Genocidal Organ

by Project Itoh

  “Like in the States, how the citizen has voluntarily given up a portion of his privacy in order to be free from the threat of terrorism?” I added.

  Lucius thought about that for a moment. “Yes, I think you’re right. It’s a continuum, and Europe is just a couple of steps further down the spectrum toward individual freedoms. That said, there’s not exactly a whole lot in it. This sort of joint here is about as far as we go.”

  “So do you see yourself as running this place to protect your freedoms?”

  Lucius’s eyes flickered, as if he were searching for an answer. “I don’t think I’d go quite that far. I guess I’m just trying to articulate a feeling that, say, the kids on the dance floor over there don’t understand. The fact that you only become aware of the trade-offs you make for freedom when you’re already having it eroded from all sides.” He turned to face the young people gyrating over the abyss. “Many of the young people over there believe in freedom as something that’s pure and absolute. It’s a phase they have to go through, this idealized notion of liberty. That way, when they finally grow up and are put in the position of actually having to make real decisions, they appreciate ‘real’ freedom—the fruits of their own choices—all the more.”

  “You sound like you see yourself as a guidance counselor,” I said.

  “I guess I do. Well, I like to think of myself as enlightened, at least, and I’m always happy to spread the love.” With that, Lucius lapsed into silence as he surveyed the room in a deliberate, calm manner. I could see what Lucia had meant when she described him as introspective. He was contemplative, a philosopher. Even his conversation had been carefully chosen; we had touched on some deep topics, but he had given very little away. This was definitely a man who liked to think before he spoke.

  I decided to push the conversation a little further. “Well, the Enlightenment was a European movement after all. Not so easy for us simple Americans to relate to.”

  “I’d hardly say that. Isn’t the US always instrumental in exporting its freedom and democracy around the world? Your own unique brand of Enlightenment?”

  “Hey, there’s no need to go all sarcastic on me.”

  “No sarcasm intended,” Lucius said with a straight face. “Think about how much the cost of modern warfare has skyrocketed, even compared to just a few decades ago. The huge costs associated with the latest high-tech weaponry, the increased personnel costs, the opportunity cost. War just isn’t profitable anymore, no matter how much oil might be at stake. And yet America still soldiers on, policing the world. Why? Even going to the trouble and massive expense of hiring private contractors around the world to put out fires that have nothing to do with the US. Sure, there are those who criticize your actions as Team America trying to impose their righteousness on the whole world, but I see it differently. Given that it’s the US who’s picking up the tab, I see America’s wars as a new form of Enlightenment, where war is no longer an extension of diplomacy—diplomacy is now an extension of war.”

  “War … as Enlightenment?”

  “Whether or not Americans see it that way, yes. I’d argue that their military actions are exactly that. The so-called war against terror is an extremely principled war, devoted, even, to certain ideologies: humanity, altruism, the Golden Rule. The US is not the only country who acts this way—most modern democracies support this way of thinking, to a greater or lesser extent—but America’s the leader of the pack.”

  “Uh, thank you, I think …” I managed to say.

  “No,” Lucius said bluntly. “Don’t get me wrong. I’m neither praising nor condemning US foreign policy. I’m just calling it like I see it. After all, who says Enlightenment is always a good thing? What might seem like progress to one person might be a self-righteous imposition of values to another.”

  I didn’t really know what to say to this man. Was he really just a club owner? I decided to ask him straight up.

  Lucius laughed. “Am I ‘just’ a club owner? I guess so, in the sense that Eric Hoffer was ‘just’ a longshoreman, or your dear friend Kafka was ‘just’ a petty bureaucrat. The Japanese have a saying that all honest trades are equally honorable. And I think it was Joseph Conrad who said that thought is no respecter of persons.”

  “Lucius, what are you two talking about?” I turned around—Lucia was back.

  “Not much. Just how freedom is a currency we spend, and how war is Enlightenment …”

  “Just the usual idle chitchat then?” Lucia laughed.

  Lucius smiled. “Actually, there aren’t too many people who I can talk to like Mr. Bishop here. Sadly, though, I’m going to have to call it a day and retire to the office. My stevedoring duties call, as it were. But it was interesting talking to you, Mr. Bishop, and I do hope you’ll come by again sometime so we can pick up where we left off.”

  “I’d like that,” I said.

  Lucia and I watched Lucius as he disappeared into the back office.

  What was it about the disappearing figure that made me feel nervous?

  3

  “Well, you weren’t wrong when you described him as being the introspective sort,” I said to Lucia after Lucius had left. “He struck me as being more the Gallic philosopher than the stereotypical Czech businessman.” I took another sip of my Budvar.

  “I told you so. He keeps you entertained, though, doesn’t he?”

  “It can’t be easy to make a success of a club like this, though?”

  “Maybe not. But as long as there are people who remember what life was like before the surveillance crackdown, and as long as there are youths who don’t remember, but who still feel clamped down on and claustrophobic without being quite able to explain why, there will always be a need for places like this. It’s just a case of supply and demand.”

  “So the people who are here now are the people who demand their freedom—is that what you’re saying?” I asked.

  “A taste of it, at least. Take me—I’m scared of terrorists, why wouldn’t I be? I’m glad of the war on terror, as they call it, and the fact that our society is now organized enough to nip potential threats in the bud. In that sense, I suppose I might be different from those boys and girls on the dance floor. But that doesn’t mean I don’t sometimes want a breather, a time-out. Just once in a while, it’s nice to be able to relax and spend time in a place where nobody knows what you’re eating, what you’re drinking, who you’re dancing with, for how long …”

  Me time. In the truest sense of the phrase. That was what Lucia got from this place.

  A place where nothing is observed, nothing recorded, and anything goes.

  And Lucia wanted to share it with me.

  “It was very kind of you to bring me with you to this place,” I said. “Thank you.”

  “It’s nothing. It just felt like the right thing to do. I’m not sure why,” Lucia mumbled, staring at her beer glass.

  “To talk about John?” I asked, as I placed my own glass down on the counter.

  “Maybe. I’m not religious. I have no priest to talk to. And I don’t believe in counseling.”

  “I know what you mean. I’m the same.”

  Lucia’s eyes glinted with the faintest hint of a smile. “Poor little me, huh? No sympathetic priest to pour my heart out to, and I’m not in the habit of keeping a journal to sort out my thoughts.”

  “Maybe you should write a book? They’re all the rage, aren’t they, confessional memoirs. A coming-of-age story or something.”

  “I just don’t seem to have the talent or the inclination for it. Pretty pathetic, I know, considering I studied language.”

  “Well, I guess that leaves just one option. You’ll have to tell me all about it.”

  Lucia’s eyes flicked away from mine and toward the abyss that threatened to pull in the dancers. It was as if she longed to be sucked down into that bottomless pit herself.

  “I was in bed with him when Sarajevo disappeared.” So began Lucia’s story.

  Her voice was compl
etely different from that point on. A thin whisper. Really, I shouldn’t have been able to hear her without bringing my ear right up to her lips. The music should have drowned her out. And yet, somehow, I could hear every one of her words with absolute clarity.

  “John’s wife had gone to visit her sister in Sarajevo, taking their daughter with her. John and I were making the most of that precious time together without them. Cambridge was our oyster. It was a time when we didn’t have to worry, when John wasn’t constantly looking over his shoulder. It was such a lovely time. I was happy. So happy that I couldn’t even bring myself to feel the slightest bit guilty at what we were doing. Every spare moment I had, I spent with him.”

  Then Lucia paused and bit down hard on her lip. An act of self-flagellation to punish herself?

  “I remember it clearly. We had just made love, and I had gone for a shower. I emerged clean and fresh to find John frozen stiff, glued to the nanolayer projection. The front page was showing an update flashing across the top. Sarajevo had been hit by a nuclear bomb. He was watching the linked video clip.

  “I was terrified. I just stood there, still wrapped in my towel. He, too, was paralyzed, just watching the same clip over and over again. The anchorwoman in the clip was just reading out information as it was transmitted to her, and the subpage below the clip was saturated with constant updates, links to new clips. John made no effort to look at any of them. He wasn’t interested in finding out any new information. He was stunned enough by what he had already seen, and all he could do was keep his eyes glued to that.”

  Lucia stopped to take a sip of her beer. Her voice was calm and disinterested; it was as if she were talking about events that had happened to somebody else. I almost expected her to start the next part of her story with something along the lines of “once upon a time, in a faraway land, there lived a woman called Lucia Sukrova.” But when she continued, it was about how John Paul flew to Sarajevo.

  “I wanted to go with him, but even I had some sense of shame—it would hardly do for a mistress to accompany her lover as he traveled to discover the fate of his wife and daughter. Had John and I been in bed laughing when the bomb exploded? Was he inside me when his wife and only child were obliterated from this earth? I didn’t know what to do, what I could do. I had no idea how I was going to act, how I was meant to act, when he returned from Sarajevo. The worst part of it was that I still loved John, with all my heart. I ached for him as soon as he got on that flight. I needed to feel his body wrapped around mine again. And I wanted to mortify the part of myself that had these unbearably selfish feelings.

  “In the end, I didn’t need to worry about what to say to him when he came back. He just silently returned, dropped out of school, and went away somewhere. I didn’t try and look for him. I was afraid of seeing him again. After all, he had become the living embodiment of my own terrible sin. And I didn’t have the confidence or the strength to face the consequences of my own actions.”

  Lucia’s story was over.

  I had been listening in silence. There was nothing I could have said. After she finished, she stared in silence at the bottom of her glass. I had no idea what I was supposed to say next. What to say to help ease the massive burden she was carrying on her shoulders.

  I particularly couldn’t say anything because her story hit so close to home.

  That vague sense of emptiness that I remember feeling when I read her profile back at briefing. It was crystallizing, coming together. The gaps were being filled in, the skeleton fleshed out with Lucia’s story. The written word only encompasses so much; Lucia’s voice was so much more revealing.

  I remember someone once saying that we have eyelids but no earlids for a reason. You can shut your eyes and be oblivious to the words written down in front of you, but you can never quite block out a story that someone else shares with you from their own mouth, with their own lips. Not unless you can completely shut off your ego from your body.

  It was only now that Lucia had shared her story with me that this fact really hit home.

  The human voice adds color to a story.

  The color of penitence. Thick, heavy slabs, dark and red like dried blood, saturated like a Mark Rothko abstract.

  John Paul’s wife and daughter disappeared that day in Sarajevo. And Lucia had no way of atoning for her sins against them. No way of begging for forgiveness. Because they were dead. Not even their corpses remained.

  To lose the subject of your feelings of guilt is to lose your hope that you can ever truly be forgiven. That’s why murder was such a taboo in all cultures—there was no way of atoning to your victim. No possibility of pardon.

  The dead cannot forgive.

  That was why Lucia was suffering so. She had already started her irreversible descent down that slippery slope and had learned too late that her actions were painfully, hauntingly irrevocable. In her mind, there was no one and nothing left in this world who could possibly forgive her for what she had done to John Paul’s wife and daughter.

  God is dead. Which meant that sin was now solely in the realm of humanity. Humans were always the ones to commit sin, but now, instead of praying for divine forgiveness, humans had to find some way to work it all out for themselves. When the spirit was no longer living, the flesh could no longer afford to be weak. But when the target of the sin was gone …

  This must have been why I was so drawn to Lucia. She was a kindred spirit—a fellow unforgivable. Like me, she was beholden to the dead.

  Which was why I decided to tell her about my own sins.

  It was the least I could do. And looking back on it now, I see that it was my own way of acknowledging that I liked her.

  4

  I asked if my mother was in pain.

  The doctor explained that it was not so much a case of if she was in pain, but whether she was still able to feel pain.

  I thought of the corpse of the girl who’d had her cranium split open by the rifle round, the body of the boy who’d had his guts blown out from behind, the villagers roasted like so many chickens, and the dead body of the ex-brigadier general who had fashioned all these atrocities.

  The accident happened three days before my return to Washington from the death and destruction of central Asia. I didn’t panic when Colonel Rockwell told me the news; I felt a strange calm as I headed toward the hospital.

  It had been an old-school Cadillac that had run over my mother—a real piece of junk that had never been retrofitted with modern safety devices. A throwback to the twentieth century. It was pink. It almost seemed hilarious. Except that at some stage, I would have to face the fact that it wasn’t a joke. Mom really was run over by a Hollywood cliché pink Cadillac. To round out the joke, the driver had been a textbook drunk who’d had no interest in installing the sort of automated soundness-of-mind checker that now came standard on modern vehicles. How else would the pink Caddy have had the freedom to lunge onto the sidewalk where my mother was walking, taking her out along with the booze-addled driver and a couple of other pedestrians for good measure?

  Putting aside the absurdity of the fact that such a car was somehow still considered roadworthy in this day and age, the end result was that the pink Cadillac finally came to a stop only when its momentum was killed by its smashing into the flank of another car across the way that had been minding its own business at a traffic light. The pink Caddy’s momentum wasn’t the only thing killed at that point: the driver’s drink-sodden life was snuffed out instantly.

  My mother died too. Her lungs had stopped moving by the time the ambulances arrived, and although she had been put on a respirator, she was pronounced DOA at the hospital.

  But then she was brought back to life. The hospital had the right equipment and performed the correct medical procedures. Mom was given the same treatment as we were after being wounded in battle: the processes of her internal organs were suspended, nanomachines stopped her internal hemorrhaging, and finally her heart started beating again.

  She cam
e back to life for a reason: so that she could force me to decide her fate. To punish me for joining the army.

  It was none other than my own mother now treading that fine line between life and death. And yet I couldn’t bring myself to rush to the hospital—I felt no sense of urgency, no compulsion to hurry. Thanks to my occupation, everyday life was so saturated with the color of death that I was now inured to it. My inoculation had started even before I joined the Forces, of course, what with my father disappearing one day when I was young, and thanks to my friend who died of cancer as a kid. So was I now supposed to wallow in the luxury of fretting about whether another person close to me was going to die?

  I walked. During the whole length of the journey from my lodgings to the plane to Washington, then to the cab ride to the hospital, there wasn’t a single moment when I started running. My heart was full of sadness, but it was of a chronic sort rather than acute—not so much a response to this latest tragedy, but a world-weariness at my preconceptions about the painful nature of life being reconfirmed. Nothing surprised me anymore. Such was the way of the world.

  It was summer. I stepped out of the August sun into the crisp air of the hospital reception area and signed in. It was only when the receptionist asked me if I wanted to upload a hospital guide for my alternative reality contacts that I realized I had left my ARs at home. At no point at the airport or in the taxi had I even noticed I was missing them. I told the receptionist I didn’t have my ARs in, so she activated the hospital beacon so that I would be led automatically to my destination. A black beacon appeared on the floor, swimming across the pressurized floor pads like a goldfish in a bowl, leading me toward the ICU. The hospital floor looked almost like a work of art.

  I walked along the hospital corridor, guided by the slow-moving black beacon as it crept through the wards and public spaces. Each of these were clearly marked to distinguish them. A faint dreamlike aroma was pervading my senses.

  Without the beacon I would never have been able to find my destination, but with its help it wasn’t too long before I arrived at the ICU. I was given antiseptic whites to change into before crossing the threshold into the unit via a set of sliding double doors. Inside the ward, beds were cordoned off via transparent curtains, and beyond them were the patients, many of whom looked as though they were not much longer for this world.