Chapter 22

Sunday night felt like a bit of a free-for-all in my head. Cooper and I were trying to reach some accommodation to the fact that the both of us were stuffed inside the body that used to belong only to Cooper. Fortunately, Cooper agreed with Bud that he had thrown away his chance to be in charge when he tried to kill himself.

"He did not try to kill himself," Bud reminded us. "He did kill himself. Our intervention prevented that death from being as permanent as Cooper thought it was going to be."

Cooper's purpose in this was to try to reintegrate his knowledge and skills. As far as it went we weren't sure what might still be there as far as the physical skills went. We had both been soldiers during our own time, and we had both seen men killed and had killed men ourselves. Mine had been on a scale that Cooper had trouble grasping and his had evolved into something I had trouble understanding in return.

"A Marine is trained to kill," he pointed out. "I received advanced training that made me proficient. Through that training I found a natural aptitude for it, and had been going through advanced training in the jungles of Okinawa at the time of my discharge that was intended to make me more than what I was, and I was already a legitimately scary fellow."

He was hoping that some of that training had become so ingrained physically that our body would remember the appropriate skills even if I consciously wasn't aware of them. At the same time we wished for this, we worried that it might be so and that we wold react in a way that I wasn't prepared for if the situation triggered any of Cooper's training. The better solution would be for Cooper and I to merge more completely. It didn't seem to be working.

"I would suggest we just continue with life and where Cooper has knowledge and skills, let him provide them. The more we use it, the more it may integrate," Bud suggested.

Worked for me, I was still feeling a little weird having three people in my head. Especially since the head wasn't mine to begin with. "Here's something Cooper can help with," I thought. "We need an email address. Mitch suggested something called Gmail. Do you know how to set that sort of thing up?"

"Sure, no problem," Cooper said. "Its a kind of web-based email from Google. Most of us stationed overseas tried to have something like that to use for keeping in touch while we were there. Just about every base had a tent with computers and internet access for keeping in touch with family and friends back home."

So we went back upstairs and at Cooper's suggestion, first looked through the sheaf of papers Bobby Chalmers had left us. We did have an email address as part of our internet package. We also found the address of their web mail site and we tried logging in their with the information on the sheet.

"One day and we've already got 6 pieces of spam, not counting the welcome emails from the ISP," Cooper snorted.

"That's bad?" I asked.

"Yeah, but we're just going to use this address as a starting point for signing up for Gmail."

Cooper started telling me where to click and what to type, but at Bud's suggestion, he began pausing each time before doing it and instead just thinking about what would be the thing to do next without 'saying' it to us. That was the first time I'd realized that our internal dialog was separate from our thoughts, even the surface, verbal thoughts I had almost continually. It took a conscious effort to rise above that level of thought and be heard by the others. Cooper was trying to make the conscious effort without verbalizing.