Otherwise Occupied (Evan Arden 2)

“Your health is exactly why you are here,” he countered.

“Just forget it.” I stood and began to walk to the other side of the room.

“I’d like you to stay,” Mark called out. He stood up and took a couple of steps towards me, which emphasized a slight limp. When I glanced down, I could see he wore a shoe with a thicker heel and sole on his right foot. “There’s only twenty minutes left in the session. You can stick it out that long, can’t you? I really would like to talk to you some more.”

“Morbid curiosity?” I sneered.

“No,” he replied sincerely. “I’m concerned about you.”

“I don’t want anyone writing a fucking book about it, all right?”

“All right,” Mark replied through narrowed eyes. “What makes you say that?”

Tensing a little, I tried to keep myself from actually balling my hands into fists. Whenever I thought about Hartford and his ideas, I wanted to punch something.

“Hartford wanted to write a book.”

“Ah.” Mark shifted in his seat. “Well, I’m not much of a writer, and I really just want to know how you are doing now, so can we finish the session? I mean, you already paid for it.”

Forcing myself not to roll my eyes, I sat back down in the chair and looked at him.

“What do you want to know?” I asked.

“All I really know is the part that is a matter of public record,” Mark said. “Anything you want to tell me that isn’t still classified would be a good place to start. If you’d rather talk about the known stuff, that’s fine, too. It’s up to you.”

There was a lot that was still classified as far as I knew. It wasn’t like there was anyone coming out here to debrief me of any changes, of course. Regardless, it was best to go with the things that could be found by anyone who did some digging.

“You see the video tape?” I asked. An involuntary cold shiver went down my back, and my stomach tightened up.

“I have,” he admitted. “I watched it again when you were assigned to me, but I had seen it on the news before then.”

“That guy – that writer guy,” I said. Inside my head, tiny little explosions began to commence in the center of my skull. My hands clenched without my permission, and my mind fought to only say the words, not actually see the pictures. “You know the one? When they had us all on our knees in front of the camera – right after the bags were taken off our heads – he was on my left.”

“I know who you mean.”

“He kept saying he had a wife and kids,” I remembered. “He kept begging them and talking about his two little girls.”

I hesitated. Most of this was on the tape – the one they played over and over and over again. There were probably five hundred copies of it up on YouTube. Most of it, but not all of it. There was a whole bunch of it before that part that never got out of the government’s hands.

“Before they had us on camera, when the guy was talking about his kids – there was one of them – one of the insurgents – he said someone had to die, and I told them to just shoot me instead of the writer guy because I didn’t have a family. It didn’t make any difference though. They shot him anyway.”

Pain in my lungs made me stop speaking for a second. They were trying to go into overdrive or something, and it took all my concentration to stop myself from hyperventilating. My fingers gripped onto my knees in an attempt to stop shaking, but at least my voice remained steady.

“Sometimes I think he got off easy,” I said. “Thinking that sometimes makes it hard to sleep, too.”

“That’s a change in your thinking,” Mark said. “At least, as far as what you talked about when you were here before. There’s nothing about the video in Doctor Hartford’s notes.”

“Maybe it’s still classified and no one remembered to tell me.” I shrugged. “If you see any MPs coming up the driveway, give me a chance to run, okay?”

I laughed, but he didn’t smile, and I couldn’t really hear the humor in my voice, either.

“It was on the news a lot.”

“I was still in Saudi Arabia when it broke out,” I said, “then Germany, and then the hospital in Virginia. I didn’t see it for a couple of months – not until they were discharging me. It was a year old by then, anyway. It’s not like I had paparazzi following me or anything when I got back. Instead, I had freaking MPs. The whole media circus didn’t have any effect on me.”

“You think something like that just goes away after a year?” Mark asked.

“No,” I said, “but it wasn’t the worst anyway.”