Love At First Sight

The Love Story

After completing initial training they were ready for women. No agent could act out his situation without a beautiful woman. They knew this from having watched the original James Bond movies. ‘I Dream of Genie’ may have played a role.
When Charls looked into Madeline’s eyes in the seventh grade, he saw Europe for the first time. He fell in love the instant he saw them. The irises I mean, somehow they were very beautiful and beyond him. And she was untouchable by him. That much was clear, and he would come to seek things which were clear. That much was clear to him.
He would regret it for the rest of his life.
Her eyes had color and compassion he had not seen before. He didn’t look for more. She was Iguanian but had family in Switzerland. Her family was very well off. He, a brilliant student, from a broken, then fixed middle class home; and now when he looked in Madeline’s eyes he saw love and understanding. They played tennis daily until driven by independence Charls kissed another girl at the high school dance because Madeline had not wanted to accompany him to the dance because she, too, was independent. She agreed to meet him there; their arrival together disguised; unseen eyes. For Charls this was tantamount to treason. He danced and kissed another girl, and the one girl he had truly fallen in love with at first sight would ignore him throughout high school and later call him a pervert for calling her after he graduated from college.
She lived in a mansion in lush green hills covered with daisies, off the main highway and up a gravel road in San Juan Capistrano, and the onetime Charls visited the place he could only think of it as a castle. There was a wooden observation tower situated so as to have a view of the valley. For several years after he dreamt of that tower and being there again, but as it is with dreams, the tower was always just a little out of reach. If he was lucky he’d make it to the base of the tower before waking up. On occasion her family came in to the restaurant for a Sunday lunch. She was within his grasp, there at last, but didn’t see him. She would break his heart again when she changed her name to a more independent masculine sounding, Germanic one. Charls in the innocence of being young never even kissed her.
She was obviously very pissed off.

There had been a previous affair played out in the third grade with a girl named Shelly Quinn. It centered around a tether ball pole on a playground in the morning and walking home together after school. When plans were made and his family preparing to move from Redondo Beach to San Juan Capistrano, he hid a rose in some bushes on the way to school, on a morning he didn’t meet her, with the design of giving it to this girl on the way home.
When he pulled it from the bushes it was wilted and dry like a raison. She said she thought it was beautiful.
Golem was born a hopeless romantic. Would you know more?

***

Holding her left breast as she readied to leave the water, the swimmer slowly made her way back to her bungalow. She was watching Golem, making sure that he was alone. He was with a woman the last time she saw him. Golem sensed the heat of the hunt. He would be looking for her tomorrow, when she satisfied herself that he was alone. She wore goggles when she swam. She was an experienced swimmer. Her hands made no splash as they entered the water. Both Golem and CHarLie wanted to enter her in another way. Both knew they could have her before the week was through and the great boat adventure to the mainland. She was a swimmer.

***


Twenty-five years after Madeline, Charls would write these words down and then a few days later see that another Madeline had been kidnapped. By that time things would have gotten way past bizarre. Fate would be taking him to many places and many of these places would have been in his consciousness before he got to them. Things he asked for were being given to him and desires satisfied.
He would become very aware that he had better make sure and ask for the right things. It scared him. He would appear to be following a path to his own destiny and that was one scene he wanted to get right. More poignantly, he seemed to be able to control his own destiny. Twenty-five years later there would have been one too many coincidences for any of the story to be coincidence. Bizarre as it might sound now, Charls would almost believe that this kidnapping had happened because he wrote an evil thought about another Madeline. Could the Gods have had a case of mistaken identity? Had this other Madeline been kidnapped because he had asked for it somehow? He knew at this point the readers would think him nuts. You would have to have been there to believe it. Later in the story when we reach that destination together you may come to see that you too may have come to the conclusion that the Gods had kidnapped this Madeline by mistake. Don’t worry; this isn’t the tale of a fake or a charlatan. There are no blurry people in pictures to be shown. There are no unidentified sounds that go squeak in the night. It is a tale told exactly the way it happened.