Travesty (SolarSide Book 1)

by Austin Aragon

  I laugh at the sheer disbelief of how fucking pathetic my life is. “I can’t even kill myself!”

  The birds keep chirping.

  I am my own joke.

  I hear the rumble of a car approach from behind. I quickly grab the weapon and place it inside my sweater pocket. The car doors open and two college kids come out to the edge of the overlooking. One poses for a picture by raising their hands up around the orb of the rising sun as the other takes it. They give me a look, and leave just as quickly as they came. I am alone again.

  God, fucking selfies.

  Isaac would have laughed at them with me—why did you save me! Why didn’t you just go for the helicopter and get away? Huh!

  I grab the gun and stand up, aiming it at my heart.

  “Just let me do it!”

  My hands shake. I hurl the pistol above the overlook, and it disappears into the foliage below. Fuck you Isaac! Fuck you for saving me. Fuck you for getting yourself killed. Fuck you for not letting me kill myself! Fuck you! Fuck you for making me know you! Fuck you for making me love you!

  I sit back down. I look for his lighter in my pockets, but realize it’s fallen onto the cold earth below me. I pick it up and try lighting it—right it’s broke. I stare at the thirteen stars and etched away quote. I said I’ll carry his dreams. I stand up, wiping my face. “I’ll do it Isaac. I’ll lose, they’ll win, they always do. But I’ll try.”

  XXXV

  “That’s my story.”

  The Psychologist looks at his keyboard and papers before him, and begins jotting stuff down. “That was definitely an earful.”

  The Commissar goes to a corner table and refills his coffee, and sits back down.

  “Now,” speaks the Psychologist. “We have to figure out if you’re sane or not. So I will start by asking you a variety of questions. Do you feel different, or better?”

  “Not really, I still feel like shit and hate what I’ve done…and myself.”

  He looks down at his paper, then glances back at me. “Okay—”

  I push my chair out and rise, inhaling deep. I cough—I must still be sore from my tour. The Commissar stands quickly, his hand back on his hip.

  The Psychologist waves him down and addresses me, “What is it?”

  “Maybe I do feel a little different.” Realizing my step is lighter.

  The Psychologist raises his eyebrows, begging me to continue.

  “I feel a little relieved I guess. Like a burden is not so heavy on me now. That I kinda accept myself a bit more.”

  “Okay, next question then. It has been some time since your last combat experience, and over a month getting here and situated. Have you found out the answer to your question by now?”

  “What, where do the empty and destroyed ones go?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I haven’t.”

  He looks down at his papers with a sigh. “I’m sorry about that. I think this session has gone on long enough today. You will go back to your cell. I will need to evaluate your story tonight some more.”

  The Commissar beckons us to rise. The door opens from the outside and I take a step. “Well now that I think about it. Maybe I have.”

  The Psychologist looks back up, interested but also tired of this little game. “I think the shells of once to be men like me, they go on that little paper there on your desk, written down by you. Then, they are squished together into one stack and shoved into your tiny filing cabinet. Then…” I pause coughing again—maybe it’s all those ancients I used to smoke. But I feel a sting of anxiety rise in my belly too.

  His gazing eyes peer into mine. Like the eyes of that Herculean. “Then what?”

  “Then, they are taken one day to a shredder, and one by one. Each little empty shell is destroyed for good as they are ripped apart into little pieces. By the people that are supposed to help them. By the foundation that promised them so much. That promised them hope, security, peace. And when that was destroyed they promised valor and honor. That fighting was the right thing. And when that was destroyed…” I fumble the Medal of Honor and Herculean artifact in my pocket. The anxiety is lurching in my throat.

  The Commissar walks towards me, but the Psychologists pauses him for a moment. “Go on Peter.”

  “When that’s destroyed. That’s how I end up here. And later shredded…”

  My younger self appears in the corner. “I told you not to tell Peter. I told you to go back and fight.”

  I continue, my voice squeaking now, and they look at me concerned. “Because I told you everything that they didn’t want told. So I’ll go into that cabinet of forgotten files for my actions.”

  My younger self is right before me. “I told you not to tell Peter! You’ve ruined me! Us!”

  I fall to my knees from a brutal headache, and they carry me to a chair. My hands start to seizure again. “Because I told about what really happened. And they don’t like that!”

  My younger self is on top of me and I scream pushing him back. “Peter! What the hell is going on?” says Mr. Reeves. “Calm down!”

  “I told you not to tell Peter!” He closes the door and the darkness surrounds me.

  “Leave me alone! Please just leave me alone for once!”

  The Psychologist is trying to hold me down while Mr. Reeves holds a handkerchief to his cut lip I must have punched. “Peter you’re just having a panic attack again!” he says.

  “Oh no, this is way worse than a panic attack sir,” says the Psychologist, while he feels my pulse and tries to make me mimic him in breathing normal again.

  I look up and it is the face of my younger self. “I warned you Peter.”

  The darkness takes over the room with a deeper intensity. “Peee-teer.”

  “No not again! Not fucking again, go away!”

  “What’s happening to him!” says the Commissar as they hold me back and I kick at them.

  “Peee-teer, remember me?”

  I kick the Psychologist’s kneecap and he falls cussing. I roll out of the chair.

  The monster is above me, dangling from the ceiling. “I told you not to tell, Peee-teer.”

  “No please, please, let me live!”

  “I told you not to tell!”

  “Hold him while I get help!” says the Psychologist.”

  I feel the tight grip of the Commissar around me.

  The monster comes closer, screaming at me, “NOT TO TELL! I SAID NOT TO TELL!”

  “GO AWAY!”

  “I SAID NOT TO TELL!”

  “Peter.”

  The monster is gone but the darkness remains. “Who, who’s there? Who is it?”

  “You will find peace in the Blue Eye, Peter. Rest easy in the Blue Eye.”

  “The Blue Eye, what does that mean?” I ask hastily.

  I hear a bang. MP’s come in detaining me while the Psychologists jabs a cold needle into my arm.

  “Peter!” says Mr. Reeves.

  “Take them both away,” says the Commissar as my eyelids shut.

  The calming voice continues repeating the same avowal. “Rest easy in the Blue Eye, Peter.”

  XXXVI

  “Peter, morning medication,” says a military nurse entering through the door, frustration already in her voice.

  I rise out of bed. “You know what I am going to say.”

  “Sir,” she looks at me with resentment, but also concern, “I know you tell me you’re doing better, but I can still hear you talk at night. You say some of the most horrible things.”

  “Horrible things have happened to me.”

  She puts the small cylinder container by the trash bin, and looks at me. I nod to her. She opens the bin and drops the medication in it. “See you tonight for your next dose.” She is out the door.

  I rise and open the blinds, letting the sun invade my tiny room. I go to my desk. A doctor’s note informs me of the doses and medication I should take. It’s to help figh
t schizophrenia. So this is what they gave me. I haven’t taken a dose yet since the entire month I’ve been here though. I must hold strong to my resolution to never take drugs again. It is also the only way I have any strength over Cloud, and I must be free. Replacing one hallucination with another is not a great tradeoff. So I rather deal with the fictions when I am fully myself, even if being my self means I will live surrounded by fiction.

  I am the product of my doings. Somewhere I must begin the path to recovery. So be it if it means I am to remain insane. I look over at a pile of letters from my family. It’s not all that bad. They visit me almost every week now. I have the time and joy of receiving their love that I never truly appreciated till I came back from a war I never thought I would. This love, especially the time I can spend with Creon before he becomes an adult, is all the medicine I need—even if I can never tell them the truth.

  I look up at the mirror above my desk. My Soul said that I won’t realize how bad I miss it till it’s gone, and that I can only wish where it went to. I miss my old life. The Peter I was before the war. Who went to college and aspired to be a change for the world. Occasionally, I watch from the courtyard at young students advancing in their med degrees helping patients. It breaks me down that I am no longer in college. God it hurts so bad, knowing I will never do this in my inhibited state. I try to smile into the mirror, my scars smile back.

  On the beginning of my second month in the ward, I am woken one morning by the last man I would expect to see. Marshall Hannibal walks into my dorm. They have finally come to get me! To kill me! My younger self stands in the corner screaming bloody murder and laughing, “I told you! I told you!” I fall off my bed onto the ground with my hands against my face. I can’t take it again! My insides fill with terror.

  “Son, get up,” he says calmly.

  I raise my head from my snot covered hands to look at him. This is the man I hate the most in my life. He destroyed me.

  “I am not going to hurt you. Your little stunt a few months ago has cost me my generalship—hell my job. But I wanted to come here first before retiring, to thank you.”

  I wipe my nose on my sleeve, what?

  “I regret everything I did back there. I was no longer fighting for humanity but the bigger sellout that could slip me the larger check. This corruption, it went all the way to the top. My only alternatives were to pull a you and get canned for it, my job and life that is, or bite my tongue. But then you gave me the best alternative I didn’t even know existed, another way out. Discharged for questionable commandership—that’s what they’re telling the press to keep them happy at least. I am free of it all now.” He takes the chair next to me. “So thank you.”

  “You, you, you let them do this to me? Destroy me?”

  “Son, I had no choice—“

  “No! No, you had one. You know what no choice is?” I can’t hold the tears back anymore and they fall a second time, but now they are of a familiar rage. “No choice is not being able to save your friends—the ones you love!”

  I look at my arms, scarred from the shit I carried around for a year and the firefights I nearly escaped. I hold them out to him. “I couldn’t save them. Julian, the girl,” I drop my face into my arms. “I couldn’t save Isaac! He, he just lied there in the snow. He just kept saying ‘Peter we got to go, help me Peter, come on Peter, please Peter’ and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t help him. He died. He bleed all over me, all over the snow, they, they kicked him out. He didn’t even get to come home! He’s still over there, still in the snow! But I had no choice! Not you! Me! I didn’t ask to join. I didn’t ask to fight. You asked me you took me away. You took them from me. My friends, my brothers! They died, I couldn’t save them. I couldn’t, I couldn’t do anything. The drugs, they controlled me. I had no choice. They told me what to do.”

  I crawl to the base of my bed to lean against it. I can’t take this abuse. “I killed them too, so many of them. Children, mothers. I killed them and watched them get killed. But I had no choice! Then I got out? Why! Why did I escape when no one else did?” I try to look up at Hannibal, but even here, when confronting him after all he took from me, I am defeated once again. “Why did you try to kill me? Fucking ruin my life! I never had a choice in it all. I never, I never—couldn’t, they died, all of them.”

  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.”