Resolved

“Man, what the fuck am I doing here?” Doug said. His zip-tied wrists and ankles hurt and he had lost feeling in his hands. With each unanswered question he felt more panic course through his blood. He could feel the guy’s presence in the shadows ahead. 

When he first came to, he had been confused. The last thing he could recall was leaving the bar. He had walked out toward his GMC Denali in the back lot. He remembered he had found the last parking spot because he was early, before the New Year’s Eve crowd. He had wedged the big vehicle in there and nearly scratched the paint, it was so tight against the chain link fence.

He had felt the three whiskey sours and the IPA as he left, but since he was only a couple of miles away he’d be fine. Cops were out but no way he was Ubering back in the morning. He drove in. He’d drive out.

But then, bam. He guessed this coward had sucker-punched him. Maybe even drugged him too, it was all so fuzzy. And now he was here in this…what the fuck was this? A basement or some shit? It was all concrete and gloomy as hell. His fear receded for a few seconds as he tried to take note of the facts.

He saw tools and a couple of brooms to his left, laid down in a pile. He thought he remembered stairs, wooden ones, but couldn’t see them even when he craned his neck. There was a window ahead and up to the right. Up to the right. Okay, yes, it was a basement. And it was cold as fuck in here. He had worn layers to the bar, but now he realized he was shirtless. His extra thirty pounds fell over his belt.

“Bro, I don’t know what the fuck you want but I’ll give it to you. Whatever it is. I have money. I got a truck, an expensive one. Is that what you want? Money? Just give me a number.”

Doug’s fog was lifting. He winced as he felt the extent of the injury to the back of his head. He thought he felt dried blood that had trickled down as well, which meant he had been sitting there passed out for some time. He was on a steel chair with a grey vinyl pad on top. The material was ripped, showing the faded yellow stuffing that had lost its spring decades ago.

“I don’t want money.”

“Oh so you do speak, motherfucker. You sayeth words. Man, I don’t get this. I don’t get this shit at all. And I’m fucking freezing. Give me my goddamn jacket. I’ll chat, or whatever this little meeting of the minds is, but how does it help if I’m cold?”

“It helps me.”

“It helps you.” Doug made a show of looking around the empty room. “It helps him, everyone. Great to know, you fuck!” Doug said, all spittle and hot breath. Then he burst forward with all he had, but only managed to move the steel chair one screeching inch as the four legs scraped along the old concrete floor. Doug breathed from the exertion and the fear, and looked up at the ceiling.

“Man, I got news for you. Someone’s gonna come lookin’ for me. Maybe you got no people, but I do. And they will come. So whatever game you’re playing needs to end or this is gonna get bad for you. Whoever the fuck you are.” Doug looked toward the dim space in front of him and leaned forward as a new thought dawned on him. “In fact, just who are you, man? Why don’t you come a little closer so I can see you? Or maybe you’re scared I’ll still fuck you up from this old ass chair.”

“You have no people. You have only your sad life and your empty apartment daddy paid for.”

“Fuck you, man. You don’t know shit.” Doug shook his head. “Like I said, asshole, why don’t you come front and center so we can get to know each other properly.”

“I don’t need an introduction, Doug.”

The man stepped forward into a dusty shaft of light coming in from the street lamp outside. He was lean and athletic with the slight hunch of a long-distance runner. His beard was long and thick, with a touch of gray on the bottom edges of the otherwise black hair. And his eye, the right one, didn’t look at you like its partner. The glass eye sat in the socket of a ruined, gravelly upper face. Pock marked, misshapen, irregular. His long hair hid a portion of it, but a man—or the eight-year-old boy he had been—could not fully hide the damage he had sustained in the accident. The surgeries had helped, so many of them, but he could not tuck it away somewhere. Not this. Not like the emotional stuff.

Doug took it in. His eyes comprehended the situation as he saw the face emerge. The man had changed with the years, but decades and hair and life experience could not cloak that face.

“Fuckin’…Jacob?” Squinty eyes.

“Fuckin’ Jacob, indeed,” said Jacob.

“Dude, what the hell is going on?”

“What do you mean?”

“What do I mean? What the fuck are we doing here? And get me my coat, man. This is bullshit.”

“Is it?”

“Goddamn right it is.”

“Call it what you want. In any case, what’s your play?”

Jacob took a moment to look up at the wall behind Doug, then back again.

“Alright, look man. Let’s just talk this through. We haven’t seen each other in, what, twenty years? Somethin’ like that? I go to a bar on New Year’s Eve, minding my own business, and out you come and cold-cock me? Now I’m tied up like an animal or somethin,’ half naked in the freezin’ ass cold, and you’re just sittin’ there, silent and shit, lookin’ at me in the dark. What the fuck? We go back, man.”

“Yes, we do, don’t we. We go back. What was that like? ‘Back,’ I mean.”

“For who?”

Jacob nodded. “Now we’re getting somewhere.”

“That’s what this is? You didn’t like your place so you’re, what, getting some kind of revenge? Life has a pecking order. We talked about this back then. You are—”

Jacob was at his side before Doug even registered movement. Jacob sliced Doug’s left ear clean off to the base, then walked back to his previous spot in front of his former classmate.

“Ahhhh, FUCK man, you fuckin’ piece a’ shit! Oh my GOD, what did you do? What did you do to me?!” Doug struggled with the explosion of pain, trying in vain to rip his hands free and hold the bloody hole. 

Jacob looked on from six feet away, watching Doug fight against the unbreakable ties. He cleaned his knife on Doug’s wool winter overcoat.

“Motherfucker! Goddamn, this hurts! You cut my ear! What the fuck?!”

Jacob picked up something behind him and stepped to Doug. He held forward an antique, framed mirror the size of a small portrait. “No, no, no, man. You cut it off?! What is wrong with you, man? I can’t even…I can’t…fuck this, man.”

Doug began to cry, sobbed in his seat in the cold room as a light snow floated down outside the small window.

“You mean, what is wrong with you, ‘Mask?’ That’s what you used to call me, right? Mask. And yes, I always understood the reference, in case you weren’t sure. I liked Eric Stoltz, wondered where the hell he went after Pulp Fiction. You, Ed, and of course Flanny. How much fun you all had making the resident mutant an even bigger outcast than he already was. What memories…and then there was Halloween.”

Doug quieted. Jacob paused before continuing.

“I never talked much about school with my dad but he always knew kids made fun of me. I mean, of course he knew that.” Jacob pointed up to his face. “But you, man. You took things to a whole new level. And you dressing up as me for Halloween? Damn. Just epic, bro. Your costume sucked, by the way. If you’re going to tear someone down, get it fuckin’ right."

"That little stunt changed how my dad looked at me. That day forward, I didn’t see the same thing in his eyes. His love was there—a word I doubt you know anything about—but I also saw pity. I was something to be pitied now, and therefore I felt pitiful.” Jacob looked up again at Doug. “Do you know what it feels like to have your dad pity you?” Then Jacob laughed. “Actually, I’ll bet you do.”

Doug spoke through shivering whimpers. “Jacob, I was just a kid, man. I didn’t mean anything by it, I swear, I swear to God, man.”

“Just a kid. I see. I recall you and your cronies were still comin’ at me senior year. At my locker. In gym. At practice. Coach didn’t like it much but that didn’t stop you, did it? Pretty sure we all turned eighteen that year. I went and fought for my country, saw lots of my friends die in the dirt. What did you do again with your adulthood? Right. Video games and bars.”

Doug’s shaking increased, his torso and limbs. Jacob stared at him, arms crossed in his dark hoodie and black jeans, leaning back on a depression-era workbench.

“You said Ed and Flanny,” said Doug. “Before.”

“Yes,” said Jacob.

“They’re both dead,” said Doug.

Jacob looked past Doug a second time, above his head to the back wall again, and took out his Glock 19.

“Whoah, whoah, whoah, man, let’s talk about this. Like I told you, I have money, whatever you want. Whatever…you—” Doug trailed off, expression frozen, blinking harder and faster. The temperature did not change but he broke out in goosebumps and his heart fell into a rapid rhythm.

“Wait, wait, stop,” Doug said. Jacob sat, appraising, gun in hand. Then Doug said, “Flanny…he drove off a mountain. It was on the news. And Ed. Dude had mental issues, just took himself out one day with his granddad’s shotgun. That was…was that you?”

Jacob looked on, quiet, no expression. Doug’s head dropped an inch, his shoulders slouched. He sighed out a lifetime of false bravado, then shifted his eyes back to Jacob. Jacob looked down at his Glock and ran his left thumb on the slide, slow, intentional. Then he spoke.

“A few months into my first deployment, we were near Gardez, in this little village,” Jacob said, fixated on his gun. “Our mission was to bring in some tribal elder for questioning. He supposedly had intel about an attack on our base a few weeks earlier. Didn’t seem worth it to me, but so many of ‘em weren’t. It became clear they had maybe twice the guys we thought they had. We made progress but it was tough. We worked our way to the village slowly, over some hard terrain and consistent fire. Once we hit town, they seemed to multiply, maybe forty guys, dug in pretty good.

“Our best info had the guy in this house in the northwest corner of the village. Cole and I—Cole Hardy, guy from Florida. My friend, and another one who didn’t make it home.” Jacob glared at Doug as he mentioned Cole. “Anyway, Cole and I, we were clearing houses as we got closer to the target. Another team was doing the same on the other side. Couple a’ guys on a rooftop started pounding us. I tried to take cover near this door and Cole got trapped on the other side, but there was no real protection so I slipped inside. I was gonna regroup, look for an egress to get back on mission. The second I got in, someone jumped me from behind, tryin’ to choke me out. He took me down to the floor. The guy was big, real strong.

“I took my knife out and stabbed him in the thigh. Then I flipped on him. I fuckin’ destroyed him. Stabbed him in the chest probably twenty times. Maybe thirty. Shit, coulda been more, I don’t know. I snapped, I guess. Unloaded everything I had on this kid. And that’s what he was. A kid.

“When I was too tired to kill him again, I rested a minute, stared at him. Then, I don’t know why, but I took off his face covering. I needed to see this guy.

“And goddamn man, this guy—this kid—was maybe sixteen, seventeen. Right side of his face was a mess. No eye, just the socket, beat up to all fuck, scars like a fuckin’ highway map. Guessing he took a land mine at some point. This kid was me, the Afghani me.

“I mean, what are the odds? That I would kill basically me. This kid. This fuckin’ kid—I wanted to talk to him so bad. I wanted to hear what his road was like, what he went through. I wanted it some way I can’t describe. I felt…I felt regret. This lonely, fuckin’ regret, so powerful. I’d never be able to talk to this dude, ever. It left me empty.”

Jacob paused and Doug let the silence alone. Jacob sniffed and rubbed his nose.

“I left. We captured the motherfucker we came to get. I never mentioned this kid in the after-action. I just said I stumbled out the back and encountered rooftop resistance. Just left it at that. But he stayed with me. Like you, but different.”

Jacob stood.

“You started hollowing me out. You and your fuckin’ friends. That kid took me to a place I never thought was there, empty like death itself, for years now. But I want to change, Doug. Every year I say I will. Every year I say I'll get whole and slay my dragons. Then I see that kid's face and I'm frozen. I become the old me, the scrawny teenager with the fucked-up face, the butt of everyone's joke. The year goes by and there I am, still empty as shit. Still searching.

"But I’m starting to see that kid differently now, Doug. Not as the thing that erased me, but more like the thing that is allowing me to find myself again, the me I was before you, before all of it. I need that, Doug. I need to be whole again.”

Jacob remained standing, holding the gun.

“So, what then? You kill me and you feel whole again?” Doug said. “Man, I don’t know much. I admit that. I’m a fuck-up, as you know. Fine. But killing me won’t change shit for you. I made fun of you twenty years ago and you think killing me will help you? Did Flanny and Ed help you? Did that make you ‘whole?’ I doubt it.”

“Shut up. You don’t have a right to judge me. No right!” Jacob said, pointing the gun at Doug.

“Okay man, settle down. I’m not judging you. I’m tryin’ to help you. Yes, I’m the one tied up and I’m tryin’ to help you. This ain’t gonna get you what you want, Jacob. Look at me.”

Jacob looked Doug in the eyes.

“I’ve shredded people my whole life. Didn’t give a shit about anyone, really, ‘cept me. I don’t even know why. Maybe my dad and his shit had somethin’ to do with it. Doesn’t matter. The point is killing me won’t get you peace. It won’t make you whole. Trust me, Jacob.”

Jacob placed the gun against Doug’s head.

Doug’s face became taut and he closed his eyes, then opened, then closed them, wincing again and again, waiting for his fate. “No, man, no! Don’t do it, Jacob, I’m beggin’ you!”

Jacob pressed the barrel middle of Doug’s forehead, relaxed it, pushed harder, relaxed it again, deciding. Jacob’s tears came soft at first. He tried to stop them but couldn’t. He choked them back with nasally fits and spurts and saltwater coursing down his cheeks. After a time, he pulled the gun back and brought it up to his own temple. Doug felt the gun leave and a moment later opened his eyes and said nothing. Just watched Jacob.

Jacob tapped his own head with the Glock, thinking, deciding. They were together like this for a time, Jacob facing Doug, gun at Jacob’s head. Jacob suffered in mumbled, suppressed cries while he thought over his life.

Then Jacob made a choice and the flood was over. Jacob gathered himself, stepped back, pointed the gun at Doug and said, “Fuck you for what you did to me.” He wiped the last tears away with his sleeve.

Jacob lowered the gun and walked behind Doug. He cut the zip ties and came to face his former tormentor. He looked at him one last time and nodded his head to himself in affirmation. He picked up his black duffel bag from the shadows and walked up the wooden stairs as the clock behind Doug struck midnight of the new year.