He’s here.

I can feel him – I don’t need to open my eyes. I know he’s here in the room with me. I can smell his aftershave – Old Spice – he’s been wearing that one for years! Kept borrowing mine in college...

I knew he would come. The nurses have had Christmas carols in the Muzak for a while now – and every year, just about the time I think I’m going to go out of my mind from an endless repetition of “It Came Upon A Midnight Clear” and “Silent Night”, he shows up. It’s a routine he’s kept for the last God-knows-how-many years – one I doubt will ever change until one of us is dead and gone.

And today, just as every year since I’ve been here, I wish I could ask him what the Hell he thinks he’s accomplishing, hovering over me like a sorrowful shadow for a week. Does he think that one week of attention will somehow atone for what he does during the other fifty-one weeks out of the year? Surely he can’t believe that one week of pro bono consultation on the most puzzling of cases the Home can throw at him will balance out against the minor fortune he earns participating in an outrage instigated by the Centre?

Yes, he’s here. He’s bending over me – I suppose checking to see if I have as many wrinkles as he does now. “Good morning, Jacob,” I hear. God, his accent gets less and less every year – and there’s the slightest whiff of whiskey on his breath. At least he hasn’t been smoking that pipe of his – I never did like the stench of his tobacco.

Dammit! Why was it I who was sentenced to this living death – and not him?

Dammit! Who do I think I’m kidding?

I don’t know why I always get so angry at him when he shows up – after all, I was part of the reason he ended up working at the Centre, I was the one who decided he should be deliberately kept out of the loop as to what use his prized research would be put. I was the one who threw the hood over little Jarod’s head and dragged him from his bedroom window. I did the paperwork – I created the lie he’d be told to make what he would end up doing seem somehow less obscene. If anything, I know that my sentence in this prison of waking nightmares and utter helplessness is deserved. It’s a comforting thought – a very slight comfort, but one nevertheless.

I was asleep in other ways for so long before this – asleep to the harm I was doing, to the evil I was aiding. But I woke up – just before they put me in this twilight sleep that leaves me just enough awake to reflect on my sins. I woke up and was doing something – something proactive – to counter all the evil I’d done. The plans were in place – the three of us most sickened by what the Centre was doing were going to strike a blow for justice and right.

That accident was no accident – I knew it the moment the car started to swerve. I knew that one of us had sold out the others – and that my death was only going to be the beginning. But I didn’t die, did I? I became the way and the means to keep him comfortably beholden – to keep him deliberately distracted.

But it’s been long enough that he’s got to have figured a few things out by now – surely he could see what is going on! Surely he can’t be THAT blind! Surely he hasn’t been coming here out of guilt at being behind the wheel of a sabotaged car?

I woke up – and I paid the price. I wonder if Sydney ever will?

FIN

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