#angstttttt

“Still get my sleep

Do you get yours?

I’m getting to know myself

In spite of the bend

I’m getting ahead of myself

Time and again”

“purple strings”, Nothing

The florescent lights above him felt kind of like they were burning into his brain.  He was exhausted and longed to crawl into bed and sleep the kind of sleep he hadn’t experienced since he was maybe about 16 years old.  Leon looked over at the darkness outside the plate glass window of the diner and caught his own reflection; he’d shed his suit coat a few hours ago, and with two days of spotty stubble, his dress shirt sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and his tie loosened and askew he looked either like he’d been having the time of his life or like he’d drank too much and fallen into a gutter.

The tired, blank look on his face sealed the deal; nobody having fun wore that expression.

He looked back from the window and the darkness and his reflection, and looked back across the diner booth.  Claire was on the other side, tucking into a chicken fried steak like she’d never get to eat again.  The florescent lighting made her already pale skin washed out; her freckles popped, the minute dark smudges under her eyes more pronounced.  She somehow always looked tired too, but it was a different kind of tired than him—she was perpetually recovering from some kind of college-age bender insanity, according to what she related to him.  Periodically she was perturbed by some of the same things he was perturbed by, the ghosts of the past determined to keep her up too, but on the whole she seemed fairly committed to stuffing it all down and maintaining the free-wheeling, wild college student persona.

Her flight back to New York left shortly after midnight.  They’d spent the day with Sherry.  Leon <em>could</em> have just dropped her off at Dulles early and let her sit in a terminal for a few hours, and gone home to drag his weary body into bed.  Something wouldn’t let him do it.  He offered to buy her food that wasn’t ramen and that didn’t come from a street cart.  She’d been casual and coy but the way she was eating the meal in front of her betrayed her casual air—Leon felt like maybe it’d been a minute since she’d had what could pass as a real meal.  She was a college student, and she was perpetually broke.

Not for the first time, he thought of the divergence of their lives that he himself had orchestrated.  Claire was a broke, hard-drinking menace with soft spots who was probably too unruly to live in a dorm, pulling all-nighters and blowing into DC now and again to continue her mothering of Sherry.  He was property of the US government, constricted in a suit or sent off to be drilled and trained in new and inventive ways to kill people.  He had no life.  He drew in paychecks that seemed obscene.  He was probably rapidly encroaching on hard-drinking himself in his scant downtime.

Blankly, he watched Claire eating.  At least they didn’t seem to fight much, anymore.  In the beginning, after it all, after Claire had come back to the States, it’d been round and round.  He couldn’t forgive her for leaving; she couldn’t forgive him for making his deal with the government and the outcomes it had meant for all of them.  They held it together in front of Sherry when their paths crossed, and then post-Sherry they’d be arguing with raised voices over the center console of a government issue Tahoe.

Time mellowed them.  At least Leon knew it had mellowed him.  He was too tired to keep fighting with her.  He didn’t know what kind of acceptance Claire had come to, only just that she didn’t shriek abuse at him anymore or curl into a ball in the passenger seat of the Tahoe with tears leaking down her cheeks.

“I’m not sure you’re going to make it to close to midnight,” Claire said suddenly, scooping up a bite of mashed potatoes and forking them into her mouth.

Leon sat there, arms limp at his sides, leaned back against his side of the booth, head angled off into space a bit.  “Sure I will,” he replied.  “I’m good at going without sleep these days.”

“Maybe you should drink some coffee or something,” Claire suggested.

“I don’t like coffee,” Leon returned, benignly.  “You ever seen me drink it?”

“No,” Claire said.  “I don’t like it either.  But it does what it’s supposed to do.”

“Yeah.  Ten Cokes will do the same thing,” he said.  “I’ve only had about three today.  That’s the problem.”

Claire made a little noise, looking down at her plate.  Summer had faded into fall; Claire sat across from him in a hoodie and some jeans.  In some ways Leon was thankful summer was over—the occasional sight of Claire in crop tops and cut-off shorts was driving him to new levels of self-abuse and all-consuming guilt over it.  With dismay, he realized her being fully clothed didn’t make the urges go away entirely—they were still there, whether he could see her skin or not.  “You can drop me off at the airport,” she said.  “If you want to.  If you need to.”

“What’re you going to do at the airport for four hours?” Leon asked, with a sigh.

She looked over at him.  “I dunno.  What are <em>you</em> going to do with me for four hours?  You look like your brain checked out two hours ago.”

“I always look like that,” he returned, even if his brain had in fact checked out some time ago.  “It’s fine.  There’s nothing to do but drink in airports, anyway.”

Claire let out a dry, humorless chuckle, gathering another bite.  “Have to have money for that,” she said.  “I’ve got about 24 dollars to my name.  Airport beer is beyond me.”

Leon looked over at her evenly, watching her eat.  “Hard times,” he said.  “How do you do it?  Life in New York City.  If DC’s expensive, New York’s another tax bracket entirely.”

She sighed a little.  “Grants from the government,” she said.  “Allowance from Chris.  It doesn’t go far.”  She shrugged a little.  “I’ve been poor my whole life.  It’s not like it’s a shock to me.”

Leon sat there, tiredly, gazing at her for a long moment.  “Do you need help?” he asked, finally.

She looked up at him, chewing, her bangs framing her face.  “No,” she said, evenly.  “I manage.  You’ve got enough to worry about.”

“I really don’t,” Leon said.  “I’m too busy to have many worries, at least ones related to relationships with people.  I just kind of go from point A to point B, in an endless loop.”

Claire nodded, her blue-grey eyes looking at him.  “I don’t need your money,” she said.  “Buy stuff for Sherry, for me.  I’m fine.  But I can’t get her the stuff I’d like to get her.”

“Oh yeah?” Leon asked, muted.  “What’s she want?”

“Stuff to do,” Claire said.  “Things that make her feel like a 14 year old.  Books.  Nail polish. Stuff for her hair, like barrettes and stuff.  CDs.”  A corner of Claire’s full mouth pulled up at him, minutely.  “She’s got access to MTV in there.  She’s developed a taste in music, independent of anything we exposed her to.”

“Let me guess,” Leon said, “me exposing her to metal via the metal Monday program on the radio back in the day didn’t take.”

“Not at all,” Claire returned.  She was pushing the last remnants of food together on her plate.  “She’s into boy bands.  Pop music.  NSYNC.  Britney Spears.  Backstreet Boys.”

“Jesus, we failed her,” Leon said in dry, subdued amusement.

“Trust me, I’m equally heartbroken she didn’t take a shine to Queen or the Allman Brothers or something like that,” Claire said.  “But then again, that’s just…more stuff adults have forced on her.  She wants to be 14, even in captivity.”

Leon sighed, watching Claire clear the remnants off her plate.  “Fine.  I’ll buy her whatever kind of CDs she wants, but I’m not going to be happy about it.”

Claire looked at him for a long moment, her face unreadable, and she swallowed her bite of food.  “You don’t seem happy about much, these days,” she said, quietly.

She had him, there.  He managed to keep it all under his hat and put on a cheerful face for Sherry, taking on the big brother cum guardian persona, but once they were out of her presence and it was just he and Claire, he felt like the experience of assuming the persona drained half his life force and made him feel about 60 years old.  He really <em>wasn’t</em> happy about much, these days.  There wasn’t much to be happy about.  He sat there in silence, considering her words, not really knowing how to reply to her.  “Are you happy?” he asked instead.

Claire’s face went minutely tired, like she’d expected something else out of him and was disappointed she hadn’t gotten it.  “As much as I can be, I guess,” she said.  “It usually goes fine if I can keep my head under control and keep bad memory theatre from taking over.  My therapist calls it emotional dysregulation, and negative self-concept, and a bunch of other shit.  I dunno.  If I don’t let myself think, I usually do okay.”  She pushed her empty plate away from her.  “Are you happy?” she asked, measuredly.

He looked back at her for a long moment.  “No,” he said, and his tone almost had a hint of realization to it.  Normally he was good at doing what his father had told him to do his whole life, which was be a man about things and endure his suffering in silence, and get out of bed every day and carry on because that was what men did and that was what people expected of a man.  He was tired; his defenses felt worn down.  He felt like he hadn’t seen a face that contained empathy in a long minute, maybe since the last time he’d been around Claire and Sherry.  He certainly wasn’t finding it in the faces of the government operatives around him.  “I’m not,” he added, with dull finality.

Claire looked like she had long expected this answer out of him, but him being so open about it also seemed to disarm her and throw her off balance.  “Let’s run away,” she said, finally, in an undertone, her eyes big and imploring.  “Let’s steal Sherry and go.  I don’t need college and we don’t need the government.  Let’s do it.”

Leon looked at her, in silence.  “I don’t want to run away,” he said.  “I want to go home.”  He sighed a little, gazing into space.  “I want to go home and run the shop.  I want to do manual labor the rest of my life.  I kind of wish I’d never wanted to be a cop.  Got me into this whole mess in the first place.”

Claire looked like she didn’t know what to say.  “Maybe I never should have left home, either,” she murmured.  “Just settled for what I was kind of destined for.”

“And what were you destined for?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” Claire said, furrowing her brow.  “Not much, probably, like everyone in my hometown.  Staying there forever.  Getting married too young.  Having kids.”

He blinked at her. “Is that what you want?”

She shifted, similarly leaning back in her booth like he was.  “I… no.  I didn’t want that.  Everyone told me I had airs about myself.  I guess I kind of did. I was dirt poor like most everyone else and one step away from being a ward of the state, to boot, but I constantly wanted bigger and better things.  Maybe I did expect too much for myself.  I dunno.”

“I don’t think you ever stopped wanting what you wanted,” Leon said.  “You were momentarily derailed, by everything.  But as soon as you could, you went right back to it.  You went to college.  You went back to the big city.”

“What about you?” Claire asked, almost hesitantly prompting.  “What did you want?  I don’t think it was to be in hiding with me and a kid.  I don’t think it was the government.”

He cocked his head at her, leaning back in the booth, looking up at the ceiling.  “I don’t think it matters, anymore,” he said.  “It is what it is.”

Claire was looking at him, her face somehow seemingly pleading.  “You always say something like that,” she said.  “Forever.  You constantly insist what you think or what you want doesn’t matter until someone forces it out of you.  I feel like I only ever know what you want when I argue with you.  <em>Then</em> you’ll say it.”

“’But now you must put them all away—anger, wrath, malice, slander, and obscene talk,’” he said.  “Colossians 3:8.”

Claire sighed.  “So that’s it?  You just keep your mouth shut forever even though you’re miserable?  What’s the Bible say about hating your life?” she asked, tiredly.

“’I could complain but who’s gonna listen?’” he said, instead.  “Da used that one all the time with customers in the shop.

Her face was softly adamant, her eyes imploring.  “You have to complain.  You probably should complain all the time.  You should probably be screaming at the top of your fucking lungs.  Leon, your life is—it’s fucking ruined.  You said it before, yourself.  In an argument.  And I didn’t want to hear it, and I think I told you to fuck off or get off the cross or something generally bitchy but…you’re right.”  She looked down at her empty plate.  “It’s fucked.  And I feel like it’s our fault.”

“Whose fault?” he asked, his eyebrows pulling together somewhat.

“Mine,” she said.  “Sherry’s.  We shouldn’t have been your responsibility.”  She made a noise, looking off into space.  “Maybe we shouldn’t have had responsibilities.  I feel like people are constantly telling me I’m a kid and these are the best years of my life.  We were kids.  Were these supposed to be the best years of our lives?”  At 21 and 23, Leon knew most people would have still considered them kids.  Leon had not felt like a kid since that night in 1998, and he knew Claire felt the same.

“Maybe,” he said.  “It’s not your fault.  Yours or Sherry’s.  Shit just…happened.”

Claire’s brow furrowed as she stared out into space, her face helpless.  “Why am I the only one without consequences?”

“You’ve got consequences,” Leon said.  “You call me after nightmares, every once in a while.  You jump at loud noises.  I think we all got the PTSD consequences.”

“I mean my life,” she said.  “Sherry’s an experiment and you’re a dog on a leash.  Why am I free?”

“Because that’s how I planned it,” Leon said.  “That’s how I planned it for Sherry, too, but the government had other ideas.  At least half of it went according to plan.”

“What about you?” she asked, her tone small.

“I’m gonna be fine,” Leon said, looking at her concerned face.  Concern somehow made her look <em>younger</em>.  He didn’t know what to tell her.  He didn’t know what to tell himself.  This was just the way it was, and he needed to be a man and get out of bed every day and endure it.  “It’s not the end of the world.”

“You’re not happy,” she said, still small.

“Lots of people aren’t happy,” Leon said.  “Maybe it’s a temporary condition.  I think—sometimes I think it’s all still too close.  And I can’t let my old life go.  I think some acceptance would go a long way towards happiness.”

She looked at him silently, her face disbelieving, her eyes big and shining.  Leon thought of the faces she made, in his downtime; she had incredibly expressive eyes and always had.  She wasn’t always great at hiding the way she felt via her face.  Leon had been like that at one point too, but he was being conditioned into something else.  Claire still had reason to express an emotion.  Leon was losing those reasons.

“Come to New York,” she said.  “Let’s just have—let’s have one stupid, dumbshit, fucking out of control weekend.  No worrying about Sherry.  No suits.  No government.  Just…party.  Like we were never able to.  Stay out until the bars close at 4.  Just go nuts.”

Leon looked at her, imagining drinking himself to oblivion in a bar in New York as opposed to in his apartment, alone; he imagined standing too close to her in public, laughing, holding onto her, acting his age.

In the back of his mind he imagined kissing her, and he roughly tamped the thought down.

“I don’t know that I could hack it with you,” he said, dryly.  “I’d probably die.  And I’d have to ask for permission to go, which would probably be denied.  They’re still trying to whip me into shape.  They don’t let me go very often.”

“You should ask,” Claire said.  “Keep asking until they say yes.  I don’t know if I’ll stay in NYC once I graduate.  You have to come once.  The mother of all blow outs.  Just stupid and drunk, until we don’t have any problems.”

Leon looked back at her, silently.  He remembered a few years ago, after Chris and Claire had returned to the States and been in DC, Chris had groused something.  <em>My sister is either running straight into a problem or away from it as fast as she can,</em> Chris had said.  It was an apt assessment.  Claire had decided Leon’s problems could be solved by running away from them.

Inside, he knew he wouldn’t let himself run.

Leon thought of the time after Raccoon City, waking up with Claire’s hair in his face, her body under his arm; once she left he thought of waking up with Sherry, the young girl’s head pillowed up on his shoulder because she said she was scared to sleep alone after Claire left.  He thought of his mother and brothers mailing him endless pictures, memories of the life he didn’t live anymore, and he looked at them all with a certain feeling in his chest and dutifully attached them to the front of the fridge in his small apartment.  He thought of weekend barbecues, and church potlucks, and standing around in the garage at his parents’ house with high school buddies, drinking beer and invariably looking over some kind of car with the hood open.  He thought of his mother’s endless supply of casserole recipes, thought of Claire managing to make pancakes in hiding, thought of meals he’d shared in the company of family and loved ones.  

He imagined a normal life; sometimes his thoughts of Claire veered from the pornographic and he thought about things like going to the grocery store with her, watching her fold laundry.  He thought of the kind of life his parents had, and his brothers had, a life with pictures on the wall and rings on fingers and family dinner around the table.  He’d been on that trajectory, until everything.  And now it was gone to him.  Probably forever.

“Leon?” Claire asked from across the table, gently.  He let his eyes refocus on her, and she was looking at him inquiringly, hopefully.

“Do you want pie?” he asked, instead of whatever he wanted to say—that he was scared he’d made his life not worth living anymore, that he drank too much at night when he looked at the pictures of family on his fridge, that he did want to run away with her and Sherry and live in a little bubble with them the rest of his life, that he longed to go to New York and be ignorant and irresponsible with her.  “I want pie.”

She continued to gaze at him like she wanted desperately to say something, her eyes sad.

“This place has really good coconut cream pie,” he went on.  “I come here a lot.  You should get some.  Unless you’re one of those people violently opposed to coconut.  I can’t remember.”

“I like coconut,” Claire said finally, instead of whatever she probably wanted to say.

“Great,” Leon said, finally forcing himself to move for the first time in several long moments, righting his limp body off the back of the booth and leaning forward to the table some.  The waitress was behind the diner counter, and Leon looked over at her, and after a moment she felt his eyes on her and looked up, quickly moving over to them.  

“Sorry, I was rolling silverware,” she said, standing next to their table.  “You need something?”

“Yeah, can we get two pieces of coconut cream pie, please?” Leon asked of the middle-aged waitress.

“Sure, honey,” she said, picking Claire’s empty plate up from in front of her.  “You need anything else?”

“I’m alright, thanks,” Claire replied, with a small smile.

“I don’t think so,” Leon said.  The waitress moved off, and Leon leaned on the diner table, folding his hands in front of him.  “Ma used to make German chocolate cake,” he said.  “Lots of coconut.  We were a house divided.  Half of us would eat it, the other half were coconut-haters.”

“Yeah?” Claire asked.  “I don’t know if I’ve ever had it.”

“Straight to jail,” Leon said with a heavy breath outward.  “That’s criminal.  You’re not living life.  You need to try German chocolate cake.”

“When I graduate college,” Claire said suddenly, “Chris is going to help me buy a house.  I can’t be stuck in some apartment somewhere.  I’ll go crazy.”  She was still peering at him with sad eyes.  “You should come visit.  I don’t know what we’d have to do to let them let Sherry go.”

“I dunno,” Leon said evenly.  “Maybe it could be swung.  We’ll see.”

For a long moment they just looked at each other across the diner table, Leon forcing his face to be blank and nonchalant, Claire looking at him like she was waiting for the answer to something to present itself.

The waitress returned, setting two chilled plates of coconut cream pie down in front of them, then holding two forks out to them.  “Here you guys go,” she said, and they took the forks.  “Holler if you need me.”

They both cut into their pie, sky high with filling and cream, and took a bite.  Leon looked down at his piece of pie, swallowing, cutting another bite.

“You’re right,” Claire said, quietly.  “It’s good pie.”

“If there’s one thing about me,” Leon said, bite on the fork in front of him, “it’s that I’m going to sniff out a baked good no matter where it is.”

“Leon,” Claire began plainly, “I’m worried about you.”

He put the bite of pie into his mouth, looking at her somehow eager face.  “I’m fine,” he said.  “I’m always fine.  It’s the only way I know to be.”  He looked at her, chewing.  “Eat your pie, Claire.”

Claire’s mouth hung open for a moment, like she had more to say, and then she shut it and instead looked down to her pie, cutting off another bite.

This was just the way it was.  Leon had been told to be a man about things for as long as he could remember, and he’d been trying his whole life.  As a man, he stuffed his fear and revulsion in Raccoon City down and moved with assurance.  As a man, post-Raccoon, he’d maintained what kind of life he could for he, Sherry, and Claire until it all unraveled.  As a man, he’d made the deal that put them all where they were—him in government service, Sherry in tightly controlled observation, Claire in the wind making the kinds of decisions a 21 year old made.  He’d done it to keep them safe, to hopefully make them happy.  As a man, he figured it was the least he could do.  A noble act.

As a man, he couldn’t let on that he felt like he’d fucked up.  He couldn’t let on that he was scared of what he was becoming.  He couldn’t let on that most days he saw no point to it all.