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In his AA sessions he’d met a fellow, Mason, who’d turned out to live just a few doors down from him.
Mason was about his age, a Marine who’d served during the invasion of Iraq, who, like many vets, had self-medicated to treat rather crippling PTSD.
With their apartments so close together, Chad had taken to inviting Mason over regularly. Though Chad’s apartment was no longer the epicenter of wild all-night ragers—those days having phased out along with the blackouts, binges, and benders—he still had multiple, partially-overlapping circles of friends whom would often be found bbq-ing, lounging, catching up on gossip, shooting the shit, and generally wasting time on the premises.
No one had overtly complained, but a few of Chad’s friends had, on more than one occasion, questioned his choice of invitees. They’d found Mason an unsettling addition. Sherri had said he had lifeless eyes. Mark said those very same eyes held contact for far too long. Danny thought he acted like a “fucking robot.” Most everyone found it palpably disconcerting to be in his vicinity, as he’d just stood there, always at the peripheries of interaction, never engaging, only talking—in single sentence fragments—when talked to first. They most anyone ever got out of him was that he liked the way the great redwood forests looked: nothing like the desert, one day he’d like to live in such a place.
Even Chad’s sister had cautioned him. Of course she’d been happy he’d stopped drinking, but she worried that associating with former addicts might prove problematic. She had changed her tune following the evening Mason pulled the mugger off of her as she was leaving Chad’s apartment. After that she had begrudgingly accepted the broken man’s presence in her brother’s life.
For Chads part, despite his quirks, he’d always gotten on quite well with people. He seemed to have a sort of magnetism about him, especially with fellow weirdos, outliers, and atypicals. People gravitated towards him. And he’d never seemed to have met a soul he didn’t like.
He’d never minded Mason.
In fact, he’d been glad for his company during a brief relapse at age 33.
Chad remembered little of the few day span, save for Mason holding him steady over the toilet, rolling him to his side on the floor, and dumping the rest of the Bud and Jack into the sink.
Usually they’d just sat and watched TV at Chad’s apartment: baseball, basketball, whatever UFC fight was on, Mason was never picky.
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Sometimes he and Chad would just sit in silence for hours and smoke.
Chad figured that’s what made most of the others so unconfortable: the silence.
He’d found that most people always wanted to be talking, or to listen to someone talking. Apparently it just didn’t feel right to sit in complete silence with someone who wasn’t an intimate partner, especially when that someone didn’t pick up on social cues and wore a thousand yard stare in perpetuity.
Ultimately none of it had concerned Chad.
Mason didn’t talk, didn’t ask questions, didn’t emote, didn’t feel the need to fill silences with idle chit chat.
As far as Chad saw it, the man was merely being efficient. A machine conserving energy. Perhaps one of those automatons with no inner life, no point of view.
But, nonetheless, an automaton that had helped him, looked out for him and his.
And that was enough for Chad.
One night Mason had departed from his typical impassivity. He’d shown up to Chad’s door with black saucers for eyes. His expression was the same as it always was: blank, totally unreadable, but there was something subtle, almost imperceptibly different about his gait.
It was unusual for Mason to be the one to initiate a hangout—in fact, in Chad’s recollection there was not a single time they’d hung out not begun by Chad knocking on his door and doing the inviting.
They had sat on Chad’s couch and passed the bowl back and forth. Between tokes, Mason had rubbed his hands along his thighs and incessantly clenched and unclenched his toes on the carpet.
Then, all at once, unprompted and unexpected, with an emphatic sigh he’d said “I wish I hadn’t joined the Marines.”
Chad had been so busy trying to process the spontaneity of the remark, that he’d missed its contents and had had to ask Mason to repeat himself, a request that was obliged.
Chad hadn’t quite known what to say after that, running the conversational-calculus in his head didn’t yield any immediately obviously better or worser responses—evidently he’d never ventured very far down that particular branch of the hypothetical dialogue decision-tree.
Eventually he’d just settled for “why not?”
Mason had made oblique references to doing things that he wished he hadn’t, in places he wished he hadn’t, to people he wished he hadn’t.
In turn, Chad had deployed various platitudes he felt might reassure and console. He’d said surely Mason had been a good soldier. Surely he had followed orders, good orders. Surely he had saved lives, good people’s lives. Without him no doubt countless fellow soldiers and innocents would have died. Surely he had made the world a better, safer, happier place for everyone.
Chad had asked why he would regret such a thing as that, why he’d wish to take that back.
The man on his couch had exhaled slowly, dinner plate pupils moist and gleaming, still focused on some far-off place. Through thick phlegm, and with more affect than Chad had thought possible from the man, he’d said “because killing people doesn’t feel good.”
Chad hadn’t said anything after that. Mason had dropped his head into his palms and rocked there on the end of the couch for a time, before again reclining and staring off into the space beyond Chad’s drywall.
For another hour they’d sat there, saying nothing and passing the glass between them, before Mason had stood, thanked Chad for listening to him, and walked out.
A few days later Chad had seen the police loitering by Mason’s place, no one had seen him. Rumor around the complex was suicide, but Chad had seen Mason’s sister outside the apartment a few weeks later.
She had been visibly annoyed by Chad’s prying questions, but insisted Mason hadn’t killed himself. Allegedly, he was alive and well someplace, but she hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with specifics.
Chad hoped that wherever it was, there were forests of giant trees with hanging blue mists under thick white clouds, and that it looked absolutely nothing like the desert.
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