by Неизвестный
“Fired. Not freed.”
“Come now, son, you weren’t the only one who was ‘fired,’ as you put it, were you? Soldiers from all sides were ‘fired,’ young and old. Your new country only needs a small standing army, after all. That’s what we mean when we talk about demobilization. A country at peace has no need of so many soldiers, and besides, children shouldn’t really be fighting in the first place.”
“I don’t know about your country, Doctor,” I replied, “but in this country, what ‘should’ happen and what does happen are two different things.”
“Well, then,” said the doctor, “I guess you could say I’m here to make sure that what ‘should’ happen does actually happen.”
We were bussed over to the ruins of a place that had once been a five-star hotel somewhere in downtown Heaven City. American and Shelmikedian armored vehicles were parked outside, and both countries’ national flags were flying. Next to these flags was another flag with a picture of the earth wrapped in a ring of leaves, and next to that yet another flag, this one with angels of yellow and cream and brown holding hands and forming a circle around the earth.
“What’s that flag there?” I pointed and asked as I got off the bus. The doctor, who had gotten off right behind me, peered at it and replied, “That’s UNICEF. It’s an international organization dedicated to protecting children around the world.”
Hmm, great job you’re doing there, I thought but didn’t say. I continued my questioning. “And what about the one next to that?”
“Oh, that’s what’s called an NGO. It’s not a national or international organization, exactly. It’s more like a civilian organization here to try and help the people of this country get back on their feet.”
“What about this CMI that you’re from, Doctor? Don’t you have your own flag?”
“No, we’ve been hired in by MSD—that’s short for Monde Sans Divisions,” the doctor explained. “That’s what this NGO is called. And we come under their banner.”
The hotel had been abandoned during the war, and with no guests or even a skeleton crew to maintain it, it was now in a real state: a crumbling husk of a building with an empty, cracked swimming pool that now functioned as a giant trash can. Looking at the pool now it was hard to imagine it ever being full of water. It was as if the rectangular hole was the obvious thing to expect there, a natural part of the landscape.
As such it was hard to imagine that inside would be much better. It looked like these guys had set up camp here a few days ago. Cardboard boxes were scattered all over the place. The hotel was made of stone, like all the fanciest places were once upon a time, but right now it was a dump. The soles of the doctor’s shoes clattered on the marble floor as he walked along.
“You’ll have to excuse the mess,” the doctor said with a hint of apology in his tone. “But up until three days ago there was even a pack of wild dogs roaming about the place, running through the corridors and guest rooms.”
So what’s happened to them now, I asked, and the response I got made me laugh.
“We got rid of them, of course. We had to make this place safe for you guys.”
Safe. What a word to use. Up until recently there wasn’t a single place in this country you could have called safe.
There were twelve of us in total who had been brought from the school, and now we were escorted into a large room. As I looked at a mural on the crumbling wall I thought what a beautiful room this would have been only a short while ago. It had a skinny guy in the middle who was glowing, with his arms outstretched, and around him were a bunch of men. It must have been painted by some of those Christians who used to run the country. It looked like the guys in the painting were at a dining table or something, but for some reason they weren’t gathered around it but rather lined up neatly on one side. Each to their own, I suppose, but it seemed like a strange way to eat dinner to me. It almost made our own gatherings around the campfire chewing our Khatsticks seem normal.
Anyway, the room we were now in, it was full of lots of weird-looking chairs.
Almost like the robots used by the American forces. They were brand-spanking-new shiny, and I imagined that they were ready to grow a pair of legs and walk off at any time. The strangest parts of them, though, were the bucketlike contraptions attached to the tops of the chair backs.
“What are those things that look like buckets?” I asked, pointing at one.
“Well, after we’ve given you all your little shots, we’ll just need you to put them on for a little while and take a little nap,” the doctor explained. “Goes without saying they’re perfectly safe, of course.”
“Why do we have to put them on?” I asked.
“These are the things that are finally going to bring your war to an end,” the doctor said. “As I said before, as long as you do this you’ll be able to stay part of the program. You won’t return to the House of Smiles, of course, but you’ll be able to carry on your studies in peace at another institute nearby, and you’ll be well looked after.”
That’s why I was here, after all; that’s what was on offer. It was just me and my ilk who had been brought here from the House of Smiles. In other words, kids who had joined the SDA after they’d had their family and friends killed by the Hoa. We weren’t the only kids who had joined the SDA, remember—some kids signed up because it had been the only way to get a full belly. But none of those kids were here with us in the hotel today.
“You keep on talking about this injection. What is it exactly?”
“Well, you remember how we were talking about the shot to the heart that we could give you? This is it.”
“How does it work?”
“How does it work?” The doctor laughed nervously. “Uh, that’s not the easiest thing in the world to explain, but I suppose I could try. You know what the brain is, right? It’s the part of us that controls how we think or feel.”
“Have you ever seen a brain, Doctor?” I asked him.
“No, well, I’m what you call a nanomachine technician. I’m not a brain surgeon.”
Nanomachine, schmanomachine. This much I did know—I’d seen enough brains to last me a lifetime. Even if I’d never seen a whole one intact, as they were always messed up and spilling all over the place. What right did this guy who hadn’t even seen a real brain have to lecture me about how they worked?
The doctor just carried on, though, completely unaware of how much of a fool he looked in my eyes. “To get a bit more technical, the procedure’s called Geistesgestaltbedeutungseinsatzexistenzlokalisierungsveränderungsausführung. All you really need to know, though, is that we lightly, uh, modify your brain, so that you end up looking at the world in a slightly different way. We call it the Indifference Engine.”
At the time I wasn’t thinking too hard about what the “slightly different way” could mean. I am who I am, after all, and it’s hard for a person to get his head around the idea that he could be any different from who he is.
I was more interested in asking whether the procedure had been tried out on anyone else. “I’m not being used as some sort of guinea pig, am I?”
“Not at all. There are plenty of people in my home country who’ve already had the same operation as the one you’re about to get. They all chose to have it—it’s an elective procedure. And even here in your country, there are quite a few adults who’ve had the operation and are working to make the world a better place. Take microfinancing, for example—oh, I guess you wouldn’t know what that is, would you?”
“Not exactly,” I replied.
“Microfinancing is where you lend money to people who just need a tiny bit of capital to get a business off the ground: seed money, it’s sometimes called. Now, normally, the condition of the loan is that the person who borrows the money has to pay it back and then some. After all, the lender is entitled to make some profit, right?”
“I guess so,” I said.
“Well, this extra amount is what we call ‘interest.’ Now, the NGO tha
t employs us makes these sorts of loans to people who want to start businesses, but they give them a choice. The borrower can choose to pay back the money with interest, like with a normal loan. Or they can choose to have the shot to the heart. Many people go for the shot. Most of the traders you saw back at the market have already had it, for example.”
This I didn’t know. Still, I couldn’t quite shake off a niggling feeling that there was something not quite right about all this, even if I wasn’t the first to have the operation. It still felt like I was somehow being hoodwinked.
The doctor addressed the whole lot of us now. “Anyway, come on now, guys, the sooner you take a seat the sooner we can get you all home,” he said, almost cajoling us into the chairs.
What did he mean by “home” anyway? We’d lost that to the Hoa many years ago. Not just “home”: our villages had been wiped away completely. Where exactly was I supposed to go? As long as the war continued, I always had my company. That had been my home. War had been my home. What about now, though? Was the House of Smiles supposed to be my new home?
The doctor just didn’t get it. I ignored him as he droned on and slipped into one of the chairs, which turned out to be surprisingly comfortable. I decided to focus on the reality in front of me—if I went through with this, at the very least I’d be good for another meal.
We were moved again.
To the east side of town this time, to a building that had a big billboard displayed up top reading SEEDS FOR A BRAVE NEW WORLD. This new building was closer to a residential area, and people from the neighborhood had come out to watch our arrival. Their stares were full of curiosity—and hostility.
When I realized I wasn’t going to have to deal with those Hoa I had fought with, I breathed a sigh of relief. Half the class I was now with were guys who had fought alongside me back at the ruckus, the other half I didn’t recognize at all. We all seemed roughly the same age, and I figured the others had probably been involved in similar incidents elsewhere. I doubt they’d thought to use a pencil like I had, though.
Something seemed strange when we entered the classroom. It was almost as if my field of vision had been wrapped in a warm, fuzzy blanket. At that moment I hadn’t yet realized what had happened to my mind.
“I’m Ezgwai,” said the softspoken boy who was sitting next to me.
“What did you do to make them send you here?” I asked by way of introduction.
For a second he looked as if he’d been slapped, but then he laughed. “You don’t beat around the bush, do you?”
“We’re all here for a reason—we’re troublemakers. I just figure same goes for you guys,” I said.
“Touché. I’m sure you’ve probably worked it out by now, but we’ve just been moved here from a place called the Second Chance Rebirth Saloon, over on the other side of town,” Ezgwai answered.
“You guys ex-soldiers too?”
“Yep.”
“Huh. So you were a soldier too, huh? Like me.”
At this point Ezgwai seemed to bite down on his lip. As if he’d just remembered something he’d rather forget.
“My family were all killed,” Ezgwai said. “My ma, pa, gran, my brother—all of them.”
“What about your village?”
“Gone, I’m guessing. It was burnt to shit last I saw it. Most of us were killed, but I was one of the ‘lucky ones’ taken prisoner.”
An orphan. Just like me. He too had seen his house put to the flame, seen the piles of arms chopped off by the Hoa machetes like so much firewood. We were hardly the only ones here who’d seen such atrocities firsthand, of course, but nonetheless the shared experience seemed to act as a bond between us.
“My family was murdered too. Same goes for everyone else in our class.”
Ezgwai nodded in silent acknowledgment. There wasn’t any more to say on the subject, and the conversation tapered off into an uncomfortable silence. Unable to bear it any longer, I decided to change the subject completely.
“Did you guys go to that weird hotel too?” I asked.
“You guys too, huh?” Ezgwai actually seemed surprised about this. “Yeah, we were made to sit down and put those barrel things on our heads after being pumped full of stuff.”
“D’you know what they actually did to us?” I asked, my voice trailing off.
Ezgwai shook his head. “You?”
“Nah. One of the doctors did try explaining, but …”
“Forgot what he said, huh?”
I shook my head. “Something like that. There was this ridiculously complicated foreign word. Something to do with cutting something off or blocking or changing or something, I think. A million times more complicated than our classes here.”
“I wonder if the teachers here would explain it to us if we asked them,” Ezgwai said.
“Yeah, I wonder. I get the sense they’re keeping something from us,” I said.
Just then a teacher came into the room. A fat lady wearing a pearly white short-sleeved shirt. I wonder if she’d been raped too, I thought to myself. I couldn’t imagine that there were many women left in this country who hadn’t been raped at some point or another during the war. I’d done my fair share of rape after all. When we raided Hoa villages. The captain had said he’d kill me if I didn’t, so what else was there to do? I was shit-scared the first time, but once I’d done my first I realized there was nothing to it, really. If you needed to empty your bladder you pissed in a toilet, and if you needed to empty your balls you raped a woman. So it went, and so I did what needed to be done.
But I did wonder which tribe would have had this fat woman. The Hoa? Or would it have been us Xema?
And that was when I started to realize that something was not quite right.
“Good day, gentlemen. Welcome to the place where you will prepare for a new chapter in your lives,” said the fat lady.
Gentlemen. I looked around, surveying the others who were in the room.
“You have all been granted a new ability,” Fatty continued. “An ability that will stand you in good stead for the future of our country. This new ability is already commonplace in Europe and America, and I guarantee you that it will free you from the shackles of hatred that are currently holding you back.”
Her voice was soft, gentle, brimming with hopefulness—and gave me the creeps.
I leaned in toward Ezgwai. “They just don’t get it, do they? I mean, it’s not as if they don’t know what we’ve been through.”
Ezgwai suppressed a laugh. “You said it, bro. I do see where they’re coming from, though. That sooner or later we’re going to have to let it go, or we’ll never be happy. Otherwise we’ll never have peace, I guess.”
“What about our mothers and sisters? They’ll never be happy. Do we let that go too?”
“No, that’ll always be with us,” said Ezgwai, his face suddenly a picture of desolation. “And even when I know in my head that sooner or later we’re going to have to let bygones be bygones, whenever I actually see someone who used to be the enemy … I see red. I feel like I’m going to explode with hatred. But what can I do? I don’t have my AK-47 with me anymore, and even if I did, if I killed someone I’d just be imprisoned for murder. It’s not like it used to be, when you could kill all you wanted.”
“Well, we might not have our guns anymore,” I replied, holding up the pencil I’d been given, “but this baby here can go a long way in a pinch. Trust me, I know.”
Ezgwai and I became tight.
We lined up for rations together, and we helped each other out with our homework. He was a real good guy, was Ezgwai. He had his head screwed on too and was always there to calm me down whenever I was about to flip out over something. You could have called us opposites—could have, that is, if we hadn’t shared the uniting factor that we’d both been driven into the army when our families had been killed.
Our actual classes were more or less identical to those we’d had back at the House of Smiles, with one key difference: the teachers s
eemed awful keen on speaking to us individually. Do you like it here? Anything that’s annoyed you or made you feel angry recently? There seemed to be a constant barrage of questions like these. And there always seemed to be a white doctor by the teacher’s side, tapping away at their keyboard.
“So, can you tell me why you’re feeling grumpy?” Fatty asked me one day.
I nodded. “I guess ’cause I got no Khatsticks or gunpowder.”
“That’s the reason, is it?” Fatty gave a sympathetic nod of her head. As if to show she understood my pain. All this did, though, was piss me off even more.
Fatty continued regardless. “We call those sorts of things drugs. If you carried on using them you would have destroyed your bodies.”
“I feel so irritable without them though,” I said.
“And what about your friends? Have you noticed any of them fighting? Anyone you particularly don’t like?” Fatty continued.
“Fighting?” I asked. “Not really—what do we have to fight about?”
Fatty and the white doctor exchanged glances. Then she smiled at me again. “Looks like we’re making progress.” She rubbed her eyes. And then I realized it was to wipe away her tears. She seemed deeply moved by something.
“By the time you young men become fully fledged adults this country should be a wonderful place again. A gentler place where the terms ‘Xema’ and ‘Hoa’ are nothing but irrelevant old labels. Even though at the moment it might seem like all you can think about is hatred, it won’t be long before you breech that final frontier. You’ll explore strange new worlds together. You boys are our hope incarnate, you are new life. We adults have been irredeemably corrupted by our hatred. But you’re different. You’ll be able to leave this place and boldly go where no man has gone before. You’ll found new civilizations, a new Shelmikedmus.”
With that, Fatty rose from her seat and enveloped me in her ample bosom with a tight hug.
The main feeling I experienced at that moment, with my face pressed into her massive tits, was an uneasy sense that something wasn’t quite right about what she had just said. I wondered from where this woman’s hopes and dreams were springing. Personally, I’d seen too much—and done too much—to expect anything good from this world.