Brilliant, special, perfect. Upon meeting Aaron you would never have thought it, but he wasn't really any of it. He was nothing like what people thought. He himself knew it, but admitting it would have broken him apart. For some time, he found a way around it. He became an addict, because addictions of all sorts have their way of making you feel better. About your life, about your past, about the future and yourself, at least while on the substance that you crave.
For Aaron, however, what would make him feel better wasn't a substance. Aaron was addicted to knowledge, and as everything in an addict's life would usually be every little thing in his was only ever aimed at providing him with it. In times of its absence, like every other addict, he would go through withdrawal symptoms. Shaking hands, depression, hot flushes, tension and a racing heart, until he would get his hands on the one thing that could make it stop. Only when he would finally feel like he knew everything he would be himself again.
He was a thinker, that was why he was never a big drinker. He couldn't let himself indulge in intoxicating behaviour, because with a brilliant mind like his, you have to take responsibility, so he would claim. To him that meant: avoiding everything that could put his mind at risk. No drink, no drugs, no processed food, no mundane thoughts and nothing else that could in some way poison his brain, speed up its decay, or cause a neurological disease, which was mainly everything that life contained.
That he felt the duty to preserve his brilliance, wasn´t just a narcissistic thought, it was anything but selfish. He wouldn't preserve his mind for himself, he´d claim, but for the world that was meant to benefit from it.
Despite Aaron´s disapproval of intoxication, as of now, a Tuesday, 16 years before his death, he found himself in a place that had been built to indulge in it. Usually places like this would repulse him: shady looking, twilight wrapped pubs with lion head door knobs, rusty old street signs that had been out of use for ages, and aging redheads who were looking out of use as well, as they were standing behind the counter of a little lit up bar, pulling their noses up.
How they even saw what they were serving was beyond Aaron and there weren't many things beyond his comprehension. The few that were, however, he went out of his way to avoid at all costs. How to deal with feelings, how to handle people and, here we go again, little lit up bars, so why was he here at all? At a dim looking counter, shoulder to shoulder with people who came here to deal with their feelings?
Disgusting.
That was what Aaron thought about himself, sitting on a chair and pretending to drink. Whisky, straight, because he remembered the order from a shallow tv-movie that his parents liked to watch, but instead of drinking from his glass, he poured it out at the edge of the counter, the hand that did it hidden under the other. He watched it dripping down, dripping and dripping, just so he didn't have to see the depressed and drunk, oh so ordinary people who came here for the sake of not being at home and perhaps not in this world anymore, after all the liquor that they poured down their throats.
If it hadn't been for the poured out, dripping down whisky that Aaron was concentrating on so it could pass through between his knees without disturbance and gather in a puddle on the ground, he would probably have felt a panic attack coming on. That was how uncomfortable he felt, and looking at him you could almost have guessed that he had only come here on somebody else´s request and was doing them a favour. Whichever way it was: In his thoughts, he had to cajole himself into staying so he wouldn't just walk out.
Now pull yourself together, Aaron, will you? You have to get over yourself! You know you have to be here, just remember the reason! You cannot give up now, you started it and once started, you have to finish it!
While he was sitting at the counter, watching his drink drip down, what he was there for was, in fact, approaching. To be more accurate, it was already there, outside in the parking lot. What he was here for was Bob, who had just arrived.
Groaning and with tired bones, Bobby gave a sigh before he turned the key to stop the engine of his lumbering car. He took his seatbelt off, and moved to crack the car door open. As the crisp night air, with its minging scents and the slight breeze that carried it, rushed in, he started gasping. Maybe it was out of displeasure, but it could also have been out of desperation.
Sluggishly he struggled out of his seat and as he had dragged himself out of the car, he threw the door closed, with a bang that echoed like a shot. The clicking of the key as he locked it, before he turned around and he rushed towards his refugee, the to him so inviting pub, as if its dim light and the roaring fire magnetically pulled him in. He smiled a dull smile, because honestly: the two, at best three minutes that he would feel somewhat okay on an ordinary day would all be taking place between these walls. When he pulled the heavy door open, he was looking forward to brooding to himself in the dark and quiet room that opened up in front of him. Little did he know that something much heavier, much bigger would be in the cards for him that day, and if he had known, he might have turned around to go back home, because: for fuck´s sake, hasn´t Bob Melanski been through enough? Wouldn't he today - a day like every other - deserve his peace and quiet in the dim light, so that for two, at best three minutes he would feel just about okay?
As he shuffled up to the open bar, the barmaid, bored and nonchalant, nodded at him dismissively.
"The usual, Bob?" She asked with a half smile, not a real one, but the forced one that you'd smile just to be polite.
"Yes , thanks, Maureen," Bob groaned as his eyes scouted the room. "Slow night, is it?"
A nod.
"Not even many regulars in, today. We may have to close earlier than usual."
Even though Aaron had heard the door - oh, the creaking fucking door! - only then did he feel safe enough to take his eyes away from the whiskey dripping down.
There he was, Bob, like Aaron had imagined him! The shiny bald head, five hairs arranged across it, the sad eyes, deep in his face, and a build so inconspicuous, that you would overlook him in a crowd or even when he was sitting next to you.
Bob Melanski, the person that Aaron had been waiting for, the man he had spent weeks investigating, the same one who would open doors for him, so he was hoping.
Aaron´s heart was trying to escape his body. When he realized what was at stake, he was getting nervous. Not only did his knees feel weak, but his hands started trembling, to which he reacted fast by hiding them in his lap, so no one would notice. Staring at them as if to stop them from moving by telekinesis, he shook his head.
Oh, damn you, Mara, what did you fucking start?
Months ago she had left Aaron with a name that he had not been able to forget ever since then.
Why had she spelled out Bob Melanski, of Polish origin, and then just refused to introduce them to each other?
Another open question that was tormenting Aaron: Why had she made Bob Melanski sound so promising? Like a hero who could save the day? Just to give him hope before she would smile at him and take it away?
She had woken sleeping lions with that manner, or in this case: She had woken up the scientist in Aaron, and as scientists usually would, his just craved to know. His addiction had kicked in, because nothing upset Aaron more than the grey zones and maybe Mara´s answer as to why she wouldn't introduce them to each other had upset him just as well.
"He is a perverted freak, okay, and not my client anymore," she had brushed him off, closing her skirt, and realising how inappropriate her snapping at him had been, she´d approached him slowly the next minute to pet his shoulder.
"Look, I´m sorry this didn´t work out, but you are better off, I swear to God! Just saying, he might have lied about what he is doing for a job, who knows?"
Well, had Bob lied or had he not?
Aaron had been eager to find out ever since she had said it. Curiosity kills the cat, they say, and maybe in this case it really did. Not the cat, but the man who Aaron was.
His naturally curious nature had in fact put him on a path of no return, or why not say it like it was? It was the path towards his death that he had started walking on.
Fucking Mara!
Not only had she lit his curiosity like the candles on a Christmas tree, but thereafter she had tried herself in gardening as well and maybe Aaron could have seen it coming. Hadn't she told him once that when she was young she had dreamt of becoming a gardener?
While she had never reached her dream, in Aaron´s mind, at least,she had recently planted a seed: Bob Melanski`s name. Oh, if only she'd had foreseen what she would cause with it! Who could have guessed that what she had planted would, like everything else that Aaron didn´t know how to rate, start growing in excess, and bear fruits of obsession? Like a tumor, Bob´s name had proliferated and infiltrated once healthy areas of Aaron´s mind to take over everything. Now he was so close to whose name had spread inside him and was occupying every inch of him. So close to the subject of his new obsession, and new meant that there had been others.
Just like with Bob Melanski, the things that Aaron would usually get obsessed with were the same things that he had insufficient knowledge about. The very few things that were beyond his comprehension, and for that reason scared him. For once, when it came to this, despite his seemingly extraordinary mind, Aaron was just ordinary, because his obsessions, just like those of everybody else, were fueled by his deepest fears. One of them was to fail, but what scared him even more than that was the thought that lacking knowledge about a single thing - no matter how small and irrelevant it was - would make him insufficient as a person and undeserving of his life.
Just like all the other obsessions that Aaron had gone through in his life- usually it was one at a time - the idea of Bob was a one direction road that he just had to follow, whether or not he would crash along the way. When it had started, he´d had no control. It had felt like being dragged along. All at once, the mere thought of Bob Melanski wouldn't let him eat, it wouldn't let him sleep, it would nearly prevent him from breathing and even at thinking he would fail. To fix it, Aaron would have to find out everything that there was to know about the man who was now right next to him, which was what he had come there for. To a place where he really didn't want to be. Quite frankly, it was the worst place he could have imagined, literally and figuratively speaking.
Well, fuck it,, Aaron! Can you finally stop sulking now?
He wouldn´t only think this, he would whisper it to himself, so he would have to listen. While he was sitting there, two empty chairs away from Bob, the thinking person that Aaron was, only wanted to go. But whenever he tried to slide off the upholstered chair, enveloped in the awful stench of old leather in his ears and the scratch it gave when his cheap suit pants moved across it, it felt like someone was holding him back.