And the worst side effect kicks in as we come down from our high: the withdrawal. But also the reality.
That we’ll never stop taking it.
It’s beyond addiction.
It’s a forced dose I can never stop taking.
Wake up. Shoot up. Kill.
It’s a forced dose I can never stop taking.
Night time. Shoot up. Kill.
It’s a forced dose I can never stop taking.
Repeating the same horrible shit I did the day before.
Because it’s a forced dose I can never stop taking.
The drug lasts in my system as long as I last. I can never get clean, never quit. And when I die, my blood will soak the earth and the drug will seep into the roots of plants and kill them too. It will seep into the water supply and kill those who drink it. The sun will dry up my blood and when the clouds rain, it will rain the drug and kill those who are under the storm. The sin will repeat as an endless cycle because it’s the worse addiction out there and someone will always be trying to get their fix, always finding a reason to start a war. And the drug will have different names on the street. It will be called nationalism, patriotism, self-defense, preemptive strike, morally just, in protection of the greater cause.
But it’s all the same war with all the same side effects. The truth will never change.
War is a drug, power its abuser, and the state its addict.
I may have stopped taking it for now. But its damage is already done and irreversible. The residue is still in my system and it will remain there till I die.
But maybe… I can warn others of it. I have to try. It’s the only good thing I could possibly do with what is left of me.
My only chance at maybe finding my soul again. At redemption.
The train whistle wakes me. I look out the side window to see the station approaching, the huge city of Nova Carthago in the background. It all becomes swallowed by a bright light, followed by a ringing in my ears I have become all too familiar with. The glass shatters. It rips away at my already fucked up face as I flop backwards over my seat into the lap of the people behind me. The train screeches to a halt. Next, a black blanket of smoke shoots down the train cart I am in engulfing all of us in its grasp.
I am pushed into the walkway between the seats. People trip and collapse over me and each other. I try going for a window. The smoke enters my lunges. I can’t see, I can’t breathe! The ringing turns into the sirens and screams around me. I find a window. On the seat I see a kid covered in smut and blood. He screams for help. I grab him into my arms and crawl out the window. We fall onto the tracks next to the burning train. My body hurts and I lie on the ground, trash and debris raining about. All around me are the injured and dead from the explosion.
“It’s another suicide bombing!” says someone.
I look over at the child I saved. I turn his head—it’s my younger self again!
He laughs at me. The face of the apparition disappears, and it is the face of a real dead child. I lie back onto the ground.
“Why!”
“Yeah, why Peter?” you ask.
“You could have saved him,” says Peter.
“Stop! Not again! Stop!” you say. You roll over onto your knees and hands. You crawl away towards the other survivors.
Peter won’t possibly get away. “You should have stayed! Fought!” he says.
Soldiers surround you, looking confused. “Check him for injuries!” says one.
“Peter failed, Peter failed again,” I remind him.
“He’s not too bad,” says a paramedic, “He’s in shock though. I know I would be.”
Peter is taken away. The younger version of himself tagging along, reminding him he is a traitor.
There you go my little soldier. There you go.
I look around me, I’m in a room, hospital? I touch my face, the bandages are gone but I can feel the fucked up flesh of the scarring.
A young girl—candy striper—walks into my room carrying a colorful hand basket. She looks up from her basket at me and screams, dropping it. A nurse runs in after. “I’m so sorry, sir.” He bends over to pick up the basket. “She’s a new volunteer here.”
“I’m that ugly?”
He doesn’t know how to respond, and leaves the room after being called.
After spending an afternoon at the hospital, I’m allowed to leave. I rip the IV’s off as quickly as I can.
Peter, don’t…
Fuck off Cloud. You’re just like the rest.
I walk down the hallway to the exit where the nurse from earlier hands over my belongings. “Where did you get that lighter?” he says, giving it to me last after he reads the side.
“Oh, this thing… from an American GI. He left it behind as a gift.”
“The quote, who said it?”
“I never thought about that. I don’t know.”
“I would have thought it your generation as one voice.”
“That’s a lot of orphans.”
A bus takes me to the spaceport. I give my passport information to an attendant at the terminal, and wait outside at a sitting area near the boarding ramp. After hearing there will be a delay, I buy a pack of ancients, not because I am caving into my addiction again, but because there is one final thing I’ll have to temporarily break my vow for.
For Isaac.
I light the ancient with the lighter, watching as the Dream turns to flame, and take a drag. I look back at all the things he was and did. I don’t hate him at all for when I was punished—he even said sorry. I just miss him. I really fucking miss him. I keep thinking, I’ll just wake up tomorrow and there he’ll be, sitting in the foxhole with me. But now he is dead. Dead on a planet that will never know about him. Dead from a war that will never remember him.
I will remember him. I toss the ancient onto the ground and twist my shoe over it for the last time. “Goodbye Isaac, I love you. I will carry your dreams.”
The spaceship jolts and then shakes as we take off through the atmosphere towards Hope Arc station. I look out at the heavens and see the breathtaking sphere of Nova Terra. You wouldn’t think there is a devastating war happening on its surface from here in space, where everything is magnificent and pure in its beauty.
I was on this planet for a while now. I helped liberate Jericho, won a medal at Tionem for heroic action, meet a gorgeous girl, thwarted the rebel rising of Khaf’Jadeed, and to the military and reporters, died heroically in the Kuplar province trying to save a besieged regiment. That is what the media and Party will report of me back to Earth. Of the good the Coalition has done on Nova Terra.
What did I really do? I came to this lost planet at the will of the Party and United Nations. Got the shit beat out of me assaulting Jericho. Then I was given a medal for killing a defenseless alien—his blue beautiful eyes still emanate in my mind as if he was before me right now. Next I liberated Khaf’Jadeed, by massacring every innocent there that got in the way of Hannibal’s flawless victory plans for the Party. I became a hunter, killing fellow humans, and became hated by every Terran on this planet. Finally, I somehow survived that horrible ambush where we received our turn of useless bloodshed and slaughter.
And all for what?
For what can I say I did these things? I lost the person I was when I entered Parris Island. I joined for a good cause, and they perverted it, destroyed it alongside me. I like to think sometimes, maybe if I went back to that base, and walked backwards out of the entrance and down the steps I would bump into my old self, my lost soul. And maybe, I could get it back. Hop into its shoes right there, and runaway, never looking back. But the reality is worse than that. My soul left in fragments, in pieces like petals from a rose shaken by the wind. Like this planet, parts of it disappeared from every engagement. Every narrow escape form death. Every killing of another soul. And I am convinced that all those Herculeans that died—not because they were any better than us, they fucking started the war—but because they are also living creatures, because they too have souls, helped those petals wither away, fall off, or get crushed by the marching boot. Ultimately, my soul was taken away petal by petal till only the shell, till only the dry black thorny stem of Peter remained.