Characters in Remember When, 6. He's a crowd.
You might recall that I said there was a risk in talking about how the characters in Remember When came to be. Specifically, I said:
This is one of those "okay, I might be begging trouble here" sort of posts, but hey let's take a whack at it. There is a delete button for posts if this goes wrong. Well, that goes double for the Main Character... kind of fitting, that, as he is a double character.
He is "The Roomie", a name defined by his introduction as Ed's roommate at the apartment. That's the only name you get for his base identity. You do get a physical description, and hear and see the first expressions of his voice and thinking.
In that same scene, readers also get their first reference to one of his other identities, under the name of "David Cox", and a whole lot of cryptic reference to his doing something quite different from a normal life as a job. It's made clear that David is an artifice, a cover identity, but one so complete as to be functionally an alternate personality for the Main Character. Oh, and also... one that has gone a bit wrong in the compartmentalization department. That sort of thing can happen to anyone whose career life and home life are governed by different rules of success and conduct; My Editor actually fed back to me a story of a Trial Lawyer she knows who made the decision to stop doing that and move into a non-representational specialty of law, because the way they had to think and act to be a successful Trial Lawyer was incompatible with having real relationships with people like their spouse in their home life. They recognized the "bleed-back" of their work attitudes into their private life, and that wasn't a way they wanted to be. Well, that was the same process by which the manipulative, cold-hearted, and very selfish David Cox had changed The Roomie over the years. In fairness, The Roomie did "create" David, with the approval and assistance of the organization he worked for, as an identity he was comfortable in. That should have been a warning that such a base nature was there in The Roomie to some degree before that, and that it would only be reinforced by his living and working as David. Professionally, no one noticed such damage had occurred until recently. The Roomie was very good at his job as David, or any other cover he was using. Apparently someone inside The Project (his employers) had recently observed how much of a risk this was becoming, because The Roomie had been taken out of the operational rotation for nearly half a year "to go find normal."
He's been busy the last six years. It is implied or outright said in Remember When that he'd been through some years of training in the military and in The Project, he'd been deployed several times, and then had been given assignments that he had to conduct with very little direct support. His most valued skill, other than being capable of believing any lie he was telling or living, was that of observation. He saw details other people didn't see, could communicate those details to others, and was trained as an Operational Analyst who could turn a mix of observations and other information gained while out on a job into real-time actionable intelligence on the fly. "Look at a boot print in the mud and tell us what unit flash is on that man's uniform shoulder." would be Sherlock Holmes-level fantasy, but what he could and did do wasn't far behind that in the amazing category.
His career so far has been a very well planned place, at least pre-mission, for years now. But in Remember When, he's dragged back from finding normal into an operation that someone up the chain has decided has to be done, and it's a throw-together. The whole damn thing seems to have been planned in less than a week, and he got to be David Cox and dropped into it with no work-up time at all. This alone would be a challenge., but in this case there was more to deal with.
The Roomie, as part of being home, had gone back to doing a lot of the things he used to like to do. Some of those were pretty reasonable, like doing things with his hobbies and interests, and making plans with his now-fiancée for the future. Some of them were not, like spending too much time wanting to do more of the things with Rock & Roll that he'd come to enjoy while building the David Cox identity, and then there was all the cheating on his fiancée... recreational fornication taken to an extreme. He might not even have realized how poor a job of coping he was doing, until he met Sherri.
I'm not going to explain it further here other than this; the telling is in the novella, and referred to in
the Character study here about Sherri. The very first time The Roomie met Sherri, they both realized that they were people who always had a false front up, to everyone, and yet that they both had instinctively dropped any pretenses within seconds of starting to converse. They fascinated each other, even if they were consciously unaware of why. Neither of them had ever had a love-at-first-sight, so they didn't even think to apply that label to it. Everyone who watched it happen to them did.
The rest of the tale is one of reality overtaking hope, for them both. Sherri probably dealt with it, given time. The Roomie didn't, and it would be a long time and a lot of damage all around him until he came to understand. But that, my friends and readers, is a tale for future tellings.
Did he "live" for you, as The Roomie, as David Cox? I'll happily discuss some of the finer points in the comments.
