The Man in the Raincoat

There is no rhyme or reason to any of this. No purpose to this hell I'm living. But I must leave something behind, if only a miserable account of my story. To whoever is reading this, I must warn you; it is not cheerful.

I was born on November 6^th, 1989 to a single woman whose name I may not divulge. I had a decent childhood. We were poor, but my mother made up for it with all the love she could give me. Be it birthday parties at pizza places, occasional trips to county fairs, or expensive gifts once every few years, she made sure I had everything a poor kid could ever have. I grew up loved and without regrets. When I was of age, I got a job as a waiter, started attending community college, made a few friends, and had a few girlfriends. It was the typical life of a college student. I lived a peaceful life, with just enough problems to keep me humble. That is, up until that night. The night I lost my peace of mind. The night that robbed me of everything. I think it was raining, I don’t exactly remember, but I seem to have vague memories of a strangely damp sensation, like my clothes were wet. I was coming home from work, getting back into my apartment. I struggled to get the keys out of my pocket, jammed them in the lock, turned them, but there was no clicking sound. The door was already open. “I must have forgotten to close it,” I thought, while entering my apartment. I slammed the door behind me, reached for the light switch and flicked it. Standing in my living room, in the middle of my apartment, was a man in a black raincoat. He appeared much older than I was, with a long grey beard and unkempt salt and pepper hair. We stared at each other for a moment, like we were in a trance, then a loud thud took me out of my torpor. “What are you doing here?” I exclaimed, while trying to pull my phone out of my pocket. Without saying a word, he walked toward me, reaching his hands out. I turned around and grabbed the door handle, but he was fast, and blocked both my hands, effectively preventing me from turning the handle. I had to get out of there. I elbowed him in the stomach hard enough to knock the air out of him, and tried to give him a punch, but he dodged it. He rushed toward me with his head down and knocked me over. He was now on top of me, punching me until my vision started to become blurry. I was passing out. I thought this was it. Then, in a last desperate attempt to save my life, I reached out behind my head for something, anything that could help me. My hand grabbed hold of something cold and sturdy, something metallic. One of my football trophies. They were displayed on a wooden shelf in the corner of my living room. I wrapped my hand around it and hit the man as hard as I could. He violently fell on the side and stopped moving.

When I tried to stand back up, I felt something warm and humid on my left hand. I looked at it and realized it was covered in a reddish-brown liquid. I looked over at the man, and discovered he was lying in a pool of his own blood. The man’s whole body was shaking; it was shutting down. I kneeled beside him, took his hand, and held it as tight as I could. I knew he was dying, and I just wanted to be there for him. He uttered unintelligible words, as if trying to tell me something. Then the light in his eyes was gone. His hand became stiff, lifeless. I sat there for a moment, still holding his hand, trying to understand what had just happened. A few hours ago, I was just a normal college student working his afternoon shift at a decently popular restaurant. Now, I was a killer. Granted, it was self-defense, but it didn’t feel like it. It felt dirty, primal, like I had just won a survival trophy in a sick and twisted contest. I called the police, told them everything, told them it wasn’t my fault, told them I was scared.

When the police came, they weren’t even phased by the body. They weren’t shocked at the sight of a murdered man. What had shaken me to my core was just another night for them. They took me to the police station, asked me a few questions, then released me. “We’ll reach you if anything comes up.” And there I was, a killer, made free. The following days felt like my body was operating on autopilot. I had become a shadow of myself, dead inside, surviving on uppers and an obstinate will to overcome my guilt. But whatever I tried, my thoughts always went back to the quavering body of the man in the raincoat, a pool of blood slowly forming around him. He even was in my dreams, still trying to tell me something, while drowning in blood. The blood always ended up drowning me too, submerging me in its warm darkness. A detestable part of me even thought it was soothing. My mind was trying to justify this man’s death. A sick way of getting over it quicker. “He shouldn’t have been in my apartment. He shouldn’t have attacked me. I was right to defend myself.” But I just couldn’t shake the stench of his death.

Then, one day, I saw him on the street. You must think I’m crazy, but I know what I saw. I thought he was gone, but there he was, at the other end of the street. The man I had killed all these years ago was smiling at me. I wanted to run to him, to tell him I was sorry, that I didn’t mean to kill him. Suddenly, the sound of wheels loudly screeching on the pavement made me look away. A black van had stopped right next to me. When I looked back, the man was gone. And so was I. A group of men in black suits came out of the van, lifted me up, and threw me in it. I tried to scream, but they covered my mouth. I struggled, but they held tight. They were too many. Once in the van, they injected me with a greenish liquid. Everything around me became a blur, and after a moment, darkness took over. When I woke, I was in a six-by-six cell covered in white cushions. I was lying on a white bed, handcuffed to the railings. My clothes had been changed to a white hospital gown. A few hours later, some men dressed in white hazmat suits came to take me away. They led me to another white room, a bit larger than my cell, and sat me on the single chair in the room. They shone bright lights in my face and started asking me incomprehensible questions. “How many of you are there? When did you start traveling?” I couldn't answer, even though part of me knew this was somehow connected to the man I had killed. When I didn't answer, they placed a towel over my face and poured water over it. When they were done suffocating me, they stuck cold metallic disks on my temples, forced a mouthguard in my mouth, and gave me electric shocks. All the while, a cold and apathetic voice repeated the same words, over and over again, "Show us what you can do."

This torture lasted for hours. Then, they drugged me and threw me back in my cell. The next day, they repeated the same thing. Drilled me with questions, tortured me and drugged me. They did it again and again, until the days became months, and the months became years.

This is my story. I was able to write it only after one of them reluctantly slipped me a pen and a piece of paper. These are the words I could conjure in my rare moments of awareness. I feel my mind slipping away. Madness is the only way to escape this desolate predicament. Lately, I’ve been seeing my mother. She comes to my cell and passes her delicate hands through my hair. She’s beautiful, and her warmth is ever so loving. God, I hope she’s okay.

The man had been locked in his cell for what must have been an eternity. He had forgotten even his own name. He was locked away in a center full of strange beings. He was there because he had time-transcendent abilities. He had a long grey beard and unkempt salt and pepper hair. No one even knew where he came from anymore. It probably didn’t matter anyway. His only known relative had passed away long ago. He was alone. And he would never see a familiar face ever again. However, he felt like he could prevent everything that had happened to him. It was a certainty that had started growing in his fractured mind, the only thing that kept him alive. And that morning, that certainty had reached a nearly religious conviction.

The man focused the remnants of his eroded will toward changing his fate. He focused so hard on what he wanted that the walls around him started shaking, and suddenly, they were no more. He found himself on a busy street, in full hospital gown. Whatever decency he had left suggested he hide his clothes, and he did. He found a clothes bin near him and picked a black raincoat. Suddenly, something told him to run to the next street over, which he did. When he reached that street, he saw a young man walking alone, looking down. He didn’t know why, but he felt close to that young man, like he had once been a part of his life. The young man looked up, and the man in the raincoat smiled at him. Suddenly, he heard the loud screech of wheels on the pavement. A black van had stopped right next to the young man. Out of it came men in black suits.

Upon seeing the black suits, the man in the raincoat felt a visceral fear take over him, reminiscent of something he had already felt. A phantom fear. He quickly turned back and hid around the corner. When he dared look down the street again, the young man and the black suits were gone. The man in the raincoat felt great despair overcome him. Something inside him knew he had failed to change his fate. Hopeless, he kneeled and started crying. It was over. He would never get the chance to have a life again. He would be broken forever, trying to regain irretrievable memories from a distant life.

“Hey, are you okay?” When the man lifted his head, he saw a visibly worried woman accompanied by a child. He didn’t fully understand what she meant, but her unintelligible words seemed to convey good intentions. “Whatever it is you’re going through, you can overcome it,” she added. She smiled at him, and so did the child, ever so innocently. Then, she walked away.

Somehow, the woman’s gibberish had reinvigorated the man. Even though his brain hadn’t understood the woman’s words, his being had.

He felt hopeful again. Maybe he could go further in the past. Try to change things from the start. So, one more time, he focused all he had on traveling even further back. The world around him started melting into a homogeneous blend of colors, until it collapsed, and everything became dark.

Suddenly, the man heard a strange crystalline noise behind him, something he hadn’t heard in what felt like ages.

He turned around and saw a silhouette standing in the middle of an illuminated doorway, then heard a loud slam. The silhouette reached for something on the wall and a sudden flash of light blinded the man.

When he opened his eyes, he saw the same young man he had seen down the street. They stared at each other for a moment. Then a thud resounded, coming from a package the young man had dropped on the floor.

The young man started shouting inaudible words. The man in the raincoat saw he was alarmed, and walked toward him with his hands out, trying to calm him down. Suddenly, the young man turned around and grabbed the door’s handle. The man in the raincoat blocked his hands, fearing his escape would alert the black suits. Then, his memories started coming back. He remembered being that young man, failing to escape his own apartment, then elbowing the strange man in the stomach. As this memory came back, the man in the raincoat had the air knocked out of him by an elbow. Thankfully, he remembered the punch that came after that, and dodged it. Then, almost instinctively, he rushed the young man, knocked him to the ground and started punching him. He didn’t want to kill him, he just needed him to fall unconscious. In a glimpse, the man in the raincoat saw the young man reach for something, and the painful memory of a murder resurfaced. Suddenly, with a flash of gold almost too fast for the eye to see, his head was struck by a painfully blunt object. He felt a violent pain on the left side of his head and fell over.

As his consciousness slipped away, he felt the young man hold his hand tightly. “Break the loop,” he tried to utter, but his damaged brain could only murmur indiscernible words. In his final moments, the man in the raincoat realized he would remain in an endless cycle of death and murder.