by Weston Ochse
Which I was.
The same as I was now.
I reminded myself that the only reason I wasn’t going bat-shit crazy right now was because of the mystery of it all. The newness of my predicament, the shared predicaments of all of us in the underground bunker, and the idea that even as broken as I was, I might be worth something, someday, if I ever had time to read all the books, watch all the movies, and pass all the tests.
I found myself looking around my tiny room. I didn’t pretend that I didn’t know why. I knew exactly why. I was looking for something I could use to take my life. Not that I was going to take it right this minute, but if I wanted to, and I knew I would, I wanted to be ready when the feeling arose.
I cursed. The problem with an institution creating cells for men and women who might try to commit suicide was that they generally knew all the things one could use to accomplish the job.
No sharp objects.
No access to electrical.
No way to tie something from the ceiling.
No way to slam your head against an outcropping.
The bed was an ergonomically curved frame, and the only part that extended was the mattress. A shelf along one wall was recessed. The shelf I pulled the tablet from was made of fabric. The mirror above the recessed sink was made out of stainless steel and was part of the wall. Even the toilet, which moved in and out of the room at the touch of a button, was made of a rubbery substance that made me not want to sit on it for any longer than was necessary.
Someone cried out, followed by a chorus of shut up!
Nothing like a bunch of soldiers with whom to commiserate.
No state has an inherent right to survive through conscript troops and in the long run no state ever has. Roman matrons used to say to their sons: ‘Come back with your shield or on it.’ Later on, this custom declined. So did Rome.
Robert Heinlein,
Time Enough For Love
CHAPTER SEVEN
SIX WEEKS PASSED as I worked through the list. Days were punctuated by three meals and a midnight snack, provided by our trusty remote servants. Sometimes I read right through the night, interested in the battles and relationships with the characters, other nights I paced back and forth, staggering sometimes, as I tried desperately to stay awake so I could complete the task sooner. Twice I took tests which I failed, meaning I had to go back and read those sections of the books I’d failed to understand the first time. I should have known better. Whenever I thought something wouldn’t be on the test, it was, as if the test controllers had chosen the densest parts of the book to use to quiz me.
My strategy was to read all the books first and leave the movies for last. What at first had seemed daunting had become a succession of hills to take, military objectives. Once I conquered one, it was time to run down and conquer the next. My reading was getting faster too. Not that I’d learned how to scan, like PFC Paulsen back in Iraq, who seemed capable of reading a book a day, but I was no slacker.
We hadn’t seen anything of the officials running the complex, except when they came to remove all the tables and chairs, and when they came to remove the bodies. Two of our members had been determined enough to find a way to kill themselves. I watched as their bodies were carried away. I was detached. Other than Michelle and the asshole Olivares, I didn’t know anybody else. Unlike in a military unit, we didn’t share anything except our nightmares of war and the agreement we’d made with TF OMBRA to try and save the planet. Once we made it to Phase II, we’d have plenty of time to bond. Now was the time for concentration.
It took me a while to work out how they’d killed themselves. Whoever had constructed the rooms had done a magnificent job eliminating corners and sharp edges. Even the light fixtures were immovable. The silverware was made from Teflon rubber. The plates were made from indestructible plastic. Really, other than slamming one’s head against the walls, bars, or floor, there was little someone could do to hurt themselves.
Except for the underside of the bed. Doing sit ups my third day I saw it. The metal loops of the springs ran from one side of the frame to the other in a continuous interlocking web, both holding the mattress up and adding spring tension so it was less like sleeping on a rock and more like sleeping on a board. All of the metal pieces had been spot welded, probably to make certain we couldn’t use one of the ends. But the last spot weld at the foot of the bed on both sides was loose. I pried free one end, revealing a nasty-edged piece of wire, which once freed, I could bend with only a little amount of force.
It would take very little effort to rake my arm from wrist to elbow, dragging the metal through tissue and vessels to end it once and for all. At least once a day I found myself on the ground, staring at it. The metal represented a release, a way out. It was an alternative I could choose to take, or not.
Yet the more time passed, the less I looked at it. The more I immersed myself into the lives of fictional soldiers and contemplated the reality that there were real aliens out to get us, the more I wanted to live. It was extraordinary that the threat of an alien invasion could do what all the counseling and consulting had failed to do.
That is, of course, if I believed lock, stock, and barrel what TF OMBRA was telling me.
My thoughts slipped to my Aunt Nancy, who was as fond of conspiracy theories as she was of her gin. I could still see her, sitting at the Formica table in her tiny kitchen in Hackettstown, New Jersey, drinking gin and juice and smoking cigarettes like she was a major stockholder in a tobacco company. She’d wave her hand around, making miniature tornadoes as she turned the news of the day into something conspiratorial.
If a plane crashed, it was the government trying to cover something up. Her favorite theory was that every single plane that crashed was the result of a UFO encounter and it was our government’s secret treaty with the aliens that made them kill their own people. If there was a train wreck, it was to cover up some release of energy/noxious gas/alien technology/fill in the blank from whatever Top Secret government facility was nearest the crash site.
Then, of course, there was the weather. Major disasters were the result of the government’s weaponized weather machine spinning out of control. She’d theorized that the machine was located somewhere in the Midwest, which was the reason states like Kansas, Oklahoma and Texas were always hit the hardest.
When once asked about hurricanes, she’d laughed, explaining how the Soviet Union had put their own weaponized weather device into the hands of Fidel Castro. All one had to do was look at a map and see that all the hurricanes came from around Cuba as proof.
I’d developed my love for listening to the Night Stalker on late night radio from her. No matter how extraordinary her theories, the Night Stalker’s conspiracies were even crazier. Except that listening to his cold, velvet voice on the late night airwaves, I couldn’t help but believe in what he had to say.
My Aunt Nancy loved him. Often three sheets to the wind, she’d listen and provide a constant commentary about whatever the topic of the evening was.
Even into her sixties she’d dressed like a House and Garden housewife from the early nineteen-sixties. She always wore old fashioned party dresses and high heels. She was never seen without pearls. She wore her hair high on her head, the curls under tight control, until the day wore on and the New Jersey humidity took its toll. About the time the gin started to make her wobble, her curls would fall loose over her eyes. Sometimes she’d pause in mid-sentence to toss her head and get them out of her way, but more often than not she’d use the same hand she used to hold her ever-present cigarette, its red hot tip coming within millimeters of igniting the layers of hairspray.
As a kid, me and my cousins would watch her talk and wait for the inevitable. It was funny and we couldn’t wait, sometimes running into the yard and twisting as if we were in flames, burning, burning, burning. I used to find it funny, those memories of my Aunt Nancy. But when I saw D’Ambrosio do his own burning dance on a road in Iraq one fine evening, I lost all appr
eciation for those kid games. He bounced twice off the Bradley after being sprayed with the contents of an exploding Corolla’s fuel tank, as if the twenty-seven tons of metal could put him out. I remember raising my M4 and tracking him through my ACOG, thinking I might shoot him to save him, but chickening out at the last moment, not wanting to play God. Last I heard, he’d made it out of Walter Reed Burn Center, gone home to his family’s house, and drank a bottle of Drano.
Would have been simpler if I’d have just shot him.
And I bet knowing what he knew as he raised the blue liquid to his lips, he’d have begged me to do it.
The problem had been that I was already responsible for so many deaths. Could I be responsible for one more? Could my sanity take it?
All this seemed like so long ago.
The six weeks did a miracle at resetting my morale clock. Still, that last night before we got comms, I found myself lying on the floor, staring at that piece of broken spring and wondering how fast I’d be gone if I ripped into my arms, and how much it might hurt.
War is the ultimate reality-based horror show.
Col David Hackworth
CHAPTER EIGHT
I AWOKE TO voices.
“Marines are another thing altogether. If a Marine wants to kill himself, he locks the doors, bars the way with heavy furniture, keeps the windows shut with a long stick, and has three or four things at hand to do it. I once knew a Marine who was found with a rope around his neck, his wrists bled out, a knife through his chest, and later they found he’d taken twenty-five Ambien. He was one determined man.”
“So what happened to you?”
“What do you mean?”
“You were a Marine. Why didn’t you succeed in killing yourself?”
“Maybe I had second thoughts.”
“Did you?”
“No. The rope broke and before I could re-tie it to the overhead pipe, my Gunny Sergeant had me in lock down.”
“How does that stack up to being a Marine?”
“Pretty badly. I couldn’t even do that right.”
“Makes you want to kill yourself, doesn’t it?”
“Yes, it does. All over again. This time I’d do it right.”
I’d fallen asleep on the floor. My back felt stiff. My left leg had a cramp from where I’d had it crossed over my right. The Bluetooth earpiece was still in my ear and the tablet was lying flat against my chest. I lifted it up. Instead of the usual black screen which appeared when it was resting, the words COMMUNICATIONS TREE were displayed across the screen.
As I stared at it, other people began to speak.
“I saw my best friend get shot through the face.”
I closed my eyes as I listened.
“She was standing next to me behind the sandbags,” came a female voice, raw with emotion. “She was telling me about her prom dress and how her stepmother had helped her get it, but she was too embarrassed to let her mother know. She turned to me and smiled, then a round came from nowhere and made her dead. There wasn’t even any fighting. We didn’t even know to be careful—I mean, we were always careful, but on that day we didn’t think about it. It was almost like we were regular people again. Is anyone even listening?”
I opened my eyes.
“I don’t know what good this damn thing is if no one listens.”
“I’m listening,” I said hesitantly. My voice was still rough with sleep. I cleared my throat and repeated myself.
“Oh,” came the voice, a little softer, a little less raw. “Sorry, I think it was my turn. I listened for a long time to get up my nerve.”
“What’s your name?” I asked.
“No names. Didn’t you read the rules?”
I lifted the tablet and saw the link for the Community Rules FAQ. I’d need to review them at some point.
“I just woke up,” I said.
“Well, it’s your turn if you want to.”
I thought about it. “I think I’ll just listen for awhile.”
She hesitated, then said, “I’ll listen for awhile, too, just to see if you want to talk about what it was that made you want to—”
“Kill myself?”
“Yeah.” She said in a breathy whisper. “That.”
I thought of a dozen things to say, but none of them held the appropriate gravitas. I’d always deflected seriousness with humor, and death was no different. In fact, I’d pushed death even farther away with jokes that everyone used, making fun of the termination of life like it was the turning of the page in a book.
As I thought about this, someone else spoke up.
I glanced at the screen. I noticed the text beneath COMMUNICATIONS TREE read SUICIDE 101. Beside this was another branch of the tree which read DEPRESSION 101 for those who were so locked in their own holes they hadn’t thought to commit suicide.
“I ran into traffic,” began the voice of a somber man. “I thought I’d timed it just right. It was a big delivery truck. But when the asshole saw me, he swerved.” It was a moment before the voice continued. “I learned later it was a mother and her two children he crashed into. Their names were Mary and Brett Sykes and they were in sixth and seventh grade.” A longer pause. “How do you live knowing that even when you tried to kill yourself you killed other people?”
The silence on the line was resounding. No one dared answer the unanswerable question. Finally, the voice said, “Thank you,” and was gone.
It was soon replaced by what sounded like a young black man. “The sound of someone screaming with their legs missing is something I go to sleep with every night. Even when I listen to music, it’s there, in the background, some sort of instrument torturing the notes into the same fucking sound.”
I stood and tossed my Bluetooth onto the bed. I wasn’t ready for a notional Kumbaya group hug. Mention of the deaths everyone else was responsible for brought mine front-and-center. It didn’t matter what barriers I’d constructed. The memories slid past and confronted me.
Brian, Jim, Frank, Steve, Lashonne, Mike, Mike 2, Isaiah, Jesus, Todd, and Nathan all pushed and prodded for attention. Eleven friends, eleven comrades, eleven soldiers with whom I’d served and fought and laughed and cried and cursed the universe. The relationships in war are like none other. When you’re scared and the world is shooting at you, your love for the soldier next to you is so transfigured that only those who’ve been there can really understand. I once tried to explain that to a psychologist at Walter Reed Army Medical Center. He strung together a dozen or so ten-dollar words to express the simple fact that warriors on the battlefield love their friends more than their own lives. We do this without knowing it or acknowledging it. We’d rather we died so that they might live.
So the idea that I’d survived eleven instances of friends dying, eleven separate times where someone I’d loved more than myself passed forcibly from this life into another, felt like a God-wielded ball-peen hammer to the soul.
And they wanted me to fucking talk about it?
Might as well give me a knife and let me stab myself over and over. That would hurt less than having to relive the violent deaths of eleven men who were, each and every one, better than me. I sat on the edge of my bed and stared at the ear bud for several minutes. Then I took it and placed it on one of the recessed shelves. I went back to the bed and picked up the tablet, and scrolled until I found the rules for Suicide 101. A strain of unwanted music filled my head as Blue Öyster Cult sang about forty thousand men and women everyday who killed themselves. What was so bad? I mean if the pain got to the point where it was unbearable, why not deliver yourself from it? I found what I was looking for, and as I read, my chin sank deeper into my chest. I had to bear witness before I could move onto the next step.
Fucking mindjacked!
I dropped the tablet on the bed as explosions shook the surface of my mind, rounds whizzed past my head, a helicopter swooped in from somewhere and crashed. I staggered to the other side of the room, put my back against the wall, and sank to the floor
. I let my arms dangle over my knees as I stared across the room with slitted eyes, barely able to see the Bluetooth over the horizon of my many dead.
Rodney came and went.
Whichever meal it was, I skipped it. It wasn’t the first time. The robot waited a moment, beeped a few times, then moved on.
And I continued staring.
During the entire time I was trying not to relive anything. I was trying to make my mind a blank. But like that old trick where you tell someone not to think of a white horse, all I could think of was what I was trying not to remember. But my mind was getting it wrong. Frank died from a sniper, but in my mind he was run over by a tank. Lashonne was hit with an RPG, but in my head he was shot by a platoon of five-year-olds with Kalashnikovs. The more I tried not to think about them, the more my mind rebelled. It was that damned, overwhelming sense of responsibility I had for them.