Me

Anna Feruglio Dal Dan

Yesterday I stood, looking down at the body, waiting for them to burn him. You hear about corpses that look like they’re asleep, but not when they have been flayed and their eye sockets are empty and their mouths are caved in. Then they look like nothing but corpses. I stood there and reminded myself that I have always been me. It has always been me, all along.

Goddamit, I can see!

Red streamers snapping angrily in the wind against a clear blue sky. There is a symbol on one of them, but I can’t make it out. My vision is not that good.

It could be my family’s mark. Yes. The air is cold and sharp and bright. My wife sits there in her red wedding dress, perfect and still and lifeless as a statue. She must be unhappy but she is a good daughter and submits. She looks at me without begrudging me my role. That was when my heart began to thaw, I think. We were both enduring this together. We were united by the same unhappiness, joined by the same unfortunate virtue. None of us would make a fuss. We would be getting married. That was it.

Even swathed in layer after layer of ceremonial clothes, we were very cold. I remember my teeth chattering. That must be why I am remembering. Cold and misery. I thought I’d never feel that much pain again. I was wrong.

Huge all-powerful ships cruise overhead, each capable of wiping out continents and all of us with them, and they do battle with each other, but we don’t see them, can’t see them. Only when there’s a kill, close enough to our site, we can see the debris streaming down, clawing the sky with fire. But it doesn’t happen that often. They can kill continents but they have a hard time killing us. We’re too small, too well hidden, and we have our own stings. So the killing of us, and them on the other side of the river, has to be done the hard way. The ugly way. One by one, by hand.

I am lying on the grass, staring across the river at the old intercontinental street.

The street shuffles nervously down the mountain, in tight fearful bends, clinging to the rock, then sways in apparent relief left and right on the almost flat terrain, and finally leaps over the river in one bold span, to take up the same pattern on the other side. The last I can see from here is a pleasant curve that disappears round the curve of the Anthill, the high hill on the river bend. The central span is, of course, mined, and has been since I first set eyes on it.

At night the fog rises from the river in graceful white swirls, and ends up filling the entire valley, but it does not obscure the view from the infrared glasses I am using to watch the enemy positions. Not that I see much. We have become too good at hiding from each other.

The theory is that to control a planet you need to control the high orbit. We have high orbit on most of the systems coreward of this, and the war there is simply a matter of mopping up the troops that are left without damaging the planet too much. They have high orbit on Sensa and Maraui, and are currently mopping us up. But on this planet we wiped each other out of high orbit, all our technological wonders have cancelled each other out and we’re fighting it out in the old way, on the ground.

I don’t actually need to be out here, in this uncomfortably hot armour with its heat shielding and fuzzying field, looking at the other shore with my own eyes. But I need to get out of the underground now and then. It crushes me, and I can’t think well down there. And of course, I am always afraid. Fear is something that never leaves you at the bottom of a gravity well in a war. You can hear the space-to-surface craft passing overhead down there, and we don’t always know whether it’s ours or theirs. I wake up every time, and lie in the dark thinking of the earth falling on me and smothering me, burying me in its wet, cold embrace. People go crazy down there, and I use my privileges to get out now and then, to escape.

The Anthill is a fortification. The problem is that I don’t know how strong it is and how determined they are to hold it. I don’t even know if it is vital to take it.

The Maseian have wonderfully powerful hydrogen reactors, truly amazing machines. They can keep their army supplied and even provide limited manufacturing capability. But once landed they can’t move them, unlike ours, which are much smaller and much less efficient but that can both land and take off. And the aerial and satellite surveillance swear to me that they have four of them up there, just beyond the Anthill, on the shores of the Rauma lake. We captured or blew up the six they had on the Southern Continent, and we don’t think they managed to land others, which is why I suppose that they are going to hold the Anthill no matter what. And it is also the reason I think we can take the whole planet if we manage to capture these last four hydrogen refineries.

The Anthill is not its real name. On my map it is only referred to as “AG 40 summit”, because this used to be Maseian territory, and the Tyrosian command will be damned if they use the Maseian toponyms. It is almost possible to forget, from where I’m lying with my chin on the concrete lip of the road, that this world has been inhabited for almost two thousand years: that the Empire had time to rise, and become corrupted, and, well, peter out, and another nation take its place, and there have always been people – peoples, ours and theirs - here, living on this land. The planet was terraformed by the Earth but all Terran authority had disappeared by the time the colonists began to trickle in, from both side of the border. And they were getting along, if not well, at least avoiding outright slaughter of each other until the Maseian (but I have to admit, not without provocation) decided that Tyros was getting uppity and needed to be taught a lesson and drove our people out of the Mishita Belt. And so we came to the rescue, though the colonists might have bitter things to say on the matter, and this war started out the worst possible way: as a they’re-fucking-animals, let’s-take-no-prisoners, gloves-off war.

I find that the farther I get from the front, the easier it is for me to hate them. I didn’t use to. I knew there were reasons on both sides.

But since then something got to me. Necessity, maybe. Their atrocities gradually become more atrocious than ours, while ours were always rationalized away, explained or justified or just glossed over. And as I was bumped up the ranks by the rapid turnover of the war (not even a general is safe here, not even in high orbit), the need for victory somehow turned into a need for their defeat.

I am good at this, so good that even the higher brass up there beyond the orbit listen to me. I won the whole southern continent. I know my enemy. Very well.

She and I shared an excruciating bowl of soup after it was all over, and we were left alone with the precise duty to fuck and get it over with. While we were sitting there in silence in the bare room whose faintly luminescent walls were supposed to create an atmosphere conducive to sensuality and they only succeeded in being gloomy, she and me and the soup and the tasteful thin mattresses and nothing else, in my father’s house, which was to be her prison for the rest of her life, I looked into the soup bowl, and the thought occurred to me that I was her owner and master now. She was an attractive woman, and I had no obligation to be kind to her. I could take her when and how I wanted and if she didn’t like it, well, there was nothing she could do. And that was, in that moment, a very pleasant thought. I had been joined to this woman I didn’t know and torn from my own true love, and the one thing that I had on my side was that I could take it out on her. As long as I produced an heir.

I looked at her and she had a look of great sadness, but there was no fear in it, and I felt ashamed.

“I am sorry,” I said.

She seemed surprised. “What for, my lord?”

“Because I have failed to make you happy to be joined to me.”

Her face dissolved suddenly into a mask of twisted pain. “My lord, this is not your fault. You are an attractive man and everybody tells me that you are kind. If I am unhappy, it is just because, I am ashamed to say, I have been unable to overcome my affection for another. I was led to believe that we could be united in marriage. It is I who have to ask for your forgiveness.”

I remember lifting my hand to her cheeks. “We are more similar than I thought,” I said. I cupped her face in my hands. She slid down into my arms, I think because her grief was too much and there was no one else to comfort her, and I held her. Her body was very warm. I told her about my love, and she told me about the childhood friend who had almost been chosen for her, and we cried together, close to each other as brother and sister. I could not have forced her, or even pressed her. But when the night was almost over and she was nestling in my arms, and we had talked ourselves to exhaustion, she turned to me and said very softly: “My lord husband, have you had many women?”

“Yes,” I said. “But I was paying them. If you want to know if I am a good lover, well, the answer is, I do not know.”

She was silent for a moment and then said: “I cannot promise to love you, and I do not demand your love, but as friends, we might find comfort in physical pleasure.”

I sighed, and held her closer, as I had tried to stop myself doing up to then. I felt the shape of her body, and her warmth. I slid my hands up, so that only the last thin layer of silk stood between our flesh.

“You are a handsome man,” she said, softly. She was arching her back slightly, and her body was tensing, not out of fear. “And I trust you.”

Thinking back on it, in time, I think her trust was what got us over the night. Or some benevolent god was passing by, because there were so many ways things could have gone wrong. They didn’t. She was ready for me when I entered, though her eyes went wide with surprise at the pleasure. The mercy of the gods did not stretch to make me last long enough, but she took my hand and, despite the extravagant praise of the courtesans I had had in the past, I believe that was the first time I satisfied a woman. We didn’t love each other in the morning, but we were lighter, and less unhappy.

You need the Fleet Commander’s permission to use the device, and that means the complex setting up of an encrypted conference.

“I thought you already knew all that you wanted to know,” she says.

Sherom Himago, Fleet Commander and in charge of the whole sorry business, my immediate superior, seems tired. She always seems tired, tired and harried. I talk with her in the gloomy recesses of the Cryptography Room, surrounded by clicking machinery presided over by anxious young soldiers with cryptos insignia. I can’t see her: she’s just a familiar voice underlined by a faint hiss.

“Yes, ma’am, I do, but I need to know the context. I need to know what no source can tell me no matter how good, what no interrogation can give me. I need to know what it feels like to be there.”

“Are you sure it’s not too dangerous?”

Short hesitation. They warn you about the procedure. They tell you it’s going to be very vivid. They warn you about subjective identification and trauma.

“It’s probably going to be unpleasant. Given the circumstances, probably very unpleasant. But nobody ever got hurt doing it. Nobody who wasn’t sick to start with.”

“And you feel the risk is justified.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

“Go ahead then. And good luck.”

It took some time and a lot of reading and some long quiet talks with the older of the women I had used to pay for me to be able to give my wife the pleasure she deserved. It was the only thing I could do to lift her misery, which expressed itself in beautiful poetry I never tired of reading. I never forgot my impossible love, but in time, I began to see her as a lively and beautiful maid, yes, but not particularly bright. The fire had mysteriously gone.

I was dazzled by my wife’s spirit and mind. She managed to go along amazingly well in such a complicated household as mine, so that it only took me a few friendly chats with my sisters to make them love her as well. She could offer shrewd and intelligent advice whenever I asked for her counsel, mostly on the managing of the farm that my father expected of me and that I had not been trained to do, since it was my brother who had been selected for the task, and I sent to the Academy.

One day I realized that her poetry had become less moody, and that her laughter had lengthened and brightened, and that she had been taking more care of her long black hair, pinning it up in elaborate loops, and that her dark eyes had acquired a happy gleam. I was proud of hearing her say “I love you” in the exhaustion that followed the peak of her pleasure, but I knew that it was not necessarily a statement of great depth and importance. It was the day she lifted her smiling eyes on me with no apparent cause, while I was passing by her study’s door one day, and told me “I love you” that I understood with a suddenly painful piercing of my heart that the same thing had happened to my wife that had happened to me. She had fallen in love with me.

We were not particularly worried about the fact that we had conceived no child. After all, we had had tests and everything was in order, and heavens know we were not sparing in our efforts to produce an heir. We took it for granted it would happen, sooner or later.

We stood in front of my father one glorious winter morning, almost exactly five years after our marriage, and he spelled things out for us. Our eyes were cast down. We felt guilty and ashamed, despite the number of times he repeated that it was not our fault. But most of all, we felt terrified. Her hand twitched with the same desire I had for her reassuring touch, a grip that might reassure us that, no matter what the future could bring, she was there now, solid and substantial and present. But we did not dare to reach.

It was nobody’s fault, my father said. He knew that. It was simply a legal matter, a matter of our matrimonial contract.

He was dressed in white, I remember. In a formal dress that had the look of a military uniform, and went well with his merciless white hair.

The contract stated that if no child were born of the union in the first five years, the family of the groom had the right to ask for divorce. He looked at my wife, whose pale and stricken face was free from tears. The bride would of course receive a compensation, equal to her dowry, and she would not be required to provide restitution for the expenditures the family had to incur for her these past five years.

I wanted then to stand up and hit him, but of course I didn’t. It was unthinkable. Just as it was unthinkable that I should refuse my father’s orders and not ask for divorce. We both knew that.

I had only one way out, and she cried finally when she saw me in my uniform. She cried as she hadn’t in a long time, just as my father cried.

I told her that only by shipping out to the war I could stop the divorce long enough. With some luck, the war would last for at least a year. The contract would have become binding by that time.

We had I think our first serious disagreement. She was terrified and dismayed. She begged me. She cried. She told me that there were other solutions, drugs and cures and doctors, better solutions than leaving for the war.

I told my father that just as I was an obedient son to him, so I was an obedient citizen of my country, and reminded him that the Army had been what he had been ready to offer me up to in the first place. I told him my country needed me more than he did. I told him the war was a just war. I think he cried genuine tears. It was not only because I was his only surviving son that he would miss me.

I left. That was eight years ago.

Sometimes you get extraneous material. They warned me about that. Reconsolidation of memories, they told me. Should not be enough to stop you accessing what you really need, they told me.

They do the procedure in a cheerfully lit, white room. It still feels closed in, as everything does down here. They lay me down among looming white and alarmingly silent machinery, and put me under.

Of course, everybody knows. Everybody knows things are going badly, very badly. Despite the clean corridors of the Anthill. Despite the crispness of my soldier’s salute. Despite the mighty mass of our four hydrogen refineries parked on the shore, which give us plenty of power, but that we can’t move. Despite the justness of the cause, despite the bloodiness of our actions. Despite everything, including my efforts. I am good. A good commander. But despite everything, we are losing the war, and everybody knows that. This is why I have made this foolishly risky journey to the shores of the River Rauma, where they are laying in wait, invisible. To try to reassure my soldiers, my officers, my men. I wonder what fear and despair seized them now that I’m gone.

I came to this war with all the right feelings and all the right reasons. I knew there was going to be evil but I thought it was the lesser evil. I don’t know about lesser now. I don’t know if you can have degrees.

I have to cross the Detention Section to get to the debriefing rooms. That’s the section they call the Cage or, because the prisoners we’re getting are all, with no exception, male, the Boys House. I clatter down the metal steps and along the catwalk among the brightly lit stacked cages, in the echoing great underground space. I can see on both sides three cages deep, and up and down for three levels: the cages have metal grids on six sides so that the guard – a young plump girl of no more than eighteen in the orange uniform of the custody complex, sitting bored in a chair – can see all of them. I keep asking Supply to send us mats for them to lie on, because it can’t be easy to sleep on the metal bars, they are quite spaced apart; or at least pails; but they haven’t sent them down yet.

It’s not out of cruelty that we keep them that way, we just don’t have the space. Some of them go crazy, poor bastards. All of them scramble to get as far away as possible from anybody coming through, as they are now doing with me. It isn’t nice to say but it’s only the smell that bothers me. I try to get across without breathing. It should be a harrowing experience but screaming doesn’t move me any longer. I have a perfect steel heart, which doesn’t skip a beat, and reports only occasionally to my brain. My brain feel sorry for them, for they are still human beings after all, and tries, failing, to imagine what it is to live in the Cage, to live there for months on end. My steel heart beats unconcernedly on.

Occasionally there is laughter, my people’s. I cross without paying attention. They take the prisoners as cheap entertainment, it’s not supposed to happen, but ends up being tolerated. Do I actually encourage them? I guess I do. When people come to me complaining about the Cage and the rapes and the poles and all the rest, I nod understandingly and try to shift them back away from the front, even if they are good people, I guess because they are good people. I don’t want them to go crazy over the Boys House, but I know that I don’t need good people to win this war. It took bad people to clear the Southern Continent of the Maseian colonists, and that is what this is all about: clearing the land of their people to defend ours. At least, that was what I called defending them when I arrived. Things are a lot murkier now. You begin to suspect the land – this wonderfully terraformed land in such prime strategic location across the galactic border between us and them – is and always will be more important than the poor bastards who live on it. You do wonder if they had any outside help in getting started killing each other. And it’s hard to see wholesale slaughter and terror as defence, no matter how many times you tell yourself it’s the only way. But still, there is no going back.

The only time I really try to stop my soldiers is when they are bothering our colonies. And they do. Every bloody day there’s some kid – boy or girl – who goes missing and either gets back all bloody and shook up or turns up as a corpse. That understandably upsets the colonists a great deal. After all they are the people we are ostensibly here to protect. So they come to us and complain, as much as they feel they can afford to, because when all’s said and done, they know the Maseians wouldn’t stop at fucking a couple of their kids. But still they complain, and since I do happen to agree with them, I try to rein my people in. I talk to the brigade commanders who talk to their officers who talk to their soldiers. I tell them to keep it down at least for a while. It’s the best I can do. More than that and you’re asking to be fragged, even if you’re the damn ground forces commander. I can ask them only so much, and I keep my authority over them for when I have to ask them to die for me.

So I pass the screaming Meseian boys and I think a bit despondently that it’s really good for morale – my people know that’s what would happen to them if they let themselves be captured. I don’t know what they call the Boys House, across the river, but I’m pretty sure they have one of their own.

I shouldn’t have gone, I shouldn’t have been there at all. I had requested a leave to go home, and my First Planetary Strategist, my direct superior, had granted it, I guess because of the desperation and urgency he had read on my face. Something about my wife, I had said. I hadn’t mentioned that it was good news – maybe. I didn’t even allow myself to think that it could be true. For all I knew it wasn’t – we had had so many false alarms. But I wanted to be there for her when the answer came, whatever it was. I wanted to be there, to hold her in my arms, if the baby turned out not to be, after all.

I would go after this last tour of inspection, I told myself. On the shuttle coming back to the base they had attacked us with a limpet ship.

It was very quick. I was asleep. There was a bump, a scramble, and when I managed to wake up somebody had the mouth of a Rashett 7-7 against my forehead. I froze, long enough to forget that I was supposed, in a case like this, to go down fighting.

They dragged me abroad and I saw the shuttle fall away, helpless, my pilot and escort as good as dead inside, and my survival seemed, even then, obscene. I knew I had no right and no reason to feel relieved. I was as dead as they were. And nobody knew or could know I was still living.

I had never seen his face before, but from his rank and insignia I recognized him. I knew his name. He was a calm, collected, intelligent man of about thirty, who had like me stopped being innocent some time ago, and he regarded me with cold, competent green eyes. He might have been sorry for me but it would not make any difference. He was the new ground forces commander, he was myself across the river.

He asked for my name, though he must know it as well as I knew his. He refrained from asking obviously delicate questions – we both knew the moment for those would come – but did ask me why I joined the army. He seemed genuinely curious, but I was suspicious of any genuine emotion coming from him. I said they were personal reasons and left it at that.

“But you must have thought your side had good cause,” he said. He seemed so sincere. “That we were displacing your citizens. Killing them. That we started this war. I know this was what they told me.”

I looked at him. He was trying to catch me but he wouldn’t. Not that way. “Somebody started it, I guess,” I said. “I doubt we will ever learn who it was now. And I doubt it matters.”

“Do you have a family?” he asked, softly.

“Everybody does,” I answered.

“I’m sorry,” he said. Maybe he even meant it. But it made no fucking difference.

They started with inductives. Inductive questioning procedures are a complex job and not granted to everybody, but they are very useful as a preliminary guide to interrogation. They pump you full of a drug that drastically reduces your control over your body’s reactions, they hook you up with sensors, and they start throwing stimuli – words, names, images – at you. They record your reactions and then follow up on them with more stimuli.

The drug – by chance or design, I never knew – leaves you extremely dizzy and nauseous, and is anything but a pleasant experience, but it’s survivable.

The following step is worse. They forced salt down my throat and kept me walking up and down in a brightly lit room, for what seemed like days – I know (we both know) it was probably no more than forty-eight hours, and perhaps less. Perhaps considerably less. They say, the people who know this things, that you can break anybody that way. If thirst doesn’t do it sleep deprivation will. They say they can break anybody, but they would, wouldn’t they?

They broke me.

I knew perfectly well that that wasn’t the end. That I would gain no respite. That they would keep the pressure growing to the end. I knew the routine, I knew the protocols (we both did). I knew it but I couldn’t help myself. I sold my country and my men and you, my love, for a glass of water and a night’s sleep.

After that they sat me down and debriefed me. That was what he called it. Debriefing. He was there. He talked to me in that quiet voice, in his fluent Maseian, as if we were colleagues – which we were – discussing our respective jobs over food or wine. We both knew the reality of what was going on. And we both knew that when I’d finished, he’d have to push farther, to check that I had held nothing back. I sat in front of his intelligent pale eyes and talked through chattering teeth.

They gave me a little time. Then his questions began to repeat themselves, and become more aggressive and insistent and I had no more answers. They took me away after that.

There is no way to think or speak about what came next in a way that would convey it. They took one of my eyes and left me with their questions for one night. I howled and clawed and begged and pleaded. I tried to stop them. I screamed all the answers I had and the ones I hadn’t. In the morning they took the other, and left me crawling in the dark.

I thought of you, my love, my heart. I thought about your face, forever gone. I thought about your horror and your pain. But I could not, not even in such pain and shame, go to my death and abandon you. I thought about you. I begged them in your name. I could not speak, only scream. I screamed his name and yours. I begged him not to kill me.

But he did.

I have to get to a phone. Yes. A phone. I half-climb, half-fall off the table (I can see!). There on the shelf sits my civilian phone, battered and stained. I can’t recall her number. I call the services and a voice in a foreign language answers me.

“How may I help you?”

The voice is bored. I look at the phone, confused. It’s the wrong language. I got the Tyrosian service, for some reason. I try to think of her number. I try to think of the number for the information services. Blank. I panic.

I am hyperventilating. I put out a hand on the white tiles, because I feel dizzy, and it’s a white, square hand, not mine at all. I stare at it stupidly. I try to think of my wife’s name. I try to think of her face, but it fades, it goes away from me, it goes away from me forever.

“Sir?” somebody calls from behind me. I turn. I look in terror and confusion at the captain in the white coat. He was not supposed to leave me alone. “Colonel? Are you feeling all right?”

I go back to the table, sit on the clean white sheet, still clutching the phone. I can’t call my wife. I don’t know her number, I don’t know her name, I don’t know her face. I only thought I knew. Specific details. She’s not my wife. And I’m dead.

“You were not supposed to leave me alone,” I say, reduced to meaness by my panic.

He straightens, guilty. “I’m sorry, sir. I didn’t think you were coming out of it. How are you feeling, sir?”

“Fine,” I say. From the glass front of the cabinet, a faint reflection of my eyes looks out at me, cold and green. His memories overwhelm me for a moment, and I’m sick. “I’m fine,” I repeat.

Himago comes down to the planet to discuss the latest developments, her and me and the Planetary Theater Commander who’s supposed to coordinate air and low and high orbit with me (he’s pointedly late).

I see her start when she comes into my office, and she gets over the formalities of getting me to jump up and salute and saluting back quickly and closing the door she says: “My, you do look cut up.”

“You should see the other guy,” I say.

She looks very disturbed for a moment. She is better than me, a more decent human being, despite the pressures she’s working under and the job she has to do. She is a better human being, but I am a better soldier, and we both know that. I have served under her since I came to this war, and we are something more than superior and subordinate, though something less than friends. She doesn’t like my style, but I keep winning, no matter what the chances. “How useful was the information you got from him?”

“You mean through the procedure?”

“Yes.”

I think about it for a moment, and the room, my underground cave, sways about me. I feel him possess me again for a brief moment. “Do you know how it works?”

She shakes her head. Her hair, which used to be honey-colored when I first met her and is now grey, always manages to escape even the cleverest traps and prisons she devises for it; and it springs and slips and oozes out to form a triumphantly messy halo around her face. She is a wise and fair and competent woman, and her people including me would follow her to hell and back; but as far as military neatness goes, she’s very, very bad. Always has been.

“You scan the hippocampus of the source subject, and then employ a high-precision inducer field ” – the term ‘inducer’ is too similar to inductive for me to be able to suppress a shudder – “ to mimic a neuronic activation in the target subject hippocampus remarkably similar to the scanned one on the source. This way, you get to access his recent memories, including older memories the subject has recently recalled.”

She says nothing. It’s a disturbing concept.

“You get a lot of extraneous material, of course.”

“False memories?”

“Not exactly. Shape of memories. Things the target subject gives actual content to. I don’t know how close they were in my case to his real life. To his real memories. Of course I know a great deal about his culture... and about him. I was there when they questioned him. I knew him. In a sense.

“Yes,” I say slowly. “You see, most of the things he told us we suspected about already – the four hydrogen refineries beyond the Rauma River, the deployment at the Anthill, the general difficulty they have receiving supply and reinforcement from off-planet. And I was able to access his short-term memory and confirm that.” I focus my gaze on her, suddenly urgent. “But the one thing that counts, the one thing I got from him, is that they are cracking, ma’am. They are in despair and disarray. They’re ready for us. We have to go in.”

She seems taken aback. “You’ve seen the Strategic Command recommendations. They suggest pulling back to a stronger defensive position.”

“With all due respect, ma’am,” I say, and I realize I’ve dropped my voice as I do when I’m trying to get people to pay very close attention to what I’m saying, “my advice would be to go in. Now.” I shiver. The clean well-lighted corridors of the Anthill come back to me. I see them through both of our eyes: spattered with blood. “Tomorrow.”

She looks at me, utterly still. “Are you ready?” she asks.

“Yes, ma’am. I’m ready.”

She nods. I can see she’s almost on the verge of asking me if I am up to taking command tomorrow, but she doesn’t.

“If this goes as intended,” she says instead, “do you need... do you wish to go home for a while?”

She is more than my commander, and cares for me. But she’s also less than a friend. She wants me back sane. I don’t know if she’ll get her wish. At the mention of home, I shiver. There are times when the need for the touch of another human body becomes so urgent and so great that I feel the walls of my underground room close on me, smothering me, crushing me. I think of my lover’s long red hair and long soft body, her full laugh and her tame jaguars, her moans and how strong her voice became when she was talking of politics, I think of all the things about her that I don’t deserve, and I know that I can’t go back. I am trapped here with my enemy and myself. I don’t think I’ll ever be able to hear her moan and not hear the fratboys’ screams in her voice. “Do we really need to be like that?” she asked me the last time I really talked to her. “Do we really need to win this war?” I answered her.

“No,” I say.

So here I am, at the bend of the river. I won’t be here tomorrow when we go at the Anthill across the river, I’ll be back in HQ. This part of the offensive, the most crucial one, is under the command of Zai Faraniy, who is some sort of a friend, and somebody I trust to keep a cool and smart head even in the worst of the chaos. He comes in the small hole where I stopped, smelling of freshly dug earth. He comes in with incredibly good cheer, considering that I’m about to send him to what may well be his death.

“I heard you got lots of good stuff out of that Maseian officer,” he says, loyally. He doesn’t like it.

“I killed him,” I say looking out.

Zai shrugs. “Zai,” I say, in a different voice. “What do you think of the enemy?”

He seems very taken aback. “What do you mean, what I think?”

“Do you hate them?”

He looks, instinctively, at the wall in the direction of the other shore. “Oh, well, no, poor sods. Not as such.” He pauses. “Now and then they annoy me a little.”

I smile.

“What about you?”

I do hate them. How can’t I? They killed me. They ripped me from my life, took me away forever from the people who loved me. Erased even my memory. I sigh.

“I’m the enemy,” I say.

Zai shoots me a guarded look. “Go back to sleep,” he tells me. “We’ll need to be rested.”

We both know we’ll try to push over the river in a few hours. “I didn’t need to kill him, you know,” I tell Zai.

“We are all a little crazy,” he tells me softly.

“Yes,” I say. “We are all a little crazy.”

When you send infantry to attack, as we’re going to do, you have your officers follow them with side weapons, to shoot the ones who turn back. I have been there. I have been the wall pushing them forward. But there is a wall behind my back as well. It’s far more powerful than I am. It may be honor and duty and fear of a court martial, or our own less than laudable nature, or State necessity. It may even be reason and justice. I don’t know. But no matter what I think, or doubt, or feel, it’s keeping me here.

I go back to looking outside. The trees rustle and bend in the wind, but they’re used to it. Clouds scurry away. All is at peace. On both side of the river, we lie in wait. I am going mad, I think.

The End