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MIND + BODY

A NOVEL

BY AARON DUNLAP

Mind + Body

Pronounced, “Mind and Body.” Alternative formatting, “Mind & Body.”

Copyright © 2008 Aaron Dunlap

Some rights reserved.

This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

To view a copy of this license, visit

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/

or send a letter to Creative Commons, 171 Second Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, California, 94105, USA.

According to the Creative Commons license for this work, you (the reader) are free to:

Share - to copy, distribute and transmit the work to any other party

Remix — to adapt the work, modify its contents or context

Under the following conditions:

Attribution - You must attribute the work to the original author (Aaron Dunlap) by name and maintain any website or contact information, but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work.

Noncommercial - You may not use this work for profit or for commercial purposes.

Share Alike - If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under the same license as this one.

Any of the above conditions can be waived if you get permission from the copyright holder. Nothing in this license impairs or restricts the author’s moral rights or legal copyrights.

ISBN 1440414793

EAN-13 9781440414794

This is a work of fiction. All characters, events, and locations are the product of the author’s imagination.

Real-life products, equipment, and techniques are portrayed as accurately as possible.

Cover design by John Godfrey

www.johngodfrey.net

When it is not in our power to determine what is true, we ought to accept what is most probable.

René Descartes

To believe something, one must imagine that it is more probable than not.

Cyrano de Bergerac

At times truth may not seem probable.

Nicolas Boileau-Despréau

CHAPTER 01

I was seventeen, almost eighteen, the first time I killed someone.

It was kind of an accident, in the same way that bubble gum is kind of a food. I hadn’t set out to kill him, honestly, but I wasn’t exactly trying not to kill him either.

To be fair, the guy was trying to kill me first. That I had most likely broken his arm and nose before he tried to kill me would probably have been brought up by the prosecution at my murder trial, if there had ever been one. If there had been, though, I or my overpriced attorney (I’m assuming that if I had one, he would be overpriced) would have mentioned the extreme duress I was under. My father had recently died, my school life had gone completely out of control, I had more than a little bit of pepper spray in my eyes, and I was acting to defend my life and the life of the girl I was with.

But alas, there was no murder trial. There was hardly an investigation, really. As an average teenager, that night would have probably been the high — or low — point of my young, naive life. It would probably have been the topic of discussion in a lifetime of counseling and group therapy. It might have motivated a period of heavy drug use and the abandonment of friends and family, followed by an inspirational recovery that I might later write about in a best-selling autobiography, that would surely be described by Newsweek magazine as, “A haunting, yet uplifting story of tragedy and the re-discovery of life that every person, young and old, must read.” My life wouldn’t move in that direction, though.

Being put in a situation where you have to decide whether or not to probably kill someone to protect your own life should have affected me profoundly, but it didn’t. It bounced off me like rain off glass.

Around two weeks later, when I killed someone again, this time much more deliberately, I was affected even less. There was no murder trial for that one, either.

I’m getting ahead of myself, though.

If what I’m trying to insinuate is that I’m not a normal teenager, I have to confess that I was painfully normal for most of my life, up until the moment my father died.

It was a usual night; a school night.

I was putting off an English assignment. The document I was supposed to be writing was opened on my computer, but I was watching a movie on TV instead. I don’t even remember what it was called, some B-horror movie on cable about a giant mutated snake was eating people. Said snake was in the middle of eating Wil Wheaton when the house phone rang.

Twelve seconds later, I heard my mother screaming downstairs.

He’d had a heart attack at work, and died on the way to the hospital. He was in his forties and by all accounts seemed perfectly healthy. He hadn’t had a full physical in a while, but it wasn’t like he ate nothing but cheeseburgers. He smoked in college, he’d told me once, but hadn’t since.

Daniel Baker, my father, was a research scientist at the Marine Corps University Research Center in Quantico, Virginia. That is, until that night. Then he was just dead.

The nature of his work demanded a large measure of secrecy. I had a very small idea about what he did up there in Quantico, and we were given no clue about what he was doing when he’d had the heart attack beyond that brief, emotionless phone call.

It’s not all too unusual, where I grew up, for such secrets to infect people’s lives. I’d lived in Fredericksburg, Virginia my whole life. Quantico — a self-contained “city” that’s home to the nation’s largest Marine Corps base, the Marine Corps University, DEA University, FBI Academy, and a few other assorted pillars of dread — is about half an hour’s drive from Fredericksburg. So too is the CIA headquarters in Langley and the Pentagon, and Washington D.C. isn’t all that far, either. Everybody who worked for these societies of secrets tended to live in the suburbs outside of them, like Fredericksburg. A lot of kids my age were just as clueless about one or more of their parents’ occupation. If they didn’t tell us, we didn’t ask. “Don’t ask questions,” is a kind of unofficial motto for the youth of the area.

We knew it wasn’t all cloak and dagger business with fast cars, encoded messages dead-dropped inside payphone Yellow Pages, and pistols under pillows. Even the most mundane of government jobs requires some level of secrecy. In a way, it’s comforting, knowing that the job is being done and that the secrets are safe.

It’s no comfort, however, to a kid whose father had died.

For the next week I existed in a state of disconnection from reality. The edges of the world, my world, were dulled and prodded uselessly at my senses while I walked around, spoke to relatives, bought a suit, attended a funeral, and when not doing any of these, sat alone in my room. The relatives and family friends who came over before and after the funeral wore empathetic faces that squawked of sympathies and if-there’s-anything-I-can-do’s. Sentiments and familiar stories bounced off the walls and mingled with the scents from the floral arrangements. I just sat there, pretending to pay attention, but wallowing in the daze I’d seeped in since I’d first heard, and trying very hard to concentrate on the thoughts spinning around my head.

I wasn’t very close with my father, nor was I very distant. He was just… my dad. A fixture in my life that I assumed would always be there. That he couldn’t talk about his work or anything having to do with it handicapped many opportunities for conversation. We’d talk about school or old movies. He could help with science or math homework, subjects in which I had little interest, with classes I liked like English or history I was usually on my own. He didn’t say “I love you” as much as fathers on TV, if that’s any kind of measuring stick, but I didn’t have any doubts about it, really.

These were the things I thought about endlessly. I thought about my relationship with him, at what his absence would mean for my future. If I decided to go to college, he couldn’t write me a letter of recommendation on prestigious Marine Corps letterhead. He couldn’t help me with the math and science courses that would be required for any degree. He couldn’t tell my mother that, maybe I should get my own place to live and that, maybe they should help pay for it.

I’m not the sort of person who maps out their life with any sort of detail, but with such a huge chunk removed, I felt helpless. I felt like I’d been kicked out of the reality I was happily swimming trough and was now flapping around on the shore of some new existence I hadn’t requested and didn’t want.

With an absurd naïveté that in hindsight could be mistaken for genuine insight, I thought then that my life would never be the same.

CHAPTER 02

One of the very few nice things to come from my father’s untimely death was that I was excused from school for practically as long as I wanted.

I was a senior in high school at the time, and although I did well in most classes I loathed the very notion of being inside the building. If I had been just a bit younger during the Attention Deficit Disorder and Ritalin craze that swept the nation a few years ago, I probably would have been swept up in it. They’d say the reason I was so disinterested in classes was that I couldn’t focus or that my brain was working harder than most other kids, so I should be put on a neuro-stimulant that single-handedly changed the already-aging idea of a school nurse from an applicator of bandages and thermometers to a dispensary of pre-prescribed medications.

I doubted I suffered from any definitive brain disorder, though. I just didn’t like spending all day in a school, being given information and then instantly asked to recall it, and being fed mass-produced chicken nuggets at lunch. The US government, the largest governing body on the planet is tasked with educating its children in everything needed to be successful in adult life, and this is the best they can do? By the end of each day I would always feel exhausted mentally and physically, not from difficult classes but from trying to parse enormous chunks of boredom into pieces small enough to handle without causing an aneurysm. I’d head home each day with the eagerness of a recently paroled inmate and decompress my brain with some television or video games before going to bed way too late and wake up way too early, just to deal with it all again.

I was grateful, then, for the respite from institutionalized learning.

The day after the funeral my mother had an appointment with the family lawyer to go over my dad’s will. At the last minute, someone had called my mom and asked that I come along as well. It was the sort of thing that I’d typically protest, waking up early and going to a stuffy office to hear about the particulars of section whatever, paragraph blah, but it seemed like it would make a useful distraction from the mental

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