The stinging smell of cordite woke him from his coma, or so the doctors would say, when they found his empty bed. The fire alarms, his clarion call, had woken him from what seemed to him a short nap, but what had, in reality been a decade's slumber. Rumpelstiltskin, he thought, only, he had awakened to a dsytopian world where things seemed to be perpetually falling apart. But what sort of world had he fallen asleep in? For a decade, his wife had waited for him, showing up everyday at the allowed visiting time, and praying by his side, with an infinite patience, which was even now reflected on her peaceful countenance as she lay blown ten feet away by the full force of the explosion. This must be Hell, he thought. It would hurt a lot more if I remembered any of this. Thank God for small mercies, he mused grimly. He looked at her with dumb incomprehension, trying to remember who she was and what she meant to him. His brain was working overtime to protect him from regaining his memory. All he remembered was heavily censored and practically useless bits and pieces of information.
He tried to get out of bed, but slumped back, too weak to move, his muscles wasted by the immobility. He could discern hooded figures moving towards him a few feet away. They proceeded to yell at him. Who were these idiots? What were they doing here? Had they killed this woman? He found himself criticizing the choice of cordite as an explosive material. The fools, too much sound and fury signifying nothing. A strip of Semtex would have been more than sufficient.
Breathing was suddenly made exhausting by this attempt at movement, and he tried to fight off the mists of sleep that were descending upon his shrinking sight. He inhaled deeply, as the tunnel vision erupted into a white fireball of light, and the cacophony of yells and screams in a strangely familiar tongue gave way to the piercing silence of unconsciousness.
A twig snapped under his feet, as he found himself upright, clawing at the air to shield his eyes from the harsh sunlight. “Delivered again, from darkness into light”, he thought grimly, remembering a half-forgotten prayer from his childhood.
“What if this darkness is what I really want?”
A glance revealed a lot of details, but explained nothing. His brain was clever, a protective force that had recently run amuck, and much more of a formidable opponent than his waking self, if that is the term to applied to a conscious persona that is permanently marooned in the cavernous depths of an overactive imagination.
He was in some kind of jungle, cloaked in greenery so vast and bright that it made him squint. The air was blanketed by the fresh smell of the earth after a rain spell. He suddenly remembered what childhood was like. He remembered how it felt to run barefoot on the wet earth, with the mud between his toes, chasing after his accomplices, with the smoke of his village lazily wafting over the horizon. He remembered yelling with all the strength he could muster, out of the sheer happiness that belongs to a child who knows no responsibility, and has no concept of the idea of actions and consequences. Those lessons would come later. But for now, he could taste freedom and happiness, for this one brief moment. He celebrated it exultantly. It was a rebirth, the re-birth of an emotion he had thought long since to be dead.
He caught sight of a settlement in the distance, much like his own. Smoke drifted peacefully out of the chimneys, diffracting the rays of the reddening sun. He found himself gravitating towards it,as the Voice continued droning. All living things must eventually return to the place of their birth,to be taken in again in the arms of an innocent happiness long since lost, a place where all sins are forgiven, and the pain and sorrow of every lesson learned in life is washed clean by the swiftly raging torrents of bliss, of extinction.
He had not staggered three paces when ruins suddenly appeared all around him, rising out of the ground, the trembling earth torn and bruised as large chunks of rock carved out by forgotten artisans started crashing all around. Crumbling towers of granite shot upwards, seeking union with the vastness of space. Were they the pillars of his forgotten beliefs, so eager in their desire to reach upwards, to reach the nothingness above, that they cared nothing about the destruction they caused?
As he looked around uncomprehendingly, his flight instincts were suddenly suppressed by a new understanding that was dawning on him. His mind was playing out his life in metaphors. The village was now on fire. Children were running, screaming, on fire. Men and women were writhing on the ground in flames, trying to shake themselves of everything they could, to be given a chance to live again. The thick sting of cordite was once again in the air. “Things always start to crumble when happiness rears its head”, the disconnected Voice in his head lectured, as his disoriented stagger turned into a full fledged run in the direction of the town. Out of all this destruction, came discovery, the nauseating discovery that he was somehow responsible for all of this. He was responsible for the lives of those children. He was responsible for why there was a hideously disfigured body in the town square. As he moved closer, he started to recognize details about the corpse. It had once been known to him. It had once been a living, breathing, talking, moving mass, that had much to say about the state of the world, and what should be done to improve the lot of the people that it considered allied to the Cause. He found himself in tears at the sight, conscious of the fact that it had happened once before, yet, there was no memory of tears that time. “Why now? What is happening to me?”. He looked at the bodies of the children that were innocent casualties of his personal war. In each of those little bodies, lay his happiness, a happiness he had worked hard to build, as he remembered slowly, what he meant to these people, and what he had ended up becoming. A torn red vest lying next to the corpse caught his eye. Little details,colors and smells form the patchwork quilt of our memories, the Voice said. Out of this shredded and stained fabric, a myriad details were now unraveling, too swiftly for his dull mind to process. The sudden onslaught of memory pulled him to his knees, as shots rang out. Uniformed men appeared, firing indiscriminately at everyone and everything. Those in flames were consigned to the merciful hail of bullets that immediately cut short all their suffering. The soldiers seemed to be moving in his direction. They moved slowly, unsure of their surroundings, yelling to each other in strange tongues, strangers in these strange lands. But this was home to him. He felt he knew the land. He belonged here. He felt a connection to it, he had a stake in its prosperity, a stake these destructive strangers did not have. They were looking for him. They had destroyed everything trying to find him. A new word came to him. Infidels. His brain was now fighting a losing battle with his memory as the torrent of forgotten memories advanced, bursting with their new-found potency, in much the same way as he was losing the battle against the Infidels with guns. He screamed, the impotent scream of a crippled leader who is face to face with the inevitability of a defeat he had long seen coming. The more discriminating marksmen in the uniformed lot took aim, a burst of fire in his direction, and all was silence once more.
He woke up screaming in a tongue he did not know. A shocked old woman sat in front of him, the jar of water in her hand knocked off by his ferocious return to consciousness. Discarded explosives lay everywhere. Amidst the metallic clatter of the falling jar, he tried to come to grips with his identity. It could not be true. He felt like he had woken up from a slumber, and that everything bad was a dream, and it was his redeeming qualities that constituted reality. It could not be so, he told himself. One does not do these things, especially a person who has devoted his whole life to the betterment of younger, more innocent souls, so that the innocence he lost in the holocaust of his youth, could be preserved in these children. He had been a teacher before he had been overtaken by the madness “What have I become? What have I done?”
“You have done God's will, Brother”, a voice said from outside. A tall, bearded man walked in. Even though he had not seen his reflection in at least 10 years, he was struck by the man's familiarity, the resemblance to himself. It was almost as if this figure were an external projection of his own self. He did not know who his parents were, but he knew now that his mother had given birth to twins.
The man embraced him. “Your wife is dead, we did not know she would be by your side. We were given to understand that the only people around would be the prisoner detail that was responsible for your safety during your internment. She took care of you for all the years that we could not, and even though she is not one of us, we pray that the Almighty will make space for her in his heart. The world thinks you are in a coma and will never awaken. We must now continue the fight for the oppressed, and as soon as you are better, we will send you again into the occupied lands. Strike where it hurts, and again, do us proud. Brother, you are indeed back from the abyss. Our parents would be proud of you.”
Pride?, he thought. There was no pride left. What little that was left, had died with her. He became conscious of the realization that while his conscience was asleep, he had been little more than a mass-murderer. A sociopath masquerading behind a professorial countenance.
He remembered now, how he had met her. The long evenings spent under the canopy of the huge oak tree in the town square. He remembered the musical sound of her laugh, the idle chatter of the shifty-eyed village urchins who were jealous of him for possessing what they desired. He remembered how easily she submitted to him, how easily they fell in love. The long, seemingly interminable years of their romance flooded his consciousness as the tears freely rolled down his cheeks. In his re-birth, he had lost his soul, the one person who had given him the strength to carry on when the weight of his beliefs became too heavy for him to carry. She had never asked him a question about what he believed in. He wished she had. He wished he could have told her everything, he wished he could have confessed, that he was not just a teacher of science, he was also a maker of bombs, a “merchant of death”, that he was also an ardent fanatic, firmly committed to a Cause he had only the dimmest understanding of. A Cause that had destroyed his life so completely that only shards of the broken mosaic were left for him to gather. He wished he had surrendered, he wished could have given himself up early in the game, and not have had to suffer this crushing loss of everything he held close. His beliefs had destroyed everything. Reaching up towards the sky, they had left a trail of destruction in their wake.
The sunlight glinting off the barrel of his brother's discarded AK-47 brought him back to reality. There was only one thing left to do, the right thing.
In a hamlet 3 miles away, locals reported hearing a burst of sustained gunfire. The screams went unheard, as the leadership of an entire insurgency was annihilated. Witnesses reported hearing a solitary shot an hour later. Flocks of frightened crows flew towards the sunset. The scattered band of leaderless insurgents gave statements to the press, citing the insanity of one of their leaders as a reason for the alleged massacre. The occupying army countered, stating that a double agent had successfully infiltrated and eliminated the leadership. The woman was quietly buried in her hometown by her weeping family, and the world did what it does best. It forgot.
