Damaged Hearts. Jan St. Marcus

length of the place, and there are these really plush-looking throw rugs in various areas. In the living room, there is this cream-colored couch, loveseat, and recliner arranged so they face the beach. Modern sculptures are sprinkled around, and there’s a really cool, shiny, modern painting that looks like it’s fourteen feet wide and almost ten feet tall. The ceiling is really tall. Between the kitchen and the living room is a small little nook that I guess would be the dining room. Not a formal dining room with a huge table or anything, just a glass tabletop and four white leather chairs. There’s a strip of blue material running the length of the table and on top of that is a stainless-steel bowl full of oranges. I kind of chuckle to myself, thinking that this is some kind of designer’s touch. I mean, anywhere else and I would have thought that some rich douchebag’s wife probably saw it in a magazine and spent like a thousand dollars paying someone to arrange the oranges so that they were “just right” or some bullshit, but right here, right now, knowing the little bit I know about Michelangelo, it looks cool.

      I turn back to the bar and take another few bites and look into the kitchen. It too is modern. The appliances are matte black, which I’ve never really seen before, and the cabinets have that same matte finish, well sort of. They’re kind of shiny, but not really. I don’t know—maybe they’re between matte black and shiny black—what do you call that? Fuck if I know. But it looks really cool with the gray marble counters and gray walls. Oh, and the whole place is absolutely spotless. If I hadn’t actually been here last night, I would think that this was a model home or something. I think about this and realize that if I hadn’t been here last night, I wouldn’t be here today, and I would never have seen the inside of this house at all. I would be wandering up the boardwalk, trying to figure out where my next meal was going to come from. What am I doing? What was I talking about? Oh yeah, the kitchen. Spotless. I pluck a blueberry from the bowl and study it. It’s a really plump one and it has that matte-looking texture on the skin and a bit of it is kind of shiny ’cause it’s wet and I can see the rugged part at the top where the stem was attached and I’m kind of amazed that they taste so delicious. Kind of tart and kind of sweet. And as I’m contemplating whether to eat the whole thing or bite it in half and study the inside, movement from my left catches my attention and I turn to see— Holy shit!

      It’s Michelangelo and I swear, if I wasn’t sure I was kind of sane, I’d think I had walked into the pages of a fashion magazine! Okay, I know that last night I thought he was gorgeous, but then I thought that might be overstating things, but now I’m absolutely fucking sure that he is gorgeous as fuck. He’s wearing black jeans that are straight-legged, but not those ridiculous skinny things that the hipsters wear. And the legs are kind of tucked into the top of his leather boots and he’s got this off-white button-up shirt that hugs his muscles, but not like he’s showing off. They reveal enough to let everyone know he’s got a great body, but it’s not like he’s screaming for attention. And he’s got a black leather messenger bag just thrown over his shoulder like it’s no big deal. And here’s the thing—as good as he looks, something about the way he stands there looking at me gives me the impression that he just threw this stuff on without giving a second thought as to how he looks. Damn. And his eyes are blazing that hypnotic bright gray and his hair is short, but it’s just long enough to reveal these curly waves that hug the curves of his head. He smiles and I about melt.

      “I’ll be back in an hour or two. If you’re up for it, maybe we’ll go get you some clothes or something. Sound good?”

      I catch myself still staring and realize that he’s waiting for me to say something. “Huh?”

      He laughs and puts an iPad in front of me. “I set up a profile for you so you can connect to the world if you want. I took Sparky out a little while ago, so he’ll be fine. See you in a bit.”

      “Where is Sparky, anyway?”

      “He’s sleeping in the office. If you want to listen to music or anything, it’s all controlled on the iPad. And if you leave, the doors lock automatically, so you won’t be able to get back in till I get home. Is that all right?”

      “I’m literally not going anywhere,” I say emphatically.

      “Cool. Later.” And he’s gone again. A minute later, I hear this deep, throaty rumble from the garage and, a moment after that, the rumbling peaks and begins to grow distant. I realize that I’m alone again. I run my fingers up to the edge of my lips to make sure that what I think I feel is actually real: yep, I’m smiling. I realize that I’ve smiled more in the last twelve hours than I’ve smiled in the last twelve months.

      4. Michelangelo

      I rarely take my GT3 RS to work or meetings. Driving it always puts me in a great mood, but I don’t want to be smiling like a dumbass in front of the ultra-serious people at Pantere & Associates. Everyone there is kind of nice to me on the surface, but I can feel resentment coming from many of them. Sal Pantere, my pseudo-boss and owner of the company, is always really nice, but some of his senior people don’t really know about my deal, and they seem pretty jealous of my relationship with their boss. And I guess they feel like I haven’t paid my dues or something like that. There’s no way for them to know that the contract I’m working under is not really for Pantere & Associates. It’s through Pantere & Associates and connected to another company altogether. And even that company is not really my boss. I’m actually a mathematician and computer programmer. I work in secret for NSA developing and maintaining these complex algorithms to help them with their super-secret spy shit. That’s not too technical, but unless you have at least a master’s degree in advanced mathematics and a TS/SCI security clearance from the US government, there’s no chance you’d understand.

      When I was an undergrad, I developed an algorithm that I later sold to a huge credit card processing company to help them detect fraud (that’s the short version of the story). I spent about a year as a consultant with them, helping fine-tune the algorithm and was paid enough to set me up with my beach house and my first Porsche. That was five years ago. Then I get approached by these nice men who refused to give me a business card when we talked. We met a bunch of times, and then finally they offered me a job at NSA. Okay, funny side-story about NSA. The letters stand for National Security Agency, and they are responsible for securing, monitoring, and surveilling electronic communications for the United States. You have probably heard of Echelon, the super-secret satellite and computer program that purportedly captures and monitors every phone call, email, and text message all over the world, right? Well, I can’t say whether or not it’s really a thing, but if it were a real thing, my algorithm would be able to help them sort through the billions . . . no, trillions . . . of pieces of data collected every day more efficiently.

      Back to the side story: So back in the 1950s, when CIA was created, there’s this story about how the agents of CIA never said the CIA. It was always just CIA, and someone asked why that was. After all, prefacing the name with the word “the” seems natural, right? “I’m with the FBI” seems more natural than “I’m with FBI,” right? So one of the guys who founded CIA answered that question by saying, “You don’t say the God, right? It’s just God.” That story is really funny if you work at CIA. It’s really obnoxious and arrogant to everyone else. But that’s the whole point. People at CIA don’t give a rat’s ass what other people think. I don’t have a comparable story about why people who work at NSA use the same idea about not including the in front of the letters, but they do. So these guys were NSA, and they pursued me mercilessly for about six months before we had the meeting. This was where the head of the agency flew out in a private jet and basically told me that my country needed me and I would be a selfish piece of shit if I turned them down. And he also kind of made some veiled threats about how much “better” my life would be if I were with them as opposed to the “difficulties I might face” if I didn’t.

      I was this twenty-two-year-old kid who recently became a slight millionaire, living in a pretty cool beach house and doing consulting from home most of the time and, all of a sudden, I’m pressed into government service. But I didn’t go easily. I made them match the consulting fees I was getting from the credit card company, and I got some other perks (which