“I wonder how many first-time killers become second-time killers so quickly?” he thought to himself. Yet he quickly dismissed the thoughts.
For a few minutes, he tried to soak in the moment. He listened intently to the sounds around him: cars driving by, crickets chirping, the sound of night-time music blaring from blocks away. It was as if his little part of the world didn’t even matter—like the world had continued to spin, none the wiser. The few moments that had simply passed into oblivion had no more gravity than this one, and the man lying in front of him had no less meaning dead than he did alive. It seemed vaguely unfair.
“She told me I would feel something.” he mused, “She said I would never feel more alive… that I would never feel anything comparable. She said everything would change. But the bitch lied. That vampire bitch lied to me.”
He hated her more now than he ever had before. She was the wretched creature that had made him do this. She had meant to demean him, no doubt—to lower him down to her level, and force him to hate himself just as much as he hated her. She had failed though. He already hated himself… but he could never hate himself, or anything, nearly as much as he hated her.
As the minutes passed, however, and the blood began to pool at his feet, he began to feel differently about it all. “I shouldn’t feel nothing. I should feel… something… anything. I should feel some small sensation. It isn’t right and it isn’t fair. I just took everything from these two men. I stole every memory they had ever had and erased them from existence. I took their relationships, their holiday vacations, their broken bones, their first kisses, their grades in school, their plans… I brought it all to a screeching halt, and I feel fucking nothing.”
Suddenly, he began to weep. The tears flowed down his cheeks, and down his neck to find their way under his collar. Yet he didn’t wipe them away. At least this was something that he could feel… something that could anchor him to the moment. This was something that added even the slightest modicum of meaning to the terrible things that he had done just moments before.
“I need to leave.” he menaced to himself, “I need to go make myself right. I need to go feel something meaningful. And I know just how to do it.”
Kunststück
Lena sat with her mouth ever-so-slightly unhinged. She had heard him right… right? He had just said “Counter-intelligence”, right? It was a word that she knew nothing about, and hadn’t heard since she left the prison, but she had heard it before. That couldn’t mean they… that they were… but, well, it kind of had to, didn’t it? What else could it mean?
“Any ideas, Lena?” Mr. Collins asked.
“I… I’m a little confused,” she replied. “That’s when spies… uh, go and… spy on spies?”
“That’s…” Mr. Collins said, looking slightly taken aback.
“Well I’ll be damned,” Matt chuckled. “Finally! An answer that isn’t completely stupid!”
“There’s a first time for everything, I suppose,” Mr. Collins laughed. “So, Lena, why do you think we would be asking you that question?”
“Because…” she stalled, “Because…”
“Don’t slow your roll now, genius,” Matt jested.
“Because you work for the HVA?” Lena spoke, before instantly regretting it.
Immediately, she stood up and put both of her hands over her mouth, realizing her mistake. She had just given away who she worked for. I mean, she hadn’t said it, per se, but that was precisely what saying it meant, right? Oh, Dragon Lady was going to murder her now—Lena was a dead woman.
“Ah, I see.” Mr. Collins said, knowingly, before turning to Matt and speaking in a firm tone, “Matt, why don’t you go hand Jeff a guitar?”
“You got it, Boss,” Matt spoke as he stood up, and began walking out of the room.
“Why don’t you just smoke a cigarette and relax for a minute,” Mr. Collins said to Lena, as he leaned back and relaxed himself. Soon, Lena heard the sound of people drunkenly cheering outside the tour bus to be followed by the faint sound of a guitar towards the front entrance. After a minute or so of this, all of the drunken voices began singing along together.
“We always try to have at least two counter-measures in place,” Mr. Collins said. “The first electrifies the walls of the cab back here, making this place pretty difficult to use electronic stuff for spying. But…” he added with a laugh, “I’ve often found that the best counter-measure is a bunch of drunken groupies singing bad songs together.”
“That’s…” Lena laughed, “That’s brilliant, actually.”
“Oh, it works like a charm. And it’s entertaining, assuming you operate with the same sense of whimsy that Matt and I do… which I assume that you do.”
Just then, Matt walked back into the room. He was clapping his hands and humming tunelessly under his breath, “Cuz I love you… that’s why I punched that ‘gator in the face…”
“What in the hell are you singing?!” Lena laughed.
“Oh, I’m just making it up, same as Jeff. He’s gotten pretty good at this, just making it all up as he goes along. Most music is stupid predictable anyway. Most of the time, the groupies sing along not even knowing it’s fake.”
“I… that…” she stuttered. She didn’t know if that was funny or sad, but the implications were vast.
“I think it’s pretty telling,” Mr. Collins said as Matt sat down, “that folks can be so oblivious to something like that, not even paying attention to what’s going on right in front of them.”
“Yeah,” Matt nodded.
“You know, Lena,” Mr. Collins continued as he turned towards her, “that’s the difference between them and us… the people singing outside the bus, vs. the people in this room. Out there, they don’t have any higher aspirations aside from living in the moment and reveling in the status quo that we engineer for them. They just want to seek pleasure, avoid pain, get married eventually, and basically enjoy life. Honestly, I can’t fault them for that one bit. It’s a good way to live their life, and we’re happy to help them live it. But I’ll tell you what the big difference between you and the two of us is.”
For a second, Lena’s heart skipped a beat. Despite his friendly tone, she felt she was being chastised, dismissed, or worse. It was an assumption on her part, sure, but she still felt the pangs of embarrassment and failure all the same.
“The folks we work for…” Mr. Collins said, pointing at Matt and himself, “…want a world where everyone is free to live their own lives however they choose. Be it a simple groupie singing outside of a tour bus, or a raging lunatic onstage howling at the moon. Even the folks in the GDR should have the same freedom as everyone else. But… we’re also willing to go only so far to bring that freedom.
“You see, Lena, what I imagine the Stasi are probably like, they don’t feel very much the same as I do, and they are willing to brutalize innocent people like you for reasonable expressions of that freedom. Do you know how I know this?”