Then one night, I followed Seee through the woods as a sunset flopped in the sky over a skillet of clouds, rims singed with golden fire. I kept a large distance between the two of us, enough so it would be impossible to hear my footsteps. Sometimes I couldn’t see him through the thick of the woods, and I snuck toward him solely on instinct. When we walked deeper in the jungle, my pace quickened to catch him, but as I got closer, he disappeared from the path. Within a cluster of trees, I felt him staring at me, picking my intentions apart as a fisherman sheds the slimy scales of a fish.
I called after him. “Feel like company on your evening stroll?” I felt a presence behind me. Was this what I learned in the darkness, deep in The Hole? How to sniff out ghosts? Or was this just a split second of instinct, an awareness of death knocking at a doorstep? A surge of adrenalin shot up my spine. I froze, standing as still as a statue. I slowly lifted my arms, floating them up in the air like soft balloons, feeling his silence commanded it. But I refused to beg or grovel. “If you’re going to kill me, get it over with.” The response was a call of croaking frogs squawking over his every sound, deafening his every movement. I craned my neck aimlessly, and when I turned my head back around he stood directly in front of me, mud-caked and slathered in earth. Two paces away, he held a pistol aimed right between my eyes, finger taught on the trigger.
“You aren’t carrying anything are you, Isse?”
“You must think I’m pretty stupid,” I said. I slipped off my T-shirt, then my army trousers and threw them at him. He stepped on them, booting them down, trouncing them into the mud, but never taking his glare off me. His eyes shined like white bulbs under the cover of the forest, poking out at me under his mud-stained face. He spoke in a shaded tone. “I wasn’t sure you weren’t out on an ambush.”
“Why would I do that?”
“Why wouldn’t you?” he asked vaguely.
Both of us shut up for a moment. The tension in the air unfolded when a cool breeze blew through the trees. Finally he said, “Perhaps you think you’re still better than me going hand-to-hand.”
“I am.”
“I know,” he said, lips curving into a lopsided smile.
“But I fought you once. Look how that turned out.” He laughed a bit. “Come on then. I’ll show you something.”
He guided me through the jungle while trailing me three paces behind. We hiked out to a ravine with a pool-sized slab of sandstone dripping over a cliff. For a while, we sat in silence watching the crown of the sun creep beyond the tree line. Long shadows cast out over the river. I glanced over at Seee. He sat far away from me, but I could see his eyes raised at the stars twinkling through the blue-grey atmosphere.
“I call this place Second Sight Peak,” he said.
“A nice name.”
Staring at the crescent moon, he said, “We stare into the darkness every night, see the infinite, and grasp only a tiny iota of the idea of it, as no other species can. Yet few truly appreciate it.”
“I had a four-inch refractor growing up. We used to camp out on the hills and set it up and sometimes just gaze up there till dawn.”
“Is that a fact?”
“It is. My father pulled it out of a dumpster and gave it to me for my thirteenth birthday.”
“A nice gift,” he said. “Even if it was garbage.”
The last sweeps of sunlight dissipated and the singe of blue atmosphere rustled with the darkness. The cooing of an owl came in the distance. The wind shuddered and a breeze blew lightly across our faces.
“Look out there. Up on this ridge we’re standing on the Panopticon of Nature.”
Was this coincidence? Had he listened in on the words I said to Pelletier? But if he knew, wouldn’t I be dead? My silence started to be revealing. To fill the space, I said, “It’s a beautiful view.”
“Up here we are real humans, aren’t we? Nature doesn’t care about us. At least the State and Nature have that in common, don’t they?”
Edging into the conversation he wanted to have, Seee gazed over at me. Pelletier’s code words I had spoken over the phone still rolled over in my mind, but I met his eyes and smiled. He looked up into the darkness at the stars once more. “Isn’t it ironic we can see objects twelve million light years away, understand and model them, tell if it is a quasar or a nebula, or even a binary star system—but never get there.”
“Red-shift, blue-shift,” I said. “The overwhelming story a spectrum of light can tell.”
He smiled faintly, as would one who suddenly finds common ground. “Some light reaching here has traveled longer than the dinosaurs’ entire existence. Time so large its meaning is vague, because it no longer refers to a realm we are able to grasp. Like infinity, it becomes warped, a limit of our comprehension.”
I picked up a pebble and fingered it. For a moment, it reminded me of The Hole. “If Voyager were going to Alpha Centauri, it would take another 40,000 years. We would need more than four hundred lives just to see it.”
“Not a lot of time in life is there?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Men like us don’t live forever. We breathe heavier than most, and the air is always thin even when its substance is thick.”
I wanted to say something, but he cut me off. “There is pain in being alive,” he continued. “Shouldering responsibility. Knowing you’ll send men to their deaths, good men, brothers. But traitors—traitors must be punished.”
“Traitors? What kind of traitors?”
“Traitors to our forefathers and country.” He sighed. “There is a point where the problem becomes too large, the atrophy too deep. A disease metastasizing. Ignoring it any longer is an unsustainable path. Cancer needs to be removed by the scalpel if the patient is to survive. I know you see this. You’ve been out on the street and seen the disease growing with your own eyes. Your father was a victim of it.”
“How so?”
“The real story is that your father had been laid off by the city. Tough times. More debt than revenue. He goes to find a job. He finds nothing. Unemployment runs out. He takes something—anything—flipping burgers at a BK. Except now the minimum-wage job won’t cover all of the expenses, the perpetual rising prices. For Christ’s sake, bread is eight dollars a pop now. Food stamps can’t cover the expense. And he doesn’t want the charity. So what do you do?” He paused for a second. “You revert back to instinct, to necessity. You crawl back in the jungle.”
He waited a moment, judging my reaction, then shook his head as if he had come to a conclusion. “You’re going to be the easiest one to turn.”
“What do you mean by that?” I asked, shocked at the boldness of the statement.
“Once you open your eyes and see that your father was a man not uncommon to most blue-collar men, you’ll have no choice. Your father was kicked out of a job because of the clampdown on State finances; a man who could no longer find a decent-paying job because of younger and older demographics squeezing him out of the labor force; a man who had enough pride in himself to want to keep supporting the family; a man who was beaten into doing what he did out of pure desperation. Your father was one man out of millions who are experiencing the same plight. If you open your eyes and ask yourself who is truly responsible for all of this, the people who have crippled the economy and are assfisting the country with law after law to crush your liberty, you simply don’t have a choice. But you don’t see the big picture. You resist.”
“Why are you telling me all of this?”
“Because you have potential. I see it lurking within, but now it is up to you. All you have to do is step out from the darkness and accept what you see.”
“I admit the country is fucked up, but should that mean I should turn my back on it?” But even as I asked the question, I knew my own answer. He moved an eyebrow upward, as if he too sensed a tone in my voice signaling a shift. His eyes gazed back deeply into the darkness, flecks of starlight twinkling in them from vestigial stars.
My eyes moved to t
he expansive sky. I searched for Cassiopeia and then above it for Andromeda. It was out there somewhere, another galaxy mixed in with the Milky Way. Distance can always be deceiving, proximity a matter of degrees.
“There’s something large going on here,” I said.
His tone stiffened. “That much is obvious.” He stood, brushed his mottled pants off. “But reality up there is not the reality on the ground. I need your word of commitment.” Then he was off into the darkness, breathing heavily, but physically not breathing at all. He strode into the thick forest, which gobbled him up without making a sound.
Chapter 9
“Loyalty to the country always. Loyalty to government, when it deserves it.”
-Mark Twain
Standing here now, gazing out at the first snow peppering the woods on the streets of the capital in the year 2026, that first battle at The Abattoir seems a distant memory, one reflecting as a wavering blur, a thousand shards of Seee in them.
In the winter of November 2022, I tossed and turned after the night at Second Sight Peak, Seee’s words a balance inside my head, tipping from one side to the next on the idea of nation.
The next day, the men were bothered when Mir asked what Seee’s idea of fear was, to which he replied, “We are all prisoners of something—whether it is this body, this Earth, this solar system, galaxy, or universe. As you saw, Roth is a prisoner of Montgomery. You do not have to live behind bars to be in a prison. The paradox of liberty is that it disintegrates with time. Freedom is usually something we are too afraid to take. Fear is ignoring truth and seeing a reality that is metamorphosing and distorted as something continuous, when indeed it is not.”
The whispering surrounding this statement swirled amongst us throughout the day. What was he trying to say? was the question on everyone’s mind. While debate sparked among us, I kept the previous night’s conversation to myself. What no one argued over was all of us glaring into the eyes of blinding belief. We, the jealous, searched our inner souls for the same spirit, questioned larger contexts, acknowledged what he was saying was not abstract. Our ears simply refused to listen. As overachievers, the message came as a challenge instead of an answer. The camp split and became argumentative, unable to come to a resolution. Arguments based themselves on intent, not on patriotism, and did not flare into accusations. At least, none spoke openly about it.
After dinner, four more men followed Seee and I to the ravine—Split, Brock, Conroy, and Mir. Others would follow in the coming days. The gravity of Seee, pulling us together bit by bit. A man who came at you in fragments, a mosaic of the full picture, and all of us were curious to fit the missing shards of the man together, to resolve the enigma, the attraction too large to resist.
We sat in a small circle and watched the sunset begin to form. Split lit up a cigarette and it was passed around, the end burning like a sun, a fusion reaction between us, the first spark of the fire that would begin to unite us.
Seee took a long drag on the cigarette, and told us it reminded him of his days smoking the peace pipe with Ahanu. He told us that American history was dirty just as much as it was inspiring. He spoke of slavery and how Native Americans suffered the wrath of an enemy too strong, how they were dispossessed of their lands by the white man.
“Ahanu says that his people were too slow to adjust to the creep of change.”
“Yet, does he still consider himself Native American?” Split asked. “He was in the Marines. He fought for America.”
“Ahanu is a wise man who considers himself American, while at the same time respecting his roots,” Seee said. “He isn’t a man rooted in the past. He looks to the future.”
Then Seee began a story. “Perhaps you don’t know, but Ahanu was a descendant of Kicking Bear—great, great, great grandson or something like that. Legends were passed down. Who knows if it’s true, but he told me a good story once. He told me the Bear liked tall tepees. So they build one in the winter of the late 1800s that gets particularly tall—has a massive space within. All of the tribe is engaged to paint the inside of it. When it’s done, the crackling fire inside lights up the static lives on the canvas above. The characters on the canvas are their ancestors—grandfathers, grandmothers, legendary braves and chiefs. But up above, nothing is a lie. All of the scenes are things that actually happened. At least that’s what I was told. The space is filled with these warm lives. When the nights are ten below zero and the earth is an icicle, everyone bundles under buffalo skins after a ghost dance while each one of the tribe in turn tells the story of their drawing from above. They gaze up and watch the spirits of their ancestors dance in the shadows. The stars poke through the tiny slit at the top of the tepee, and this is the spot they call God’s Eye. What they notice is both the figures on the canvas and their conscious eyes direct themselves to the slit above, to the darkness and the thin shimmering starlight bleeding into the fortress.”
Seee took another drag on the cigarette and passed it to Split. “Now, none of them was told how to paint their scene, but all the characters’ actions are funneling to the hole in the top of the tepee. Kicking Bear thinks this an omen. He claims that under this tepee, God’s Eye is glittering, the drawings magnetized to it, the light pouring in is more radiant within. The tribe ends up believing it is a crack of Nirvana, to which all of their ancestors journey. They say it is a remnant of the ghost dance, a celestial crystal ball to see within the heavens. A month later, on a clear night, the tribe is bundled once again in the tepee, gazing up at the slit, waiting for stars. But ominously, none come. Puzzled, Kicking Bear goes outside and sees a sky full of stars. There’s not a cloud in the sky. Long after all of the others have gone to sleep having grown impatient looking for one, Kicking Bear stays awake gazing through the slit at the dark sky. Still, no stars pass through the window. The Sky Father has closed The Eye on them. When morning comes, Kicking Bear wakes everyone and forces them out of the tepee. Then he takes a torch from a fire outside and burns down the Tall Tepee much to the lament of the rest of the tribe. He claims the Sky Father disapproved of the tall structure and that the tribe should remain close to the earth, close to its roots and what is already known.”
When Seee was quiet, Brock said, “Makes you wonder. What happens when the universe becomes darkness? When the last star flickers out?”
“The universe did not end happily for Kicking Bear,” Seee said. “He ended up being a clown in a road show.”
“From warrior to mascota,” Split said.
“It’s the metaphor for our great nation,” Seee said.
“How do you mean?” Brock asked.
“Too many of our people are becoming Kicking Bear, either waiting for a star that isn’t coming, or like a clown, dancing around oblivious to the world around them, willing to give up their freedom for the status quo.”
“I don’t think it’s quite that bad,” Conroy said.
“You don’t? Curfews? Drones? Robotic police? The expanding apparatus of the surveillance state? The government’s attempt to confiscate weapons and gold? Disallowing money from leaving the United States? Then, they give themselves the right to detain you as they see fit for as long as they want, all under the widening umbrella of national security. What about the internment camps? You don’t see that as problematic?”
“You mean the Uplift camps?” Conroy asked. “I think it’s a bit of an exaggeration. People are exercising their rights by protesting.”
“Isse, what do you think?” Seee asked. “You were in the riots. Give us America’s pulse.”
I scratched the stubble growing on my chin. Eyes around the fire gazed at me eager for what I would say, ready to make a judgment, and Seee cleverly put me in the spotlight.
“I think the element within the crowd has changed,” I said.
“How so?” Seee asked. He swung around from a reclining position where he was perched on an elbow, swiveled his hips in a break-dancer move, and ended up sitting in a lotus position.
“It’s not only
your street punk, anarchist, or left-wing radical out there now. Most of the protestors are no longer the fringe. The circumference of the circle is thickening, with a large majority of them now the middleclass.”
Mir interrupted. “What did you mean this morning, Seee? You talked about the paradox of liberty and reality metamorphosing.”
“We are all born into the State, and therefore we are part of it, constituents with passports, birth certificates, tax payer IDs. The State tracks us. They regulate when we can leave or go. They take judicious records of our birth, whether we pay our taxes, and our eventual deaths. The State gathers taxes from the collective, from a group whom are supposed to represent our interests. They vote on how the funds are to be used. But over the last sixty years, funds taken in have not met the insatiable urge to spend. Naturally, the State borrows, making promises to return funds to their lenders. But in effect, they shifted the burden of payment in colossal amounts to the future, as the future was distant, a day so far ahead it was inconceivable for it to come. And then it did. That day is now, and slow change is accelerating, the result of which is civil disobedience, to which the State responds with confiscation of one’s liberty.”
“And you think the riots are because of this?” Conroy asked.
“The riots are a symptom of financial hardship, which has been caused by rising prices, the creation of funny money, and a kleptocratic political system intimately tied with a corrupt financial system. But it has moved very slowly throughout the years. So slow you can’t see it or understand how it happened. Only now are eyes opening. People are dripping with discontent and it’s leaking out onto the streets. The media is nothing more than a propaganda machine bogging you down with disinformation and shifting the blame. They claim the rioting is caused by the fringe, the undesirables. Or they simply bury the coverage.”
The Cause Page 10
