Some of them are pretty painless, actually. I could cleave the planet in two with a shock wave. The concussion would kill nearly everyone instantly. I could hurl the moon into the sea. It would all be over in a few minutes.

Then I think of you, and the debt I owe you.

§

I killed your husband. I consider him the third unarmed person I killed.
I didn't do it directly. I didn't create the liver cancer, or cause it to grow faster. But I could have stopped it.

I saw it growing as I peered at him, seething with jealousy and hating myself for it, at your wedding. I saw under his skin. I could have mentioned it then. It was quite treatable. Heck, I might have even been able to do it myself.

But I didn't.

He got sick after the birth of your second child, and like a jealous child myself, I didn't say anything. By then it was too late to do anything about it. Even for me.

I am so sorry.

§

This world, as I've gotten to know it over the last few thousand years, hasn't really changed. I probably won't destroy it. I may just let a stray asteroid take care of it. (There's one coming as it is. If I do nothing at all, your kind only has 374 years left anyway.)

I haven't talked myself out of it. Not yet. But I will wait. And I will disappear.

It won't take long for people to notice I've gone. Some terrible thing will happen, and they'll shake their fists, and they'll forsake my name. For their purposes, I will be gone. But not for yours.

I hope you don't think it too creepy, but I'll be around, and you will never see me. No harm will come to you or your family. Don't ask for me to appear, because I won't.

But I will be around, repaying my debt as best I can. Please have a happy life. Give my love to Lisa and Tim. Tell them not to worry about anything.

Your friend,

Gerald

P.S. Timmy will probably be experiencing a tooth abscess in about a week. From what I understand, they're pretty painful, so a preemptive dentist visit might be a good idea.

(Need a copy for your e-book reader or phone? Grab a copy from Scribd.)

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