When I wake up, a combination of cereal crumbs and drool crust my cheek. Despite this, I feel optimistic. I even let myself think about next steps. About Costa Rica, where I plan to go immediately after I get the rest of the money from The Man. I heave myself out of the me-shaped hole in the center of the mattress where springs or something like that should be, but, by the way my hips feel, there is nothing but fabric and dead skin cells. Maybe I’ll get some sheets when I get to Costa Rica. That would be nice. Fitted and top and maybe a weighted blanket. Those are supposed to be great. Will I need a blanket in Costa Rica, though? Sometimes, I’m sure, but, definitely sheets. Bamboo. And one of those beds that comes in a box, and some furniture that matches each other. Oh, and knives! Like grown up knives that are sharp and slice right through, that you have to pay someone to sharpen. All the things a person has in a house. Nay, a home.
I bought the land in Costa Rica five years ago. Just land. No house, no nothing except trees and bugs and birds, I suppose. A part of me never thought I would get here. To now. To the last job. That part of me thought I’d be in limbo forever. I guess that’s why the Costa Rica plan is less a plan than most. I was simultaneously pretending I didn’t want it, and wanting it so badly that nothing short of perfection would do and, in the process, rendered myself entirely incapable of making any real plan beyond conception. But it feels good now. I’m glad there is nothing there and it’s all mine, to shape as I will, as I am. I’ve done enough arriving in spaces I have to fit in to. I want this one to fit me.
I grab my computer from the corner where it is being consumed by the hungry couch. I smile at the familiar, daaaaah of it waking up. The coordinates The Man gave me correspond to a home north-west of the Aspen city center in the hills above the high school. It’s in a development, but the lot is large and has no shortage of full, mature trees, so it feels secluded. I first access the exterior cameras, which show a home spartan in its Scandinavian minimalism. A single gable roof runs the span of the home apart from the flat roof of the garage. Large windows leave little to the imagination, but as it’s in the center of its own little forest the risk of wandering eyes is minimal. The way the exterior materials carry into the interior blurs the distinction between in and out with the light wood of the façade mirrored in the interior ceilings and the black aluminum of the exterior trim the same as that of the interior windows. It’s layout is simple given the basic rectangular shape and all the windows. I can nearly create a floor plan without even pulling blueprints or accessing the internal security cams.
Nearly, but not quite. It takes some time getting access to the internal security system, but in the way that cleaning a house does, not brain surgery. Maybe a brain surgeon would liken brain surgery to cleaning a house and hacking a complex security system as the figurative brain surgery. For me it is simply putting some things in their place and finding a suitable place for others; a methodical organization and making sense of things. When I do gain access to the internal system, the perceived simplicity of the task thus far dissolves completely and is replaced by suspicion. I see that every inch of floor space in the house has weight sensors. This is a security measure that would only be necessary if the home needed to be warded against someone that could enter without using a point of entry. A feat that, to my knowledge, I am the only person in the world capable of, let alone in the heist community. My unease around the assignment increases as the, “something about it,” begins to become more defined. The creeping sense of being watched, of being found out, washes over me. I look around the apartment to make sure someone hasn’t materialized within its walls. Its apparent emptiness does little to ease my paranoia.
I shake my head like it’s a magic eight ball and the jostling will somehow produce a different response in me. It does not, but I know that there’s no going back now. All there is to do is the next thing. That thing being how do I bypass this seemingly unnecessary security detail? I see that to avoid setting off sensors I’ll have to input the security code within thirty seconds of the sensors registering my weight. The sensors catalog all feedback and store it, but as long as I input the security code, no one will be alerted of my presence in real time. The code changes every twenty-four hours.
I look to the internal camera feed to help locate the artifact. After some snooping, I settle on a hypothetical space in the wall of the master bedroom. The massive walk-in closet is about two feet shallower in reality, than it is in the blueprints, leading me to believe the back wall of it is false. There is a security panel just inside the bedroom door so this will necessarily be my location of arrival.
The next phase of the process is somewhat less scientific but no less of a skill. I have to become at home in the space, recreating it in my mind and living there, in a way, until it feels safe. The room has a coldness to it in that everything is perfect and nothing is human. The only proof of anyone ever having been there is a jacket hung on a hook by the door. The space is very male in its finishings. Everything from the iron boned, shearling armchair by the fire, to the tan leather bench at the foot of the bed seems to say, “I killed this.” It’s not without its charms, though. The floor to ceiling glass of the north facing wall that rises to a peak with the gabled roof showcases beautiful, snow-capped mountains and a sky so big the breath goes out of me. A black, iron, fireplace bumps out from the wall facing the bed and despite its utilitarianism, feels cozy and grand. The light wood paneling on the ceiling and the black aluminum of the window frames and French doors lend it a comforting feeling of solidity. I memorize every detail, texture and shade of neutral over the course of the next few hours until the image in my mind when my eyes are closed is an exact replica of what I see in the camera feed. When everything down to the industrial looking black floor lamp next to the bed lives in my head as it does in reality, I close my eyes, and find myself in the room.
I walk over to the french doors in the wall of glass and open them, feeling the crisp cold of high elevation on my cheeks. The thinness of the air only contributes to the freshness of it and I hold it in my lunges before I let it gust out of me. Before I step outside, I slide on the slippers sitting next to the door and grab the brown leather jacket hanging on the hook above them. The slippers feel warm like someone was just wearing them, but in a nice way, not in a gross way. I drape the jacket over my shoulders pulling it tight around me and breathing it in. It is supple with wear and smells like campfire and cologne. I bury my face in it, savoring the smell. The smell of him…
I drop the thought.
But hold tight to the feeling. This dichotomy is not singular in this process. It’s actually the heart of it. Because as much as I am trying to feel, I am also trying to suppress. It's like doing psychological surgery. Cutting away the memory that spawned a feeling of home, of safety, and transplanting into a new, blank host, for which I feel nothing on its own. It’s probably my lack of home, or yearning for, that makes me so good at this. My body aches to feel all the old ways but has nothing to feel them about, so when I am prepping for a job it all tumbles out of me, willing to attach to anything, real or not. In essence, I can lose myself in his scent, but I can’t think about him.
After a while on the balcony my nose loses feeling and my cheeks prickle with the beginnings of numbness, so I go back inside. I leave the slippers by the door, but keep the jacket on as I stoop to fill the fireplace from the leather sling of wood next to it. For a moment it is not my hands I see but those of my father, stacking the wood in the dark belly of the fire-place. I feel his warmth, his assurance and I hold onto it, letting his hands become mine again. I crumple some paper from the magazine on the end table next to the chair, put it on top of the wood and strike a match. I sit on the floor, folding myself up and wrapping the jacket around me. I watch the flames eat the papers, the images on them becoming distorted before dissolving, and the logs that go from aspen white bark, to gnarled char.
When the flames reach their peak and the heat gets to be too much I rise, letting the jacket fall into a heap at my feet. I slip into the bed, relishing in the cool of fresh sheets. They smell like outside. As my eyes fall closed, I feel the release of a day passed and the gentle shift of weight on the mattress as my mom eases off of it before creeping out of the room.
I wake up with a kink in my neck, back in my apartment. The security cam footage of the bedroom still plays on my screen, but now it is not of someone else’s vacant bedroom, but a place I have been. One that is a kind of home, but, most importantly, a place to hide.
33Please respect copyright.ＰＥＮＡＮＡ3EeP6URzAL
I begin preparing around 10:30pm the night of the procurement in order to be on location by 2am. I don full body, black spandex, including a black ski mask and black gym shoes. Next, I pack my messenger bag. It’s not like I’ll have to do real travel with it, but I still pack light, taking only a change of clothes, a forged driver’s license, and $500 in cash just in case, a locking, protective case for the item, a couple pairs of latex gloves, a hammer and the safe breaker that I designed. Given the amount of space in the false wall, there are a few options as far as what I may find behind it, and the safe breaker I designed is equipped to deal with any of them.
Up until this part of my process things have been pretty standard. My skill with a computer and experience are exceptional, but within the realm of normal. What will happen next, though, is nothing short of miraculous and I stand alone my ability to produce it. It does come at a cost. It’s weird and hard and where the pain is, none of which is incidental. The weird, the hard, and most importantly the pain are the way. This the door who’s swelling light drives me from sleep, except now, I have to open it, fall into its contents, and let them do to me what they always do.
At first it's not so different from what I did to familiarize myself with the room in the Aspen house. I sit down, I close my eyes and I imagine. I immerse myself in an alternate reality to the point of it becoming real, but this is where the two paths diverge. Where the room in the Aspen house is a safe place to land the other is a catapult. Where one is a fabrication, the other is a memory an where one feels like finding a new home, the other feels like falling down a well, and having no fingernails by the time you reach the bottom.
I struggle at first, try to fight it, as I always do, but I relax, knowing it is, if not inevitable, necessary, to fall. If I could do it without going there, I would, but I don’t know how to do it without remembering. I can’t do it without being there again. Being in the fear again. Being in the rage again. Being… and there they are, the vibrant green leaves of the aspen trees against the chaste white of their trunks, flickering past in my mind’s eye. The loud sound of that old truck with a cardboard muffler carrying us up and up and up as I am pulled down and down and down…
ns 15.158.61.18da2
