Stranded on an empty stage. An abstract shadowplay with
lines fed by uniformed men I had only met five minutes prior. A headful of
empty prompts that meant nothing, absolutely nothing at all for those up there
under those lights, who had Survived, who had a story that'd never get told.
I
have a tendency to get lost in words and tangled in webs of syntax. But that's
not my talent. Mine is memory. Not the same as those savant-types who memorize
telephone books but can't tie their shoes, nor those borderliners who can
remember what they did on exact days, like the toppings on a pizza they ordered
on, say, September 20, 2048. It's really just the lack of a mental filter. A
teacher in an anthropology class lectured that the gift of intelligence
regarding memory is not just the retention of memory but selective memory.
Forgetting things. It's an important process in infants' newborn minds. Weeding
out unnecessary elements of the stimulus overload so that they can focus on
images and sounds without the background static of the living world.
My
memory is what allows me to remember all this and compile it and write it down;
and maybe, one day, it'll be plucked off a dusty library shelf if anyone wants to
remember a smelly, nasty chapter of history, less about the false nobility of a
war and the Wars and more like a scrappy street fight than anything else.
I'm
thinking of this now because I'm remembering the press conference after we were
released from the Castle and swapped. The five of us that survived sitting at
that long table, myself in the middle because out of all our codenames,
"Meridien K" was alphabetically at the center. Lights so bright the
audience was all silhouette, disconnected voices shouting out from the din
until the PR man from the Forces picked one to ask their shadow-question.
"What
do you want to do now?"
The
PR man had coached us, and we were all given the identical answer to this exact
question. So the reporter must've been their plant or too stupid to realize he
was wasting everyone's time.
But
I had some trouble, and I'm sure they all chalked up the hesitation to what we
had all been through, even if they hadn't truly known how many years we'd been
in the field, operating far outside the jurisdiction of any authority or,
worse, any clear objective. My trouble was remembering everything that had
happened over fifteen years and trying to grab at all those half-moments that'd
get forgotten if I didn't record it. Training, specialization, desensitization,
deployment, the AO, an entire year of leave that none of us wanted,
redeployment, all the battles that wouldn't be named, all the skirmishes far
too unimportant to have any record in history's dingy annals, the eventual
dropship crash and imprisonment, more years of routine than any of us could
guess, and then this, a shower and shave, freshly-laundered uniforms that
weren't even ours, pushed out after a five-minute brief by the PR shill, forced
down into uncomfortable, plastic-molded seats, blinded by spotlights and
flashbulbs, asked about current events that none of us had ever heard of,
certain questions intercepted by the PR even though we didn't see the harm, and
then, as a few men on the wings began to tap their wristwatches and give The
Signal to all assembled, there was that one last question from the plant, and
everyone, for whatever reason, looked to me to answer it.
It's
not that I was scared of the Forces if I told the truth. The truth being that
myself, and all of us, without any hesitation, wanted to get back in our AVs
and drive to that familiar no-man's-land between borders and continue the same
operations we had been conducting for half our lives, not because we were the
best but because what the hell else were we gonna do? We had explicitly
heard that the Forces and the Provisional Government were going to set us up
for life, lest some investigative journalist catch wind of the whole project
and try to expose it as something wrong, something shameful, make us all out as
brainwashed military drones. Which we weren't. But putting us into retirement?
Mothballed in sparse houses across the gaping expanse of the once-and-future
United States? We spent over a decade accepting the fact that we'd die from a
bullet or a giant bomb or a rocket or a lucky mortar or any one of the millions
of things that can kill you, and the notion of sinking into a deathbed,
surrounded by the non-existent families we sometimes imagined, well, that
wasn't too many shades removed from the idea of our own personal hell.
So
I lied. I told them what they wanted to hear.
That
question, again: "What do you want to do now?"
A
well-rehearsed, thoughtful pause, and, "I just want to go home," I
said, and I forced a smile.
(Chapter 2 coming Friday, November 18, 2011.)
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