My mouth stops speaking, my tongue a foreign organ I can’t control. The burden of my grief. My loss. It takes over. Only my tears continue the conversation. I reach out in longing—I am so alone! My hand does not come back empty though. I feel the old and rough hand of Hannibal. I don’t look up for a while. My arm rests across his lap. The man I hate the most, and now, he is the only one to comfort me here.
“I am so sorry, son,” I hear him say over and over again. Through his words I can hear he is choking up too. I guess even the toughest men cry.
“I won’t leave you here to rot. I will help you, for what I did to you.”
With that I feel his grip loosen and the chair moves to the side.
“Hannibal.”
I hear his footsteps pause. “Yes, son?”
I take out the paper with Isaac’s name on it. “A man was killed by your actions. This is his name.” I hand him the paper. “We played a game. Where you write a stanza off the last word in the previous line, it’s a silly poem type thing. I can’t figure out what to add after his name. Maybe you can.”
He looks at the paper, folds it up, and stands with a troubled sigh, his face stuck into a position of wanting to say something, but can’t. Instead, he sits back down on the chair.
“What was the point?” I say, after sitting quietly with him for a while.
“There wasn’t.”
“And you, the leader of the whole war, honestly believe that?”
“Well there isn’t now, I should clarify. It took a little time for me to figure it out. See son, the cost was too high, it outweighed the reason we fought for and the reason gradually disappeared, and so became pointless. We lived in a society of peace before the Herculeans came. To preserve that global pacifism that raised you, we had to fight. I led this war believing that it was necessary. Necessary to fight. To preserve humanity. Peace. But how it was fought, that was wrong.”
“So, it was all pointless.”
“Eventually. We are still at peace here on Earth. The war is away from the public. Away from their real lives. And I think, maybe we are doing a good job at preserving their way of life at least—but then I look at the cost of it, what we did to you boys, and I remember it isn’t. And sure, they see it on the screens, hear it in the news. But those are fictions. They don’t reveal the reality, the true costs to the public—nor was that ever the intention. Only the people fighting really know what’s happening, and even then, they too, are the farthest away from the truth of what is really happening, because they are smack dab in the middle of it all, and it all becomes confusing—this is why you asked me the question—so they too turn it into fictions to try and cope. Fictions of honor and valor, fictions of victory. The only real thing is the fiction itself, which isn’t.”
“But if the people here don’t really know, and the soldiers over there don’t really know, who does?”
“Nobody, that’s why it’s pointless.” He rises, walking towards the door. “When I placed that medal on you, I only knew one thing then; you were a hero, in a heroless war.”
I mutter to myself, “It’s all a delusion.”
“No, for the people here it’s an illusion. But for you, you brave boys we sent, it was a delusion.”
“What’s the difference?”
His hand rests on the doorknob after he turns and opens it, where he stands in the open space of the doorway, becoming the only shield from the outer world to my small fragile one in here. “An illusion is when everyone is in on the joke, a delusion is when you are the joke.”
The door closes, leaving me fully alone. I lie on my bed. I don’t feel the desire to do anything, anymore. I wait for sleep to take over.
The white void surrounds me. Before me the hill, but it’s now green again. I walk to the top, and where the weeds and roses once were grow a single sprout. The naked lady stands above the sprout, and in both her hands she carries a pitcher that she lowers to water it. She no longer looks starved and her skin has a beautiful tan to it. She gazes downwards at the plant, where only her lower face that is one big smile leading up to her bangs, can be seen. The rest of her hair is tied into a bun at the end of her head.
“Hello!”
There is no response.
The lady continues watering the growing plant. She starts to look up, but pauses in the motion, her upper face still hidden, then her mouth moves, “You are now just body, but darkness has strangely left it.” She stops watering the plant, and kneels by the stem, moving her slim fingers over the sprout towards a green bud, and looks up at me. My skin feels a prickly sunburn sensation. Her face is brighter than a star, white as the void around her.
I wake up with tears running down my face. But they are not of sadness or pain this time. They are of realization, understanding. The boulder I carried around ever since my escape from the ambush feels lighter, my lungs can breathe easier.
“Don’t let this war destroy you,” Mr. Martin once said to me.
Sadly I have let it. But I believe I can find myself again.
Who I once was.
One day, while I sit on the steps looking over a garden in the facility. I watch a woman—her right arm missing up to her elbow—as she enjoys a garden box of blossoming flowers. She turns around, and I am met with her huge smile.
“We never had time to talk about where we both lived,” she says. She sits down on the lawn I visit every night now. “Marshall Hannibal himself surprisingly contacted me. He told me I could be relocated to a clinical ward that you’re at. He also left me a note,” she reveals the paper I gave Hannibal. “I figured out the word game, it was one funny enough, that I played in high school. I thought Hannibal’s line was a little too gloom, so I wrote one as well.”
I take the paper from her. Hannibal actually carried through on his promise. He actually played the game. I read his line, that last word being Isaac.
Ignorance sins, advocating anger carelessly,
And I read her line.
Introspection, subtle altruism, attributes compassion,
She breaks the silence, “Whose Isaac?”
I try hard to find an appropriate answer. I know who Isaac is, and I can feel what Isaac is and was to me. What he still is to me. But I can’t possibly give her the feelings I have inside of my heart about him. What he is, what we have, is beyond words.
Isaac was sacrificed to this war. Sent because orphans aren’t supposed to have anything to lose. But what guarantee, what assurance do we have that it wasn’t wasted?—I don’t know. And the only thing I end up seeing, is that the survivors of this generation, like absurd Abrahams, will simply go and repeat the cycle, sacrificing the Isaacs of the next generation uselessly as the ones before. The State is the alter, the War is god, but where is the ram we were promised?
“He was an offering.”
We watch the sunset together. “It really is beautiful,” she remarks. “Whole, complete, compared to over there.” I look over at her. She looks down at the nub of her missing arm. “Compared to here.”
“It looks like a circle doesn’t it?” I say.
I see the twinkle of muse in her eye, like at that café. “Yeah, of course it does.”
“From here. But if we were able to get right at its surface we would see that it’s hardly a perfect circle. It would be scary, dangerous, a mashed up shape floating in space.”
“True.”
I look at the nub of her arm, she turns away. “Nothing is perfect. It’s what makes us human.” She turns back. “We’re like circles, but poorly drawn and hardly perfect. From afar we may look so, but when you get up and close, we’re anything but. I tried to be a perfect citizen before the war. Then they tried to make me a perfect warrior. After that, I tried to be a perfect martyr and tell the truth about everything. Instead, here I am, broken, insane. But it’s here I can best follow my circle now.”