Free Hollow Man by Mark Pryor Page B

says I stole their music?”
    â€œYou did steal it, man, but if you don't know who complained then maybe you did it more than once. Maybe several people have complained to me about it, and I ain't telling. Come on, get real, Dom, you can't do that shit.” He started up again, talking about ethics and trust, as if he didn't screw every musician who came intohis shitty little bar, making them play for tips and be grateful for the chance. As he rambled on, I tuned him out and thought about what to say in reply. I could go with the apologetic, So sorry, it won't happen again, please forgive me , or maybe try, I must have absorbed it without knowing, I'm just so embarrassed , both attempts to save my musical career in Austin. Manipulation is my strong point, especially making myself the victim, but in the end I chose door number three. I waited until he was midflow to interrupt. “Hey, Marley. Fuck you.” I hung up.
    At moments like that, when events conspired and turned against me, I could always set them straight by tweaking someone else. Usually, I'd find a girl to sleep with, make some impressionable, dumpy chick do something she didn't want to do in bed by feeding her hope for the future. I'd lie about a pending record deal and ask if she'd want to go on the road with me, did she like hotels and breakfast in bed? Then I'd not call her, or call her and ask for another girl and act like I couldn't really remember her. It sounds cruel and maybe it is. Cruelty is pretty abstract to me, a concept I get on an intellectual level but don't experience. After all, cruelty requires empathy, and that bucket is empty.
    And remember what I'm saying, the reason I toyed with these girls. It wasn't to be cruel—it wasn't about them at all. It was to build myself up, and their hurt feelings were a mere by-product. Something more, too, these excursions acted as scientific endeavors because incisions into a person's soul gave me a chance to see emotions I didn't have, to experience things vicariously that most other people experienced all the time. And I benefited from that vicarious experience by studying it in a detached way, learning a little more about my fellow man. Or woman. If I saw an emotion, heard it, then I could mimic it.
    The drunk girls in Austin were safe, though, that night at least. I just wanted my music. My lovely guitar, the gentle hum of words in my throat, perfect accompaniments to an idea floating like a songin my mind. It was a song about the unthinkable, and yet I couldn't stop thinking about it.

    I took two more weeks to decide, but in the way a starving man sits before a meal and decides to eat it. Some things become inevitable. I'd surrounded myself with a force field of reasons to keep on the straight and narrow, to stay invisible behind my one-way mirror: personal safety, financial security, avoiding the stigma of my condition. Those reasons were still there, but the force field had weakened thanks to a pay cut, an unwanted transfer, and accusations of musical fraud. And on the other side of the mirror, out in the real world, a beautiful woman beckoned like a proverbial siren. I wasn't planning on shipwrecking my life, of course, but given the circumstances, a careful tack in her direction seemed, at the time, reasonable enough. And, of course, there was the money.
    Money meant freedom. And pleasure. It meant that to everyone, of course, but to me it meant I could live more like myself, not worry so much about the people around me finding out who, or what, I was. And as question nine on the Hare PCL-R indicates, living off other people was just another part of me, one of the internal cogs that worked in synchronicity with the other elements of sociopathy. Which is to say that money wasn't just alluring, getting my hands on it was a biological imperative.
    After a morning docket at the JJC, I took off my tie and drove across town to buy a disposable cell phone, what the bad guys call a