Cat In An Alien X-Ray

“So why have you stopped being an elusive evil genius and become a confrontational one?”

“I wouldn’t have been elusive if you hadn’t been so hard to find for so long.”

“My fault. I see. I’m told I knew you once.”

“In the biblical sense.”

“That’s too bad,” he said.

“You didn’t think so at the time.”

“I was young and stupid.”

“And in love.”

“Was I, now? A pity I don’t remember the details. First love and all. But your life and my life and how and when we met doesn’t need to be remembered. It’s a story now, in Ireland and here in Vegas. We are legend, Kathleen O’Connor, despite ourselves. What a hell of a thing to not remember.”

“I can make you remember.”

“No, you can’t. That’s one thing you can’t force.” Max thought a moment. “You’ve put yourself in my power. Why? And why now?”

She didn’t answer, instead shifting her body on the chair. He took it for an automatically seductive move, then noticed her right arm was a bit askew on her lap. An injury?

“Aren’t you going to offer me a drink?” she asked.

“No.”

“You couldn’t wait to swig beer in the pub in Belfast.”

“I don’t want to get that close to you.”

“How you’ve changed,” she whispered intensely.

“That was years ago, Kathleen. Maybe you could do with a bout of amnesia yourself. Why hang on to that misbegotten part of that day, to that act, surely only one of a painful, vengeful parade of hundreds, thousands?”

She shut her eyes. “You changed so fast. It had been me, me, me that day, and then it was Sean, Sean, Sean that night and ever after, for always.”

“My cousin died in a bombing. He was a brother to me.”

She hurled herself upright, on her feet. “Men! Men and your brotherhood! All the IRA men were the same. Vengeance for one of their own, and then the other side retaliates in kind, and the women are left on the sidelines as collateral damage and the cause for more retaliation, or just forgotten. I was not going to be left on the sidelines.”

“That’s war.”

“That was you. You just left me there in the park like a piece of trash when word came of the bombing. You hadn’t been like them, caught up in their games of anger and tit for tat. You were from somewhere without a history of the Troubles. You said I was the most beautiful girl in the world. We laughed. I forgot about the Troubles. You said you loved me.”

“I was seventeen, Kathleen. A boy. I’d have been enamored, sure. I’d think I loved you.”

She wasn’t listening. “Then you left me as they always did when they were through using me. Then you had to go and find the bombers and get yourself hunted by the IRA and then become the hunted. Leaving me behind was so easy. I had always been nothing, forever and ever, amen.”

“And that’s why you’ve hated and hunted me and mine all these years?”

“No! It’s because you’re the only one I could have loved.”

Max stared into her bitter eyes sensing past images rising like a tide over the empty beaches of his mind. He hadn’t lied to her. Her beauty was extraordinary, but left him cold now. Or maybe left him with pity. Once he’d seen her with the eyes of love, and for that she’d never forgiven him.

“I think I did love you, Kathleen, as only an idealistic, randy boy can. And so I chose you over Sean that day. I didn’t lose the love. It was overpowered by guilt. By letting Sean stay behind in the pub to die, I couldn’t perpetuate what I then saw as my traitorous happiness. Maybe in time … but by then I’d heard what a … flirt you were. I came to believe you were toying with me and even that you knew Sean was doomed. And then, I sensed your pursuit and thought you wanted me dead too.”

“So it’s like all of my life, a big misunderstanding.” She stepped nearer, confrontational again. “No one in charge knew what went on, and they are very, very sorry. It’s been my job to make them sorrier. And you’re the sorriest of the lot. You’ve remembered you loved me, but the feeling is gone. So sad.”

“Wait. How do you know I remembered that?”

“A little birdie told me far above the atrium of the Goliath Hotel.”

Max knew one feeling he had wasn’t gone—a sense that something bad was in play.

He heard a bit of scuffling sound at the front door, remembering he’d never heard the intruder shut it in order to enter the house more silently.

Kathleen was armed only with her anger, but Max rose and moved to the side of the chair. He didn’t want to shoot her, but might need to tackle and confine her. Who the hell would be at his front door at five in the morning?

“The irony,” she said, interrupting his intense listening, “is that it was all for nothing. Your cousin Sean? He got lucky as well as you that day.”

“What do you mean?”

“A barmaid.”

So Sean had flirted with a barmaid at the pub after Max had left with Kathleen. Good for him. He was a good-natured guy, and hadn’t been feeling angry or jealous when he’d died.…

“I suppose that’s ironic,” Max said slowly, trying to guess her point.