Riven - Jerry B. Jenkins [169]
Night was no different. Except that the noises changed because of no TV after midnight, little differentiated night from day. Everyone lived in noisy darkness and stench. Brady wished he could force himself to get interested in the news, comedies, sitcoms, documentaries, sports, anything.
He would sit staring blankly at the screen, determined to keep the black hole of memory from invading his brain. But it was futile. The scene always began with Katie North speaking to him as if he were an imbecile, amazed that he actually thought there had ever really been something between them.
Was it possible he had been wrong all along? He couldn’t make it compute, couldn’t convince himself that it was simply because his love for her was so deep that he had only imagined it went both ways. Had he wanted to believe it so badly that he read all of her politeness and friendliness and mischief as true love when she was, as she claimed, just having fun?
It couldn’t be. And the more her questions from that final conversation echoed in his brain—the ones about what he thought was going to happen in the future—the more he dreaded what was coming next. Where would he work, what would he do, what would she do? He had no answers and she was on her way out of the car.
But wait!
Wait!
And he was reaching into the backseat, and now it all went to slow motion. Something had burned onto his mind every detail, every drop of sweat, the exact hue of her ashen face, the sweep of her hair as she turned to slide out, the sound, the horrid sound of the blast, and then . . . and then . . . everything else.
No matter how many times the ugly scene played out in Brady’s mind, he couldn’t get it to change, to fade, to adjust. It was as if the explosions from those barrels had torn his lover in two and killed him in the process. And yet he had not died. At least physically. But there was nothing left of him but a body and a mind. Everything else seemed utterly gone.
Guilty, guilty, guilty.
There was no excuse. Oh, of course, he’d had his reasons, but he had hit a fly with a sledgehammer. He could have simply told her off, screamed at her, slapped her. He could have cussed her out, pushed her from the car, even pulled her hair.
Brady would have been charged and prosecuted and punished for most or all of that too, but it might have at least fit the situation in some extreme way. But no. He had acted without thinking. He had let his rage, his shame, his humiliation, his abysmal disappointment over losing her lead him to take matters into his own foolish hands.
As soon as the detonation assaulted his eardrums, Brady had known. There wasn’t a split second of wondering if this was real or whether there was some way to take it back, to start over. He knew his beautiful Katie was dead before she hit the ground and that his life was over too.
Guilty, guilty, guilty.
And he was going to hell.
This unending replay continued for days, and finally the morning arrived when Brady didn’t even bother to turn on his TV. He didn’t retrieve his meal tray when it was delivered, and thus he didn’t have to return it to the slot.
But that was duly noted and reported, and he was warned that if he continued to starve himself, he would be moved to a psychiatric facility for diagnosis and therapy. He didn’t care. Some cons looked forward to such diversions and even faked neuroses and psychoses, but this was anything but an act.
Brady didn’t want any attention. He just wanted to die. And yet he didn’t want to go to hell.
At the predinner count he took a little too long to rise from his cot and the officer shouted, “You want me to bring the extraction team in here, Darby? Don’t tempt me. Because I’ll do it and you’ll wish I hadn’t. Now get up and show yourself. And you’d better be eating tonight or we’re shipping you