~
It happened again.
We’d been given orders to strike the industrial quarter of a small town in the lowlands – Intel said it had been cleared out of workers and was being used as a military supply point and refuelling station.
I knew from the scale and scope of the operation that I’d get a chance to fire. Maybe a few times (my UAV carries up to six Hellfire missiles). I was nervous to start with, as expected, but then my training took over and I can’t recall much until I was watching the numbers count down as the missile neared its target. I was calm then, so nerves can’t have explained what happened. Sometimes you just know it will be a clean and precise strike, and I knew that this time.
My screen flared white and I was already starting to think about the next target when a dark, pixelated face flared out of that whiteness, and then another and another, and I knew they were all the men I had just killed. They looked out of the screen at me with hatred.
I didn’t mean to but I cried out into my microphone. Of course I recovered myself, didn’t tell anyone what I had seen. When I had to fire again I looked away from the screen at the crucial moment, so that it wouldn’t happen again. That hatred...
Rumour has of course got out that ‘Drone’ shrieked across the airwaves, that ‘Drone’ sounded like he was afraid even though he (and only he) was in no danger. People are looking at me oddly again. I feel that nausea I get when confronted by problems I can’t solve by reason alone.
I mustn’t let it happen again.
~
I can’t keep doing this, I can’t keep looking away or closing my eyes every time I fire. Even behind closed lids the flash of light is white enough to penetrate, so that I almost see the faces each time even then. Seem to feel their hatred straining to reach me. And their disdain, for the enemy, these soldiers, are just like those on my side – they despise me for killing them from a position where I can’t be killed myself; from the other side of a computer screen.
A few times I have tried to stare them out – to look into their faces in the bright light of the fire I have delivered and meet their gaze: men, boys, and women (we know we sometimes target civilians by mistake, but another blind eye is turned). To prove to them that it is not my fault; that the decisions, the votes, were not mine. But their hatred and disdain always makes me look away first.
~
I am to be transferred back home due to ‘stress’. They want me to quit of course – far easier for them if I just leave rather than have to try and discharge me due to a psychological condition that started whilst on active duty. Ungrateful bastards. But I will oblige.
“Bye Drone; see you Drone” – I am glad to get away.
~
It’s three months since I was discharged; I am shivering in a cold house because I can’t afford to pay the bills. (It feels so fucking cold here after being there.) I can’t get a job that I can hold down because I can’t work anywhere with screens.
It started on the flight back; it was a civilian flight and in each seat people had screens folded down from the roof to watch the in-flight movie. I didn’t pull down mine, but I could still see everyone else’s out of the corner of my eye... especially when they seemed to slow, and show numbers counting down in the bottom-right, and then flash with bright light and hatred that washed over me in my seat. I sat clenched and terrified staring out the window; I was sick but not for the reason the air hostess thought.
It has been happening more and more since I got back; and there are so many screens everywhere nowadays! My house is full of them – my TV, my laptop, my mobile – I have had to turn them all off. The GPS in my car blinding me; the screens in shopping centres showing adverts until I pass, when they fill with silent faces. TV shops with each screen in the window a single, separate face. (Have I killed so many?) And of course, any office I try and get a temp job in is open plan and full of PCs. I try to focus on the meaningless document or spreadsheet of numbers I am working on, when suddenly the numbers began falling and I knew what will happen when the countdown reaches zero...
Closing my eyes doesn’t help; crying out doesn’t help although I do it anyway and the whole office turns to stare. Before I am asked to leave I have no doubt acquired a nickname or two; I am still ‘Drone’ despite leaving the war.
I don’t know how to stop seeing the faces – my parents wanted to show me a photo on their digital camera of their first grandchild (my brother’s daughter) and how could I have said no? But then I flinched and dropped their camera (it didn’t smash) when the screen filled with light only I could see, and a face that promised me damnation in return for that I had visited on her.
But why me? There’s a whole army and air-force killing them all the time, and everyone I pass on the street lets it happen, so why me?
~
It may be over. For some reason I was feeling defiant today, and I plugged in my TV for the first time in months. By coincidence I watched the news, showing troop movements and drone strikes after the event. For a brief moment I felt the old camaraderie and wished I was back there, despite all that has happened. And then, as I expected, the TV screen flooded with white, silent light...
I picked it up and smashed it against the floor just as the first face started to appear.
For a moment I thought, You fool, you’ve let them out! because I felt the light and the hatred surround me. I closed my eyes. I imagined their forms as I had seen them in my night-vision: amorphous and glowing ghosts. And I swear I felt something almost like a hand start to pull at me, to pull me down.
Then there was a pause, like consideration, and then nothing.
I opened my eyes – the TV was smoking with its screen cracked down the middle, and I was alone. After a few moments I cautiously turned on my mobile phone, which I’ve also not used for months. Its screen filled with the bright light of its maker’s logo, but nothing more. It’s been switched on for over an hour now, and nothing has happened. I will call my parents on it to apologise; hell, I may even video call them.
I think it will all be alright now.
~
It didn’t make sense for a while, but now it does. I always knew I wasn’t to blame, not solely at any rate. The people who voted for war or who just let it happen or profited from it – they are as guilty. Everyone I killed, I killed with thousands at my back.
It started with army personnel on leave – killed, seemingly torn apart in a frenzy when they were alone. No one understood how or why – the savagery, the speed. Like they’d been blown apart but without any explosion.
Then a politician was killed in the same way, and then a newspaper editor, and then the CEO of a munitions company. It was all the news talked about, and there was speculation that it was a new terrorist weapon, and that we should step up our war effort accordingly.
And then a petrol station attendant, ripped apart in his booth between customers, and that confused everyone because why would terrorists attack someone like that?
And then the people who were killed were just people, normal people – a few every day, but more every day too, seemingly at random across the country. All killed in the same hideous way. Everyone is terrified but no one knows why it is happening but me.
I did let them out, after all. And they understood where the blame lies, understood which army of people their hatred should be targeted against. I wonder who, if anyone, they will spare as guiltless? It is one thing to imagine their glowing, infrared forms descending on an adult; but on a child, a baby... I think they will care about such things as much as we did, out in the desert.
They still hate and despise me more than everyone else though – for being cowardly, in their eyes; from watching their deaths on a computer screen miles away from even the faintest chance of retaliation... That for them is the final insult and indignity.
They do hate me, so they are leaving me until last.
To watch, like I’ve always done.
Public Interest Story
&nbs
p; Outside, next morning, was a crowd.
Joel stood and watched them from the front bedroom, which afforded the best view. It was a small crowd, true, maybe a dozen people. But it was a crowd nonetheless – he could see that by the way they stood, not moving and close together, little bits of their personality rubbing off on each other. Their eyes glazed over with each other’s mentality. The quick twitch of his curtains set them murmuring, started a couple of them pacing around. Someone shouted something, seemingly for the sake of it, but Joel couldn’t make out the words. He let go of the curtain and sat down with his back to the wall, head below the window-line, arms around his knees. He looked at the dusty wooden floor of the bedroom, the bed stripped of bedclothes, the bare coat-hangers in the open wardrobe. There were still magazines and one shoe under the bed, which he hadn’t noticed before. Ian had packed so quickly that he had left some stuff behind, but Joel didn’t think his housemate would be coming back to get it. Joel licked his lip, where it had been cut. He heard another yell from outside.
That newspaper, he thought, this is all the fault of that fucking newspaper.
~
The two housemates had a newspaper each delivered every Sunday. Typically Joel and Ian would be sitting together, nursing hangover coffee, when the clattering, metallic sound battered at the doorway (the newspaper girl or boy was just a smudged shape behind frosted glass). Maybe it was the caffeine – maybe it was the hangover – but the sound of the paper being delivered always set Joel’s nerves on edge.
It was always the smaller, tabloid-sized paper – Ian’s paper – that was delivered first, with a brief clattering fanfare. Like something alive forcing its way in. Then Joel’s paper struggled through, a more difficult and segregated birth. The broadsheet wouldn’t fit through in one go and some of the sections – maybe Culture, maybe Escape – were pushed through separately. Even so, the main paper tended to rip, so that words of stories on page 3 and even 5 could be seen on page 1, hints of editorial decisions in an alternative universe.
Ian and Joel were not students, but still lived like they were. Joel didn’t really know how he had ended up living with Ian – he had lost touch with other friends with whom he had been far closer. Although they got on, it was because Joel never argued with Ian’s opinions, which he felt were frequently loud-mouthed and ill-informed. But then maybe Ian’s gypsy-bashing and homophobia were really Devil’s advocacy – Joel didn’t actually know him well enough to be sure. So he said nothing and stayed living with Ian. Besides, the house was near to the dead-end street where he worked, and the rent was cheap for a double room (for what good the double did him).
Ian would always get up with a groan to go and fetch the papers, leaving Joel a few moments hanging suspended, reflecting. He would never quite admit to himself that this reflection made him even more anxious; nervous even – although he had been drifting since university, he still felt he must have made some drastic and ill-founded detour to have ended up living how he was. Somehow, when he looked at his life, it didn’t seem quite his.
Ian would return with the papers, flinging the ungainly broadsheet at Joel in two parts. The headlines – the international tension, crisis recoveries, and exit plans – soothed him, gave his previous thoughts some perspective. The two lads would sit and read their papers, drinking their cooling coffee. Generally, Ian took as long to read his paper as Joel did his.
“I don’t know why you read that shit,” Joel would say at some point. When Ian finished with the tabloid Joel would pick it up between thumb and forefinger, like it was trash discarded. But still, he would always read it. It always seemed the same, and yet in the same heartbeat surreal, some dispatch from a country with which he had lost touch years ago. There were stories about celebrities he’d never heard of, agony-aunt columns whose advice seemed suicidal, constant froth about a soap opera royal family, editorials denouncing “mass immigration” from countries too small to be found on the map, tirades against “perverts and paedophiles” opposite the tits of an eighteen year old girl with a made up name. He felt strange reading it, like there was more meaning in the fuzzy print than he could decipher, like it was all set in a code that he should have learnt.
“Why do you always read it then, if it’s so shit?” Ian would say.
Joel couldn’t answer. Partly of course it was just sick fascination. He didn’t find the views expressed repellent so much as ludicrous – an elaborate mythology scratched and re-scratched below the tide-line. So partly he read the paper on the know-your-enemy principle. But partly... he was also looking for something. For what exactly he didn’t know – and indeed he was only half-conscious of the fact that he was looking for anything at all. But as he strived to make sense of the tabloid mindset, underneath there was the feeling that one day he would see something in there with a direct and vital relevance to his life.
BAN THIS FILTH! he read. HOW CAN THIS MONSTER BE ALLOWED OUT AMOUNG OUR KIDS? LEFTY LUNACY. 34DD.
“It’s just trash,” he would say to Ian, flinging it back with a faint but tangible feeling of disappointment. Of relief.
“Go back to your liberal crap,” Ian would say. “There’s enough of it.”
~
There were more of them now – Joel watched from the bedroom as the newcomers were welcomed, absorbed into the crowd. They had come as a couple but they weren’t looking at each other now, but upwards at his house like everyone else. Their expressions slackened to match those around them. The crowd all swayed with the same internal rhythm; all of their eyes remained fixed on the still point of the window. Why are you here? Joel thought. This is ridiculous! There was some shouting, which died down. He couldn’t hear what they were shouting. The crowd moved – from above he could see the movement like ripples on flat water. He realised one person was pushing forwards, but he could barely see the man, just the wake either side of him as he moved people aside. When he reached the front of the crowd the man continued to run forward, a dark silhouette cutting across the lawn towards the front door. Joel heard the letterbox open and close, then the man ran back to where he had come from, creating new ripples in the crowd before those caused by his brief exit had even died away. Joel blinked in astonishment, and lost sight of the man. Then he ran downstairs, to the hall. When he saw what had been pushed through the letterbox it made some sense – maybe it would all start to make sense now.
Through the door had been pushed a rolled up tube of newspaper. Tabloid, Joel saw – it must be today’s edition, and it would carry some explanation. But halfway to it, Joel’s eager strides slowed; he could smell something. Kneeling to retrieve the paper it was unmistakable – shit. As he lifted the paper it sagged with weight, but didn’t break; Joel gagged at the smell. The bastards have put shit through my door! he thought, not so much angry as simply incredulous. What had driven them to such a thing?
The dustbins were in the back garden, which was fortunately self-contained, so he could enter it without the people at the front of his house realising. Joel gripped the newspaper between thumb and forefinger, head averted, and flung it into the bin. He could hear the sound of the crowd from round front; a chant almost started up but the rhythm was lost this time, defused. Why? Joel thought again. Looking in the bin he could see the crap stained stories, the crumpling of the newspaper putting the wrong words next to each other – Joel thought he could see his name, but it was an accident of the way the words fell. That was all. The newspaper was old, he realised he had read these stories, these football scores, before. Over a week ago, in that pub, and he hadn’t seen anything then. But maybe now... – he reached for the paper again...
What am I doing? he thought, why am I standing and reading a shit stained newspaper? Grimacing, he closed the bin and went back inside, where the crowd-sounds seemed quieter.
~
It had been the Saturday before. Whether the day’s events were connected to what happened seemed unlikely at best, a forced connection from a later viewpoint. But it had seemed like t
he day when the pressure had changed.
Joel was on the Saturday shift. When he’d taken the job they hadn’t mentioned anything about working weekends, but he was only a temp, and they could do what they wanted to him. He was fighting back yawns and a mild hangover when the boss called him into his office and told him he was fired.
“Wh.. what? But why?” Joel had said, too tired to be anything but perplexed.
“Listen, there isn’t, I don’t have to...” – his boss was a blustery, stuttering man, fat-lipped and heavily jawed. “I just have to call your agency, I don’t have to give you a reason.” The manager’s words were all said in a brave little rush, and he was shifting his weight from one desk-job buttock to another. Joel realised that the man looked genuinely anxious about something.
Joel walked slowly back to his desk, to collect his things. None of his ex-colleagues looked at him, they were intent on their PCs – suddenly and mysteriously industrious. Joel started to speak to a girl with whom he thought he’d struck up a polite friendship, but she ignored him. In fact that wasn’t quite true – she heard him and tensed at her PC – Joel could see the muscles tighten in her shoulders. But she carried on her impression of being a valued and eager employee.
Well, fuck ’em all, Joel thought as he dragged on his coat. He was better off out of here anyway – the agency would find him another job on Monday. What did he care what these people thought of him? He left without another word, his pockets full of office stationary.
The street outside was crowded with shoppers, so many of them it was as if Joel had got his seasons all wrong and it was really Christmas. Joel felt comforted by the crowd though, the sheer normality of it reset his emotional temperature after the strange and alienating way he had been treated. It was a fake solidarity, not conceived of or shared by the women struggling with pushchairs draped with carrier bags, or by the gang of youths all gathered heads together around one mobile phone, or by the beggar temporarily not seeking charity but just looking angry and baffled by those walking past. But it was a solidarity Joel felt none the less.
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