The Unbinding Read Online Free PDF Page A

my screen.”
    “I just had a pretty wild, icky thought. Say that I do break down and sleep with Kent, and say that this ear jack flips on while we’re in bed….”
    “I’ll tell you a secret. It happens.”
    “Like how often?”
    “More and more. Like everything.”
    “One more excuse to postpone penetration.”
    “Your ‘anxieties’ have persisted then, I take it.”
    “I think I’ve babbled enough for now. Good God!”
    “Fifteen-F in North Platte, Sabrina. I’m here for you.”

7.
    [MyStory.com]
    Occasionally, maybe twice a year, revved up after a hard-fought paintball match, I’ll wash my face but leave my body spattered, concealing the “wounds” with a clean white business shirt that I button up tight around my flushed-pink neck. It’s a ritual I’ve evolved, a private ceremony. I put on the tie and gray suit I bought for work and rarely wore after my training period, preferring looser outfits in lighter fabrics, and I head to the bar of the W Hotel, where the bands and athletes hang out when they’re in town. There I order a single neat manhattan, amber and cold, with a ghostly sunken cherry. It was my grandfather’s cocktail. I first tasted one at his Elks club in Racine, the night he celebrated his sixtieth birthday. It was also the night his only son, my father, flushed away his visitation rights by taking me out of state without permission to visit my grandfather and snagging a DUI on the drive back. I didn’t see either man much after that, but I was fourteen by then, a hard fourteen, and convinced that I was the only man I needed. Now, of course, I’m the only man I have, which is why I try to go easy on the liquor. Easy on all those things. In all their forms.
    But I do like a nice manhattan now and then.
    Yesterday, Sunday, knowing I ought to stay home and watch
Aguirre
before my date on Wednesday, I ran to the range for a quick skirmish and suffered two gaudy fluorescent yellow “kill shots” during my squad’s disorganized attempt to free a female peace corps volunteer from an urban terror hideout. It was a new scenario for me, engrossing and overstimulating. The blindfolded “hostage,” a guy in a blond wig, shivered my skull with shrieks and pleas that bounced at slashing angles off the tin walls. The match was held indoors, in a vacant old leased warehouse we’ve spray-painted roof-to-floor with hellish slogans. DECAPITATE ! REVOLUTION ! DEATH TO TRAITORS ! Lots of brutal insignia and symbols, too. Sword-pierced eyeballs. Bloody talons. Entrails. The only rules are nothing Nazi or racist or anti–anything that really exists—no nation, church, group, idea, or individual.
    With two exceptions. Two organizations.
    Guess.
    Click here for the first one. Click here for the second.
    Maybe you dislike those outfits, too. Maybe you love them. Maybe you’re involved with them. Or maybe you don’t think about them any. But you’d abhor them if you only knew what sort of damage they’re capable of causing. It’s my secret, their crimes, and they have to stay my secret, because that’s how the magic of curses operates. Call down destruction on something, then shut up. Desecrate its image, then veil its image. Wait for the crumbling. Then take credit for it.
    Maybe those clicks will hurry things along.
    Or maybe there were no clicks and it’s just me here.
    To gaze ungazed upon. I’ll take the deal. It sounds depressing, but when you think about it, it’s the same deal the creator gave himself. And the creator had all the deals to choose from. I believed that I did, too, back when, but somehow the thought prevented me from acting, which was why, for a time, all my choices went away. According to a wise old priest who counseled me toward the end of my decade of confusion (the man who steered me to AidSat, actually, and provided the reference that helped me land the job), the time to choose is always now, and the only two choices available are these:
Do
or
do