A Gray Llove

When Lloyd Loses It for Real

Lloyd and Sasha were on a mission, sprinting across rooftops in Sao Paulo, when Sasha misjudged her opponent. If her target had been five pounds lighter, Lloyd was convinced that she would have pinned her mark to the ground and taken him out. The two of them could have found a beach to occupy and watch the moon rise over the gorgeous coast. Lloyd would have spent the morning basking in the sun with a couple of Daiquiris, Sasha with her mojito, and life would have gone on as usual.

But the target was five pounds heavier, not lighter. When Sasha ran at her mark, he had simply reached down and flipped her over his shoulder – off the edge of the building. Down seven floors onto a cement road. Lloyd remembered screaming. Then he remembered tearing at the mark, turning his face to pulp, kicking his dead body. He remembered Denny's voice in his ear, then Suzanne's, and remembered ignoring both of them to retrieve Sasha's body from the ground.

Dumb civilians and hapless EMTs were already there when Lloyd entered the scene – given the area, he figured they must have already been assembled for some other accident. He pushed past them all and drew a knife on the most stubborn EMT who insisted he get out of the way for the stretcher. He ripped Sasha's prone body from the Velcro bindings of the mobile cot, cradling her bloody, smashed skull and feeling the extra bendings of a score of broken bones along her body. He didn't know how to hold her without making it worse, and had the violent urge to burst into tears.

But he didn't. Lloyd scaled the seven flights of stairs back up to the rooftop, where faithful Denny had sent a chopper for him, the target, and whatever was left of Sasha. As they hovered up the coast toward the CIA rendezvous on home soil, Lloyd watched with a critical eye as the agency medics treated her. He interjected when they looked like they were hurting her. One of them had stupidly assured him that she would be all right, she wasn't dead yet. Lloyd had cried and believed it.

Denny and Suzanne had wanted a briefing as soon as he arrived at the CIA compound. Fat chance. Lloyd followed the medics and Sasha down into the hospital wing and sat down in the chair next to her bedside. He didn't let go of his gun. He cried some more at the sight of the wreckage of the fine, fluted architecture of Sasha's face, her head – her whole body. The small beeps from her heart monitor tapped his heart like a tiny needle going deeper and deeper, deeper and deeper...

Denny had come by himself and done Lloyd the service of being a very quiet guest. All he asked was whether Lloyd had finished the mission, and left him alone after Lloyd had tossed him the crumpled, bloodstained piece of paper from the dead target's body. While Sasha's vital signs ebbed, flowed, and slowly increased beneath the deep layer of her coma, the only people who bothered Lloyd were the medics who tried to get him to clean up or give them some space. They soon learned to leave him alone, too. The one brave enough to speak to him again told him what to expect: Sasha had a slim chance, and if she came back to consciousness, she would never be as she was again. Something was bound to be shattered inside as well as outside. If she woke up, it was possible her bones would never fit together as they should again. It was possible that she might need a machine to breathe or pump blood around her body.

No one told Lloyd that it was possible that, when Sasha finally opened her eyes and saw him, she would have no idea who he was. And that was exactly what had happened.

The medics quickly diagnosed what had happened – the part of Sasha's skull fractured in her fall had scraped the part of the brain dealing with memory. When they prompted her about her life, she could remember almost nothing about her family, her home, or her work. When her regular doctors came to treat her, she couldn't recognize them. She seemed to do a bit better with written reminders, like a record of her medical history, but Lloyd thought it looked more like she was simply accepting what she was reading instead of connecting the information to memories. For a CIA operative, he reflected, she had always been very trusting.