Maybe that was it. Maybe that was how. Like damaged nerve-endings that prevent you from feeling.
I held up my arm. I was still glowing with that strange luminescence.
“Huh.” I murmured. “What did you people do to me...” Standing there, staring at my arm, the light just continued to intensify. Now that I was standing still, it seemed to be happening faster and faster. Unable to do anything – and with no idea what the light was – all I could do was wait. Wait while it intensified. And it did...until there was nothing. Until I could see nothing. Nothing but bright, blue-white light.
§§§
When I came to, I was alone.
I was in a room with a high, domed ceiling and polished metal walls. There was a screen. I moved slowly over to it. It was enormous: about three metres high, by ten metres across. It could have been mistaken for a window...but from the porous silicon I could feel beneath my fingers as I reached out to touch it, I knew better. It was a screen.
This technology...there’s nothing like this...
Nothing that I was aware of, anyway. The image of the planet Earth that was displayed on it was almost too real. No pixels; no glow emanating from it; and nothing to suggest it was an artificially relayed image, except the tell-tale texture of the screen itself.
I choked down a quiet, lonely sob as I watched the hungry, devouring maw that had – as recently as that morning – been the United States of America. One edge of the cratering abyss was now flush with the Pacific Ocean – having swallowed the heart out of California in order to get there – and was in the process of widening the oceanic ingress. The vast chasm was beginning to fill with sea.
From such a distance, I couldn’t see the foaming tips of the waves, and – without any sound – it just looked like one colour bleeding slowly into another. Night-blackened-blue slowly overtaking dark, earthy, corroded brown.
The abyss was a giant circle, at that point: straightening out – roughly, but considering the vast scale of it all: with alarming precision – along the lines I mentally drew in for the Canadian border in the north and for the Mexican border in the south. To the east, States that I had never bothered to memorise the names of continued to slowly crumble into the nightmarish desiccation. Morbidly, I wondered what would happen first: would water from the Pacific reach the receding inner edge? Or would that edge reach the Atlantic? What was happening to all the dirt and rock that should have been under the surface? Why wasn’t there a vast, obscuring cloud of dust? What happened when sea-water gushed down and into the angry, torn-open inferno that had, until yesterday, been Yellowstone National Park? I remembered something about volcanoes and sea-water from school. Something big. Something bad. What if...no. There was no point.
I almost laughed, then. And then I did laugh. I fell to my knees, holding my shallowly-slashed stomach; both arms wrapped around my bloody, hysterical self in a gripping, constrictive, furious hug.
And it was all for nothing. This is where caring gets you.
My inner monologue wasn’t laughing. It sounded sad. Withdrawn. I didn’t know why I was laughing...but I couldn’t seem to stop. My stomach was aching and my throat was raw. Tears streamed down my face; my vision becoming a blurred mush of colour and light.
It was true though. That inner voice was right. Doubled over, choking out deep, wrenching sobs of miserable, broken laughter...I knew it was true. I’d never see Naithe again. Even if I could get back, he’d be gone. Him and his whole family. His mother and father...his cousins...and Meg. God...Meg.
I’d never see any of them again. I knew that. And I knew that I’d either have to die, or I’d have to learn to live with it. In a sick, strange way...there was actually something comforting, there. A sliver of hope, orbiting a single, simple reality:
We’ve done it before.
The wheels turned in my mind. I sniffled miserably. I thought of Ambrose. I thought of the men who wore black and came for people because they’d been told to. I thought about all of The Disappearances, and the research that I kept – updated from my laptop every night and morning – saved on my phone. I thought about the exhaustive list of names that the research in question included. I sighed...but it was almost a sigh of relief. I could see the path stretching out in front of me. A different path: a better path than the self-destructive, futile, and alienated one that I’d chosen the last time. This time, I wouldn’t fight myself. I’d embrace the scars. I’d use them.
Getting awkwardly to my feet, I moved toward what appeared to be a door; an eight or nine foot high, curved, polished aluminium archway. It receded as I approached, revealing a walkway – edged at either side with tapering, concave strips of metal – suspended amidst a deep, vertical cylinder. Walking out and onto the walkway, I peered down: hundreds of people milled around below me. Between myself and them, several levels curved around the cylindrical perimeter; each inset with hundreds of ‘doors’, similar to the one I’d just walked through. Identical pathways criss-crossed each level, splitting the rings into semicircles. Sounds of misery and fear echoed up and around me. The first thought that came to mind was ‘concentration camp’. I felt – deep in the pit of my stomach – that the evaluation was inaccurate; that it was based on fear as opposed to reason: that something altogether different was going on. But I knew better, at that point, than to put any stock in hope.
Assume the worst.
It was the only intelligent option.
“You?” I heard. I turned. A short woman in a smart, grey suit over a conservative, white blouse was approaching me from the entrance to a nearby room. Her shiny, blonde hair was pulled back in a tight, severe ponytail. The edge of her lip was pulled up in an angry snarl.
“Do I know you?” I almost squeaked. Despite her size, there was something deeply intimidating about the way she held herself. Pausing, her anger seemed to fall away...bleeding into a hopeless expression of whimsical uncertainty.
“Fuck. Sorry. I thought you were someone else, I guess.”
“Oh. Good. You looked like you were about to gut me.” She sniffed out a humourless little puff of laughter.
“Night’s still young, right?” I shrugged uncomfortably.
“Hope not. Seems like it’s lasted a lifetime already.”
“Amen. A-fucking-men.” She nodded.
“Kayla.” I said, holding out my hand. “Kayla Donohue.” She eyed it suspiciously, before slowly – tentatively – reaching out to clasp it. We shook. Her palm was cold. But it had nothing on the icy intensity of her steel-and-sky-blue eyes. Eerily: it seemed as though...that is to say, I could have sworn...that I could see recognition, there. I quickly dismissed the idea. I was being paranoid, clearly.
“Aviary Black.” She finally offered. I nodded, giving her a small smile. Separating, we stood, side by side, looking down into the space below. Together, but alone: lost in thought.
Screw self-preservation. I thought: Screw control. Screw catharsis.
And I meant it. I deserved better. I deserved a lot of things, actually. But the most obvious thing...the thing that sprung the most immediately to mind...and the thing that I could see tattooed in varying, macabre permutations onto the backs of my eyelids with every...single...blink...was revenge.
We deserve revenge.
They wanted the world? Fine. They could have it. But I promised myself – with a certainty bred from newfound purpose, and a self-assurance bred from fury – that I would tear that world to shreds, and burn those shreds to ashes before I let them keep it. They’d know how it felt. Whatever it took, I’d find a way.
Act 4
Deep and Shadow
§
The Acacia bared:
Root and branch. Nought remains but
Sand and suffering
XX – Rivers of Babylon
~ Dio ~
10/12/2023
After burying Yvonne’s body near Be’er Sheva, Dio took a few days worth of rations and left in the night.
The Palatine forces had some
training, but – for the most part – no real field experience. There were a handful of men who moved like soldiers, and a few more who Dio reckoned could have been a handful if push came to shove...but mostly they were as green as green came.
Not that he cared. He was done caring. That was the whole point.
In a way, he actually hoped they’d come for him. He remembered the cell in Tel Aviv – the white room – where he should have died. Part of him felt that he owed God a debt, and had for some time. Interest was building. Did it really matter who serviced that debt?
The image of Yvonne’s face rushed through his mind like a chill wind.
Yes. Yes, it did matter.
Yvonne had been wrong. No part of her had remained with him. He felt a cold, eviscerated lack, deep within himself, where the heart of the person that he’d once been had been torn away. There was nothing to replace it. And while he still felt the presence of God...this was where he felt it: in that empty place...that absence of a good man’s heart. He was alone, now: a stranger, even to himself.
And so he walked. Like his primordial ancestors, he walked. He walked until the skin on his face peeled away, and the soles of his feet stung deeply and endlessly with raw, blood-sodden blisters.
Not that he cared. He was done caring. That was the whole point.
He lasted three days – three days and two nights – before his body betrayed him. As evening fell, he collapsed...crawling under a ragged, leaf-bare, weatherworn acacia tree.
§§§
When he finally woke up, the sun was blinding.
There it sat, quietly watching the world: high in the sky above. Beneath him was the rumbling metronome of an ageing diesel engine. He felt a vague rush of nostalgia, remembering the battered delivery truck his father used to drive. Turning...Dio pressed his face into a patch of shade. Groaning with relief as his sunburnt and heavily blistered cheek squashed down against cool, ridged metal, Dio fell back into slumberous repose.
There must’ve been a hundred mornings – more: many more, probably – where Dio and his father had set out at four in the morning in that beat-up old truck. With its peeling red paint, its thick, iron bull-bar, and its noisy, grumbling engine...that truck had been his father’s livelihood, and – in the faith he had in its continued functionality – his father’s own simple, personal compact with God.
For some reason – at the time – those journeys had seemed magical to Dio. He remembered that his father would bundle him up, still half asleep, and push him up and into the passenger seat. Dio would doze to the rumble of the engine as they set out from Haifa and towards the Kibbutzim farms that lay – dotting the landscape – beyond the city’s limits. His father used to speak in a special kind of Hebrew with the Kibbutzniks. Simple, crisp, and uncomplicated...littered with casual and colloquial traces of Yiddish and Arabic. ‘Farmer’s tongue’, he’d called it. Dio liked to listen – only picking up every other word – sitting a ways away at the edge of one of the fields as he pensively devoured one of the farmer’s special treats. An orange, usually. But even out of season for citrus, they always gave him something.
For Dio, the Kibbutzniks had always been...special. His father laughed at him for saying it – jostling him and calling him a ‘little American’, dreaming of ‘magical Jews’ – but, back then, he was fond of the idea that the Kibbutzniks were, perhaps, just a little bit more ‘chosen’ than everybody else.
Back then, though...back then, things had been simple. Silly ideas and pleasant daydreams had been just that, and nothing more. They hadn’t bled out and threatened to discolour the world around him. Dio missed that. Imagination with no stakes...that invited no condemnation or fear of retribution; no cries of treachery or blasphemy...no ultimatums to countenance, or moral conundrums to ponder.
Serving in the army had been the thing that stripped away the most of his innocence, and forced him to see the world through a darker, crueller lens. But that was the world that pushed in at Israel on all sides. It wasn’t a choice, Dio knew...but a cross to bear...ironic though that choice of metaphor was. In a hostile world, peace required commensurate hostility, and that was an unavoidable fact. Unless one was willing to walk out into the line of fire and move to embrace those who sought to enact murderous retribution against all that one was, one could not hope to tame such a world through passive resistance. Dio sincerely doubted that the Palestinians would be as stultified by bemusement as the British had been with the Indians if faced with such tactics. After all, the source of their antipathy wasn’t a challenge to their rule, but a stranger in their home. Ghandi was a great man, but – at least, this was what Dio had always suspected – one who would have been utterly confounded by the schismatic conflict at the heart of life in the Levant.
There was too much blood. Too much killing. Killing that only made more killing. There was too much hate for the Palestinian radicals’ thirst for violence to be slaked by symbolic inaction. What pained Dio the most was that – inverting the roles – the same could be said of Palestinians and Jews as could be said of Jews and Palestinians. Both sides were blind to the dark mirror that – for one another – they had become.
And between the duelling monoliths – Palestine’s David pitted against, ironically, Israel’s Goliath – Dio saw a new Tigris and Euphrates had begun to flow. The trickle had started with those first clashes between Muslim and Jew in the turbulence and uncertainty endemic to the period defined by the final collapse of the long-decaying Ottoman Empire. The trickle had quickly become a flood, and, with time and consistency of flow, the flood had become riverine.
The tears of millions had spilled into the sand; the swollen cascade bisecting roughly – cleaved in twain – where religion and history dictated. Twin deltas had been carved – one Palestinian and one Israeli – out of the landscape. Even in their sorrow they were intrinsically divided and at odds...or, considered another way, symmetrical and complementary in the absurdity and agony of their opposition. But blood now streaked and stained the rushing, writhing cascade of Human misery. The banks now swelled, and seemed ready to burst, as they had before, and would, no doubt, again. For how long would this be borne? For how long would the ebb and flow of suffering and hate be tolerated? For how long would it be allowed to wash its way through – poisoning and polluting – the so-called ‘Promised Land’?
That first word, in particular, saddened Dio. ‘Promised’. Promises were made where a thing was deserved. By deserving a thing and receiving it, one silently committed oneself to not betraying the rationale according to which that thing had been given in the first place. What would God make of his Chosen People, now? Did God weep as he watched Dio’s great grandfather and the other men and women of the Irgun and Lehi gangs do what they had done at Deir Yassin? As the Intifadas raged? As gunfire rang out; as explosions rocked; and as Palestinian and Jewish blood – mingling – soaked into the ancient stone and the new cement of His Jerusalem?
In that, he wouldn’t have been alone, Dio knew. After all – at Deir Yassin – it had been fellow Jews from a neighbouring town who finally confronted and ran off the misguided gangsters and opportunistic murderers of the Irgun and Lehi...preserving what innocent Muslim lives they were able to in the process. And throughout the wars; the intifadas; the horrors and atrocities, Western outsiders who sought to intervene and impose had never spoken so loudly as the Jews and Palestinians who spoke as one against both peoples’ madness. For many on both sides, yes, it was true: their tears were not just for the Self, but also for the Other.
But their tears and exhortations were not enough. They were never enough.
The futility; the stupidity if it all, was blinding.
Dio’s people – the Jewish people – had finally come home to Israel, after millennia of wandering. This was not unreasonable. The Palestinians – needled and goaded by the interests of others, as well as their own history in that place; their own love of the lands that they called theirs – resisted their dispossession. This was not
unreasonable. Lies were told and lives were taken. Oaths were sworn; confidences betrayed. Conflict, competition and response in kind were – and are – as innately Human as breathing air and drinking water. Nothing that happened was, in and of itself, unreasonable. It was, simply...Human.
But – as-always-everywhere – it was normal, everyday people that shouldered the cost. And they would, forevermore; for the sake of the fallacy that the Other was the villain and the Self was the victim. Both sides had the right. Both sides shared the blame. And somehow, in the middle of the madness, those who sought to pull innocents and civilians away from the front lines, had become traitors and terrorists. Those who railed against the conflict, had become anti-Semites and infidels. Those who believed that there was a better way, were branded simple-minded and naïve. And so the tears continued to flow. And so the blood continued to spill. And so, Dio couldn’t help but believe, God must have wept.
As did Dio, himself.
“Good lives for good men”. Those had been the words that he’d followed away from the frying pan, only to be led – willingly – into the heart of an all-devouring inferno. In the frying pan, he would have certainly died. In the fire, instead, his soul was wracked with guilt and shame: tortured by his complicity in the deaths of a hundred million – more than that; many more – who he had turned his back on...standing, instead, by their murderers sides...and allowed to perish. Dio was ashamed beyond words.
Beyond thought; beyond Faith; beyond reason...he was ashamed to the very heart of him. He had chosen wishful delusion over obvious truth...and that was the thing that had stripped away the last shred of his innocence; the last trace of his cherished childhood self. That was the act – or non-act – that had cost him the last of his hope for a better world, and boiled away the last tentative traces of his faith in Human goodness.
Because now he understood. Now...he understood. There were no “good lives for good men”; not in Israel, and not anywhere else: only bloody, unending consternation over the exact definition of words like ‘good’. Words like ‘evil’. Words like ‘right’. Words like ‘wrong’.
Abyss (Songs of Megiddo) Page 25
