How can you know who you truly are? Are you certain that the reflection you stare at every morning is really your own face?

I’m not.

I feel more a part of the flames swallowing up the building behind me in a mouth of light than what I’m supposed to be inside of this body. Committing another’s crimes will, inevitably, turn you into a demon puppet. Except worse. Because you’re human.

And when humans lose their humanity, any existing evil knows well enough to stay in Hell, because you and I…well, we can be a whole other breed, wrapped around the one last shred of the person we thought we would always be.

Every muscle in my body pulls me forward, begging to be released at a dead run, but I struggle against the adrenaline, forcing a slow walk that allows the guilt to wrap me from behind. The angry shadows thrown from the blaze behind me make the ground appear as though it’s shifting, deepening, ripping a chasm dark enough to swallow me whole.

God, I wish.

Nobody ever thinks about the simple things a criminal does in the dead of night, minutes after committing their crime. I personally like to jog back to my Brooklyn apartment, letting all of my anguish escape my body with each slap of my feet on the pavement. Theft, fraud, extortion, vandalism, arson. I’m dripping with remorse, but I sweat it out of my pores, wicking it away into the corners of the sharp night air, because it is only a small nuisance, overpowered by the fact that the end will justify the means.

Truth. That is the chase that leaves this string of madness in its wake.

***
The morning air is the cutting edge of an icicle as I walk briskly down the early morning street. The rising sun paints the historic buildings in a glowing light, radiating the colours of late fall around me. Despite its best efforts, it hasn’t managed to scare away the memories of the night before. Images of angered heat slicing through the pitch-black sky flash before my eyes, bringing back the strangling guilt that I thought I had cut apart and thrown into the blaze at the crime scene.

I shake my head, knocking my thoughts loose and rolling them around my skull until they are broken and discernible. By the time I step into the shadow of Left Bank Books, my anxiety has disintegrated to a mild hum. The door to the used bookstore creaks open, and a rush of hot air instantly spreads its warmth throughout my chilled skin.

“Hi!” I smile and wave to Andrea, the spectacled bookworm who, in between pages of whatever “light read” she had going at the time, would run this cozy oasis of literature.

“Good morning Riley,” she replied, glancing over her glasses first at me, then the clock. “You’re here early.”

“Yeah, I figured sleep deprivation might kill my writer’s block.”

Andrea’s laugh sprinkles around me like tiny droplets of rain. “Ain’t no rest for the wicked, huh?”

Again, images of the night before flicker in my peripherals. The corners of my mouth struggle against the weight of her words, finally managing to force a smile. “Guess I’m living proof.”

I hope my voice was inflected with more humour than ominousness.

Weaving my way through the unmistakeable smell of millions of well-worn words nestled together, I eventually find the familiar back left corner of the store. The light is dim and the oak has faded a shade or two less on the overflowing bookshelf in front of me. My eyes skip to the right, eyeing the book.

The book.

Its red binding has slowly frayed at the edges, but not quite enough to make you notice its misfortune. It’s inconspicuous. Invisible. Perfect.

The only reason I took notice of it two months ago was because of the initials engraved into the spine. AL.

Allan Limerson. My father’s initials. The running joke of ours was that he wanted to be buried in a book when he died. He told me with a sad smile that it was the only way to live eternally, because words were everlasting.

We buried him in the ground.

Next to his nearly unidentifiable body.

Only because no book was big enough to capture the essence of his soul.

A few tear-stained months, and several hundred miles later, I found this book—or rather, it found me. It reeled in my heartstrings and wrapped them around and around my chest until this coincidence pained me. With a reluctant anticipation, I slowly reached over and slid the book off of the shelf, catching the split binding on the sharp oak edges. The stitching tore a little deeper.

Like my conscience.

When I flipped over the blood-red leather to reveal the first page, I threw it to the ground with a small gasp. What I saw had to have been a mistake.

I am grieving, I am clearly hallucinating this.

Calm the hell down.

No amount of rationalizing could cushion the jackhammering of my chest. Looking around me to make sure no one was witnessing what appeared to be my first mental breakdown, I bent over and retrieved the violated book. It was lying spread open on the floor, the middle pages folded over on themselves like broken bones. I’m sure I even heard it let out a little scream. Closing my eyes long enough to take a pre-emptive breath, I forced myself to stare into the waiting face of that first page.

At first, nothing. Then, my ears were muffled by the harsh confusion rising up through my body, crashing down behind my eyes as wave after endless wave of unfiltered emotion. Clearly, I had known nothing about death. Neither had the coroners.

Hello Riley…What took you so long to find me?
     -AL

Now, I stand in the same spot, but with my feet depressed in the visibly worn footprints on the beaten ancient hardwood. Every day since that fateful morning, I’ve come back to this book. To my father.

What my life has become is because of him, but it is also for him.

First, let me explain something to you. Rationality is subjective when you lose someone close to you, and when they mysteriously step a foot back into your life, there’s not much you wouldn’t do to drag them all the way in. As you saw last night, my outcome of this situation isn’t pleasant, but with each “assignment”—as I call them—my father spells out for me in the book, I gain a piece of knowledge that brings me closer to finding him. I’m convinced he’s being held captive, and his torturers are turning me into a criminal to test the limits of my love and loyalty. Or maybe he’s just lost his mind.

There are over a hundred pages of correspondences between the two of us, and

…with each one I step closer to the truth, and sink lower to Hell.

Page 28, dated September 30th.

This was my message to him.

It took him three days to respond, I imagine because the pencil he was holding would keep tripping clumsily over the aching words he’d try to write. Or maybe I’m just projecting.

At any rate, he did finally respond, saying that he knew what he was asking of me was wrong, and seemed “…more insane than Hemingway after his shock therapy,” but that I must continue, nevertheless. I knew it was the only way to find him—free him—from the grasp of whatever rogue gravity was holding him back.

Now you know the story. Judge me if you must; compartmentalize my irrationalities if it so suits your desires, but don’t even think you can try to stop me. Trust me, I’ve tried, but a brain and a heart can’t walk in two different directions without pulling the body apart.

If I can’t stop me, then no one can.

My mind is tugged back to the present as I feel the book almost pulsing between my hands, as if it’s red-hot angry that I haven’t opened it yet. Or maybe it had captured some of the fire within its textured pages. Forcing away another vision of last night, I pull open the book to the last dog-eared page.

*Approximately 3 torturous lifetimes (seconds) later*

I’ll tell you this right now—I really should not have done it.

***
Night isn’t as romantic as people make it out to be; I think they’re just trying to convince themselves that the black sky and inky air are products of infinite souls, on the clock from 9:00 pm to 5:30am—that their job is to breathe magic and mystery into the air, swelling it up like a balloon until all that enchantment pushes the sun halfway around the earth, quietly chanting all the way, anything is possible. I beg to differ.

See, tonight feels like drowning. I’m sure you’re saying it’s ironic, since just twenty-four hours ago, I had set a fire that no water could contain. It’s not ironic, though, it’s just plain morbid, because it isn’t water I’m struggling against. It’s the night itself, dripping with the blood emptied from all of the evil I have fostered.

Thick, black blood.

It started earlier today, as I stumbled through Andrea’s quietness, desperately reaching for the exit, book concealed under my coat. My feet wouldn’t slow until I got home. Once I set foot inside my house, I crumpled inward like a piece of useless paper inside of a clenched fist. Soundless wails tore holes through the noise wrapping up my mind. And no matter how many tears or litres of bleach I poured onto that god-forsaken page, my last assignment refused to disappear.

Riley,
This is the last step to finding me, so I am begging you to please find the courage to do this. I need to be able to finally see you…Tonight at 11:30, there will be a man in boots and a black leather jacket standing on the near end of the Brooklyn Bridge. When you see that man, you need to tap his left shoulder, and when he turns around, push him off of the bridge. I swear that tonight you will finally be able to see me, and you will know the truth. Riley, I realize this is asking too much of you, but it is the only way.
I love you,
AL

All day, the words would never leave me; they might as well have been tattooed on my face. Where it hurts. I relived everything I had ever done for this man, all of the petty crimes and the misdemeanors, then the felonies like last night’s destruction. I ran my fingers over every page of that book, convincing myself for the thousandth time that this had to be my father. The body lying in his grave was misidentified, and he was still alive somewhere, now in New York, and he needed me. I was meant to save him, and heroism is forever a by-product of sacrifice.

But was it really my sacrifice to make?

Every so often, when this thought would stretch my stomach and pin it painfully to the floor, a scream of rage would claw its way from my lungs up to my brain, but I would supress it. There was no blood.

At least, not yet.

That came later, when I turned to that last page for the final time. My eyes wouldn’t blink or snap or break away from it, and with moving just my arm, I grabbed a nearby pair of scissors. I felt trapped and dying inside of my own skin.

Then, in an attempt to break free, I stabbed the book, hard enough to bruise my hand. But the blades wouldn’t wound the paper, so I ripped out

page after
page after
page
until

The front and back covers slapped against each other. As if they were clapping for me. I imagine that’s when the murky blood started leaking from the confessions in all those papers. I had broken the bonds, and some type of dark honesty had to come leaking out. I didn’t really notice it until it invisibly pooled around my feet, and soaked up into the sinister sky outside my window.

There is no magic. Only pain.

And now I’m standing twenty feet away from the Brooklyn Bridge, trying to breathe when all that is filling my lungs is cursed destiny. I can see the man, bent at the waist, leaning slightly over the railing with his back to me. I can picture him staring wistfully out at the city lights.

How bright they must be for him. He can’t see the blood.

My body moves forward. I don’t. I’m stuck up to my elbows in a cement of fear and doubt, cured with adrenaline. I want nothing more than to see my father, to free him, to know the truth, but if all of this is somehow a lie…

Dad…
I’m not sure it’s you…
But I believe you…
This isn’t like you…
I need to save you…
It’s not worth it…
I promised I would!
I’d rather die a monster than live as one.

My mind grabs hold of a thought. Palms over the texture and heat of the words. A decision is made.

I can’t believe what I’m about to do.

I take a step forward, snapping back into my shell of a body. Inhaling deeply beneath my closed eyes, I slowly walk towards the leather-clad man. His fate has been decided.

He flinches when I tap him on his left shoulder.

“Yeah?” he says as he instinctively turns around.

I give the stranger a sad, wavering smile. His brow pulls in to the centre of his face as the streetlights bounce off my tearstained cheeks. Before he can ask me what the matter is, I give a small disappointed laugh.

“You’re not who I was hoping to see,” I say, moving to stand beside him. I place my hands firmly on the bridge railing. He joins me, watching me with confusion as I stare out into the night.

“But you know what?” I ask shakily as I pull myself up onto the thick handrail. “I feel free.”

***
I’m not sure if he yelled or screamed, or if he tried to stop me from falling. Maybe he just walked out into the noise of the streets and never looked back. I guess you’ll have to ask him to find out.

All I know at this moment, is that someone’s life had to end today, and it’s for the best that it is mine. I am just a miserable puppet that has hung itself with its master’s strings. Let the truth

fall
fall
fall
down.

And never reach my ears.