Chronicles of Jonathan Tibbs 1: The Never Hero (31 page)

The woman is deeply disturbed by this and asks, “Even now?”

The solider replies, “Always.”

It was the one moment in the film that gave Jonathan pause, was it simply fear and discipline driving him now?

After the final scene, he looked over to Hayden, who was anxiously waiting to explain why he found the film so noteworthy.

“This one is all you, fat man,” Collin said to Hayden. “I’ve never seen anything more than a crappy B movie here.” He’d been watching halfheartedly but was mostly focused on a comic book panel he was completing.

“You have to look at what the story really is,” Hayden said to Jonathan.

“So, what is it then?” Jonathan asked.

“All things have a spectrum, right?” Hayden asked rhetorically. “There are an infinite number of shades of gray between white and black. I think, the writer of this movie was trying to find the most extreme version, the blackest of black, the dark side if you will, of the warrior story, or at least the cultural myth of what a ‘male’ is,” Hayden explained, smiling, as though this answer cleared everything up.

Collin shook his head. “Crappy B movie.”

Jonathan ignored Collin for the moment. “Okay, Hayden, I’m interested. If this is the
dark
side
of the male cultural myth, then that begs the question—”

“—What’s the myth? Glad you asked,” Hayden replied ecstatically.

Jonathan knew then that he’d walked into another of Hayden’s pre-engineered conversations.

“Think about it a little and it’s not that hard; men are told, directly or indirectly, their whole lives that they’re supposed to be expendable killing machines. Stories tell us that an ideal male will fearlessly confront the enemy, using his body as a human shield against all that would hurt our community’s women, children, and resources. That we’re supposed to be able to turn off all emotions; be cold calculating reason, be fearless, and when necessary, be primal rage. That men are warriors at all times and can work like machines until we collapse.”

“I think you’re being a little extreme,” Collin interjected. “What drugs were you on when you came up with this theory?”

“That is the point, jackass,” Hayden said responding to the interruption. “This is the extreme. This is the peak of the cultural mythology about the path of the warrior. In the end, the hero is the man who confronts his fear with discipline, who defends the community because it is his vocation to do so, who is perpetually ready for war, and despite all this hardening of his humanity, is somehow supposed to remain, well, human.”

“I thought Batman was supposed to be the dark side of the hero story,” Collin said, starting an argument.

Hayden shook his head.

“Young Collin, the hero story has many incarnations,” Hayden replied.

“You know I’m older than you, right?” Collin reminded him.

Ignoring him, Hayden continued, “Batman is a vigilante. His story has a lot of the same elements, in that he is perpetually training and he defends his community. The reason his story is not as dark on the spectrum is because, in the end, Bruce Wayne chooses to be what he is. The hero in this story was never given a choice about what he was going to be, not till the end, when he’s abandoned by those who created him and chooses to fight for his own reasons.”

To Jonathan’s surprise, Collin looked slightly convinced by this argument.

“What is this incarnation then?” Jonathan asked. “The solider in the movie, what do you call his story?”

Hayden’s head bobbed back and forth a few times before he admitted, “I never named it. I’ve always just thought of it as the dark side of the mythology.”

“Weak,” Collin interjected.

“Point of fact,” Hayden raised a finger and pointed it at Collin, “if I hadn’t been so inebriated when we discussed it, I might have pointed out that this is a flaw in your argument that Superman and Jesus share the same story.”

Hayden raised his eyebrow, daring Collin to challenge him.

“Oh do go on, Professor,” Collin said.

“Superman is a champion, Jesus is a savior,” Hayden said. “A messiah, if you will.”

This was followed by Hayden taking an arrogant bow. Collin rolled his eyes, waiting for the theatrics to run their course.

Fear and Discipline,
Jonathan thought.

It was later in the evening, and he sat in the garage reflecting on what Hayden had said. The man’s tendency to preach, to get up on soap boxes with his extreme theories, was always reason to dismiss him. Yet, Hayden, even if he may never know his own courage, had been the brave one, the one who had volunteered to stand by him when the Ferox was killing in the streets.

Jonathan was on the end of his bench doing bicep curls until each arm grew unresponsive. Lincoln called this, “working to failure.” He wasn’t keeping count; he just waited until the limbs felt numb from use and he couldn’t lift the weight again. His biceps shivered from overexertion; his skin felt tight over the muscles bulging with blood in his arms.

He had considered his actions extreme, but saw now that there was an entirely different level. He could follow this dark side, go to the absolute black of the spectrum. He couldn’t change his upbringing, of course, but he could become the machine he had imagined he would have to be to survive. He could do whatever it took.

The bar fell to the floor with a slap against the rubber mat. He couldn’t lift it again.

Dammit Heyer.

He needed to see where this fit in the bigger picture. He needed to know what he was to the alien’s purpose. He needed to believe that the truth would make these sacrifices stop feeling like sacrifices.

Time was on his mind a lot lately. What the alien had said, about the time lines, it didn’t make sense. Paradox. It was a word he’d heard Hayden and Collin use so many times, they’d get angry and scream it at the television whenever they watched science fiction shows involving time travel. He understood the word now; he understood the confusion, how irritating it was to contemplate. His problem was simple. How can you erase everything that happened, start time over, and still have a dead Ferox somewhere out there? It didn’t make sense.

Sometimes you’re too damn short,
he thought, reflecting on how the alien had kept him purposely in dark.

Protecting him
, Heyer had said, insulating him from some forbidden knowledge. Like a parent changing the TV station when an R rated movie came on. At times, more than the Ferox, Jonathan was afraid of what he was being sheltered from. After all, withholding reality from a person always boiled down to the same thing. Manipulation.

His phone vibrated in his pocket, pulling him out of his thoughts. He reached down and saw that one of his co-workers at the hardware store had sent him a text message.

“Your order showed up today.”

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

SATURDAY | JULY 23, 2005 | 2:00 AM

GRANT
couldn’t sleep. He sat propped up against his headboard in the near darkness of his room. Paige was asleep beside him, naked except for the white sheet draped across her hips. His eyes were tracing her curves. She’d wanted to stay at his place more often the last few weeks. Probably so she didn’t have to wake up to her roommate yelling.

Olivia
.

He couldn’t look at Paige’s naked skin without his mind wandering to his handler. At first, he’d just found her off putting. That woman, with her professionalism, her excessive attention to detail, she didn’t let her emotions reach her face because she didn’t want him seeing through her. He knew what she wasn’t showing though; the power she thought she held over him.

She was another wall between him and the truth. The meticulous way she arranged her files on her desk before she’d uttered a word to him, that calm and flawless way she carried herself, made their mandatory debriefings a maddening struggle with his patience.

He’d reported to her every detail of his interactions with Paige on a weekly basis. Every time, she acted like she was being forced to interrogate a special education child. The more she acted like the boss of him, the more he found himself thinking of her when he was with Paige.

Princess thinks she’s got me all figured out.

When he realized how addicting it was, he found himself with renewed interest in taking his government-assigned girlfriend to bed, eager to put Olivia’s face behind Paige’s expressions, finally rattling her composure with Paige’s bare body in his bed. The uglier the betrayal, the deeper the level of duplicity, the more he wanted to repeat it. Just deceiving Paige had had its own small charm at first, but picturing the woman he loathed while Paige was at her most vulnerable, that scratched an itch he hadn’t realized he had.

“Observe and report all of your interactions with the girl,” Olivia had said, “and, of course, any interaction you may observe between her and her personal associates as well.”

Princess Olivia paid well too, so nice to get paid for what Grant now knew he’d happily continue doing for free. He went out of his way to give more detail than the woman had asked for; leaving out, of course, that he liked to imagine it was her he was having his way with night after night.

Olivia never flinched, never batted an eye. She just took notes, not reacting one way or the other. He knew she could feel his gaze, his disrespect for her position over him, but he wanted to see it on her face. He’d wanted to turn that table since the first day she started playing this game with him.

The woman needed to realize his potential; he could be so much more than a paid informant. He wanted in on the real investigation. Homeland’s Security didn’t give a damn about Paige. Even if such a highly unlikely coincidence were possible, there was nothing out of the ordinary about the girl. She was just a college student, a well-intentioned idiot who wanted to save the world from poverty and global warming; a sexy idiot, of course, or else it would’ve been much more difficult restraining his opinion about her ill-placed passions.

Yeah, she had some classic daddy issues, if Grant had to guess, liked her men muscular and controlling. It was his favorite thing about the girl, but not exactly threatening to national security.

Three weeks into this now, and
Princess
was still telling him the investigation centered on Paige. It had long since become insulting. It made him bitter with resentment, that he couldn’t tell her to her face that she wasn’t fooling him, that she wasn’t pulling his strings with her boundless well of taxpayer’s money. Maybe she knew full well that he wasn’t buying it, but that just meant she found him more irrelevant than he assumed.

Paige, unknowing as she may be to the games being played around her, wasn’t exactly innocent. She too just saw him as a means to an end, a pretty package with an empty jar head. Her attitude of superiority was a different brand, but it didn’t change what it was at its core. She was in college and he was just a discharged solider with no job plans. No clue, of course, he didn’t need a job.

One day
, he thought pleasantly,
you’re gonna find out you were just a job, little college girl, and you’ll cry and you’ll cry because daddy got the best of you again.

He’d yet to meet a woman he trusted, not as far back as he could remember. The opposite sex had something he needed, so interacting with them became a necessity, but if it hadn’t been for all the damn sexual tension that came with being human, he wouldn’t have bothered. It was perpetually irritating the amount of time he had to spend just satisfying his body’s needs.

When he was eleven, he was living with his aunt and uncle. He’d never met his father, and his mother, hardly an adult when she had him, had died in childbirth. It put a great deal of strain on his aunt and uncle to take him in, a fact his aunt constantly reminded him of growing up. She’d been a monster of a woman, so unwilling to let a man forget the sacrifices she made for him.

She dressed just like Olivia, so perfectly put together, until she got home and the disguise came off. She was always yelling at his uncle, the closest thing Grant ever had to a father. The man had been out of work at the time, laid off. Apparently, he’d been laid off for too long. He’d come home once in a while with a little money he made doing odd jobs in the neighborhood. It never pleased the woman though; she’d look down on his contributions, like he was some retard holding money out to her.