When I was twenty, I had a job that required that I fly all over the country. The details and the particulars of the work itself are boring and meaningless for our story, but it involved stripping the operating system off of older server hardware, installing new hard drives, and then updating the associated drivers.

Interesting, eh?

Don't worry. It wasn't. But it paid well, I got to see the country--flying to five or six different states each week--and generally avoiding the responsibilities and pitfalls of my failing marriage and facilitating my ongoing drug addiction and self-destruction.

I had a three-day stay in Indianapolis, which meant I'd basically spend about four hours doing my job, followed by sitting in my hotel room for two and a half days twiddling my thumbs or drinking and pondering existence and wondering what it feels like to fall from my hotel room balcony.

On the first day of my arrival, I went to the location where I would be updating the server hardware and found that the owner wasn't there.  Since I could do nothing on the server without his password, and since nobody else knew what the password was, I went back to my hotel in a huff. Pissed.

I eventually found myself down in the hotel bar, angrily drinking, leaving periodically to get high and then returning to drink some more. Self-destruction was, at the time, a mistress I had not learned to tame.

At some point in the evening, I eventually caused an incident that required the police to show up and politely ask me to leave. When I say "politely," I mean that I was pepper sprayed in the face and dragged off to a holding cell for the night, kicking and screaming obscenities at some random bar patron who as far as I can remember, accidentally bumped into me and nothing more.

If you've never been in "the tank", allow me to describe it for you. If you're lucky, you'll get a one or a two-person cell that happens to be open that particular night--but more than likely, it'll be a communal holding cell with a single toilet in the middle of the room.

The room will more than likely smell of urine, feces, booze, and whatever body odor seems to be permeating from your fellow drunks and addicts. Most of which are lying on the floor or pacing frantically from one end of the room to another.

In short, it's not exactly a pleasant experience. Not to mention the coupled stress of wondering whether or not you're about to be charged with a crime.

Lucky for me, I was released at some point early the next morning, shortly after the decision was made not to arraign me on charges--just so long as I promised to be a good boy for the remainder of my stay.

I went back to my hotel and came to find out that, due to my antics--and the stain of pepper spray across one wall in the bar with a me-shaped outline in the middle--I'd been asked to leave.

I called the lady in my company that did all of my travel arrangements and, with some work, got a new hotel room just a few miles away. She was not amused, however, when I told her why I was switching hotels.

Once I was checked in and ready for my second day in Indianapolis, I went over to the client's office to finish the job that I hadn't even started the day before. This time the owner, an older gentleman in his late sixties, was there and ready to help me get things going.

While we were waiting for the server to copy over the data from one drive to another, it was inevitable that some small talk would be exchanged.

"How long have you been doing this?" He asked.

"Only a few months."

"Do you like it?"

"It pays the bills, and I get to travel. It's not bad."

He nodded.

"You look like you haven't slept." He said matter-of-factly.

"I haven't," I said, and went on to explain what had happened in the bar. I'm still not sure why.

He shook his head at me, smiling, laughing a little at me.

"You married?" He asked.

"Sort of. Not for long."

"Ah. That's too bad." He said.

There was a long pause in the conversation as we stood there. I didn't want to explain why I was about to get divorced or why I was imploding and slowly losing my mind on the road. 

"Are your troubles that big?" He asked, finally. It was the way he said it--in a genuine tone of concern--that caught me off-guard.

"I..." I started, but I wasn't sure what to say. Of course, my troubles were big. Why else did I feel so... lost? Why else did I think about killing myself instead of facing the day? Why even ask that question?

"I think so." I finally said.

He nodded again.

There was another long silence, followed by the server rebooting. I was finally presented with the prompt to login.

"Can you type in your password, please?" I asked.

He smiled.

"Would you like to see my password?" he asked.

"No, I just need you to enter it."

He shrugged.

"It's kind of hard to hide anyway."

For one blissful moment, I wasn't aware of what he meant. But then he rolled up the sleeve on his left arm, and there it was: a small, greenish-blue tattoo. A number. A serial number. 

A blue-green serial number.

I gasped out loud. I suddenly felt like someone had kicked me in the gut.

"You--" I barely managed to say.

"Yes," he said, still smiling, his steady gaze upon me. It wasn't a statement. It was an accusation.

He punched in the password; a password given to him, forced upon him, tattooed on his skin, by a Nazi officer when he was seven years old.

"Interesting," he pondered.

"What?"

"The only person that is trying to kill you is you. Maybe your troubles aren't so big after all?"