He retreated into further solitude. This seemed, to him, the natural path. He was nearing seventy. He settled in California. The coastal aspects of the state never suited him, but he found a pleasant refuge in the Inland Empire. Communications between himself and his sporadic employers were infrequent and uncluttered by niceties. All the vicious men he had known in his earlier days were, for the most part, now either dead or incarcerated, the natural conclusions for such lives. Still, someone of Unruh’s history and reputation will never fully be unemployed, as long as damaged and angry men have access to grudges and money.
So, at a certain point, he was connected with a younger man of similar vocation and temperament. A killer by the name of John Sung, who was half-Hawaiian, half-Japanese. Sung’s ethnicity was unusual among the network of people who employed him, which was comprised almost entirely of white men of European heritage. In this sense, Sung seemed marked in a similar way to the marking of Esau Unruh’s wine stain: a man set apart, for reasons of happenstance. This endeared him to Unruh.
Sung’s background, Unruh later learned, was tainted in similar ways to Unruh’s own. Sung had been brutalized from an early age by most everyone who came across him, from relatives to teachers to state guardians, the kind of child who draws the attention of predators, and who is therefore taught from the earliest age to believe that brutality is a natural force. That brutality exists in the world like gravity, or electricity, or magnetism, in the air, in the walls, flowing all around us, unseen, and that it’s simply waiting to be given direction, to be applied to one person or another. And that those who do not learn to apply it to others are thereby condemned to be its recipients.
When they met, Unruh felt for the first time in his nearly seventy years of life the sense of encountering a kindred heart.
Sung was similarly perplexed and amused, Unruh would also learn, by the incapacity of most people to imagine the world’s history in the awesome expanse of its entirety, rather than simply as an experience bracketed by the fleeting instant that you happen by random chance to be alive. And Sung’s vocation as a killer seemed to him no more immoral than the kind of ritual exploitation that constituted so much of so-called normal life. In fact, a life dedicated to the perpetuation of other people’s systematic misery—the life, say, of a politician who by corruption condemns whole towns to some toxic poisoning of their water supply, or of a business tycoon whose fortune is built on the labor of interred children in some faraway country—seemed to Sung far more immoral than a life spent enforcing the ultimate punishment of a widely understood code by which people had readily agreed to abide.
Which is to say: the life of a professional killer.
Which is to say: John Sung had never killed anyone who did not expect to be killed. This was the simple truth of his employment. Now, whether death was an appropriate punishment for betrayal, or overweening ambition, or chronic indebtedness, was a question that Sung, given his background, did not feel morally equipped to answer. But the fact remained that each person to whom this punishment was meted out was well aware of its eventuality as the ultimate consequence for their actions—and this seemed to Sung not immoral, or evil, but rather like one of the more rational and elegant manifestations of the free will that we collectively like to imagine we possess.
For this reason and others, Unruh developed a further fondness for Sung.
This fondness was not at all undermined—it was, in fact, amplified—by the realization that the reason their mutual employer had paired them was, in all likelihood, to instill in Sung a more valuable brand of ruthlessness. Esau Unruh was little understood by the men who employed him, but what the simplest minds among them could comprehend was Unruh’s remorselessness. They imagined it must be some sort of inoculation from human empathy, which he might be able to share with others—Sung, for one. As Unruh aged and withdrew monastically from life, they hoped to build or engineer another Unruh. So, his employers, in their lack of understanding, conspired to try to instill his most appealing characteristics in another, younger murderer. To see, in effect, if what Unruh possessed would rub off on John Sung.
The entirely unexpected result of Unruh’s pairing with, and tutelage of, John Sung was that he and Sung fell in love.
This, at least, is how Unruh’s relationship with Sung would be characterized by third parties to him later, and he never took issue with it—though whether “love,” that storied word, was the proper description for his feelings, he did not feel qualified to say. Given that the first and fundamental example for him of what he understood to be “love” consisted of a hateful man who ritually beat and broke a haunted woman, he’d long abandoned the idea that “love” between two people was something he might understand, let alone encounter, let alone aspire to experience. He had dispatched those two “loving” people, his parents, from this earth himself. And he had dispatched many others after them. And he expected one day himself to be similarly dispatched, by man or God or time. Where “love” fit into that, he couldn’t say.
But what Unruh did understand was that, in the person of young John Sung, he had, bewilderingly, and for the first time ever, collided with another living soul whose continued existence on this earth he valued more than his own.
Was that love?
If so, then yes, they were in love.
Their physical relations also struck Unruh as materially different from those in his past, and not just because of the obvious fact that Sung was not a woman. Unruh didn’t imagine that their few brief naked explorations constituted anything similar to the kind of rhapsodic encounters he saw elaborately celebrated in movies or songs on the radio, all of which had struck him as an amusing collective anesthetic delusion cooked up to keep people in line. Sung, for his part, seemed incapable of conceiving of intimate physical contact that was not intended primarily to bring him pain. So their initial encounters were awkward, to say the least. But heartfelt, too. And Unruh, during these clumsy fumblings, came to believe that perhaps these interactions offered Sung a different framework in which to consider himself in relation to the world. As not an object of disdain or abuse. But as something better. That perhaps they offered him a different way to see himself. The way that Unruh saw him.
As for Unruh, the essential lacking at his center was so familiar and profound that he not only never imagined it might be any different, but he accepted this lacking as intrinsic to his being. As, perhaps, the very essence of his being. The very thing that made him Esau Unruh.
But what he found he was learning at this late improbable moment in the company of Sung was that the lacking was temporarily . . . forgettable.
For a few moments.
Just a few.
And that, in this forgetting, he came to consider that maybe the lacking was not everything. Not all the time.
It was not the whole of who he was.
In any case, Unruh was always happy that their hapless physical encounters, bumbling and comical and fleetingly transcendent as they might be, happened in the sanctified privacy of their bedroom, outside the purview of anyone but themselves, and certainly of no concern to their mutual employers.