The redeye flight had been rough. Now driving along the coastline road in the south of France I felt my first measure of peace. It was short-lived.
I jammed the car into a lower gear as I impatiently waited to pass a slow-moving bus. The coast ahead clear I flew around the bus that had been holding me back from my destination.
My seaside villa in this remote section of the south of France lay just ahead. I was hoping, but without much conviction, that it had gone unscathed in my brief absence from it.
I lost my hope of that at the sight of the gated entrance busted open. In anger I down geared the car and slipped past the entrance to glide to a stop in front of the villa.
The main door stood wide open. The organization did not waste much time in terms of making a point.
Stepping past the threshold of the home I surveyed the thoroughness of the destruction to my favorite place in the world that was now quite trashed. Smashed furniture and torn apart walls gave silent witness to the fact that they had meticulously searched for all my secret stashes.
It was clear that they intended to make a demonstration of me. Mr. Perfect had finally slipped up and in a way I was the last of the old prototypes to go.
All my new counterparts in the industry were engineered on the genetic level to be what I had been by nature, coldly dispassionate and utterly ruthless. In a state of growing apathy I made my way to the second story, only to see more of the same.
Everything was out of order. Going to my studio I felt hate blossom into a bright flame within me at the sight of the destruction to my one passion in life.
Oil paintings that had taken me years to create lay about the floor shredded into tattered pieces, while the easels they had set upon for display were now only so much broken up firewood. My paints had been smeared upon the walls and floors and the room in its destruction of all its former finery now had a ghastly veneer added to it, as if to say something terrible had happened here.
This was their futile attempt to hurt me before putting an end to me for good. It did hurt, but not as much as they might think.
Nothing quite hurt as bad, as the repeated sound of my own gun going off over and over within my mind. I’d taken the lives of many people and thought myself long distanced from the act of feeling anything, but I’d been wrong.
The whole flight back to France I had been haunted by that moment in the alleyway to the point that I dared not even close my eyes. I hadn’t slept on the flight and now what was the point of doing it now?
Tomorrow they’d be back. Tomorrow they’d come to finish their work in terms of the destruction of everything that was me.
I closed my eyes and again the shot went off. My eyes wide open again I looked about my shattered studio in search of the solace I had in part found here upon many occasions.
Going to a wall I took down a painting of mine that had escaped receiving any more damage other than having paint smeared across it. Taking it across the room I set it up on a desk.
Stacking up enough debris behind it to support it adequately I then went in search of some oil paints. Finding enough to work with and some brushes I began to paint over what lay upon the canvas already.
This painting would be the last one. I’d let them kill me tomorrow. There was no reason to keep playing at living this life, when I doubted I even had the functionality of performing such a simplistic task yet.
I was a monster of intentional creation and hell was where I belonged.