Man, Unmasked (Prologue)

I killed today, though it has not been the first time I have done so. I was high on the plateau, near the tree line of stunted pines and lichens, under a thousand stars burning like diamond bonfires. I brought down an elk, separated from the herd, limping among the boulders, desperately searching for a mouthful of sustenance.

I shoot well for a woman with less than 3 years practice. I didn’t touch a gun until I was nearly forty. I was taught by the best of the best. I even brought my favorite guns with me when I came to this end of the world. I carry the hunting rifle, a sleek Finnish made Sako TRG, & an Italian Beretta every time I leave the cabin. With grim humor, I note I carry more designer names now then when I was a working class corporate animal back home. I don’t take the Weatherby except to hunt. The ammunition is hard to get & I figure if I asked for it in off season I’d be noticed. I don’t want to be noticed.

The .375 Weatherby kicks me in the shoulder, leaving bruises every time I fire it. it's a powerful rifle, made for bringing down big game, like grizzly bears. Oddly, its quite beautiful piece of workmanship, warm toned walnut wood with Macassar ebony & ivory inlays. As big as I am, I still am clumsy handling this piece. The first time I fired it, I fell down. The second time, I ruined the kill because I shattered the bone. The creature looked at me while it collapsed in the blood spattered tundra, & gave a mournful cry that abruptly broke my heart & I wept at its misery.

For the longest time I could not bear to kill; the eyes of the animals I hunted all looked at me with another’s eyes, except they are brown, gold, ebony, not….blue.

However, I was starving for meat, and I dared not go on the ocean to fish for fear of being seen. It is late fall, nearing winter, and there are few tourists on this Alaskan island in fall. Summer is another matter; people assume you’re with someone else. A woman alone would arouse interest, perhaps suspicion. All I want to do is live. For if I am found, they will want to kill me.

I am a murderer. I killed another human, and I am damned. Damned by my God, whom I hope will forgive me when I meet him. Damned by the society which I fled so many months ago. I wish my story could be known, but who would believe it? There is blood on my hands from taking the life of a man. Does it matter he was evil incarnate? A wolf among the sheep….a liar…a fraud…a cheat? No. It does not matter to them, the sheep in uniforms & the working class people sitting in a jury. They all saw what they wanted to see in him. A decent man, a war hero, the best of the best, a good father to his children. Every time I glance in the mirror now, and see my eyes, smoke blue, full of shadows that were not there two years ago. I’m not the same person I used to be. Look at me, field dressing an elk, up to the elbows in blood, gore & guts when in older days, I’d use my mobile to call in an order from some trendy bistro menu.

I turn my thoughts from the today’s kill to the past.

How did I meet him? A mere six months before the attack of the world trade towers is the time I remember, but the actual day I do not. All I remember was thinking "Oh God, why don't you make men like that anymore?" My public face kept a neutral expression when introduced, but inside I wished I were a box on wheels, or that I was his.

For two solid months I denied my attraction to him, buried it, & buried it deep. I kept the conversation neutral, but things that intrigued & tantalized me kept being thrown my way. His conversation grew steadily more intense, interesting, and intelligent every day. The flirtation & seductive comments came smoothly; he was subtle as the serpent we all harbor in our hearts.

I remember the day before Mardi Gras, he delighted in infuriating me, until I made some smart comment about showing up in a thong & beads the next day. That’s when he moved in on me & made it clear I was what he wanted. Then it hit me: this man wants me. Everything I buried came crashing through my weakened mental defensive walls I'd so carefully built. I confessed my shameful secret, that I, the plain jane of the team, infallibly smart, cool, & logical, had an undeniable attraction to him.

At that point, his seduction was complete. He had me begging for him by the power of his mind alone. I have had many men seduce my body, but never my mind. What a novelty it must have been for him.

That evening, his seduction of my body began. I can close my eyes & still remember his first touch, his first kiss. I told myself if the kiss was bad, I'd stop right there. But this was a kiss to remember, even unto old age. Did he? I doubt it. I found out there were so many before me. He made a profession out of it.

He got away with it, so many times…the missing girls from the north Kali counties; the unidentified torso at the rest stop in Windyville; the pregnant gal in south county who disappeared a few weeks before she was due; the dozens of missing women not reported because no one missed them, or cared to miss them.

I wonder if it started when he was young, but I couldn’t get in touch with anyone from his hometown. His father was dead. His mother had moved on. His ex-girlfriend of 9 years refused to listen, & screamed at me twice for ten minutes solid - hell, she even called ME a psycho. My God, so many women….gone. Dead, and no one to notice or remember them, because they were invisible to everyone. And I was going to be one of them.

All had one thing in common: They are women who don't feel good about themselves. They are not too bright compared to him. They are big, swimming in fat deposits from super-sized McDonald's & posting ads on adult friend finder sites as BBW's looking for love, affection, attention…a man, any man...they all have big eyes, like cartoon bunnies & kittens & infants on those horrible cutesy cards at Hallmark. Eyes with naked pleading, wretched eyes full of pain at the reality of not being a supermodel or Girl Group star, or even just plain popular; just a lonely girl out there who'll take anything offered from a man, taking it because no one else offered. Like I said, invisible.

I can't believe I was one of them, but then... I was. I was vulnerable; I was trying too hard to find what was missing in my life. I had thought I was too tall to be pretty, too intelligent for the average Joes in the Midwest town where I lived, too something for most men, period. Or not enough, somehow; how I wanted to be visible…seen…just once. I thought he was just a man; a soul mate, reaching out to me. That’s what tripped me up. My own emotional need to be visible, not to be a faceless moron in the sweltering mass of humanity.

I thought he was looking for someone just like him; a mate, someone to love. The reality is he sees only one thing: another way to make himself feel good. I was a source of supply, like a drug. A commodity to be used. A thing. I was never really a person to him. And once discarded, I was humiliated, sabotaged from a career & personal friendships. He later attempted to paint me as a psychotic, a mental case…and all done to hide the truth he wasn’t all he told everyone he was. He justified it to allay his fear that if the true face of his incredible manipulative behavior was even the least bit exposed, he would suffer. I never figured out what was the worst for him: Public humiliation or being totally ignored.

At times, when I look back, I realized it was all just to feed the illusion to everyone that he was the mask he held in front of his face. And even more twisted, despising us all for adoring the mask instead of the man behind it. An extra fillip to a much played scenario, I’m sure.

I don't know how I found my way free of this nightmare of a relationship. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a personality disorder. All I had was a set of facts that didn’t add up; a set of behaviors that clashed with my gut instincts; and maybe a small bit of faith from someone I am getting know again that I was not going mad; that I just might not be an abnormal person reacting to a normal situation, but maybe, just maybe, a normal person reacting to an abnormal situation.

I cannot begin to tell you the lies I was told, the subtle projections of his needs, the extraordinary efforts to make me totally dependent, to serve his will. He could play me like one of those old-fashioned puppets on strings with a few choice words. "I live life on the terms that I will" was a standard phrase used to control my responses. Like when I sensed he was lying to me; or questioned him on did he feel love, the next lunch, the next time we could go shooting, was he seeing me Sunday, why couldn’t he stay the night with me?

These days I reply in my heart: No, not your will. Not my will, either. It’s all God's will. These days it doesn’t bring me a lot of peace in my heart. But the truth of it is there, inflexible, solid, a rock to cling to because its true. Sometimes I have bad dreams about that year. Had I stayed, I would have ended up dead from the war between my emotions and the mental ‘training' he was giving me...

I don’t know if he ever tried this with anyone else; actually, I think he was breaking new ground with me. The others were just practice compared to this ultimate mindf*ck. The culmination of years of learning to manipulate the human psyche, to extinguish life in ways interesting & gratifying to him.

To kill by persuasion. What an ultimate conquest for him. To have so much power over someone that they would die at a word from you. It was more powerful than anything we lesser beings could imagine; it was the most mind-blowing, incredible, orgasmic act of intimacy.

That’s why I shot him. I shot to kill. I didn’t know this at the time; I had reverted to instinct & shot for the center mass. Something in me had snapped when I saw his lips move; at first when I tried to remember this, I couldn’t remember what he was saying. Then later, I did. I threw up afterwards.

What was he saying? He was softly saying "Do it". "Do it" as I was holding a gun to my head, weeping. "Do it" while I was pleading for him to tell me why, just why, was I so unlovable? "Do it" as I screamed how much I hated this empty life, this emptiness inside of me, & how I wanted to die. "Do it" resounding in my head over & over as I looked in his eyes & realized he was excited at watching me die in front of him.

Then the sharp crack of my cherished Beretta, filling my ears with the high-powered tinny ring, obscuring any other sound, & the acrid smell of gunpowder filing my nostrils. He collapsed against me; I crashed to the ground with him in my arms, a grotesque pieta, a woman holding a man's body in the moonlight.

I remember sitting there for long time, with his life ebbing, blood drenching my clothes, my hands, the thirsty soil. My lips were moving, too. I was saying it in my mind at first. Then my lips moved. Then I whispered. Then I spoke, finally. Just like a person, a real person would. It was just one sentence: Forgive me, Lord. I don’t want to die.

Every time I kill, I still see his eyes, turning to me, confused, full of naked pleading and despair. No matter what creature is laying there before me on the ground, it looks at me with his eyes. At first it was him. A man with eyes bluer than blue, like the heart of the flame, the part that burns the hottest. Hectic blue eyes full of madness that faded to the knowing eyes of an animal in the throes of death.