How to Disappear Completely
"I'm not here. This isn't happening. I'm not here. I'm not here."
Icy rain pelted his skin as he sunk first to his knees, then to the uneven ground of a Dublin alleyway. Try as he might, Lee Stetson couldn't convince himself to believe anything other than the truth. He was alone, in the dark, his whereabouts unknown to anyone at the Agency due to his deep cover. And he was slowly bleeding to death from the knife puncture wound just below his last rib.
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His mission had been to infiltrate Sinn Fein, posing as a sympathetic Irish American, in order to gather intelligence on Gerry Adams, the party's rising star, and any funding received from American sources that might be funneled to the IRA. He had been in Ireland for two weeks and had established a relationship with Sorcha MacMahon, Adam's female lieutenant in the Cumann na mBan. Sorcha was everything one would expect in an Irish republican activist: fiery, stubborn and passionate. Using his body to earn her trust had been no hardship, until his cover had been blown and she'd stabbed him in the hallway of a nightclub just off Temple Bar. He'd managed to overpower her and break her neck before she could finish the job. He then stumbled out the back door of the club and behind some dumpsters before he could go no further.
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Strobe lights and blown speakers. Soft brown eyes. Fireworks. Hurricanes. He couldn't tell which memories were real, and which were false. His whole life felt that way, in retrospect. Earlier tonight, when he slammed Sorcha against his rooming house headboard and emptied himself into her body, had that been real? Did intimacy ever count if your partner didn't even know your real name? Oh well. If this was going to be it, he was grateful at least for the momentary relief of a physical connection with another person, even if she was his killer.
It hadn't felt like a problem before, the absence of someone who cared if he lived or died. It was how he had chosen to lead his life; or rather, how his life had chosen he would be led, if he wanted to remain sane. His reasons for being were few and simple: patriotic duty, sheer stubbornness, and an overwhelming need to tell fate to fuck off. It was a bitter diet, but it had kept him alive. But now, feeling his energy ebbing slowly onto the wet pavement, he ached for something more. Some tether that would keep him here on the ground, instead of floating through the air like a lost balloon, drifting so high that no-one would notice when he disappeared completely.
He imagined his pooling blood being washed away by the steady rain into the sewer drain, flowing down to the Liffey, out into the Irish Sea, across the cold Atlantic, into the Chesapeake and up the Potomac to where his body would lie in Arlington National Cemetery, alone and unvisited in his hero's grave.
She wouldn't even know he existed. Wouldn't take him by the hand and pull him back towards solid ground. Wouldn't hold him there with her warm doe eyes. Safe. Normal. Wouldn't …
He was slipping in and out of consciousness while the discordant notes of a European ambulance approached. If he could just hold on a little bit longer. Just a little bit longer, and she would find him, and he could find a reason not to let go and just float away.