0 comments/ 115842 views/ 3 favorites Asshole Ch. 01 By: Just Plain Bob It has taken me years to learn to accept my lot in life. I've been called an asshole ever since junior high and I used to take great exception to it. More than a few fights came of it, but as I grew older I learned that it was stupid to get into a fight with someone just because he made a true statement. I am an asshole. How big an asshole you ask? Well, how big of an asshole is someone who seduces his brother's wife less than a month after the wedding ceremony? How big of an asshole are you if you start fucking the woman your dad is going to marry a good two months before they take their vows? That's how big of an asshole I am. Fucking Mary and Elise wasn't something that just happened, I wanted both of them and I set out to get them. I figured Mary would be the hardest, her being an older woman embarking on her second marriage, wise in the ways of the world. Boy, was I ever wrong! I am still not sure whether I got her or she got me. Not that it matters. The bottom line is that we both are getting what we want, and on a regular basis. Getting Elise wasn't much harder and I'm happy to be able to say that both were worth whatever effort that it took. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Dad brought Mary home to meet the family and have dinner with us one night. I wanted her the moment I saw her and the fact that she was eighteen years older did not mean a damn thing to me. After that first night Mary became a regular visitor to our house and eventually she moved in and began living with dad. One night we were in the kitchen together - she was drying dishes and I was sitting at the table, sipping coffee and watching her. She turned toward me and asked: "Why are you looking at me like that?" I smiled at her, "If you have to ask the question you wouldn't understand the answer." She cocked her head to one side and smiled, "I'm going to have to be careful around you, aren't I?" "Not too careful I hope" I replied. She stared at me silently for a few moments and then turned back to the dishes. In that moment the dynamics between us had changed. It was two days before I saw Mary again and I caught her glancing my way several times during the course of the evening. We both knew what I wanted and the looks she gave me seemed to say, "Thank you for the interest. I'm flattered, but forget it." The day my dad announced that he and Mary were going to get married my brother George and I threw a party for them. I caught Mary alone in the kitchen after she'd had several drinks and was in a mellow mood. She smiled at me and asked: "Are you going to mind having me around all the time now?" "Not a chance" I said, "The more you're around, the more opportunities I'll have, and sooner or later I'll get what I want." Mary laughed, "You can't be serious!" I took both of her hands and placed them on my hard cock. "Does this feel serious enough for you?" I expected her to pull away and slap my face, but she surprised me by squeezing my dick. I leaned forward and kissed her on the mouth and she surprised me again by slipping me a little tongue. She gave my dick another squeeze and stepped back. "You are such an asshole. I can't believe that you would treat your own father's future wife like this," and she left the room. Our next encounter took place following a party that my Uncle Bob threw for the happy couple. We'd all been drinking and having a good time and all of us were in a pretty good mood. Near the end of the party my dad came up to me and asked me if I would see to it that Mary got home since he had a few things that he needed to go do. On the way I detoured to a spot that was the local 'lover's lane'. Mary asked me why I'd stopped there and I said, "This is where people go to make out." I pulled her to me and kissed her and she responded. For about five minutes we made out like teenagers and then I unzipped, took out my dick and placed her hand on it. She pulled her hand away, but did not break the kiss. It took two more tries before she left her hand on my cock and slowly started to stroke it. For several minutes she jacked me and soon I could feel myself getting ready to let go. "Let's get in the back seat," I said and Mary shook her head 'no'. "This is all you get from me and for the life of me I can't figure out why I'm even giving you this much." Just then I spit a huge load of cum out of the head of my cock and it went all over the place. Mary laughed, "It's a good thing I wasn't giving you a blowjob - that might have taken the back of my head off." We drove the rest of the way home in silence. When I pulled into the driveway and shut off the engine Mary reached for her door handle. "Don't I at least get a goodnight kiss?" She hesitated and then she leaned toward me offering me her mouth. My mouth touched hers and just as before she slipped me some tongue. I responded, and then we were at it like teenagers again. After several minutes of furious necking I pulled free: "You know" I said, "that I'm not letting you out of this car until I've fucked you." She started for the door, but I grabbed her. "You are not strong enough to get away from me and the more you struggle the more commotion it will cause. Sooner or later someone will come out to see what all the fuss is about and when that happens you are going to have to explain all the cum stains on your dress. It won't matter what you say, it will be your word against mine and those cum stains will be pretty damning evidence." All the fight went out of her. "All right" she said, "Let's get it over with" and she leaned back against the door. "No" I said, "I'm not going to let you just lay there like a log. I want some of the passion you showed when we were necking" and I pulled her to me. It took longer this time, a lot longer, but eventually she had her tongue half way down my throat. Another five minutes and I had her bra off and only moments after that my fingers were in her pussy. She pulled her mouth from mine, "We can't do this" she said, "It just isn't right." "Sure we can," I said, and we did. Once in the back seat of the car and twice in her bed when we got into the house. There could have been a third time, but we were both afraid that dad would be home soon. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ For the next week Mary and I fucked like rabbits whenever we found ourselves alone. And then one night I came home to find her washing vegetables in the kitchen sink. My brother was the only one home and he was upstairs taking a shower. I walked up behind her and pinned her against the sink. I pulled up her skirt, pushed down her panties, bent her forward over the sink and started to work my cock toward her cunt. She resisted at first, but I had her pinned pretty good. Suddenly she relaxed, moved her feet apart to give me better access, my cock found the target and I began to push into her. "Why are you doing this to me?" she said. "Because I can. And because you have the hottest, tightest cunt I have ever been in." I fucked her hard for several minutes and during that time she had at least one orgasm. We were so engrossed in what we were doing that we did not hear the shower stop. It wasn't until I saw movement out of the corner of my eye and glanced in its direction that I knew my brother was standing in the doorway watching. I was almost ready to cum so I motioned him to come closer. He immediately knew what I had in mind and he moved toward us as silent as a creeping cat. When I came I pushed hard into Mary and emptied myself in her pussy and then, instead of just staying and letting my cock drain as I usually did, I took one quick step back and George stepped forward and took my place. His hard cock slid right into Mary's well-lubricated pussy and he began to fuck her with hard, steady strokes. So quick was the change that it hadn't yet registered with Mary. In fact, the first she was aware of the fact that it wasn't me fucking her was when she saw me standing off to the side using dad's camcorder. She was barely able to muster a "You bastard" as she experienced another orgasm. "You know you love it" I said and kept filming. "Besides, every family album needs photos showing what a loving family they are." Half an hour later, while Mary was sucking George's cock and I was fucking her from behind George asked me when dad was due home. "His flight gets in at three" I said. "Great!" said George. "That means we've got her all night." I laughed, "Yeah Bro, we've got her all night." From that night on whenever dad was out of town either George, or me and quite often both of us, spent the night in Mary's bed. She always resisted at first, but then she always gave in. We even fucked her on her wedding day - two hours before the ceremony we were double-teaming her. +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ Since she and dad returned from their honeymoon not one week goes by that either George or I get a taste of Mary. I decided that I needed to move out and get my own place and George met and fell in love with a very foxy lady and he moved out too. Funny thing though, given how she always resisted us, you would have thought she would be glad to see us move out of the house and get our own places. But every time, and I do mean every time, that dad went out of town Mary would call us to come help her do something - move furniture, unclog a drain, or replace a blown fuse. And every time, and again I do mean every time, we would go and we end up in bed with Mary. In fact, George spends so much time in Mary's bed that he leaves an opening in his own and I just couldn't bear the thought of the lovely Elise having that empty space beside her, but that's another story. Asshole Ch. 01 "Thorsen residence, This is Becky?" "Becky, are you sitting down? This is Kent" the caller introduced himself. "Yeah, I'm sitting. I'm surprised to hear from you is all. Its been what, nearly three years since there's been a lead?" Becky scolded. "About that - I'm not sure how pleased you'll be when you hear from whence came the lead," Kent sounded pensive. He continued, "You remember that tattoo that you said Mark had when you two were married.. Ah, shit. I mean when you two got married.. Well, someone turned up in Phoenix with a tattoo on their left ankle that looks like little more than a five pica smudge. It could be a script letter." Becky nearly shouted into the phone, "Well, why the fuck don't you ask the asshole if he's my husband?" "Becky, the asshole with the tattoo is at the county morgue." Kent heard the phone fall on the floor and what could only have been a banshee wail, "FUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUK!!!" he held the phone away from his ear. He heard fumbling as the phone was recovered. He could hear noises that sounded like snot in a bong, Becky was losing it. Her nose was a copious runner when she was upset. "Does it look like him?" More snuffling. "Doesn't he have ID? Dental records? Anything?" Kent didn't want to cause her to go into hysterics but the authorities needed something to help them identify if the cadaver was, in fact, her husband. Considering what was at stake here, he needed to find another way to identify the body. "The guy at the morgue doesn't have any ID. He's around 5' 10", 145 pounds. Most of his teeth are gone, they look to have been pounded out of his mouth by the way the mandible is set wrong and the bone loss around the gums. Some were proper extractions, the ones in the back." He took a deep breath. "Listen, Becky. You need to know that the guy at the morgue was run down in the street. His face took a lot of the hit and his shoulder is crushed. His left hand was de-gloved when the car tire braked over him. The police are investigating it as an honor killing involving a Jordanian family. He was alleged to have pushed the girl out of the way of the car before he tripped and the girl's father ran him down instead. Some people at the homeless shelter knew him, but only called him 'Asshole'." "Oh!" Becky choked on a sob. "No! no no no no! NO! That's not HIM! It can't be!" "So, what do you have that would help to identify him? Do you have any record of fingerprints, DNA? Anything we can use?" asked Kent. "We'll need to go there. To Phoenix. Can you find someone to watch Erica while we go? We need to move fast. They want to inter the body quickly, so we'll need to either stake a claim or let them do their thing." "Oh, fuck. This can't be. It can't be him. Asshole! That's the last thing I said to him before he ran out. Literally... ran... out!" Becky couldn't control her voice any longer. She was crying hard enough to give herself hiccups. "Becky, I'll fly to Phoenix this afternoon and meet with the county coroner. You try to find something that will help us identify him positively. Maybe get a swab from Erica. We'll need to be absolutely sure its him in order to get a release on the trust and the estate if it is him." Becky looked behind her. She stood up and ran her fingers over the drywall into which the ring was embedded. She'd done that many times over the years since it was flung there. The paint was worn now and dark right over the hole. The metal still bore a rusty hue from dried blood that was on the wedding band from when Mark had torn it from his finger and threw it like shuriken into the dry-wall. She gathered herself together enough to use a letter opener to pick it out and drop it into a Ziploc bag trying not to touch it too much. The ring had been there for nearly six years. It served to remind her of what she was missing, what she longed to have returned to her. She never realized how heavy the ring was as it dropped into the bag, the edge of which she held pinched nearly slipped from her fingers when it slid down the letter opener and plopped unceremoniously into the bag. She remembered for the first time in years how he'd play with that ring between his thumb and pinkie finger, twisting it and sliding it up and down the knuckle of his ring finger. Maybe here was the tissue they needed to dismiss the good barrister Kent's suspicion that her husband was now an unknown homeless person rotting in a Maricopa county morgue. She picked up the phone. +----+ "Hello?" Stefan answered the phone. "Stef! It's Becky! Kent thinks he found Mark! He thinks he's dead! In Phoenix! It can't be! I can't.." "Slow down! What do you mean, thinks he found Mark? We thought he was out of the country. I always wish I knew what'd happened before I setup that trust for him six years ago. We couldn't even find out if he'd used it after the way it was built." "There's a guy. He's at the county morgue there, he's got a tattoo like the one you and Mark got in seminary. Oh, Stef! It can't be him!" she sobbed again on the phone. "Phoenix. That makes sense since he picked up Emily in Flagstaff after he ran out. I checked and she was gone after you told me he abandoned you. I'd already had our accountants setup the trust and he resigned from the board. Is Trish there?" That seemed to bring her around a little. "She's upstairs sleeping. I was going to tell him I was pregnant that day he left. I have to go down there. I can have my parents meet me at the Pittsburgh Airport so I don't have to drive all the way up north to Indiana and back down tomorrow morning. They want positive ID, but the way... the way he's... They want DNA or fingerprints!" "Oh, shit! Let me line things up tonight and I'll try to get there tomorrow with you." "Can Catriona come? I don't know how I'll.." "I'll see. She's out of the country again. Something with her mother. I'll fill you in tomorrow." +----+ Stefan boarded the plane in Chicago and sat down next to a tall woman with brownish red hair, the frizzy way she wore it looked unkempt with mad streaming curls hiding her face. She was searing a high collared, sleeveless knit green shirt and black yoga pants. Not skinny nor chubby, her breasts jutted just past her stomach but she looked fit with the right tone in her arms without being ripped. She looked every bit like the Russian Jewish descendant she was. She'd been looking out the window and didn't notice him board the plane after it stopped on the way to Phoenix. She was wearing dark sunglasses. Her nose and lips looked red and chapped from wiping. She didn't pay any attention to him sitting next to her until another passenger asked, "I think you're in my seat." Stefan offered the passenger his own boarding pass backed by Ben Franklin and shook his head. The other passenger looked at the woman next to him, took the new seat assignment and nodded compassionately. Becky wiped her arm across her nose again and startled, "How did you.." "I figured you would have taken this flight, so I thought I'd jump on and join you." She wiped her snotty hands in her yoga pants and took off her sunglasses. Her golden brown eyes looked like they were bleeding from the crying and the abrasion of her hands. "Thanks for doing this. Kent's already there. I brought his wedding band, I never took it out of the wall until last night. It still has some blood from when he tore it off his finger. I did manage to get a DNA swab from Erica." "Do you mind telling me again what happened that day?" "We've been over and over but here you go again. I knew that Mark had a meeting that day but he wouldn't tell me anything about it. I think it had something to do with your grammar engine that he liked to call it. I never got to talk to him all week about how I was feeling, tired and nauseous in the morning, he seemed so agitated all week about that Friday meeting. "I had confirmed with our doctor that we were indeed on our way to finally growing our family. Kent came over to pass off documents that Mark needed in case the meeting went bad. My ankles were swollen so he was giving me a foot rub on the couch when Mark nearly tore the door off its hinges. He was mumbling and his eyes were wild, scanning back and forth without moving his head." Stefan said, "Oh, my." Placing his hand to his mouth in an apologetic way to let her know to continue. "When Mark finally looked at us, he yelled 'What the fuck is going on here!?!' I mean, Mark knows Kent is gay as a Christmas goose. This was no seduction! "Anyway, between my finely honed skills at confrontational management and fine social grace, I shouted back, 'What the fuck does it look like, Asshole!'" She stopped to choke again on the sob that gripped her entire chest. Every passenger around them was now staring. Stefan looked at them, held his palm out face down in a "Put down your guns" gesture and looking around said, "She lost her husband." The faces turned away to return to the in-flight magazines and shopping catalogues. Stefan took her snotty hand in his. Her hand was nearly as big as his, pale and freckled. She still wore her wedding band and engagement ring on it. It felt strong in his, but quivering. "Go on" he gently prodded. More slurping as she cleared her sinus yet again. "I've never been afraid of him before. No.. That's not right. I've never been so afraid _for_ him before. I thought he was trying to break his finger off. When he pulled his ring off he must have peeled his finger like a banana with his fingernails. I barley noticed the flip he did with his wrist, but I heard a metallic ping on the wall between Kent and me and felt the blood drops on my face and arms. By the time we looked where the ring hit the wall and back to Mark he was gone!" She clutched his arm and felt very tired, leaning down to put her face on his shoulder. "You're gonna snot all over me you know." He pushed her back, lifted the armrest between them and pulled her back into a hug. She wasn't crying now and her voice sounded timid as she continued. The plane was in the air now and he barely heard her finish. "Kent got up to chase after him. I was kind of pissed and shocked at the same time. His car was still there. Kent laughed. 'He went on foot! This shouldn't take long.' I had to remind him that Mark was in marathon shape, even though he wasn't fast he could be more than a mile away by now. We drove around. Found his jacket, nothing else. The police found his wallet later. All his credit cards were gone and the cash but it looked like whoever turned it in had used the cards. They had some video surveillance from Macy's and from some gas stations where I guess the fuckers test credit cards at the pay pumps to see if they were working or not without having to hand them to a clerk. Mark never used them that night. He threw his pants in the trash with his wallet." Stefan looked down at her. She looked up at him. Her eyes were the golden brown of a chocolate lab. He took a deep breath and sighed. "I suppose its my turn now to help fill in some of this blind spots? Can we wait for the beverage service?" To be continued... Asshole Ch. 02 Compared to Mary (who really wasn't all that hard) getting to Elise was a piece of cake. About three weeks after my brother George married Elise, he had to go out of town on business. He asked me to look in on her from time to time to make sure she was all right and to do whatever I could for her if she needed help. The first day he was gone I called Elise and asked her to have dinner with me ("I know how lonely you must be this being your first separation, yadda, yadda, yadda) and she agreed. I took her to a place where they had good food and a dance band. I kept her wineglass full all through dinner and by the time we had finished eating she had quite a buzz on. She readily agreed when I asked her if she would like to stay awhile for some dancing and I ushered her to a table in a fairly dark corner of the club. Elise started drinking vodka tonics and every time she would get up to go to the ladies room I'd get her another double. There were a few other people there that we knew and I invited them over to join us, but by ten o'clock they had all left except for Gary and Frank. Also by then Elise was a very happy drunk. She was on the dance floor with Gary and I had just ordered her another double when Frank said to me: "If it works let me know. I've always wanted some of that." I gave him a big grin. It was around eleven-thirty and I was dancing a nice slow one with Elise. I figured it was time to make my move so I pulled her close and pressed my stiff cock into her and held it there. She giggled, "Naughty boy. You shouldn't do that. All you boys are being naughty tonight." "They just like you Elise" I told her. She giggled again, "I know what they like and they are just being nice to me because I've got one." I smiled to myself and thought, "Time to go!" We finished the dance and went back to our table. I ordered another round 'for the road', a double for Elise, of course, as she made one last trip to the ladies room. Frank looked at me, "Don't forget, okay?" I had a particularly evil thought, "Give me a number where I can reach you in a hurry" and Frank wrote down his cell phone number for me. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ On the way to her house Elise giggled and talked the way silly drunks do. "All the boys were naughty tonight. They kept poking me with their thingys. That was a naughty thing to do, wasn't it? Why were they so naughty? They shouldn't be naughty, should they?" I told her that it was all her fault, "If you weren't so sexy their thingys wouldn't get stiff." She reached over and put her hand on my crotch. "Oops! That was naughty of me wasn't it? Your thingy isn't hard." She pouted, "You don't think I'm sexy? I thought you were my friend - I thought you liked me." This is as good a time as any I thought, and I unzipped myself and brought out my hard cock. I took Elise's hand and put it on my stiff dick, "Still think I don't like you?" She giggled, "Bad boy. Naughty, naughty bad boy" but her hand stayed on my dick. She giggled some more, "But I guess I'm being naughty too." The first time was on the living room couch. I undressed her and then myself and just as I was getting ready to push into her she giggled again, "I don't think I'm supposed to do this now that I'm married. I don't...oops" she giggled as I drove home, "Too late." The second time was in her bed and when I'd gotten my rocks off I picked up the bedside phone and called Frank. "Get over here and give me some help. The front door is open. We are in the bedroom, just come on up." Elise hadn't even noticed me on the phone. She lay on the bed giggling and dragging her fingers along her cunt lips and then she would hold them up and look at the cum on them and giggle, "I'm a bad girl - I've been a very, very bad girl" and I said to myself, "And baby, you ain't through yet!" Twenty minutes later as I was stuffing Elise's 'brown eye' Frank came into the room followed by Gary. Frank said, "He's always wanted a taste of her too so I brought him along." While the two of them undressed I concentrated on pumping my load into her ass and when I had cum I got out of the way and let Frank take my place. Elise didn't even notice - she had her eyes closed and was moaning (thank God the giggling had stopped) "I'm a bad girl. I'm being bad. Naughty, naughty me." I left the room and went looking for George's video camera. I found it and grabbed one of his tapes (only fair, right? His wife, his camera, his tape - had a kind of symmetry to it). When I got back to the bedroom Gary was kneeling in front of Elise holding the back of her head while he fucked her face. Frank was still plowing her ass: "I can't believe how tight she is, even after you were there. Your brother must not use it." For the next hour I taped Elise, Frank and Gary as they worked their way through various positions and couplings. My favorite was when Frank fucked her pussy while Gary fucked her ass. I didn't fuck Elise any more that night, not because I didn't want to, but because if I did either Gary or Frank might have picked up the camera and filmed it. If this tape ever surfaced I did not want to be seen on it. When Frank and Gary had worn themselves out and left I took the camcorder and zoomed in on Elise's face - she looked dazed and then she smiled and blew a kiss into the camera. I panned down the length of her body, rolled her over and got a shot of her gaping asshole with all of the cum running out of it. Then I went home and slept like a baby. ++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++== The next day I went over to see Elise. She had a murderous look on her face when she came to the door, "You bastard! You lousy rotten bastard." "Hold on" I said, "Is that anyway to talk to the man who's going to make you a star? The man who will make your name a household word?" She looked at me, "What are you talking about?" I walked past her into the living room, put the tape in the VCR, turned on the TV and hit the 'play' button. And then we watched as Elise, Gary and Frank filled the screen. Elise, a stunned look on her face, dropped heavily onto the couch and I joined her there, We watched the tape in silence and when I felt the moment was right I exposed myself and took her hand and placed it on my cock. She didn't pull it away, instead she asked, "What is it you want?" "Simple" I said, "I just want you to fuck me anytime I want. Me, and maybe a few of my friends." I put a hand on the back of her head and pushed it down. Just before her lips closed on my dick she said, "God! You are such a fucking asshole!" I smiled, "Yes! I know!" Asshole Ch. 02 While the airplane was queuing for a turn on O'Hare runway behind five others, the stewards and stewardesses began to take the stage for their live safety show, complete with seat belt extenders and colorful yellow masks with surgical tubing. Becky suddenly realized where she was in the crook of Stefan's arm and with both her hands on his chest pushed herself away. She lowered the armrest and leaned against the open cabin window. "Kate would kick my ass." She paused. "How come you never liked me? I mean for Mark. As his wife. You never talked to me. You still haven't. I talk to you and you say you'll look into it, whatever 'it' 'it' might be, but you never ask about me or Erika. You took the God-Father job, but we never see you." She looked down at her hands. "What about all that shit about looking after her spiritual growth, guidance and development?" Stefan leaned away from her, eyeing her like a pestilence in a petri dish. He looked up at the stewardess who smartly clipped and then un-clipped her lap belt extension to show the passengers how they work. The stewardess, "Shelly" on her badge, smiled at him for paying attention. He looked back at her. "Well, you know, as a follower of Christ, I'm never sure how to behave around the murderers of our Heavenly Father's only son." He looked at her in earnest. "Fuck you! Jesus was a Jew, just like me and just like his murderers." She smiled down at her lap when he laughed at her. "In Judaism, we're all the sons and daughters of God. And since he was a Jew himself, I can see how you'd get confused thinking he was the only one since he's the only Jew to whom you Christians pay attention to spiritually. You're happy having the rest of us in Hollywood or working your banks. You keep up that attitude and me and my folk just might do it again next time he pops by. No. Really. Stefan. What the fuck. Why wasn't I ever good enough?" She had leaned forward in her seat and the left side of her face was leaning on the seat in front of her, her hands clasped in her lap. He looked up again at the stewardess, Shelly, as she scowled behind her mask and demonstrating a gentle "tug" to start the flow of oxygen. His eyes still on Shelly's performance, he uncrossed his legs and leaned forward in his seat, elbows to knees and clasped his hands like hers. "I guess I never knew what to make of you. You were always kind of a bitch. And with Mark, well, being Mark. I didn't know what to make of it, so I just had to stay away before I... Sometimes I try to fix things that aren't broken." He looked at Becky again when Shelly put the inflation tube of her vest in her mouth, demonstrating what to do if the automatic canisters fail to inflate the vest subsequent to a water landing. Offhandedly he said, "Water landing is a happy way to say 'Crash.'" Shelly heard him and hit him with the vest she'd just removed. "Have you ever looked at a thing from which the sum of its parts all looks fine, but when you look at the actual parts it doesn't make sense to you that they would ever be viable as the building blocks of that fine thing?" he asked. She sat back and looked at him oddly. "You realize that you've just described a healthy organism with a disease, right?" "Yeah, I do." She waited a while. "So you think I'm a disease to a healthy marriage?" "No, I think you're both the disease and the result was a healthy organism. Sort of like how patients with MS can get anti-inflammatory relief from having been infected with a parasite. You're both fucked up. I just have a bad case of foot in mouth and knew to leave well enough alone before I tried fixing one thing while jeopardising the other." She turned away from him, sat back and looked out the window, moving her left elbow to the arm rest and pinching her lower lip as she thought about what he'd said. He sat back too as the plane began to make the last turn before gathering speed to lift off. +----+ Stefan woke up when his tray table dropped. Two airplane bottles of scotch accompanied a short cup of ice on the tray as he tried pushing himself up from a slouch and trying to stretch at the same time. He heard Becky laughing next to him. "Fucking Kate fell in love with that face waking up every morning?" She poured a small bottle of red wine into a cup like that which Stefan had for his ice. "You would do well to have the courtesy to leave the kind, lovely and gracious Mrs. Martin out of this until she may defend herself" he replied curtly. "And we were just starting to get along so well. Why'd you have to go and pull your dick out?" She crossed her arms and looked at the window. The shades were down on all windows she could reach. "I'm getting to be an old man. Old habits die hard and I just woke up. Thanks so much for the drink. I'm surprised you remembered." "I remembered a conversation where you spoke of the fine attributes of barley based whiskey and how corn based whiskey reminded you of cheese pizza flavored vomit with bourbon sauce." He snickered. She pushed up her tray table and lifted the armrest again. This time she crossed her legs in the seat facing him. "OK. Enough mystery. What. Do. You. Think. You. Know." She lifted her wine to her lips as she said the last. Stefan looked at his ice and decided that both bottles should dilute evenly. After he poured, he kept looking at the drink and started, "Mark is probably the craziest person I think I've ever met." +----+ "He wasn't crazy like a college fraternity pledge or Evil Knievil. I mean he was full on UFO's and conspiracies and secret underground bunkers with drugs in the water, Stay Pufft Marshmallow Man is after us crazy." He sipped his whiskey and looked at her. She didn't move. Her eyes imploring him to go on. She didn't look at all shocked by his statement so far. "So, 1989. I can't even tell you why, but somehow we wound up getting assigned to the same dorm room at seminary. He's in Spiritual Studies, I'm in Linguistic Anthropology for our vocational studies. "And we really suck together. I'm constantly badgering him about his organizational skills, how he can't remember anything, slovenliness, mood swings, I was like his cheer coach wife!" he laughed. "He's bitching at me because I can't find a place to stop - I think of two plus two equals four but I start thinking about all the different ways to have two plus two and can't stop. That's an exaggeration, but I'd like to impress upon you that I've got an attention disorder. "So eventually, we're both assigned to this project to try to develop the "Q" gospel. It's a German idea about 'Quelle,' or 'Source.' The Mark gospel came first, but the Matthew gospel and the Luke gospels both came from Mark and have features not contained in the gospel of Mark. Those features must have come from another source, "Q" because of elements Matthew and Luke share but can't be found in Mark. We got as far as we could with existing sources which were already translated, but eventually our research fell short. The sources we were working with were already translated from the originals. We decided we'd see if we could go to the source again, the 'Quelle' as it were." He looked at her to make sure she was following. She translated, "So Matthew and Luke both had some definite parts of Mark but they had additional bits from some other place in common, like they were both children of Mark but had DNA from another parent. You both were trying to pick out the additional bits. You wanted to recreate the other parent." He agreed. "Yes!" "So what did this have to do with my Mark?" she asked, frustrated. He sipped his drink again, holding it in his mouth, steadying himself for the comforting burning that he knew he'd be rewarded with after swallowing the dry but sweet malted liquor. "It gets kinda complicated, but in 1995, we wound up going to the Vatican archives to view those sources. Mark always had to work hard to remember things, but if he practiced them over and over, he'd master the concepts and tasks. I was one of those savants that had a photographic memory. Maybe photographic isn't the best way to describe it. I can memorize patterns. They could be muscle, ocular, oral, really anything that can be trained to be repeated. I was really good at picking up things like languages, music and texts. Mark was always the guy to apply things I knew for interpretation. I'm miserable at interpretation. I'm like a recorder. I can play anything I hear, but I can't, say, reinterpret Swan Lake as a reggae music if I hadn't heard Madness do it first. "When we got to the Vatican archives, he started watching me compare the original texts to translations and figuring out how I'd take patterns and apply them to the contextual matching between different languages. My wife will say, 'doncha know' at the end of a sentence, but it's rhetorical to when someone actually asks, 'Don't you know?' "Anyway, Mark had been messing around the last few years with programming and had started learning Perl to do text manipulation. After watching how I was making associations, he started creating a program to do the matching with natural language. He was hoping we could take the original language testaments from the archives and let the computer compare them to the canonical gospels to find matches or even deviations. "The problem with the work we were doing at the archives was that we couldn't take scanners or computers into the archives. That was fine by us, since we had me to record the pages to memory. As we got through the archives, it was getting apparent that some of the vernacular was going to need experts to have the grammar match correctly. Long story short, we open sourced the application and started seeking other linguistic experts to help fill in our gaps." Becky was getting frustrated. "What in the fuck does this have to do with Mark running off?" The second beverage service was starting to come around. He ordered another round. "I've got a captive audience. We still have a few hours to burn while I tell my tale. Maybe I'll even decide that I like you." He chuckled. Becky was fuming. She pulled her feed up and hugged her knees to herself and pretended to be ignoring him. "So 18 months into the project, we had pretty much hand digitized all of the original canonical gospels and the collection of other independently attested sources. It was then that we came upon a collection that we hadn't been through." Stefan was getting excited now. He freshened his drink after the beverage service passed again. Becky ignored the small bottle of wine he'd purchased and glared at him. "What we found was a story about a man who's birth was heralded divinely to his mother. Supernatural signs and visitors accompanied his birth. Growing up, the boy was a precocious student and challenged the philosophers and religious teachers of his day. As an adult, he preached the shedding of material possessions and performed miracles such as the healing of the sick, the raising of the dead, you know, messianic things. Challenging the authorities of the day, he was killed and days later, ascended into heaven and returned to earth, resurrected." He paused and looked at her. "Right. You're talking about Jesus. Why should it surprise you that you found a text about Jesus in the Vatican archives?" she asked tersely. "No, this man was Apolonias of Tyanna. He was a Greek. There's some pages of Philostratus available in the public domain, but here we'd found the complete text. We spent the next two months finishing up entering the text into the computer. I was good for about ten pages a day with total recall, so we finished up right after New Years in 1997. Mark fucking freaked when we finished and I think he had a crisis of faith. When we started running it through the grammar engine, the similarities between Apolonius and Jesus, sorted through by publishing date, if you will, made us realize that the followers of each were going tit for tat about their accomplishments for the three decades after their deaths. It was a playground 'My Messiah's bigger than your Messiah' game only these were learned men. Very few people at that time could write prose." Becky was looking more interested. A head bob from her let him know he should continue. Stefan looked a little embarrassed. "We went out drinking that night to figure out what to do with the new research. We were pretty loaded when we reached an agreement that we should include this in our final work, we wound up getting these tattoos." He took the shoe off his left foot and showed Becky his ankle. It looked like a script "V." "That's the same tattoo Mark had! He never told me why he got it! What does the 'V' mean?" she looked a little bewildered now. "He always said he found a coupon for it when I asked him what it meant." Stefan laughed at that. His drink was diluting fast so he took a big gulp. "I've never even told Kate about this before. It's really an upside down 'A', but the ink is kinda fading now after all these years. It's sort of a nod to Apollonius being the mythological doppelganger of Jesus. A mirrored 'A' would look the same as an 'A', so we put it on upside down. "So on with the story. I always had the idea that Mark had a little bit of a paranoid streak but after finding out that he was a 27 year old who's life had been spent in pursuit of enlightenment from the writings and testament of a band of rogue followers, he got pretty withdrawn. "He looked on the Church as having committed an offense of truth by hiding these documents and others that we came across. Not all shared the same breadth of history as we found with Jesus or Apolonius but there were other documents of other prophets claiming similar divine callings and circumstances as those two. The world settled on Jesus, but to Mark it was a conspiracy. "I had to spend more and more time on finishing the research myself as he had withdrawn into himself. The bishop that was to determine Mark's vocation after our studies concluded noticed his withdrawal. I guess they had a meeting where Mark confessed his misgivings. The bishop told Mark, 'You understand that you can't be allowed to publish this research.' Mark disappeared that night. He took nothing with him other than his travelling papers and the clothes on his back." "Fuck." Becky sat back and opened the airline bottle of wine. She didn't even pour it into the plastic cup. She just pulled right from the bottle and wiped her bottom lip with her sleeve. "Now you've endeared yourself to me!" he laughed. "Thanks. But... So... He's pulled this shit before? How did you know he left and someone didn't force him to leave?" she asked. "I didn't make my vocation either. I left before the summer of '97. I did manage a degree from Notre Dame, but I left Mishawaka and moved to Indianapolis. I started working at an ISP start-up. Even though linguistic anthropology doesn't provide a lot of job opportunities, Mark and I were now known in the open source community so I was able to get a job. They used a lot of open source software, so my name was known to the sysadmins. We started a foundation for the software and that's when I met Kent. He was a lawyer with the Free Software Foundation and he helped get me setup and funded. I put Mark on the board, even though we couldn't find him. Not a trace. No passport usage, nothing. "The newspaper company that owns the Indianapolis Times and some other large market newspapers bought the ISP in 1999 and contributed to the foundation. We applied for and were granted patents on the work Mark did and copyrighted the contributions of the volunteers and Mark's source code. Mostly it was for protection against our getting sued from the larger software houses. Everyone was trying to get into the translation game then, but we were way ahead with contextual grammar matching instead of just replacing one word from the source language with another from the target language. "We had 180 languages and dialects accounted for in the database and they were constantly updating the existing data. With the foundation protected and running with volunteer editors, I went to Ireland for my first real vacation in years." "Where you met your wife" interrupted Becky. "And found Mark!" "Go on." Becky took another pull from her bottle. "So I was backpacking around Ireland and wound up on a small peninsula between Cork and Waterford. I spent a couple days there at a youth hostel and one night a guy came up to me in the tavern and started asking me questions about where I was from, what I studied, what was my business there. After some problems I had in Northern Ireland on that trip, I was pretty used to that sort of interrogation. I knew not to lie about any of it. He seemed to warm up to me and then left for a little while. He came back about two hours later with Mark in tow. "Apparently, Mark had seen me in town and thought I was still with the church and was looking for him. He'd been working at an oyster farm and was packing to run when his boss found him and got him to wait until he figured out who was after him. "Mark had been using his Vatican passport that he'd kept when he had run off. They never expire, you're just expected to give them back when your work is finished. "He told me about how he perceived what the bishop told him as a threat against his life and he panicked. Once he got to Ireland, he never touched a phone, used a computer or even listened to the radio. He read some newspapers if they were left around, but other than that he had no contact with anyone but the local folk. "I spent two days there and finally convinced him to come back with me and let him know about the work we were doing with his software. He actually seemed to soften in front of me when he finally believed that there was no threat to his life. His eyes lost their agitation and I thought he was going to fall asleep right then. "We got back around June of 1999 and he started right back at the foundation with me. We started building an interface to integrate another project that converted digital recordings to text for translation and returning back an audio file of the translation. "He went on vacation in March of 2000 when that work finally went into beta. He bought a '65 split window bus to take with him. He called it 'Emily.' He had trouble with emissions on it, so we got it to pass by detuning it and put a fleet plate on it so it wouldn't have to be renewed again. "The last I heard of Emily, he abandoned it to storage in Flagstaff when the motor seized and kept going on his bike." "And that's when I met him" she sighed. "And now you have the floor. How did two fucked up people like you fall in love?" he asked.