Genocidal Organ (7 page)

“Genocide, you say?” he said. “Is that what you call our peacekeeping efforts? Our government needs to subdue the terrorist threat for the good of our own people.”

“As I said, it’s not a government,” I argued back. “Call yourself defense minister or whatever you like, but it doesn’t change the fact that you’re not recognized by the United Nations, and more to the point you’re the ones going around killing your own people.”

“What has the UN got to do with anything? You imperialists are the ones who came here, trampling our indigenous culture to the ground, laughing at our efforts at self-determination, stirring up racial discord where our people have lived peacefully side by side for years …” At this point the former brigadier general seemed to run out of steam, and he abruptly stopped talking. His eyes were glinting with a peculiar emotion, not quite fear, not quite sorrow. Silence pressed down, punctuated only by the distant
rat-tat-tat
of the ongoing executions.

“That’s right. How did our country ever come to this?” He started speaking again. “Weren’t multiculturalism and tolerance the cornerstones of our culture? Terrorists! That’s right, it must have been terrorists! Terrorists born of intolerance and hatred, it’s all their fault … no? No, it must have been something else. The military didn’t need to declare martial law in the capital to deal with a routine terrorist threat, surely? The police had it under control? So why? Why has it come to this? How has it come to this?”

Rat-tat-tat. Rat-tat-tat.

There were no cries, no screams. The only testament to the anonymous dead whose corpses were piling up in the hole was the sound of the very gunfire that caused their deaths.

I was getting fed up with this bullshit. Nothing good ever came of having an old man staring his own death in the face. What was this, some sort of deathbed confession to atone for the stream of dead he left in his wake? Did he think he would earn absolution for his eternal soul or something? Seek forgiveness with a humble heart and you will be saved? That Christian shtick isn’t going to work with me, buddy—I’m a confirmed atheist.

I told him as much. Called him out on his bullshit. I wasn’t a priest or a pastor, I explained. I couldn’t give him the absolution he asked for even if I wanted to. Which I didn’t. Your repentance is bullshit—too little, too late. No religion can save you now, and if there is a hell you are going straight there.

“I’m sure I am. I’ll go straight to hell, no doubt. But you misunderstand me, son. I’m not asking for forgiveness. I’m just trying to work out what went wrong. How this country has gone so wrong. It used to be such a wonderful place. So beautiful. Up until only a couple of years ago …”

And that was when it finally clicked. This man in front of me, the former brigadier general of this country, was genuinely puzzled. More than that, he was filled with dread, but not thanks to the knife I was holding to his throat.
He was terrified because he didn’t even comprehend his own motives for fighting in this civil war.

I shuddered. How illogical, how fucked-up it was to forget your reasons for fighting, now of all times. And how convenient.

“Why did you kill so many people?” I asked.

“Why did I kill so many people?”

That’s against the rules, answering a question with another question
, I thought.

The old man in front of me was now raving, his teeth chattering in fear. He was on the brink. His answers were too far gone for me to have any more faith in his words, but I continued regardless, pressing my knife even further up against his jugular.

“Why, old man? Answer me!”

“Why? I don’t know why!”

“Answer me!”

In the short time our bodies had been pressed together my disguise had started adapting to the outfit the former brigadier general was wearing: full military regalia, replete with medals and decorations. A cold shudder ran down my spine—it was as if the old man’s madness was infecting and about to possess me. Not that there was anything I could do about it while I had his arms pinned behind him and my blade to his throat.

“Won’t you please tell
me
?” he was asking me now. His eyes were the eyes of a corpse, pupils hollow and void of any life. The phrase “looks as though he’s seen a ghost” is bandied around a lot, but it occurred to me that he was what a person would actually look like if they had just been confronted with incontrovertible proof of a real, supernatural terror. I gritted my teeth, trying to force myself to blot out the absurdity of the situation in front of me.

“Shut up!” This was definitely not part of the plan—it absolutely had not occurred to us that this could have been one of the reactions. A groveling show of regret and remorse for the cameras, sure, and that would have been easy enough to deal with. As it was, the words that were now spilling forth from this man’s mouth had an almost hypnotic effect, and as the words increased in intensity, I worried that the torrent of madness spewing forth was starting to encroach upon my own sanity.

“Please, sir, I’m begging you! Tell me why! Why have I killed so many people?”

He was completely oblivious to me now. Babbling. How the mighty had fallen.

“Look, old man, I can’t help you. Won’t you please just be quiet?” I’m ashamed to say that by now my own voice sounded as pitiful as his.

“Why did I kill everyone?”

“Shut up.”

“But why?”

And that was that. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I drew my blade across his throat. Fresh blood splattered and turned the mosque wall into a Jackson Pollock painting. Before he had time to choke on his own blood I quickly hamstrung him so that I could force his once-imposing body to the ground and thrust my blade into his heart. As I did so, blood bubbled from his mouth and his eyes flared open.

The former brigadier general, the man who had called himself defense minister for the interim government, was dead.

The great commander of the estimated thirty-five thousand armed insurgents who terrorized the countryside was dead.

I felt as if reality had snapped back and hit me in the face. I realized for the first time that the piano melody that had been filling the room had long since faded without a trace.

Moonlight Sonata
had finished without my noticing. I shook my head to clear my thoughts before looking around. It was as if I’d been in some sort of magical alternate dimension and forgotten to breathe while I was there. I gulped again for air.

Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-tat.

The night that had briefly been caressed by the
Moonlight Sonata
had returned to echoing the sound of people killing each other.

“What on earth happened here, sir?”

I turned around to see Alex’s troubled expression. All I could do by way of response was sigh. I didn’t even want to start thinking about how to explain the old man’s extraordinary behavior.

“Are you all right, sir?” Alex asked again. Ever the professional, even as he spoke to me he was checking the corpse of the ex-brigadier general that lay on the floor. He was using the recording capabilities of the nanolayer implants in his eyes to confirm and record the old man’s death from as many angles as possible.

“Yeah. It looks like Target B isn’t coming here tonight, though.”

“Oh. Unlike Intelligence to get that wrong,” Alex said calmly, going about his work.

I could hear more gunfire in the distance.

The atrocities in this area aren’t quite over yet
, I thought to myself.

1

Hell is
here
, Alex had said.

You can’t escape from hell. Because hell’s right here, inside your mind, and you carry it around with you.

Two years had passed since the night I killed the former brigadier general, but to be honest I seemed to be doing a good enough job of evading my own personal hell. I did occasionally return to the land of the dead in my dreams, but that was too peaceful a place to really be called hell.

I never knew what Alex’s personal hell looked like to him. He never did tell me, and now it was too late. As I looked on at his coffin being carried out of the church I wondered whether he had finally made it to that heaven he’d talked about. After all, Catholics had moved on from their unforgiving dogma of the past, hadn’t they? The pearly gates were open to all these days.

Even to those who chose to die.

That’s how it was possible for Alex to have a Catholic funeral service even though he had taken his own life. In medieval Europe, suicides were buried at crossroads. People couldn’t forgive the grave sin of taking away the most precious gift given by God, and so the sin was punished by forcing the ingrate’s spirit to roam the earth without respite until the ultimate release of Judgment Day.

These days the Catholic Church didn’t feel the need to punish the dead who had, presumably, already suffered enough. Alex’s ceremony and burial were just like any other Catholic funeral service—solemn, dignified, and grave. The eulogy was given by the same old Irish priest who had delivered Alex’s first communion.

We were all notified immediately on the night that Alex gassed himself in his car, and it was our job to enter his lodgings to find his last will and testament. His room was orderly to the point of obsession. His book collection consisted entirely of theological monographs and various editions of the Bible. Once upon a time Williams had asked Alex to recommend him a good book. I’ve finished all mine and I’m bored, he had said. What sort of book do you like, sir, Alex had replied. I dunno, something entertaining, plenty of sex, drugs, and violence, Williams said. Then Alex just laughed and proudly presented Williams with a Bible.

We scoured the apartment but found no sign of a will or a suicide note. Alex had evidently made up his mind to sail his ship alone, without saying anything to anyone.

Alex was actually the second suicide I had known in my life.

As a result—and no offense to Alex—his death didn’t have as much of an impact on me as it might have. After all, the first person I’d known who’d killed himself had been my dad, and they say there’s no greater trauma than that—although that’s horseshit, frankly, as I was still a little brat when my dad offed himself and had no real conception of what death meant, so how was I supposed to be shocked by it? All it did was set the precedent for people close to me dying all the time, something that I could never quite get away from.

Why had my dad chosen death? Best rephrase that question. I doubt my father had the capability to choose. Suicide isn’t a choice; it’s what you do when there are no choices left. At least I’m sure that’s the way it was in my father’s mind—blank, except for one final course of action.

It might not be correct to say that he chose to leave this world, but he sure did choose
how
he left it. After a number of failed attempts at hanging himself when no one was at home, he fell back on the nation’s favorite default method of suicide. In other words, he blew his brains out. The method of choice of roughly fifty percent of all American suicides, statistically. That’s how it was twenty years ago when my dad did the deed, and it’s still true now. It’s such an easy way to go. When you look at the demographic of people who already have access to firearms—most adults, in other words—you’ll see that for them the statistic is closer to seventy percent. From the bum on the street to the mightiest CEO, the gun was the great leveler: all citizens were alike when their brains were splattered on the wall. Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Cobain all used this method; and as it needs no special preparation beforehand it can be as quick and easy as whipping it out of your pocket and blasting your head off. There’s still footage circulating on the web of Budd Dwyer blowing his brains out at a press conference. In a sense it’s unfortunate for minors that they can’t easily get their hands on guns, and thus have to resort to hanging themselves or some other inferior method. Hanging is the second most popular method of suicide in the States.

They couldn’t pin down a precise time of death for my father. Well, back then they didn’t yet have the Firearms Registry that we have now, and it goes without saying that guns weren’t routinely tagged at the point of sale either. These days, if you used a gun to kill yourself, the Federal Firearms Registry tag implanted in the grip would take an exact record of when the shot was fired, and the data would be transmitted instantly to the central database of the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives, so it’d be possible to get an accurate time of death, or rather the exact time the bullet ripped through its owner’s brains. The time recorded on the BATFE database was a
de facto
gravestone. My father didn’t have the benefit of this modern technology to mark his legacy, though, so his epitaph had to state “died at some unspecified time one afternoon when everyone else was out of the house.”

Of course, there was also no way of asking my father why he had gone to the effort of trying the second most popular suicide method first.
Why did you decide to die? Why did you settle on a gun in the end?
You can’t interrogate a dead man. You can’t ask him any questions, and you can’t ask him for forgiveness.

I’d like to tell you that, with a child’s intuition, I picked up the scent of death and was unusually affected by my father’s suicide, but as I said before, that’d be a lie. What I actually remember is that one day my father was there and then one day he wasn’t. He disappeared. Don’t put too much stock in this “children’s intuition” bull.

People are like that—able to disappear without rhyme or reason, without others being able to make sense of their sudden absence.

There were a few times when I asked my mom why my dad killed himself. But then I gradually stopped asking. After all, the only answer I ever got was
I don’t know
. Every time I asked I would get the same answer and my mother would make the same face of wretched incomprehension.

To depart without giving a reason why is to leave a curse on those you leave behind. Questions linger:
Why didn’t I realize something was wrong? What could I have done differently? Was it my fault?
And, of course, the dead don’t reply. So there’s basically no way to lift the curse. Time is a great healer, but an imperfect one, as anyone who has ever been assaulted in the dead of night by uneasy, shameful feelings knows. Even those memories consigned to oblivion by the conscious mind may still be in there somewhere, lurking, never completely forgotten by the unconscious mind.

That’s what I mean when I say my mother was under my father’s curse.

There’s one unsolved puzzle about my father’s death that I never asked my mother, not even at the very end. The question of who cleaned up the blood and fragments of splattered brain on the ceiling and walls. Did the police do it? Or was there some sort of specialist cleaning company that you could hire? What sort of slogan did they have—
WIPING THE REMNANTS OF YOUR LOVED ONES FROM YOUR WALLS SINCE 1965?

Whoever it was, I have absolutely no conscious memory of it. What I do remember is that once, in my movie-geek teenager years, I watched a Reagan-era oldie called
Angel Heart
on late-night cable. I remember how it made me shudder: a scene with a woman in full mourning regalia wiping red bloodstains from the wall. I supposed she was the widow of the man who had just killed himself. The movie never did go into detail on that point, and in my mind that scene seemed curiously detached from the rest of the movie.

Come to think of it, I guess it could have been my mother who wiped up my father.

It’s the nature of your work that is causing you so much stress.

I wondered if this was the sort of thing Alex’s counselor would have said to him during their sessions—if he’d been going for any.

Kill, kill, and then kill some more. Plan missions down to the last detail so that you can kill even more people even more efficiently. Conjure up in your mind, vividly, an image of the target you are about to kill. Predict your target’s next movements. Know whether he has a wife, whether he has children, whether he read
Harry Potter
to his daughter at bedtime.

Would
stressful
even be the right word to describe this line of work? Alex was a staunch Catholic, so I guess it’s more likely he would have confessed to a priest than gone to counseling. When he was in that little confessional, would he have begged for absolution for all the men he had killed in the line of duty? If so, I wondered if the priest who heard his confession now felt guilty for not being able to grant that absolution, for not being able to provide Alex with the words that could have convinced him that he was indeed forgiven.

It’s the nature of your work that is leading you into sin.

I could just imagine a priest saying something like that, a grotesque parody of my hypothetical counselor.
It seems that your work is inextricably linked with sin, and as long as you perform it you’ll carry the weight of hell on your shoulders. Perhaps you should consider speaking to your superiors to see if you can be reassigned. Or maybe consider taking a holiday somewhere nice and warm this year? That’ll take your mind off all the sin and hell around you.

It was true that we had been worked to the hilt these past couple of years. The orders from Washington had been coming down thick and fast, and perhaps it was the case that there was simply not enough time in between assassination assignments for us to be able to deal with our personal hells and sins.

Not that you could blame Washington entirely, of course. The past two years had been crazy, or rather it seemed like the world had decided to turn crazy round about the time we dispatched a certain former brigadier general. Africa, Asia, Europe: it was the whole world going mad, with civil wars and ethnic conflicts in quick succession. With most of these a UN resolution was quickly enacted. The principle of the day seemed to be “It is a crime against humanity to stand idly by while people kill each other.”