Page 49 of Rage
I have been in rooms where people have tried to kill me. I have taken three bullets across two separate incidents and walked away from both. I spent years in a pressurized white room being administered medications designed to quiet the part of my brain that makes me difficult to contain.
I’ve been called upon to help with the dirty work for all the sons of Kenyan for the women they love. Killed people. Made them disappear. Hurt them.
I found satisfaction.
Revenge.
None of those things did what her palm against my sternum did.
I stand in the outside her door for four minutes and thirty-seven seconds after she closes the door. I count them. Not because I am waiting for her to open it again, because I’m not.
Because I need the time to reassemble the parts of myself that her hand on my chest redistributed.
Thank you.
Two words. In her voice, looking directly at me, with quality of someone who has decided to admit something and is watching to see what happens when they do.
I walk back up to my room and stare at the ceiling, not wanting to forget how her hand felt.
What I know about Amy Torres could fill a ledger.
What I know about myself, in relation to Amy Torres, is less charted territory.
I was not built for this. I want to be clear about that, in the privacy of my own head, in the way I am only ever honest in the dark with no audience.
I was built for endurance. For rage that has a target. The patience of a man who has spent years with nothing to do but wait and plan and understand exactly what he wants and exactly how long he is willing to wait for it.
She was always the answer to what.
I understood this before I saw her face. Before she arrived on this campus. In Unit 9, in the dark, turning what I knew of her over in my mind, the fragments Azriel let slip, the photographs, the outline of a person assembled from the negative space of everything that must have been done to her. I understood that what I was building was not infatuation. Infatuation is about the surface. This was something older. Something that had been resolving itself in the dark for years without my permission.
What’s unresolved becomes immortal.
Dr. Wick thought it was pathology. She was right. It is pathology. It is also the most accurate thing I have ever said about myself.
Amy is not what I built in the dark. She is smaller and more tired and softer in the places that weren’t supposed to survive, and that is the part I couldn’t have anticipated. That she would be more rather than less, and that meeting her would not diminish what I’ve been carrying but compound it.
I lie on my bed and look at the ceiling, and I feel her heartbeat against my palm in reverse. Not mine against hers. Hers. The way it was running fast under my hand when sheopened the door. That quick staccato of a person who has made a decision and is frightened by it, yet is doing it anyway.
She is the bravest person I know.
And that is not a feeling I was prepared for.
At two forty-seven in the morning, something changes in the building.
I feel it before I can name it. Something that I’ve learned to read like the way others read weather, a barometric change in the quality of the silence. I’m off my bed before I’ve consciously decided to move.
I am in the stairwell when I hear her.
Not words. A sound.
The kind that comes out of people when the nightmare has them before they’re fully awake. A sharp, broken sound that has nothing to do with the present and everything to do with something the present can’t reach.
I take the stairs.
I find the skeleton key and unlock her door and push it open.
The lamp is off.
