An Image of the Moment

by daniel gothard

or dissident - keep your head down, don't look at the cameras above, ignore other people who ask you for help. This is how Very Bad Things always begin - Nazi Germany, Stalin's Soviet Union - friends turn on friends, a whole way of life becomes full of hate and deception. The idea that It Couldn't Happen Here becomes history. And those who disagree are simply disappeared.

  You know all around the country at that exact moment, thousands, maybe millions of children, just like your son, are sitting and happily watching their 'HomeSchool' screens. They are in a place of ignorance where they believe what they read on-line. There are always the government messages, so subtly placed and evenly distributed in short subliminal bursts that you have to watch all the screens, constantly, almost without blinking, hour upon hour to see any evidence of them - most people don't believe they exist.

  The children are bombarded with primary colours and information-provider smiles, friendly patterns of neural stimuli which allow them to sit inside their homes and stay silent and still while the country is stripped away. All those impressionable young minds who could shape the future are made to sit and wait for nothing at all - no real future, instead of seeing and doing for themselves in a school, a playground, with people of their own age - a generation separated and disjointed who will develop into only fractures of humanity; accepting what they are told is right and wrong. This is how the masses are kept cowed and willing. And this has to end.

  Your son begins to laugh hysterically.

  You look at him and at the screen he is watching - the computer has six separate monitors built in to a larger one. He is laughing at a news feed - pictures of people fleeing bombing raids in the Middle East.

  'Why are you laughing at that?' you ask, trying not to sound angry, and wondering how he managed to bypass the Parental Controls. You know the government must have allowed the Security Service to inveigle its way in to the broadcast feeds of suspected activists - like you - and aim psychological destruction at your families. You were told this was coming, maybe it's been here for a long time. A day without end.

  You have tried to obtain real books instead of this damn machine, but every volume you try and order either never arrives or has many images and words, entire paragraphs, redacted.

  'It's funny, dad. It's like that game I play. You watch a target, something drops from the sky then the smoke rises and people run around with weird looks on their faces. Look, dad, look at that man. He's laughing. It's really funny.'

  Your son is full of delight as he watches a sickening moment, his right index finger is pressed against one of the small monitors. He leaves his fingerprint on the screen. You wonder if the Security Service have invented a way to read those accidental smudges of our identities as another way of procuring information about what we do and how we think.

  You rub the screen clean with a tissue.

  The running man, covered in building dust, is not laughing. He is screaming and clutching his head. You wonder if he has lost his entire family in the explosion. These days, you hear, bombing raids are almost always randomly targeted, intelligence reports are wrong almost half the time.

  You look at the man's eyes - full of grief and fear. You look at your son - full of joy and faith in you, and you want to kill someone for the way such juxtaposed perversion has become endemic - the norm.

  You are staring at your son's left ear; looking at the wax that needs washing off the loop leading into his inner ear. You are wondering how you can tell him how things were and how they should still be; about how everything that so many people have fought and died for has been ripped away and then destroyed under the guise of protecting what the country holds most dear: Freedom and Liberty - now just words in books, meaningless expressions of theory.

  You are part of the generation that smiled and sat idly by as the leaders, the one-per-centers drove you and every other willing sap in to the darkest corners of need and fear and nailed the Historical Reference Nightmare: Work Makes Free above your heads.

  You let it happen here.

  And then your son is gone. There is nothing behind the glasses for a second. You are about to touch the lenses and ask the balloon what is happening; what has happened to your son; that you must go back and speak to him. There is so much more that you can teach him, show him how to bring other people into the fight to take back the land when he is old enough. You only have nine years left; you must start immediately.

  There is a burst of white light - as in a game of Word Association you immediately think Super Nova. You see flames with orange dagger-like tips above a house roof; hear the smash of window glass exploding from the pressure of heat and then you are watching your house, and what you can see of its contents, engulfed in a torrent of uncontrolled burning mayhem - the flip and flop of debris, as if the fire has been ordered to cause as much damage as possible. You associate with another word: Arson.

  You watch treasured, sentimental-valued items melting, ceilings crumbling and collapsing.

  You are about to shout for your wife and son.

  A hand on your right shoulder makes you turn your head suddenly as if you are being attacked. You flinch and drop to one side. You ball your hands and get ready to duck deeper and return punches.

  'They were taken away by the police, the local lot,' your neighbour says. You know her to be like you; hating the way things are. She has been taken in for questioning a few times and joked they have a file on her thicker than War and Peace. She is trustworthy. You like her.

  She looks at you; at the house and nods towards the fire crew. She shakes her head and holds your forearm - silently imparting a warning to ignore what is going on; pretend the devastation is something other to you. Walk on by, her eyes are saying.

  The fire officers are talking to each other - two of them are actually smiling; casually pointing two cannons of water at various points of the fire, not really attempting to quell the spread of burning. It is very clear they do not care about saving the building. They must know it is empty and, you wonder, if they are under orders from the Security Service to let it all flame-away to the ground.

  Examples must be set. Messages must be sent. And what better way to send a message than through the bright untamed light of a conflagration against the night sky - like a superhero's beacon of courage spinning on its head.

  You watch your safest place on the planet - the house your son was born in - drop to its knees in a charred mess.

  You spend the rest of the time the fire crew is 'working' to save your house in your neighbour's front room, watching until the street has emptied, until everyone has walked on by and the area is quiet.

  And then, after a comrade-like hug with your neighbour and a look up and down the pavement for faces at windows or in cars watching out for you, you return to the ruin that was your home.

  The gun and knife you have kept hidden under the kitchen floorboards for such a long time seem to be unaffected by the fire as you pull them out and hold them up.

  The local police station is a ten-minute walk away, just long enough to devise some sort of plan-of-action and not enough additional time to re-think it.

  'A family were brought in earlier, a mother and son. A house was on fire, just up the road there. Maybe they were brought here for safety?' you say to the desk sergeant. He is around fifty. He looks tired and bored; the nightshift must be slow these days - most people know to keep calm, socialise in their homes; lock the front door after dark and stay behind that door.

  'And who are you?' the sergeant says. He looks at you, at his desk; moving a red exercise book to one side, and then at the camera pointed at us in the far corner of the small reception area.

  'The husband and father. The house has gone now. All gone and burned down.'

  'They were brought in, but they've been taken ...'

  The sergeant is a terrible liar - perhaps he is one of the last good police, but you don't car
e about good police now, and you don't care about how many lives you have to crush into the dead earth of this avaricious country to get your family back.

  'Are you saying they aren't here?' you ask.

  'No ...Yes. They were moved about an hour ago. I'll try and find out where they were taken ... moved to.'

  You hear your son's voice: whining, sleepy, echoing. He is saying how bored he is. He wants to go home. He is just around the corner, down a corridor; perhaps in a cell; somewhere close.

  'Oh, just a moment officer. A mistake's been made you see,' you say to the sergeant. He turns back to face you, looking even more bored and tired now. But you know the fatigue is an act - beads of sweat have begun to build on his bald head. He raises his eyebrows, uses four fingers to dry his forehead, and looks into your eyes with fake curiosity, then glances up at the camera again - as if his superiors will send him orders through blinks of the lens. He has a barely concealed ear-piece you noticed earlier and almost certainly is receiving some form of order right at that moment.

  "Keep the bastard talking until we get there ..."

  You have waited long enough. You see the sergeant has keys on his belt; there are no other officers in the reception area - although you are certain they are on the way. You must act now.

  'Open the desk,' you say, bringing out your