Registry of the Non-Evolved Database
File #14 Oct 2009 00:56
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 Chris Noth |
I always knew my life was going to suck the big one.
That's probably why I came out of the womb crying.
"Put me back in!" I was trying to say.
Fucking doctors.
My dad was a real piece of work, Air Force Colonel, you know the type. I got the belt and so did my brother growing up, but to be honest we were both pieces of shit kids when we were younger. My mother looked the other way, kept her head in the kitchen and then in the bottle and then when I was seventeen all over the garage wall. Dad changed after she comitted suicide, Kevin was in College and he came back to try and pick up the pieces.
Dad never hit us after all that.
Most of my teenage years were spent picking up the pieces of the family. Looking after my dad and trying to build a friendship with him that I never had as a little kid, mostly because I was worried what would happen if he finally decided to put himself out of my misery. It's not hard to see how this could be awkward, getting to know a man long after you've already established that you don't give a fuck about him. Well, I guess a did, a little.
Kevin only stayed until mom's funeral, left not long afterward and continued on getting his degree. I flunked out of High School my senior year and never went back. I was too busy picking Dad up off of the floor when he drank himself unconscious or making sure there were groceries in the house or God knows how many other things.
I got my GED at 19 when Kevin came back home. No amount of fancy diploma was helping him get a job, times were tight and he needed a place to stay and Dad needed a second baby sitter. For a while the three of us were almost like a family, at least for a little while. It wasn't hard to feel the tension in the air at dinnertime, wasn't hard to tell Kevin resented him for mom's death. I did too, I just hid it better for his sake.
When I turned 20 Kevin killed my father in his sleep with a twelve-gauge shotgun. I don't actually remember what happened that night very clearly. There was a lot of shouting, crying, police everywhere. The town we grew up in hadn't ever had to deal with something like that, the Midwest can be so insular to the world's problems.
Kevin managed to get life without parole, he's probably still behind bars quietly rotting away. I've never visited.
After Dad's funeral I fucked off from Nebraska, enlisted in the Navy if only because I knew one of the recruiters was a friend of the family, and because joining the Air Force felt too much like honoring a man who didn't deserve it. You know, they still folded his flag and gave it to me, even after he drove my mother to take her own life. I don't know what it says about me that I kept the flag to this day, yet don't even visit my brother.
Nam was over by the time I enlisted but the world was — and still is — a festering shit-hole of violence. I did my due dilligence at the Great Lakes Naval Training Center in Illinois, met some really good people that I can't remember the names of anymore. Basic was the first time I'd really lived since I was young, first time I ever hung out with people my own age, drank despite saying I never would, and found out I had a way with the ladies.
1979 saw my first real engagement and I was scared as hell to be shipped off to some rocky fucking piss-hole between civilized countries. '79 was the first time I put boots down in Afghanistan, fighting for that country's freedom or independance or whatever the fucking bullshit excuse was to wag our dick at Russia at the time.
I did my part the way any good man in the Navy does to a mostly landlocked mountain nation. Blowing the shit out of things from five-thousand feet. That's right, good ole Avi Epstein had become a fighter pilot. I was stationed on the USS Nimitz and spent more time at sea than in the air, but I still grew to dislike the gray smudge that roared beneath my jet every time I took off. War's never easy on anyone, especially a war you don't really feel like you have any personal stake in.
That's how it felt for much of my first tour of duty, then my second, then my third… and by the time I'd gotten sick of seeing foreign soil I decided it was time to cut my ties before I turned into my father the Colonel. When I left the Navy the COld War was finally ending, the Berlin wall was coming down and the world seemed like it might actually be getting its shit together.
When I came home in '89 I was sick of the ocean, sick of the smell of salt air, but never really sick of being in the air. It's one of those awe-inspiring things I guess, being able to defy gravity and do so while reducing everything beneath you to fiery slag. I had some aggression to get out as a kid.
And yeah, all that? That's how I earned the nickname Aviators. It's not really all that fantastic once you realize I was a pilot and had a penchant for sunglasses; but, shit sticks.
Life wasn't exactly easy for me when I came back in '89. I didn't have anything to come back to, for the most part. No family, no real friends to speak of, just a hometown that didn't feel like home and not enough money to feel comfortable. I moved, unsurprisingly, out from Nebraska and headed out east. I wanted to move to New York, because it seemed like the thing to do at the time, but I just couldn't cut the money to make it realistic. Rhode Island isn't really what most people would call homey but who can argue with settling down in a place called Providence?
Alright, I may've also been looking for someone.
See, back when I was at Basic in Illinois I met this girl named Rachel, gorgeous in the kinds of ways they fought wars for when people used swords and shit. She was a waitress at a diner the boys and I visited off base, we'd hit it off, become close… you know how it goes. She wound up moving away before I was out of basic. She'd been running away from some troubles back home, and I kind've understood how that was. That's how I wound up in Providence, and that's how I wound up meeting her father.
Roy Raith.
Life's kind've funny when you look back on it.
I had shit like finding Rachel, shit luck with everything once I set down my heels in Providence. It wasn't until I started looking for a job guy like me could do that I found an advertisement for Raith Automotive Repair, and you know that's a pretty distinctive family name. I'll go as far as saying in all my years I've only ever met one family with it, and they've had what you could call a profound effect on my life, for good or ill.
For entirely selfish reasons I scored myself a job at the repair shop, found out Roy was a Nam veteran, a bullet I dodged quite fortunately. I never really had a dad growing up, not a biological one, but to this day I like to think that Roy was kind've like a father to me, a good one.
I met Rachel again a week after I started working there, and you can imagine my horror when she had a son, just about thirteen years old. Roy hadn't mentioned it to me, but I'm pretty sure he had a feeling it was mine after the stories we shared. Rachel knew it was, and she told me as much. There's nothing more sobering that looking into the eyes of another human being and knowing that you helped make it.
I had a terrible life growing up, a lot of baggage I'd never told Rachel about, only told Roy the half of. But at the age of 33 I was a father to a son who didn't really know me. I could've left then and there, just bounced and never come back. But I didn't want to be that man, I didn't want to leave that kid knowing he met his father and couldn't ever get to know him. That was the more terrifying possibility than being as terrible a father as my own.
At least I had something of a role-model in Roy.
Rachel and I wound up marrying in 1990, life was — to be honest — pretty good for once. Taylor, my boy, was growing up fast and I was starting to feel like I might not fuck everything up for once in my life. A few years later Rachel's brother came back from the service, and picking him up at the bus stop with Rachel and Taylor was the first time I'd ever seen Jensen Raith before.
Anyone with an amount of military service under their belt can usually tell the people who had some bad time in service. That's how it was for me when I saw Jensen. He looked like someone who had a story to tell, but the kind that would leave me up at night unable to sleep. For the next six months Rachel and I spent a lot of time with him, trying to help him reacclimate to life out of the Army.
Jensen may've been years younger than me, but we hit it off like we'd been old friends. He gave me shit about marrying his little sister, I gave him shit about being a ground-pounding Army jerkoff. It was like hitting it off with Roy all over again, and for a while things seemed pretty good. Jensen came to work at the garage with Roy and I and we'd spend Thanksgiving together, the holidays, birthdays… it felt like a real family.
A year after Jensen came back, in '95, Taylor said he was going to join the Marines. I probably would've backhanded the kid if it weren't for the fact that he had me and Uncle Jensen telling war stories left and right with Grandpa Roy to back us up. Poor kid didn't have anything but pride for the armed forces, and I can't blame him for wanting to go into the Marines. He was good, smart, bright kid. Athletic, sharp as a knife, everything I'm really not.
Rachel was the only one who didn't like the idea. It wasn't our first argument, but it was definitely our biggest. She didn't want her son winding up like Jensen, who according to her came back from the service "wrong." I wouldn't hear it, and it didn't help that Roy sided with me. I wanted Taylor to be his own man. In truth, I was just afraid of driving him off.
I always let him do whatever he wanted, because I wanted him to love me.
Jensen grew distant the next year, and when he left to work abroad with some government contracting job that scooped him up Roy and I both had a feeling that he might've gotten scouted by Spooks. With Taylor signed up during peacetime and trouble on the homefront, I put most of my efforts together to trying to help patch up my marraige with Rachel. It was never easy, really, looking back I probably could've been a better husband.
In 1999 we were expecting our second child, and in September when Emily was born it felt like Rachel and I had made things work. The problem was, it was only working for one of us. I'd thought the second child would give us a fresh start. Taylor had come back to stay with us for a few months, we were starting to be a family again and I just felt… bored. I didn't love Rachel any less, I certainly didn't love my two kids any less, in fact I felt more proud as a parent than I ever had.
But I was living my life for them, and not for myself, and the resentment was driving me up the fucking wall.
In 2000 I was approached by, quite likely, the same CIA representatives who had courted Jensen. Tensions were browing back in a familiar stomping ground of mine and they needed someone with hands-on experience operating in Afghanistan to perform some consulting overseas for military operations. I'd never been big on the whole spooks idea, never been too keen on wanting to be some James Bond kind've guy. But frankly, I felt like I deserved something interesting in my life.
Rachel, of course, pitched a fucking fit.
We had a young daughter and I was going to leave her alone to go galavanting through the desert bossing around people my son's age. She asked if I was doing it to keep an eye on Taylor, and God's honest truth if I had thought for a second that I could've been put anywhere near where he was I'd have done it, but I knew that'd never be the case.
Rachel said some things she didn't mean, I said some things she didn't mean, and I left the US with that sour note at the airport. Six weeks later I was surprised to find divorce papers in the mail at base. I spent the rest of the night contemplating how many people at the camp I could take down with me if I went out guns blazing. I'd never do it, but sometimes it's nice to think about how you could go out. Fantasies, you know?
I called up Roy, we talked, he thought we might need some time apart to think. Told me that a marraige is just a "fucking piece of paper" and that I shouldn't put so much stock into that as I do with my feelings for my wife and family. Roy was a smart fucking man. I signed the divorce papers and buried my head in the sand of my job, and for a while it was good. For about a year, actually.
When the towers fell in New York, I was on the phone calling Rachel in a panicked fit. She'd moved out there after the divorce and despite that she didn't live on Manhattan I needed to hear her voice. I didn't actually hear her until two days later, and everything went downhill from there.
Rachel didn't leave for New York because she was chasing some new job or some sweet piece of ass. She'd left for New York because she wanted our daughter to have the best medical treatment available. I found out two days after 9/11 that my little girl had Multiple sclerosis.
I can't even fucking describe how that feels. Nobody's found the right words yet, I don't think.
Right when I probably should've left and gone home, when nothing else mattered but being there for Rachel and Emily, I couldn't go anywhere. Not now, not after what happened to our country. I was "locked in" to the job I was doing, and it was about to get so much worse.
The tail end of 2001 was when I was appointed the codename "King of Pentacles" and told that I'd be working with a team of four other specialists with the SAC, one of them turned out to be none other than Jensen Raith. There was another tough as nails broad, Adrianne Lancaster, and the baby of the group— this cutthroat psycho-bitch named Sarisa Kershner. According to the rumors running around about her, her father was an ex-spetznasz KSG agent that defected in the 1970s to America. I dunno how much of that's true, but it sure sounds like a spy movie.
2001 through to 2003 was probably the most bi-polar times of my life. High times with the Royals globetrotting all across the goddamned world being the closest thing to super-heroes I thought could've existed coupled with frantic calls back home checking up on my baby girl's health, phone and video conferencing with Rachel, watching my daughter grow up and deal with a genetic disorder without her daddy around, and the two-ships-in-the-night relationship with my son, who was deployed in Afghanistan.
2003 though was when all the happy left.
I found out while I was stationed in Lima, Peru on an assignment. Taylor had been captured by the Taliban, they'd been looking for him for weeks after a video was released of him in captivity. I got the call after they found his body in a ditch, they said they were still searching for the rest of his remains.
The rest.
Of his remains.
I spent the night wondering how to handle the situation, spent the night getting so drunk I don't even remember getting into the fistfight with Raith. He knocked out one of my teeth, I broke his nose, Sarisa and Lancaster tore up the bar trying to get us apart.
He apologized for punching me when he found out his nephew was dead.
The next few months were a blur, and by the time I came home to bury my son I'd cried out everything that was left. They gave me his flag too.
I stayed out of the limelight for a while, stayed back in the states and tried to mend my relationshipw ith Rachel. I was given some leave of absence in light of Taylor's death, and all I could think about was wanting to go back to that rotten shit hole of a desert to kill every last fucking person there just so I could be sure the ones who killed my boy were in the pile.
I started going to AA meetings even though I hadn't had a drink in four months. I just felt like I needed to be able to see people whose lives were worse off than mine. I was actually kind've disappointed by it. I spent a year with Rachel and Emily before Uncle Sam kicked in the door and dragged me back overseas, and I hated every minute of it, right up until I found out the Royals were going balls deep into Afghanistan.
I did some thing there that I don't talk about. We all did, and none of them blame me for it. We don't talk about it, it was war and war is ugly, and this one was personal for the four of us.
By 2006 blood and tears had both run their course when the world just fucking fell apart at the seams. If I was a religious man I would've thought that a nuclear explosion in the heart of New York could've been a sign of the end times, but me? I was frantically trying once more to see who in my family died. For about five days I didn't have any word. I was trapped on the other side of the world, watching America go insane while wondering of my little girl and ex-wife were radioactive ashes.
When I got the call from Rachel that she and Emily were okay, I broke down and cried. They'd been evacuated out of the city, and if it weren't for being at the hospital getting Emily's treatments done they'd have been in ground zero. If I were a religious man, I'd say that was God working in mysterious ways.
But really? Fuck him.
I didn't get to talk to Rachel much in the intervening year. First it was the global search to figure out what the fuck happened and how we let it happen, then it was the Royals fracturing. Jensen going to take care of Roy, Sarisa being called in to Washington to testify in a Grand Jury hearing about CIA misappropriation of funds, and I don't even know where the fuck Lancaster went.
All of the sudden I was pretty close to alone again, but I wasn't about to give up my life. In 2007 I probably should've been surprised when the Evolved were revealed to the world, but I'd lost that capacity for underestimating the world's capacity for twisted humor. I found out Sarisa and Lancaster were both one of "them," and wound up finding myself pulled in to an NSA department on estimating the "Evolved Threat" like it was some kind of measureable force.
I think they threw something like infinity billion dollars at us in the hopes that we could make the world make sense again. There wasn't no amount of money that could make the world make sense.
When Roy passed away in the summer of 07 I attended his funeral, watched Raith get his own flag for the collection, and the next day he was gone. I didn't know what happened to him, not for the longest time, not for a few years until he popped back up on the radar in Russia only to drop off again.
It wasn't until the end of 2008 that the NSA had heard anything about the Vanguard, but that Jensen Raith was a suspected member meant a lot of things were going to change. President Petrelli formed a cabinet, a special anti-Vanguard task force that put Kershner and I back together for the first time in a few years, and this time we were supposed to hunt down one of our own?
I've said it once and I'll say it again:
I always knew my life was going to suck the big one.
Appendices
Distinguishing Features
Avi Epstein is missing his right eye following a series of unfortunate events. He has since taken up a glass eye in its place, often hidden behind sunglasses worn at inappropriate times.
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