Over and Over: Part One

**I wrote this one about two years ago, I think. The premise I original had back in middle school, but I used it here and made it a little darker. It's still quite rough; I haven't worked on it every much since the original draft, so it's going to be a bit sloppy in the diction department and flow, but I figured I'd toss it on anyway. I'm also not sure of the title; if anyone has any suggestions, feel free to send your input! Thanks for reading, and part two will be on its way soon!**

The white door to the interrogation cell opened and I walked into a long rectangular cinder blocked room with one fluorescent fixture blinking from the ceiling. At a small grey table, sat a young man in his mid twenties, hands cuffed together and chained to the table legs bolted into the floor. He watched my entrance with cold blue eyes.

            I sat down across from the young man and lay a folder on the table. I opened it and quickly skimmed of the pages within.

            “Well Mr. Mencher, I take it you have been informed as to why you’re here.”

            He nodded, the bored blank look on his face unchanging.

            “We’ve been following your activities for some time now,” I continued. “We placed you at the bombing attempt in DC as well as a kidnapping in Ohio. But you are primarily known to us for your arms trade with terrorist cells, can you tell me more about this?”

            “What can I tell you that you don’t already know?” he answered.

            “Your intentions for starters.” I leaned back folding my hands on the table top. “You associate with Islamic fundamentalist terrorist organizations and yet you are a white male with a Jewish-Polish surname born in New York City. Considering your background, you are the last person we would suspect of being involved in such crimes.”

            “You must have dug deeper than that,” he answered, the corner of his mouth upturned.

            “We have.” I tapped at the file. “Your birth certificate bears the name Brian Peterson. You changed your surname to Mencher when you were sixteen.” I paused and watched him for any significant reaction.

            “Oh, but you have even more than that.”

            I scrutinized his face. He watched me like a man watching a movie he had seen a hundred times before, able to recite the lines word for word, yet he reveled in this; he was waiting to see my reactions. 

            I closed the file and pushed it to the corner of the table. “Since you already know what I’m getting at, why don’t you fill in the blanks?” I beamed at him with stern unimpressed eyes.

            Mencher sighed and began, “During the Cold War, in 1960, there was a man named Mencher who was involved in the U-2 Incident. He was a CIA man who leaked to the Soviets that this plane was conducting a surveillance mission over the USSR. These facts were never made public knowledge and are still buried in some top secret archive, most likely never to see the light of day. But the aspect of this story that truly interests you is that the Mencher from 1960 was born William Maas and changed his surname to Mencher when he was sixteen.”

            He recited my Intel exactly. Him being the same man was impossible. The man in 1960 had been thirty-eight years old at the time making him eighty-eight today and I sat before a man maybe twenty-five years old. What I didn’t like was the coincidence. “I want to know how you know about William Mencher. I would have hazarded a guess that you were related to him somehow, a grandparent, a great uncle or something along the line. I would say that, perhaps, you met the man, but he was apprehended and…”

            “Executed in 1961,” he cut in, “yes I remember.”

            “What’s the connection?” I posed.

            “The answer,” he leaned in, “is far simpler, yet far more complicated than you could possibly understand.”

*          *          *

            You may say that I’ve always been a turncoat, a betrayer, a backstabber. It’s how I started out. It began by betraying my father, a king, for a would-be usurper whom I in turn betrayed to my father. Both king and usurper were fools, control freaks wishing to have everything under their heels; I wanted to teach them a lesson. But in the end, when the war settled and everything returned to normal, I was left a man without a home. My father refused me for my siding with the usurper and threw me down; the usurper also disgusted with me threw me up. Hence I came to rest in the middle; where I began a cursed existence trapped in the unknown grey.

            It wasn’t so bad at first; I didn’t have to deal with either of their insufferable egos and was free to think and act as I so pleased. I came to rest in a cave. There were others with me who accepted me and took me in. It was a good time. We hunted, ate, laughed and grew.

            A time came when everyone left the cave and began building a village of mud brick in a fertile area rich with plants and game. Our time there was glorious, but then it all fell apart, and it was all their fault…

            My father returned posing as some nomadic desert lord and began dictating terms to our village. When we hesitated, he broke a natural water barrier around the sea and flooded the land. Everyone drowned. Other people who came and saw the devastation quickly dove at his feet swearing loyalty and relinquishing their freedom.

            But they remembered that freedom and that was what attracted the usurper still trying to win one over on my father. He promised the return of that carefree life, when really he would only impose the same restrictions.

            It was the same old struggle, the one that got me exiled; only this time, I was powerless to do anything about it. I had to watch the people make the same old mistakes over and over and over again. It was then that I realized how cursed I had been.