5._Finding Peace

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I left Santa Fe a few days later and headed to, you guessed it, Shit-Cago. I just had a little pitstop back in Colorado to pickup this trailer and get it all registered and prepped. Had that taken care of in just under 2 weeks. Isn’t it crazy the shit you can get done when you actually have money? Like, I realized all the stick-on soundproofing foam I had was gonna take forever to get layered just right, so I just went and bought a bunch of 3M spray adhesive and big pieces of foam without even looking at the price tag. Same thing when I realized I’d forgotten spare cable-ties and some of the other restraint shit, I just went out and bought it. Didn’t even ask for a receipt, it was great.

So yeah, having money made this all pretty fucking easy, that little detour took hardly any time at all, and before I knew it I was in The Windy City. Not a big fan of the place, to be honest. I guess if I had a ton of money it might be cool, but even then what would you do besides go out to eat everyday and go to clubs and get fucked up and shit? I guess that’s all you really do, huh?

Or did, rather.

It wasn’t too hard to find your hangout. I just hung out around that fucking stripclub you always go to with your boys. Sat there and watched and waited for you to leave and kept an eye on what you were driving: black Escalade, buncha chrome fluff, ugly-ass rims, memorized the plate. Then next time you rolled up—the very next fucking night of course—I just stumbled through the parking lot like a drunkard and “accidentally” fell down next to your caddy. By the time that fucking troglodyte of yours shoved me over the hood of the Prius, I’d already stuck the hide-a-key box under your frame. Seriously, do you consider that guy a friend or, like, a bodyguard or what? Surely yall aren’t real friends, right? Do you even know what it’s like to have friends, a real friends? Yall just measure dicks to order the posse’s hierarchy til some bigger, badder dude decides he’s in charge, right? Seems like a pretty un-fucking-fulfilling way to live life to me, man. Whatever, I’m just glad magnets don’t interfere with AirTags.

All I had to do was follow my phone to everywhere that stupid fucking car went.

Seriously, what’s the point of that thing? It’s huge, looks like a pain in the ass to park, and it must guzzle a fortune in gas. You totally fucked it up with those rims too, I can’t get over how bad they look.

You coulda picked any style on the planet and you got the ones with a million little spokes radiating out. I just don’t get the appeal, I really don’t. Those would look great on the small tires they put on lowriders, you know, the cars with the hydraulics that bounce up and down? But on those oversized wheels they just don’t look right. I guess it made you stand out better, made picking you out of a crowd of cars easier, so that’s pretty cool.

I knew you’d have a hangout somewhere, I didn’t realize it was gonna be so conveniently located though. That industrial park is still looks a long way from getting gentrified. The only people around there are either strung-out sleeping on the streets, or you and your boys bringing back girls all doped up so you can fuck ‘em and then throw them away like trash once you’re tired of them.

It was trivial to find a way on top of the buildings across from your place. The old paper factory caddy corner had fire ladders going all the way to the roof. I chilled up there with all my fancy optics for a week and watched you come and go.

I’m just kidding, they weren’t really that fancy, just the NODs I told you about and some binoculars and a neat little thermal scope. I’m not the fucking CIA or anything, I can only imagine what it’d be like to track someone with a satellite. I watched you really fucking closely though. Memorized the faces of the other cunts you rolled with. I counted 5 different regulars that you always had around. Mostly big guys that looked like they could break me in half, not that I was planning to fight any of them.

At least none of yall could hold a fucking gun straight. Christ, you guys had terrible trigger discipline. I’m amazed none of yall accidentally shot each other with how many times you flashed those fucking guns. Remember that junkie you guys jumped, did he owe you money or what? Nevermind, I ask that like you’d even remember, I bet yall did that kinda shit all the time. And probably for no other reason than because you get off on hurting people and exercising control.

Honestly I kind of get the appeal now…

It made me sick when I saw those girls though. Stumbling out of the Caddy and the one had 2 little kids with her. I almost went in right then and there, I was off the roof and halfway down the stairs before I got control of myself. I was literally shaking on the way back up. You know the “seeing red” meme? Yeah, it was like that. Like I said, shaking. That was good though, the shaking part—or the being so angry that I was shaking rather.

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There had been times that I’d thought about how I was going to do it, and I’d get all shaky and nauseous feeling. And—no big surprise—that didn’t really inspire much confidence. But after seeing those kids and thinking about how they were gonna cry in a corner and go hungry while their mom got gangbanged on some cum-stained mattress, I had my—how do you say it—my “crisis of faith” resolved.

It inspired me in a sense, it really helped sharpen up my focus, knowing that there were kids in there, that there might be other kids in there, other meek, sick, abused people stuck in that fucking shit hole. People that I didn’t want to hurt, not even if it would’ve been so much easier to get to you if i didn’t care.

As much of a piece of shit as you are, and as much as you deserve everything that’s coming to you, it was of the utmost importance to me to not hurt the wrong people because I got too emotional and rushed. Like I said, I only want to hurt people that deserve it.

After about 2 weeks of sitting on that roof I was pretty confident I knew your pattern. Which, to be fair, was pretty easy, because your pattern consisted of getting faded at your hangout all day and night except for the nights you went to the strip club, which was, like, every other day. I’d gotten a good look at the 6 of you, I was certain I’d be able to pick your boys’ faces out of a lineup of a thousand people if I had to.

And you… I’d never forget your face.

It took 2 days to prepare everything. I made sure every battery was charged, I cleaned my shoes, I had the cable-ties and duct-tape laid out in the back of the van, I had a full tank of gas plus 30 gallons extra, and I wiped down everything. And I mean everything.

I wiped my prints off of Every. Single. Fucking. Bullet. That took a while.

I tried to mentally prepare as well. I tried visualizing everything. The layout, my movements, the pace, everything.

I guess “visualize” might be a bad word for it. I have aphantasia, you know what that is? It’s when you can’t form mental imagery. So I can’t actually visualize stuff per se. I can imagine stuff, but I don’t actually see anything in my head. Does that make sense?

Don’t worry, you don’t have to answer.

I had a general idea of the layout because a lot of those buildings right there are the same basic floor plan, especially now that they’re gutted and empty. I walked through one of the nearby ones and just tried to imagine what it would be like if it were set up more like a sleezy drug-den rape-brothel shithole. I got some good angles of your hangout from those dilapidated buildings too.

To get a real good view I one time waited til yall had left and then in my rattiest sweatclothes I shambled in off the street like a junkie. I saw a decent amount of the first floor before another one of your fucking troglodytes came out of nowhere and smacked me in the head—I guess you hadn’t all left. I saw him start to pull his gun so I stuttered out something about where I could score some “ice or smack or anything you got” and pulled out a fistful of bills. He just laughed and grabbed the bills and told me to get fucked and shoved my ass out the door. That was enough to get a mental layout of most of the first floor and where the corners, hallways, and blind spots were.

I think it was 3 days after that that it finally went down. Honestly, it’s kind of hard to remember now exactly. I mean, I can remember everything, mostly, I just don’t remember the order of everything. The chronology is all fucked up. Like, I have all the pieces to the puzzle, but they’re stuck together all wrong. Like, the sequence of events in my head is in an order that I know can’t possibly be right.

I remember hearing somewhere that this sometimes happens when people experience super high levels of stress. Soldiers in combat, abuse survivors, car crash victims, really pretty much any super high adrenaline situation. It actually doesn’t even have to be a bad thing necessarily. Like, I’m pretty sure that same memory scramble glitch—or whatever you’d call it—happened in that orgy.

Not the Santa Fe one—I guess I didn’t tell you about this one—it wasn’t Santa Fe, this was way back when I lived in Raleigh, in college. My girlfriend and her roommate had a big party: people packed shoulder to shoulder in the living room, keg stands in the kitchen, one of their friends DJing in the corner—a big party. Anyways, at some point a few of us were playing spin the bottle—‘cause we were all horny college kids I guess—and we were in her roommate’s room, Hailey I think it was. But one minute I’m making out with Hailey—or maybe it was Heather, I forget, something with an H for sure—whatever, so I’m making out with her and the next thing I know people are naked and scattered around the room feeling each-other up.

And it’s from that point onward that my personal timeline is fragmented. From there on out, my memories are all out of order. Really, it’s like they’re not even in an order. I just remember these distinct individual moments, and I know roughly when they must have occurred, but they don’t feel connected at all, they might as well have happened years apart. Like, I remember watching Aubrey—that was my girlfriend at the time—going down on Ty while I stood there. And I remember her blowing this other dude whose name I can’t remember. And I remember her sucking my dick while Ty fucked her from behind.

And I remember at some point Kyle was laying on the bed and Hailey was sitting on top of him topless while he played with her tits—they weren’t fucking, she was naked but he had his pants on, they were just dirty talking and touching each other—and I remember looking at her and saying “Hey, Hailey, you want a dick in you?” and she said “yes please” and one of the dudes across the room grabbed a condom out of the bowl on the dresser and tossed it to me and I felt like I was in the fucking Matrix because I remember the experience happening in slow-mo: the dude threw it, I caught it perfectly in one hand—which I never do ‘cause I’m terrible at catching—and then almost as soon as I’d caught it I had it opened and the rubber out and on my dick. It feels funny to say it, but I think that might have been the most coordinated thing I’ve ever done. Literally a perfect movement pattern. It was surreal.

Anyways, I remember railing Hailey from behind while she was still on the bed over Kyle and they were still dirty talking each other which was fucking hilarious but also hot as fuck. I remember Sayid was in the corner puking and Molly—who was my ex—was trying to get him hard but she couldn’t because he’d drank a fifth of Jim Beam while he was sitting on the couch earlier.

I remember Aubrey blowing me again and I remember cumming all over her face. I remember Hailey and a couple of the guys getting in her shower together. I can remember all these things crystal clear but the order is all mixed up, and they don’t even really feel connected. Yes, I know they obviously all happened during the orgy, and I could probably figure out the sequence of everything in retrospect via context clues—like, me cumming must have happened near the end, me taking my clothes off must have happened at the beginning, et cetera—I’m just trying to explain how the memories feel. They are totally divorced from any intuitive sense of time or interconnectedness in my mind.

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5.

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