The Last Assassin

being.'
    'You want me to tell you I'm hurt? I feel betrayed? Well, I won't. I don't need your shoulder to cry on.'
    'Yes you do, partner. You need someone's.'
    'You're wrong.'
    'I see what you're doing. You got hurt 'cause you trusted. And now you're telling yourself, "See? I was right not to trust, this is what happens when you trust. Well, I'll just never trust again, that's what I'll do."'
    'Are you coming up with this shit yourself, or have you been talking to Delilah?'
    'She sees it, too. But that doesn't mean much. You're so damn obvious.'
    'You know, the two of you understand each other so well, why don't you just take her. You've been spending enough time with her, from the sound of it.'
    'Oh, this is the part where you make the outrageous accusations to insult your friend so he leaves and spares you the burden of having to admit that you're the asshole who pushed him away.'
    I put my elbows on the table and rested my face in my hands.
    'It ain't like that between Delilah and me,' he said, 'and you know it. But it is like that between the two of you. And if you walk away from that now, you are the biggest fool I've ever known.'
    I looked at him. 'She sent you here to plead her case, is that it?'
    'No, dumbass, you told me not to invite her, remember? She doesn't even know you're back in Tokyo, and she's worried about you, too. I'll call her and tell her, otherwise I'll be complicit in your childish nonsense. But if you were smart you'd call her first.'
    I finished my whiskey and stood up. 'Do whatever you want,' I said, throwing some bills on the table. 'I just came back to pick up my money.'

55

    I went back to Rio. It wasn't home, just where I was living for the moment. But I had nowhere else to go.
    I stayed up late and got up late and took a lot of walks. I read some books of the embarrassingly self-help persuasion. None had quite the title I was looking for —
Killer's Ten-Step Conscience Cure,
maybe, or
Your Best Life After Betrayal,
something like that — but I picked up a few insights along the way.
    More than anything else, I threw myself into grueling jujitsu workouts. At first, I thought I was having control issues not so different from what drives people with eating disorders. Then I thought maybe it was some kind of age-denial thing, because if you can do two hours of nonstop matwork in an un-air-conditioned room during Rio's December summer, it must mean you're immortal.
    But as the workouts grew more intense, resulting in a series of minor injuries, I realized what was really going on. I was trying to punish myself. Because, deep down, I knew everything Dox had said to me at Heartman was true.
    Sometimes I think the urge to believe in our own worldview is our most powerful intellectual imperative, the mind's equivalent of feeding, fighting, and fornicating. People will eagerly twist facts into wholly unrecognizable shapes to fit them into existing suppositions. They'll ignore the obvious, select the irrelevant, and spin it all into a tapestry of self-deception, solely to justify an idea, no matter how impoverished or self-destructive.
    And that's what I'd been doing. What had Dox called it? My 'it's me all alone against the world bullshit,' that was it. And to support that bullshit, I'd been deluding myself in a variety of areas.
    For one thing, I'd been making too much of Midori's memory. Yes, we had chemistry. And the time we'd been pursued by Yamaoto in Tokyo had involved enough friction so that sparks were inevitable. But after our split, I wanted to believe that whatever had been between us was unique, that it could never happen again. Because if it was exceptional, it must be an exception, maybe even the exception that proved the rule. And the rule was that I would always be alone, and could never trust anyone.
    But my partnership with Dox didn't fit comfortably with that rule. And my relationship with Delilah suggested that Midori hadn't just been a one-off, either. So now, some wretched part of me was intent on turning Dox and Delilah into exceptions, too, so it could pat itself on the back and proclaim, 'See? I told you so.'
    What I was doing, I was sabotaging myself. Well, it was time I stopped.
    One day, I called Delilah on her cell phone. When she answered, I asked her, 'How would it be if I came to see you?'
    There was a long pause. She said, 'I don't know. How would it be?'
    'I'm not sure. But I'd like to find out.'
    There was another pause. She said, 'So would I.'
    'Where are