John Paul.
The strikingly nondescript name of the man who had been slipping through our fingers these past two years.
“So who is this elusive John Paul?” Williams spoke in an exaggerated parody of a Shakespearean actor. “The American who the American government loves to hate. The fugitive who is wanted dead, not alive. The tourist whose only interest is in viewing scenes of brutal crimes against humanity. Who can say who this John Paul really is?”
“Just a man, like you or me,” I said.
Williams seemed unhappy at my answer, shaking his head sadly as if to say that I just didn’t get it. “Jeez, not you too. Why’s everyone so boring? I know he’s a man, I’m talking about what else!”
“You do that, buddy,” I said, “but he’s still a man, and that’s all we need to know. Men make mistakes. He’ll make one sooner or later, and then we’ll find him.”
“Find him and kill him, you mean.”
I wasn’t really sure why the happily married Williams was here at all at my bachelor pad on a rare day off, let alone why he ordered in some Domino’s without bothering to ask me and was now speculating out loud to himself. I guess Alex’s funeral yesterday must have hit him harder than he cared to admit.
One of the living room walls was shaded from the sun so that we could watch TV and movies better. I was sitting on the couch with a can of Bud almost spilling from my hand, watching the Allies getting slaughtered over and over again at Omaha beach. I had the first fifteen minutes of Saving Private Ryan on loop. There was a reason behind this: not only were the first fifteen minutes the best part of the movie by far, it was also free to preview on the pay-per-view channel I was now watching.
Were we really thirty years old? There didn’t seem anything particularly grown up about this college lifestyle. I guess that was all part of the American Dream—work and consume, work and consume, get sucked into the cycle, and then you never really had to worry about that sort of thing.
“I guess he had some shit on his mind, huh,” Williams said out of nowhere.
“Yeah, I guess he did,” I said.
“Motherfucker … why didn’t he say anything to us?”
“Ask Alex.”
Williams sighed as if to say that was exactly what he would have done, if he could. “Do you think he really was in that hell that he talked about all the time? Out in the field, in training, back at base when we sat around talking shit …”
“Ha ha, we sat around talking shit? You talked shit and we put up with it, don’t you mean?”
I was only joking, but Williams looked at me, surprised. “You mean you never heard any of Alex’s jokes?”
I couldn’t help glancing away from the screen and at Williams for a second; after all, he was right. I had never heard any of Alex’s jokes.
“They were pretty good, some of them, you know,” continued Williams. “What’s the word. Risqué.”
“What, like when you asked him for a great novel and he gave you a Bible?”
“Nah, that was lame compared to his good stuff about Catholic priests, the Pope, choirboys, that sort of thing. He laid into the God of the Old Testament something good too, how retarded and inconsistent many of the commandments were. Had Leland and me rolling in the aisles, so to speak.”
Huh. Not what I’d expected. I’d always thought Alex had been such a strict Catholic. “I … never had the chance to see that side of him,” I said.
Williams looked at me for a while. The sound of Nazi machine-gun fire filled the room. Then Williams took his empty can of Budweiser and aimed for the trash can on the other side of the room. He was a good ten feet away, but it went straight in nonetheless.
“Damn, I’m one down on you and the pizza hasn’t even arrived yet,” I said out loud. But in reality I was still thinking about Alex. What did we use to talk about? God, mainly, I seemed to remember. I was an atheist but never felt the need to be too militant about it, and had neither the desire nor the ego to try and press my views on any believers in my vicinity. Alex was more or less the same but on the opposite side of the coin, and never felt the need to drag me into the light. It meant that we could discuss God, hell, and the nature of sin in an atmosphere of mutual respect. We had done so regularly.
Hell is here. That night two years ago on the mission wasn’t the first time we had heard Alex use that phrase. I’d heard it from him before, lounging around at base. Then too, Alex had pointed at his forehead and said, “Hell is here, Captain Shepherd. We’re all hard-wired to march straight to hell. It’s in our architecture.”
I’d no idea what sort of personal hell Alex had been cultivating in his own mind, and now I never would. The one thing I did know was that Alex ended his own life in order to escape whatever hell he had been building. A preemptive strike against death, to ensure that he never fell into that hell he was so afraid of. What a fucked-up thing to do, and yet I could see the twisted logic in it, and I could imagine Alex taking himself seriously enough to go through with it.
The doorbell rang.
“Nice, the pizza,” Williams said, jumping up to collect it. He identified himself by pressing his thumb down on the delivery boy’s ID device. Confirmation came back from the military database that held all Williams’s (and my) personal data, and the courier thanked us for our business and left.
“One of the perks of being Forces, huh?” said Williams, picking at the jalapeños even before he had thrown himself back down on the couch. “No need to worry about our data; it’s all taken care of. Not much fun on civvy street where you have to pay for data storage.”
“Sure, but Medicare covers most of it, and in any case, strictly speaking it’s not the army that ‘takes care of’ our data. It’s outsourced to InfoSec, a private firm, about as civilian as you can get. The army just picks up the tab.”
“Is that so? Well, whaddaya know. By the time I had any of my own money to play with, I was already career Forces. I couldn’t tell you what life’s like on the other side.”
“Well, think about it,” I said. “It’s a pretty massive operation, taking down your full medical history, fingerprints, retinal scans, brainwave patterns, facial contours, and other details, not forgetting things like your full credit rating. They have to be kept absolutely secure but also easily accessible, so that any part can be checked at any time. It’s not cheap.”
“That’s it!” said Williams, pointing at me. “John Paul. How is he getting around all this? All those layers of security? We needed our thumbprints just to get hold of these jalapeños here. When I was ten years old you could sometimes just about get away with a signature, but these days you need your fingerprints, your retina, your face scanned, to get anywhere. So how the hell is this John Paul getting from Europe to Africa to Asia and back again?”
I hadn’t thought about that before. You needed ID before you could buy a plane ticket. Or rather, your ID was how you bought a plane ticket, no matter what type of bank account you used, or in what country.
So how on earth was John Paul managing to travel from civil war to civil war?
Then Williams’s cell phone started ringing. I could barely believe my eyes as he shoved his greasy fingers, still dripping with pizza and jalapeño juices, straight into his pocket to retrieve his cell. He pressed the button without qualm. Well, it was his cell, he could do what he liked, but my body couldn’t help but shudder, purely as a physiological reflex. That was Williams for you.