Firefight of SZ, part I
by Dan Berkey © 2007
It begins in the forebrain like the spark of a brilliant joke during the quiet times and flares through the cortex, destroying all growth of rational grass, leaving laughter behind as a distant afterthought in a stinking plume of oily gray, a dry breeze over dead sand, then stillness.
You eat vacuum because you have to eat something. The thought of not eating is anathema. Who would disagree?
After the meal, after the ghost dance of tantalizing delusions, what you're left with resembles no empty place at all but absence itself, nothingness, a place incapable of filling, lack of creation or the hope of it, lack of God, lack of Satan, lack of life but not death; death predicates life, and there's no life where you've landed for no reason, hence no death, no end, nor a beginning, no hope of a beginning or end, no memory of life, no imagining, no dreaming, only an utter nothingness without imagination, without feeling, without sleep, without wakefulness, without the slightest obscene, courtesy of hopefulness.
“A tight-rope walker over the abyss in the dark between nothing and nothing for no audience or pay.” -R.E.
Once upon the time there was ONE.
Flash! Then there were two, then four, and then eight. And me.
We fell apart for a time, scared for a time, terrified of our own shadows, but we pulled it together and found each other. After that there was no splitting us up, a crack team. We fought together. We fought the enemy. They wanted to seduce us, lure us into complacency, make us part of them.
The enemy was clever; it lied. So we had to be clever too to recognize the lies and not be fooled; consequently we were given the maxim, don't listen! Ever!
The ones who drew up the maxim knew what they were doing.
“Sometimes the fight lasts for hours. We wish it wouldn't, but it always does, day-after-day, and we go to it. We are duty bound to go and fight,” says Drake.
The fight was given a long time ago.
A choice was made back then in a flash. The flash remains hidden. You wish you could go back and replay that flash, but you can't find it. You're certain things would be different if you could, but you can't and they aren't. Orders were issued and accepted. Things are the way they are. There's no choice now but to fight. The flash is a pesky afterthought if anything for most of us, a waste of time for all. What would be the point of worrying?
It was; so, now it is.
“Not to fight would be a blatant denial of our duty and humanity,” says Drake, "a cruel irony, yeah, what are we to do? There's nothing else. To pretend to do anything else would be stupid.”
Dom sniffs around hoping though. He and Tomas work together. Tomas often feels Dom's on to something, but neither of them will waste the group's time and effort. They're devoted to the group. When the group moves, they put their personal ideals in check to move in synch with the group. In the end, they always report to me. They want to serve me, give me hope, a reason to continue.
Each day there's a new house with a hundred rooms or more inhabited by the enemy. In each room there's an integral part of the enemy. The enemy needs to be fitted together to properly fight us, as we need to be fitted to the enemy to fight. To know the enemy is to know us. The challenge lies in comprehending the difference. There's a unique mirror in each room that reflects a different part of us. It's important to pay close attention to these reflections and to what they reveal about us. The secret is gradually known. It is unique, and it's different for every fighter. Although we fight side-by-side we are separate. The enemy says otherwise. It's a lie. We add the integrals with the reflections and we come to know the enemy, bit-by-bit, as we come to know the nine of us. There's always a struggle between the two camps. We fight to flush the enemy out by going carefully through each room, meticulously searching every nook and cranny. They're hiding somewhere. Always hiding, preparing to take us out however they can. We've come to accept this. There were times when we passionately denied it, but those times have passed. We all know it to be true now, although we wish it weren't. It is. They're waiting for a weak, careless moment on our parts to jump us. We have to be constantly on our guard.
There's never a safe moment in the rooms. In each of the rooms is a small piece of the enemy's brain waiting to be discovered and donned. These pieces work in delicate concert with each room's particular reflection. We're not just obliged to take these pieces up, we've been ordered to take them up and to understand them so we can fit them together in our individual brains like a great puzzle that will ultimately reveal the enemy.
We've never actually seen the complete enemy, but we've always felt him, her or it. To reveal the enemy we must think like the enemy. We must become like the enemy almost to the point where there's no difference, save the thread of separation that preserves both of us in our sacrosanct camps. It's a large puzzle, a million, billion pieces, maybe more. Frustration, discouragement and despairs aside, we know we have to be steadfast in our search, firefight after firefight, going from room-to-room, house-to-house, day after day, collecting the pieces, carefully fitting them to the board in our brains, otherwise there's only oblivion.
…And we know there'll always be a new house, until there isn't.
Before the sun comes up we gather to plot the day, what house to search, where and how, and then we fight.
There's nothing else but the fight, until it changes. It hasn't changed.
It lasted three days this time, and I was amazed. No fight had ever lasted so long. I guess it was inevitable.
The nine of us first entered the building, all masked. Nothing happened for a minute, then everything happened.
They came out of hiding as if the walls had dissolved, and everything at once became fire with screams and bullets every which way. We scattered like crazed cockroaches, dove for cover and returned the fire. Miraculously, none of us were hit.
Each of us made our way slowly away from the ambush under the cover of our buddy's bullets. We crawled like slugs through the halls, up the stairways and into the many rooms of the house to do our thing, each of us in our own way. It took hours to get away, but we all made it. We filled out the house with our bellies and peculiar paranoias and proceeded to scope it out, purge the enemy, find the pieces, sort the reflections and sanitize the place.
The enemy was catty, quick and smart. They mixed lies with the truth. We had to be careful. A shot could come out of the blue, from a place we never expected and take us down. We needed eyes where there were none.
“It's right here,” came a shout, “You can stay. We need you, all of you”
“Scum confabulator!” I thought.
I waited till all of the others had slithered off, took a long moment of gun-oiled silence, sucked down three deep breaths and bolted for the heavy metal door in full view of the enemy; it must've shocked the hell out of them. I was through it in a millisecond and bolted down a long, dark hallway lined with mirrors of various sizes. It was too dark to see a reflection. I cursed the lack of light and kept running. Shots rang loud and long, but nothing came close. I was long gone before they knew what to aim at. Yet, I knew they'd be on top of me in no time if I didn't get a grip of the situation. I had to keep going, no dawdling. There had to be a reflection somewhere I could use.
I knew by threats and intimations what would happen if I didn't find one. Up till now I never took any of those harsh words to heart because I always found a reflection, but the day was aching on, and I hadn't found one, flashes and glints but nothing significant, nothing recognizable. I was getting worried.
At the end of the hall there was a large metal door much like the first, but this one was very hard to open. It was covered with strange ornate designs deeply carved into the metal. I couldn't say for sure, but the symbols had a magical feel about them. They grabbed me. Despite the enemy, who was certainly hot on my heels, I took a moment to consider them. I was fascinated by symbols. The majority of the symbols on the door made no profound impression on me except one. I committed it to memory. It was a simple, gracefully shaped female figure. She smiled at me. I felt that smile at the root of my spine.
At that moment, I knew I had to find her. She looked very familiar. I was convinced she was being held hostage.
“The key to this operation!” I said aloud.
A moment later, after muscling the heavy door open and darting through it I was standing in what appeared to be a bedroom from the court of Louis the Fourteenth. It stopped me cold. I laughed. “Where am I now, on a Barry Lyndon set?”
A sharp thought then shot through my head, “Am I dreaming? Is this a dream? Is that all that's left” I quickly dismissed it. “How the hell could I be dreaming?” I said aloud, “This is reality, Dan, and you're fighting. We're all fighting. We haven't got time for dreams!”
I had only a moment, but I took it to look around. The room was laid out meticulously, writing desk, quills, cushions, even a vanity table with rouge and puffs and powders of all kinds and what appeared to be a large makeup kit, and a massive, ornate mirror. It calmed me.
“This should be Zephud's room.” I laughed.
I approached the mirror. There were no windows just another door opposite to the one I entered. I didn't stay very long despite the room's compelling curiosities, just long enough to look in the mirror, and I was pleased by what I saw--a man with questions in his eyes, no answers. It was exactly what I expected from them, and I had to hand it to them, but they were not going to fool me.
"They're hiding something, I know it," I thought, "I still have a few answers."
I immediately ran through the next door, and once again, I was in the house we'd originally entered.
“Stay!” said a feminine voice, “What do you think you're looking for?”
It shocked me like a shot of horse to the back of the neck. I stopped to turn back.
“Don't go on!” said a sharp feminine voice, “Go back!”
I froze.
The hallway stank of gasoline, fire, guns and old sweat. There were broken chairs, tables, shredded clothes and rubble everywhere like the place had been sacked only for the purpose of smashing everything in sight. I continued on and slogged through filth three inches thick. It stank and made me nauseous. I stopped a moment and listened for a sign of my fellows, but there was nothing but the muffled clatter of the approaching enemy. I was beginning to get worried. They'd never disappeared completely. There were always a few in calling range.
“They wouldn't leave me behind,” I thought.
It doesn't make any sense. “No. They're in a room somewhere in the house reconnoitering. That has to be it. Even in dire emergencies they've managed to get a hold of me.”
The radios were useless due to the jamming.
“If they can't get to me, I'll just have to get to them. Calm down, man, be patient, you'll figure it out. They're here somewhere waiting to be found.”
“And haven't they've always waited to be found?” the feminine voice asked. “When will you stop worrying? Aren't you getting tired of this? Bored? Does it really still give you what you want, or do you just want what you want for a putative lack of having? There has to be an end to this somewhere, don't you think?”
“I suppose so,” I thought, “In fact, I hope so, but it's what I do now. Reality is reality, and this is reality, man. It's how I fill it out. There's no other choice. Can't you see that?”
“You can stay, you know. You all can stay.”
“NO! We're not that stupid.”
I knew how to take care of myself.
Two doors down the dingy, battle-scarred hallway, I found a large suite of rooms, nine by my count. I ventured stealthily through the suite. It felt familiar, but I couldn't place it. I was convinced the enemy was going to leap out of hiding at any moment. I proceeded along slowly, gun up, finger on the trigger, every pore cocked to the possibility of attack. I was suddenly excited to be there.
“This was what I'm all about.” I thought, and this readied me in a rowdy calm. I fingered the trigger, itching to pull it in a hot battle, anywhere, anyhow. “Give me a reason!” I grunted, ready to rumble, but the smarter part knew better. It put the brakes on despite the heat, despite the desire, despite the hunger. It knew this was the wrong decision.
“All wrong! You're so damn gullible, Berkey,” It barked, “Stop! Now! Get some perspective, ok?”
I closed my eyes, relaxed my arms and took ten deep Yogic breaths. “A good move,” I thought.
It spoke to me gently but insistently, “You need to find the rest of the group, Dan, or at least find out what happened to them, if indeed something did happen. You've been separated too long. Don't waste your energy in pointless, selfish battle. The fight is on, no question, but not for blood at the moment.”
It was the right decision to stop, and I was thankful to the part of me that knew to stop the rest of me.
Not knowing what happened to the rest of the group was unnerving me. I carried on in search of them.
I cursed my useless radio, “Some kind of electromagnetic interference,” I thought, “It has to be, but what the hell's responsible?”
The jamming was sure. We were left with hands and voices.
“How quaint, but what good is it if you can't see anybody?” I yelled. Where or how the jamming was being generated was a complete mystery, and I had to put it out of mind for the moment for obvious reasons. I jotted it down on my cerebral notepad, though. High tech spy-stuff fascinated me. It was a weakness, according to some, a fatal weakness to a few, but not to me. I never put down a good mystery. Mysteries fed me. I lived inside a John Le Carre brain.
“You'll get back to it, Berkey, right?”
“O yeah, you bet.”
I thought of the magical symbol on the door, and the recent reflection, and I was at once calm.
“Please stay,” shouted a sweet voice.
A door in an adjacent room blew open. The enemy was close. I frantically looked around for a hideaway. At the last moment I saw the trap beneath my feet, cranked it open and stuffed myself inside a small floor storage vault in the center of the room where I huddled in a flop-sweat, listening. I listened to the footfalls and indecipherable voices inches above my head.
“Where is he?”
“I thought he was here.”
”We all thought he was here.”
”We know you're here, man! Show yourself You don't have to be afraid. What're you afraid of?”
I stuffed down a laugh.
“Don't you know you're home?”
I thought, “You'll do anything won't you? Lying piece of crap.”
“You're just fighting yourselves!”
I almost answered.
“This scene can stop, Dan. This whole act,” said the sweet voice, “Right now!”
This goon was pushing it. The nine of us lived together, fought together. We were individuals. We had our lives, our ways of doing things.
“Don't you know where you are?”
“Shut up, shut up, shut up,” I thought.
After a short silence a door was blown away, the footfalls ceased and the voices faded away. I waited awhile then slowly emerged, bayonet in my mouth, but I didn't leave the suite. I stayed low and listened for my fellows, but I heard nothing. They were all great fighters and great men. I wasn't worried even though I knew a few of them would eventually die in battle. It was our duty to occasionally die for our beliefs of home and country. The irony of that suddenly made me laugh. I waited.
After years of heavy fighting, house-to-house, the troop was still intact. I was convinced it would never change.
I knew some of the truth, at least.
“It had to be true!”
It made the nine of us very proud, very close.
“We gotta stay together as a complete unit, or else…?” I was suddenly afraid.
We knew each other by the sound of our breaths or the smell of our sweat, but I heard nothing, smelled nothing.
“One of them should've popped up by now,” I thought.
I muttered something unintelligible and walked into the hall. It was eerie. There was no indication any fighting had occurred at all, no strewn wreckage, no garbage, and no blood, no mess of any kind. I chuckled to myself.
“Well, for enemies,” I thought, “At least they're neat.”
I walked the length of the hall. Then I realized,
“I was here before I went into the suite, but this isn't....” An inner voice asked, “The reflection! Did you find the mirror and see the reflection in the room you just passed? No, you didn't, did you?”
I turned around, but I didn't re-enter the suite. Clamorous sounds had erupted. It was the enemy. I was about to run when I recognized a sound. It wasn't fearsome but welcoming, and I was surprised to hear it. I hadn't heard it for a very long time, and this was the last place I expected it to hear it. But I did, and it reached me as if it knew I wanted to hear it, as if I'd been reaching for it all along and nothing else.
“The Madame will receive you now,” the elder man said as he opened the door.
I whirled around, lifted my rifle and was about to shoot, when I experienced an odd calm, almost as if I'd suddenly awakened from a deep sleep.
“Very well,” I replied.
He stood before me glowering like an irascible old sage. I held up my gun limply as if to threaten him, but I had no intention of using it. He pointed to the rear of the room. I followed his finger with my eyes, but I didn't move. It was the room I'd just left, but it was different. I didn't recognize the furniture, walls or floor. It had changed or my memory was failing seriously. I watched the man. He stood a long time staring blankly at me, imploring me ever more urgently, but I wouldn't give in. I refused to move. Suddenly, he turned on his heels and disappeared inside the room. I heard voices some of which were familiar, particularly the gentle one I'd heard earlier.
The other sounds commenced, the violent sounds. They enveloped the room, but the gentle one remained throughout. It penetrated the cacophony easily, simply. It knew me, its target, its source and its conclusion, and it knew this was the appointed time. It had to be the time.
I had to calm myself, to focus on her words, but they were unintelligible.
In a moment, a life can change. It could be a bullet, a bomb, a simple intrusive thought, an unexpected realization, or a heart attack. It could be a note, a single strain from a musical instrument, or the sound of a voice. It could be the announcement of a birth or a death. When it comes you'll know it; if it doesn't, no one's the wiser.
“You know what you have to do, Dan, so do it!”
I nodded, then dropped my gun, straightened out my clothes, combed my hair, wiped my face and walked into the room where the old man was.
What I saw upon entering made me realize why I was there. I smiled and lowered my defenses a bit.
She raised her head and said, “In the radical room of your head you often envision a household full of loud battling aliens or masked humans in weird get-ups wielding high-tech weapons, don't you?”
I laughed. “Yeah.”
”This comes after a vague dream about sex, doesn't it?”
I didn't respond. “What're you playing at?” I wondered.
“You get annoyed with the noise, so you often get up to leave thinking this isn't the place for you, but you never can leave because your wardrobe is always too far away, and you have to search through the messy place wearing only your underwear enduring the embarrassed glances of women dressed in High Victorian Fashion, and the place is really messy and getting messier; broken bottles cut your feet, you slip on oil puddles, ripped magazines and tattered New York Times are pasted all over the walls. Crazed dogs, mechanical and otherwise are all over the place growling and rushing at you, but they never bite. You touch them and they dissolve. Robots with plasma screen faces are walking around with trays of brightly colored snacks of which you don't partake. They have no expressions only screens showing bad recordings of equally bad Sci-Fi movies from the fifties. You enjoy the malevolent irony of this and climb to the roof. You jump off in a hang-glider harness and float to your bed where you awaken shaking, filled with images of dancing porpoises.
Maybe you had a thing for Flipper, I don't know.”
Then it suddenly dawned on me what was happening.
“You stupid ass, Berkey,” I thought to myself, “why did you listen? You know who she is, what she's trying to do; what they're all trying to do?”
I tried to turn my attention elsewhere, but it was no good. I was in too deep.
I barked, “It's the only thing that's real, isn't it?”
“What?” chimed a distant but familiar voice.
“The fight.”
“For now.”
“So what do I do?”
“What do you ever do?”
“More than you know,” I said breathlessly.
“Then you'll do it.”
“What else?”
“Despite what you may think it's what you need to see.”
“What?”
”You'll know.”
“I'm sure I will.”
“That's good, soldier. First thing tomorrow...”
”What?”
“What do you think?”
”I don't think.”
“Of course you do!”
“No I don't.”
”SAY IT!”
”This is messed up?”
”What isn't?”
“Not talking to you, jerkoff!”
“But you still are, soldier.”
“Do you blame me?”
”Blame!”
“Yeah.”
“Blame has nothing to do with it, never has, never will.”
”Then what?”
“Responsibility.”
“Just that?”
”Isn't that enough?”
“Was there a choice?”
”Always has been, always will be.”
”When did I choose?”
“Think about it.”
”Then what?”
”That's up to you.”
“Really?”
”Just keep coming back.”
I closed my eyes and started to laugh.
In a moment the room dissolved. I was back in my kitchen. It was early morning, about 6:37. I had a loaf of bread in one hand and a jar of peanut butter in the other. My roommates were still asleep. It was very quiet, very peaceful. I opened the shade and watched the sun rise slowly over the ruddy shell of buildings known as Brooklyn, and for a moment I was relieved, almost happy.
…but only for a moment. I knew the feeling would pass almost immediately.
“I guess we didn't find it, did we?” I thought and became sad.
The new day was on. I'd find my mates unhurt, ready to go, and off we'd go to try again, as if it were scripted. The fight would resume.
As I thought about it in the dark of my kitchen it became achingly clear why my compatriots disappeared.
“Man, I'm going to get it today,” I thought and became very nervous.
I was the one who determined where and when we fought. It was my hat. I didn't like it, but there was no defying it. I accepted it because everything said it was the right and proper thing to do. Don't ask me to explain that. I went about the task best I could, and I was good at it too. My mates told me so. Only the enemy tried to confuse the issue, and I understood why; who wouldn't? It's what the enemy did. Only a fool would think otherwise. I ardently avoided slipping up, but I was only human.
“It was my biggest defect.”
If I gave the enemy anything at all in a weak, unguarded moment it compromised our position, and by listening last night, that's exactly what I did.
“Am I ever in for it now! I wonder what they'll do?”
The nine of us knew the score. The enemy was waiting out there, somewhere, and we waited for the next word to attack. Waiting or attacking, it's what we did to survive the day.
When an alternative finally came around the corner I didn't even see it till it was almost too late. I had to be bashed in the head, and like all good liars I had a hard head. It took a few knocks to crack an opening.
“They have some new kind of projection equipment,” I thought while I sat on my bed as the new sun shimmied up the sky. “I wonder if we have anything to combat it?”
I was feeling a peculiar dread, unlike anything I ever felt.
“They're up to something weird,” I said aloud, hoping that might deflate the useless paranoia, but the feeling didn't pass. I had to get ready. I never felt closer to an end, and it scared me.
“Could it be that it ends today?”
This thought came to me before I was ready. I hadn't expected it and panic set in, but only for a moment. The thought of an end sparked feelings of horror and relief. I sat in the middle.
“Every soldier had to face this feeling when it came. They knew it would come, even the most inexperienced. The most experienced soldiers faced it squarely with terrific courage.” This humbled me.
“Gotta buck myself up.”
I stood up and took a long, deep breath. I didn't really know if I was ready. My time? I had no idea what that meant, but “come what, come may, time and the hour runs…” I laughed.
I walked into the hall. It was dark inside the apartment. The sun was barely up. Everyone was still asleep. The pulsing glow of the control room down the hall pulled at me and I yielded. It was where I belonged.
“It's just as well if it comes,” I thought, “I'm getting tired of this.”
I moved slowly toward the room. It was well disguised as a typical living room, and I was proud of that. The design was mine. My roomies never suspected because I never gave them the slightest reason. The team's task was sacred, and I upheld it with my life.
The tick-a-tock of the monitors were unusually loud this morning. I wondered if something was wrong. Zephud was hunched over the main control console muttering to himself. Dom stood beside him. They didn't notice me as I walked in.
“Good morning,” I said. Neither of them replied. I touched Zeph on the shoulder. He jumped.
“Dammit, Berkey, don't do that!”
Dom smiled and said nothing. He was jotting notes on a small pad.
“What've you got?” I asked quietly.
Zeph took a moment. “We'll know in a few minutes.”
”Where are the rest?”
“They're getting ready down below,” said Dom, “They'll be here in a few.”
I took a moment.
”You feel it, don't you?” I said, “It's different.”
”Yeah,” replied Zeph with the faintest touch of trepidation. “The readings we're getting today are totally different.”
A big lump grew in my throat.
“So it wasn't paranoia,” I thought.to be continued in June