PREPARATION.
There are bruises and scars making an atlas of his arms and legs. They are badges from his days in training. He is a master swordfighter. He has severed the heads of seven men. He tells this to the younger generation who are now training under him. When he was in their position, no one had quite warned him that at night, he would dream a bloodbath. That he would come to feel alienated from everything he’d once derived pleasure from.
Now he was a mentor, he knew he had to prepare them. There was no margin for failure, for mistakes, for errors in judgement, for being a fraction of a second too late, for thinking that trying hard is enough, for leisure or affection or matters of the heart, for hope beyond the kill.
It’s for their own good, he told himself as he hardened against the eleven pairs of wide, frightened eyes looking up to him in the gymnasium. Prepare them now for what they are going to see and what they are going to do, and I have a better chance of saving them.
Saving the galaxy? That was different. He had built his life around this fight, but he had never thought about the possibility of winning it.
APATHY.
Do it for your people, his mother would say. She had the idealism that he lacked, even though he was younger and ought to have been more naive. All he could see was it getting uglier and uglier. No victory, no mercy, just endless sacrifice, and for nothing.
But he went anyway. He did it because he had nothing and no one else, and because he couldn’t have tolerated himself if he ever saw her look at him with the same eyes she used on other people. Those who didn’t cooperate for the greater good were, in her eyes, just as bad as the enemy. He didn’t think he’d survive if he was ever on the receiving end of a look like that from her.
Without friends, having had a menial job at a telecommunications company that he had lost when the business was shut down, his existence was devoid of personal or professional pleasures, no reason to feel good about himself. All he could do was keep from disappointing her, keep her proud of him. If not proud, then at least not ashamed. So whenever she told him to go out into the desert, he went.
Go and get it back, she would say. Bring it back, what is rightfully ours. She told him how he needed to look for that which had been stolen out of the hands of those who had never held their own belongings for more than seconds at a time.
Be a good dog, she says. Her fingers rest on his shoulder, providing some
tactile evidence of her connection to him, her dependence on him. Every time, just as he was leaving, saying goodbye, taking the pistol she made him carry- though he would never have used it, even in the direst, most threatening of situations, for he was not a fighter, despite what she wanted to believe about her son-
Every time, she said, Bite the bullet, or bite the dust.
BETRAYAL.
He named all his sons after Jupiter’s moons. As though this, beyond their blood connection to him in the dearth of any kind of connectivity that existed on their planet, would keep them true to their shared orbit.
He never did find out which of them gave him up.
He never saw any of them again after the soldiers hauled him away one cold morning the sky was tinted green. But they saw him. His face rippled before them whenever they looked away or closed their eyes.
[I compiled the tales of some of the brave individuals who fought for freedom of speech and to reclaim their human rights in the wake of the universal governing bodies being usurped and taken over by an unnamed extremist group, hell-bent on absolute domination, abolishing democracy and enforcing a totalitarian regime. You can read it here: click]]
