Pandora

*Chapter two of Disposable heroes*




         Everything had slowly melted into a dreaded, daily routine. The alarm clock was set every night, but every morning Samantha turned it off before it had served its purpose. Her mind was too wired that she found sleeping hard; she found shutting off her mind hard. Remaining asleep was harder than initially falling asleep. Everything was routine, except for the conversations she forced on Solomon. The man, vaguely predictable, always managed to say something she hated admiring. He was predictable, but the way his mind worked was unpredictable. Unique.
         Yesterday’s session, because that’s all it could be - a session, was different. Before, it had always been half-hearted flirting; their flirting always different than her peers. Flirting with intelligence rather than sexual desire. Silently, following unspoken rules, always mentally trying to one up each other. Samantha knew Solomon was out of her league before she had ever approached him, but he still responded to her. Yesterday was different, and she feared it had changed everything.
         And then what? No. She needed Solomon, pushing him away was an impossibility. She needed him.
         “You always look so thoughtful. It’s adorable.” Jem announced his arrival with a cheerful chime. Only Samantha could detect the sarcasm in his barely-there compliment. He wasn’t a cheerful person, far from it, but he liked to fake it sometimes. “What’s up?” Jem collapsed heavily onto the stool across the counter from Samantha.
         “Nothing,” Samantha murmured. She idly stirred her spoon in her untouched bowl of fruit loops, appetite forgotten. Jem was just another part of her routine. As if by clockwork, he always let himself into her apartment at six. It was because of this routine that he even bothered waking up early. It was because of this routine that he even bothered eating cereal and showing up to school on time.
         “You talk to King Solomon again?” Jem inquired. The question was just a façade, a mindless means of gaining information from her without assuming too much. He already knew the answer, but he wanted a way to open the conversation without making an accusation. Solomon always managed to make Samantha pissy.
         “Yesterday,” Samantha answered. “I brought him cereal,” she said with a sardonic smile.
         “Well, that was thoughtful. Did he eat it?” Jem asked, curiosity twisting his words into something more than he wanted them to be.
         Samantha shrugged, pushing her own cereal away. Jem accepted the bowl, and shoveled a spoonful into his mouth. “I don’t know. I left before he did. I’ve never seen him eat anything and I spend eighty percent of my free time with him.”
         Jem shrugged in turn. “Maybe he’s into that manorexia shit,” he suggested around a mouthful of fruit loops. He swallowed hard before continuing. “Doesn’t anorexia diminish your mental capacity?”
         “Yes,” Samantha murmured. She watched silently as Jem shoveled another spoonful into his mouth. He ate like a starving man. She knew there was more fact to that phrase when applied to Jem. He forgot to eat sometimes. She, being the good friend she was, always shared her food with him; partly because she wasn’t ever hungry enough to eat the entire meal, partly because she knew Jem could go days before the hunger got to him. “It diminishes everything else too. Forcing your own body to eat itself until there is nothing left is a particularly cruel punishment, but I believe Solomon already hates himself. He’s already punishing himself. It’s not unheard of, for a man to hate himself and yet compliment himself in the face of others.”
         Jem nodded. “He’s definitely better than us, and yet he’ll never be good enough for himself. He’s not stupid enough to starve himself. Or fear eating in front of people. I hear there’s actually people out there who don’t live to eat. Weird, huh? Maybe he’s one of those freaks?” Samantha smiled slightly, a sarcastic smile only Jem could force out of her. Jem didn’t live to eat. In fact, he barely ate to live. Her mind wouldn’t let her sleep, but Jem’s mind worked too quickly, too much that it wouldn’t let him eat.
         “Maybe,” she humored him, watching quietly as he polished off the bowl of cereal. “I don’t understand why it has to be so difficult. What could he actually have to hide? What could he have done? Obviously nothing blatantly illegal, or they’d be records. He’d never make detective if he broke a legit law. Why would you fear a secret that nobody but you knows about?”
         Jem shrugged. Rhetorical questions. Samantha rarely asked questions of anyone but herself and Solomon, and yet Jem almost felt grateful that she voiced her own unanswered questions in his presence even though she knew he couldn’t help her. It reminded him that she didn’t know everything. A flaw for most people, but Samantha voiced all of her concerns, everything she didn’t know. When she admitted her own humanity, it made it seem like less of a flaw. “Maybe he doesn’t have anything to hide, Sam. Maybe he just hates you prying so much that he’s being spiteful.”
         “Spiteful?” Samantha repeated slowly. She rolled the word around on her tongue and in her mind. Could such a word apply to such an enigma? Was it even possible for someone like Solomon to be so…human?
         “Yep,” Jem murmured. “You think you’re playing him, Sam, but what if he’s the one playing you?”
         “Interesting theory, Jem,” Samantha quietly congratulated. No, it hadn’t even occurred to her. She disliked the idea of being some kind of game, but if Solomon was actually playing her, that just said that much more about him. It was no longer enough to acknowledge his distrust toward humans. It was no longer enough to acknowledge his extreme dislike toward sleeping. She needed more. She needed personality forming traits; something more than distrust and insomnia. She needed to know him.
         “He’s supposed to be some kind of genius, right?” Jem asked. He verbally forced Samantha out of her mind and back into the conversation at hand. She nodded mutely at his rhetorical question. “So how come it’s taken him two months already on this case?”
         “It’s taken everybody else ten years,” Samantha offered quietly.
         “Just because everybody else is stupid, it doesn’t mean you’re smart,” Jem reminded her. “Why hasn’t he been on the case longer than two months? He has an entire team, and thousands of police reports.” He paused and reached for the forgotten box of fruit loops. “You know what I heard?” He asked suddenly, pausing once more so that the sound of stiff fruit loops hitting his plastic bowl echoed loudly in the dining room. “I heard that one of Kane’s first victims escaped…like alive.”
         Samantha silently watched Jem fill his bowl once more with milk. “Yes. I heard that too. But if they were to escape, why haven’t they come forth? Why wouldn’t they want to help catch the killer? He’s useless now, but he could’ve been extremely valuable ten years ago when he still contained evidence of Kane on his body and in his mind.”
         “But Kane wasn’t a killer then. His first victim was gone for an entire year before the deaths began,” Jem acknowledged. “Wonder what happened to him. He’s gotta be fucked up, right?”
         “Like the rest of society isn’t?” Samantha chuckled ruefully. “In modern times, a kid like that can fit seamlessly in with society. It’ll be impossible to find him, especially without a name.”
         “You think King Solomon has already considered the possibility of this kid?” Jem asked. “You think he could be looking for him?”
         Samantha shrugged indifferently. “I don’t see why he would even bother. Humans do strange things to preserve their secrets, their traumas. It’s impossible to envision how fucked up he is. And all of that wasted effort in locating him…”
         “But what if he isn’t fucked up?” Jem challenged. He bit down on the spoon in his mouth thoughtfully. “What if he’s in control of his mind, smart even? He could be useful, right? I think Solomon would risk the time for that possibility,” he concluded, his lips moving nimbly around the spoon in his mouth.
         “As do I,” Samantha murmured. “He’s becoming desperate.”
         “Or optimistic.” The spoon returned to the bowl once more and the routine began all over again.
         “He’s not stupid enough to be optimistic,” Samantha grumbled.
         “It doesn’t matter,” Jem said. “What else is he supposed to do? The case is hopeless. It’s been ten years and this psycho hasn’t let up. I’m sure King Solomon has noticed the extreme increase in murders this last year, almost as if Kane were challenging somebody. I’m sure he has enough reason to be desperate and why shouldn’t he be? Why shouldn’t he exploit every out he’s got? The entire country is counting on him specifically to catch Kane. The pressure has to be driving him insane.”
         Pressure? No, Samantha hadn’t ever thought of the ever present pressure enclosing the firm in which Solomon had been forced to work within. She hadn’t even acknowledged how the stress must be affecting the older man, because he’d remained unchanged over the last two months. He appeared untouched.
         “Clever.”
         Jem’s mouth twitched ever so slightly. He wasn’t sure if he should smile at the compliment or frown at the surprise turn Samantha’s tone had taken. Instead he dropped his gaze to the half emptied bowl of cereal and shoveled another spoonful into his mouth.
         Samantha shoved away from the counter and to her feet. “School,” she grunted, walking away. Her general enthusiasm for life and all things of intellect systematically evaporated at the mere mention of school. Jem didn’t think it was possible for someone to dislike school as much as Samantha. She was too smart for it, and yet that wasn’t what bothered her. It was the children, the people she was forcibly immersed in. She hated them all with a heated passion that burned away whatever kindness she’d ever been able to muster.