Elastic Heart

“Believe what you want, Nami,” Law replied, voice hard like granite. I turned away so I didn’t have to battle with his intense stare.

“I will. And I choose to believe you’re a liar.” I returned my gaze to his, clashing my glare with his for a good two minutes until he said, “I’ll prove you wrong.” I blinked, caught off guard.

Law didn’t give me a chance to respond. He walked out of my apartment, leaving the door open as he went. I followed his trail, watching him leave in simultaneous resentment and awe. I only closed the door when I was sure he wasn’t coming back.

Curled in a ball, I sat on the floor of my living room for hours after Law left. I had my red fleece blanket wrapped around me and Raskol slept inside, oblivious to the bitter reason for the warm cocoon. I was wrecked and warped after Law, not sure what to believe or feel. I wanted to believe Law was good, not because he looked like he belonged on the cover of a magazine, but because I was so utterly and desperately lonely.

I had no allies.

No friends.

No family.

I wasn’t living in a cartoon so Raskol couldn’t talk back to me. It didn’t take a degree to diagnose me with depression. I was beyond depressed. I was dragged down and disconsolate. I was over the cliff and lost to the rocks.

Fuck Law for making me think I could be anything else.

My laptop sat in the only corner with a working jack, the blue power light blinking lazily. I needed to research Law’s claims. The sooner I did that, the quicker I could forget Law and his gorgeous, lying face. First and foremost: the company he worked for. With Raskol safely asleep in my arms, I carried my laptop to the couch and started to dig.

I searched for GEM on the internet and at first nothing came up. I was expecting GEM to have a website, the same way all companies have websites, but they didn’t, so I searched instead for GEM and politics, and that’s when an entire slew of articles hit me.

Apparently GEM owned a bunch of shady super PACS that they use to donate to and fund campaigns. GEM was just one of the names the umbrella corporation went by. It was unsettling, to say the least, when I recognized some of the other names as products I bought for hair care, food, and just general appliances.

GEM owned everything from car companies to candy companies, and had been responsible for every sundry and terrible thing from oil spills to slavery in Africa.

Head spinning, I closed my laptop. Law was telling the truth, at least. If he worked for GEM, he wasn’t working for Morris. He was probably just doing GEM’s dirty work and funding another campaign. Somehow, I still didn’t feel that much better about him. Law worked for a company that condoned environmental destruction and slavery.

How much better could he be?

I used to have a gut feeling. That is, I could trust my gut about people. If my gut said someone was all right, then I would listen. I no longer had a gut feeling, because my gut had been utterly eviscerated after Morris. I had no idea if Law was good or bad. Working for a bad person didn’t necessarily mean you were bad. I understood that the same way I understood living in a country with a corrupt government doesn’t mean you’re corrupt.

Without my gut, though, I was blind.

I shoved my laptop aside and sunk into the couch. The TV’s blank face stared back at me. I hadn’t watched TV in months. Every single aspect of my mind had been captivated by Morris. What did I like any more? Did I still like Friends? Did I still like Buffy? Pulling the blanket from the top of the couch, I clicked the TV on and waited patiently for Netflix to scroll across the screen.

I selected Psych and as Sean and Gus started their antics, I didn’t laugh. I knew it was funny, I’d laughed before, but something inside me was broken.

I felt like screaming. Even watching one of my favorite shows, I couldn’t forget about Morris.

He’d taken so much from me. He’d taken my future, my reputation, and now he’d taken Sean and Gus.

It was time he had something taken from him.

I could feel my soul slipping away like sand through my fingers. As Mitch Morris moved around the parking lot, the shutter clicks sounded on my camera and the sand slipped faster. I needed to catch him. I was a spider in a web and he was the fly constantly torturing me, buzzing just overhead. I was starving. He was the meal I would never eat.

Morris was in the manufacturing part of Utah, just a little outside of Salt Lake City. If it had been any other person, I would have said it was odd. Odd for such a man to be out in that part of town so late at night. It wasn’t any other person, though. It was Mitch Morris, and he was always up to something.

I clicked the camera again, watching his movements through the delayed stills. He seemed perfectly calm between the gray-black shadows of the buildings and towering pallets. Questions plagued me. Who was he meeting? Why there?

Morris was dressed impeccably. Wearing a long wool pea coat with fur trim over his three-piece suit and polished shoes, he looked like he was going to the symphony, not standing on loose gravel amidst dirty wooden pallets. Again I felt myself slipping, disappearing into the man that had taken a part of me.

I needed to understand him.

I was dressed all in black, hiding behind one of the stacks of wooden pallets. I was beginning to think that it was not my superior stealth keeping me hidden from Morris, but instead his superior hubris. He had every cop in the city, every journalist, and pretty much every person, in his pocket. He had no one to fear because they all either feared or loved him. Why would he worry about me?

“Senator.” A slightly frightened, mousy voice perked my ears. “I don’t understand why we had to meet here.” I lowered my camera slightly to get a better look and squinted, finding it hard to see in the dark. The only light on the lot was meters back: a lonely and dying street lamp. I squinted harder and saw the owner of the voice: me.

Well, not me, but it looked like me six months back. The girl was wearing a nice pencil skirt and blouse accompanied by a look of simultaneous fear and awe on her face, as if she had so much to learn still, even in the clearly terrible situation. My camera nearly dropped from my fingers as memories of the incident overcame me.