How To Disappear Completely Part 11

It wasn't there. I ran into the kitchen and looked through the pots and pans, I looked by the TV, I looked on the shelves of the small entertainment center. Nothing. The Demon was stirring and still I had nothing. The moment I heard the barking of the dis...o...b..bulated dog coming back to life, I was suddenly enraged. I grabbed the taser from my pocket and started walking over to him ready to stun him again for more time. He was trying to convince his legs to stand as I pulled the trigger on the taser and slammed it once again into his side. Only that time, it didn't turn on. "You have got to be kidding me!" I yelled at the dog. I pulled the trigger again. Nothing. Repeatedly I smacked it onto the ground hoping that might shake some sense back into the thing. This was no time for the key member of the strike force to go down.

It looked as if he understood what was happening. He had to have remembered the device that caused him so much pain, despite his immense stupidity. It was simple survival. He looked at me, then at the taser, then back again. The spark of his evil erupted into fire all around him, and the heat struck an intense fear in me down to my intestines. For the first time in our battles together, he knew that he had the upper hand. I could see it in his eyes. He was going to hurt me. Bad. The insurgents finally had a chance to take down the powers that had oppressed them for so long.

In a desperate move, I ordered my foot to strike the dog. I never thought I'd be a puppy kicker, but again I had never met Satan either. Things change so fast. Apparently I wasn't fast enough for the sudden rush of power that the Devil had found. He dodged my foot and growled with the zeal of a lion protecting his offspring. As I slowly marched my way backwards towards the door, he followed me step for step. I thought that maybe if I just left, he'd leave me alone, content with his victory. As I turned to reach for the door, he leapt at me with jowls wide open ready to embrace my flesh in a murderous hug.

Somehow I was quick enough to just dodge teeth, but his body rammed into me hard enough to knock me over. We fell like angry lovers to the floor as he s...o...b..red all over me. With a sudden rush of strength I threw him off of me and turned over to make my escape. As I stood up to slam the door behind me cueing this awful scene to wrap, the beast was right behind me in the doorway. That was it. I had to call retreat. There was nothing else I could do. So I started to run.

That's where this whole story started. It was soon thereafter that we battled in the street and I retrieved the ring, covered in evil s...o...b..r, from Satan's dirty mouth. I met the wonderful Darla and Herbert and eventually made my way back to Allison's to return the broken and defeated warrior. I walked home that night to my own apartment instead of Nicole's. We had planned for me to rendezvous back with her that night, but I just needed some time to myself. The whole thing was just too much to take in. I called her as I walked home and told her briefly what happened, without any exciting details, telling her that I'd fill her in later on the rest. The key point was that overall it was a success. I had the ring.

At home, I kicked off my shoes, poured myself some whiskey and went into the bathroom. First thing was first. I had to clean the gunk off the ring. If I was going to return it, I needed to make it look like it hadn't been wrapped around a rottweiler's tooth for the past who-knows-how-many-days. I wondered how it ended up in his mouth, let alone securely wrapped around a tooth. I had a hard time imagining the scenario. I made a mental note to ask Allison, years down the line if we became friends again. I wondered if that's why she was so adamant about not giving it back. Had she though that she lost it? A string to a light bulb just above my head was pulled on and I laughed out loud.

She thought she lost it. It made so much sense. She would have probably given it back readily, but she didn't want to admit that she lost it and so she refused to give it back. That had to be it. As I tucked that little secret into my pocket to possibly use at a later date, the ring was just about clean. I held it up toward the light and it sparkled like a newborn star. "You little son of a b.i.t.c.h." I scolded the twinkling ring. "You have changed my life forever." Engagement rings were supposed to do that to the person giving it and to the girl you gave it to forever. In my case, though, it showed me a girl more suited for me and got me away from a girl that I would have been miserable with, especially given her long-standing affair with a euro-trash p.r.i.c.k named Sascha.

Chapter 14.

The next morning I felt as if I had slept on a bed of angel wings. Sure it was unbelievably comfortable, but I had a small pang of guilt knowing that a few angels probably had to die or at least become human to make my good night possible. I rolled off the soft warmth of heaven and onto the chilly floor of reality. The gates of my bathroom welcomed me and I cranked on the shower. I didn't shampoo or soap for the first 5 minutes. I hardly moved at all. I just stood there enraptured by the feeling that I was finally free. I was free from any ties with Allison. I no longer felt like I owed her anything or that she owed me anything in return. I was free of my worry about my temporary unemployment. I knew I was okay for a while and that I'd find something, even if it was something stupid, until I finally found what was right for me. I was free of any fear of the devil dog. I was his greatest enemy, but I had helped him and he had helped me in an offbeat kind of way. Mostly, I was free of any guilt of meeting Nicole. Knowing someone's story helps you understand who they are and I was finally starting to understand Allison and what she needed. I realized that I wasn't what she needed. And I was okay with that.

It all started to make sense that day as I rode the "T" downtown to Freedman Jewelers. As I rode past each stop, I watched everyone waiting for their own train. People going about their lives, with all their worries and secrets stapled to their shirts, except that they were written in a language that only the person wearing it could understand. They pa.s.sed each other, occasionally exchanging a pa.s.sing glance or wavebut ultimately they each lived in their own world. I wondered what life would be like if people could read each other's internal languages and know everyone else's stories. No more doubtjust truth, what was actually happening, hanging out around our necks for everyone to see. The idea was so farfetched that I could only hold onto it for a few seconds, and then it was gone.

By the time I stopped at Government Center and got off the train, it all went away. Life's canvas was suddenly covered in a spill of Gesso, putting everything back to a sterile blank white. Everyone just looked like they always did. Christopher looked the way he did when I bought the ringjust a guy doing his job, trying to make a living. When I told him the abridged version of my past few days, his eyes stayed wide open during the whole story. I couldn't tell if he was excited to hear such a tale or frightened by the whole ordeal. After apologies and suggestions that I keep the ring for later, they courteously refunded my six grand and reminded me to come back to them when the time was right. I happily agreed.

I called Nicole before returning to Back Bay and asked if she wanted to hang out later. We chatted for a moment about what we should do, but ultimately I persuaded her that we should stay in for the night and I'd tell her all about the trials of the day. Of course, she was fine with that and suggested that she'd make a fancy dinner. Of course, I was fine with that.

Allison was the next and final call for the day. I knew that she had the day off and I asked her if we could meet somewhere and talk. There was no way that I wanted to be in the same room as Satanwe both needed time apart. We agreed to meet on Newbury at Tealuxe, a little tea shop that was the only place you could order tea and crumpets. The place was always somehow filled with people who had been fighting for days. Some for years. It was a modern, secular Reconciliation booth. A place of understanding and peace. No wars were fought there, only after an armistice was declared could two people enter its doors.

I was already seated when she arrived. We hugged cordially and after hanging her coat up, she sat down across from me. There was an unusual sense of commonality between us. We both felt the same things in different ways and we both finally noticed it. After the first cup of tea, we started to open up a little. I asked her to tell me about how she met Sascha, and after giving me a look that said "Are you sure?" she realized that I was actually interested. So she began. They had met way back in college, remaining friends throughout the years. He had always had a crush on hermore than a crush, really, he had been in love with her. She said that he asked her out every once-in-a-while, never relenting, even after so many rejections.

He never did let go. Years later he was still asking her out with the same zeal as when they had first met. I never would have kept that up, I thought, as she continued. One night he asked her to go out to dinner with himas friends, of course. She hesitantly agreed and he took her to the Top of the Hub, a sw.a.n.ky restaurant at the top of the Prudential Center, the second tallest building in the city. Everything was going fine as a friendly date, until he got down on one knee, and asked her to marry him. Her answer was, of course, no.

But it sowed the seeds of doubt. It also helped that he had become quite successful in his business and I, of course, was doing no such thing. That was 3 months prior to my proposal. They started hanging out more and more after that, still as 'friends.' Except now, instead of asking her out, he was periodically asking her to marry him. You had to give the guy kudos on his persistence if you could get past the slicked back, greasy hair. She turned down all of his proposals as a good girlfriend would until one night her curiosity led her astray. She let him kiss her. She admitted that it was unusual and different and that she was so used to me that it didn't seem right. She let it continue and eventually, they started dating.

I was somehow completely oblivious to all of this, though none of it surprised me anymore. I just listened, genuinely interested in her story. For weeks leading up to my proposal, she went out with him occasionally on the nights that I decided to stay at home. As I sat at my computer, listening to music, or playing video games, she was out with him having the time of her life. By the time I got around to asking her to marry me, she had been dating Sascha for months and was so confused about what she wanted out of life that she couldn't accept my proposal.

Two men wanted to marry her. One was a twenty something deadbeat wannabe writer who worked at Starbucks. The other was a twenty something entrepreneur with a blossoming international business. One offered her a ring worth six grand, the other offered her a ring worth twenty. On paper there was an obvious choice, but in her heart there was love. She loved me, she explained, but she was a woman that needed security as well as love. It would have been nice to live in a fairy tale, she said, but in the real world she had to make the best decision that she could for her future. It turns out that love is only true in film and song. In real life it's just statistics.

When it was my turn, I told my story simply, without too many bells and whistles. Just the truth as it would have been shown to the world in that alternate universe where everyone's inner life was transparent. I told her about how I met Nicole. How she unabashedly broke me free and made me dance to ridiculous 80s cla.s.sics. I told her about how she disappeared that night without any reason or word. I told her about how I got fired from Starbucks and how triumphant I felt as I walked out those doors. I told her how I found Nicole the next day, most likely because of a dream I had. I told her about how Nicole tricked me into going to a swing club and how I pa.s.sed out from exhaustion. I told her about our first kiss there on the bridge, and how I went home every night because I didn't want to hurt her. I told her about how I figured out that they knew each other and what that meant for me.

Then we both took turns talking about what happened after we saw each other out on dates with other people at the Square. I felt so comfortable there at that table with her, drinking tea and eating crumpets with jam, that I almost told her about the ring. She never said anything and so I had to a.s.sume that my guess was correct. She thought she lost it and she was glad that I hadn't brought it up, not knowing that I had not only retrieved it, but had returned it that very morning. The check came and we split it down the middle. "I'm glad we got together, Josh. You have no idea how worried I was when you saw me with Sascha. My anger was really contorted fear."

"I know. I was pretty scared myself."

We smiled awkwardly at each other before embracing each other in a hug that lasted a few ticks longer than a friendly hug would. Pulling back, she the natural smile that I had seen a million times before but never fully appreciated, and never would have the chance to again. And that was ok.