The coffins were full of corpses that had been fabricated just like that.
As I carried the coffins I tried to figure out if I was angry. My comrades had died. Many of them. I was allowed to be angry. I was supposed to be angry. I should be hating someone. The soldiers who ambushed us. Or the mastermind behind the surprise attack.
But the harsh reality was that the anger and the hatred that should have been welling up inside me was nowhere to be found.
Without turning my head I looked over to Williams, who was carrying the same coffin on the other side. There, in his face, were anger, hatred, sadness, just as they should be. Tight lips and a shining desire to kill the as-yet-unidentified mastermind. I tried copying him by stiffening my lips and squinting. After holding the face for a couple of minutes I started to think that maybe I was beginning to feel angry after all. I didn’t know who I was supposed to be hating yet, but maybe I could hate them once I found out.
I wondered if Williams’s righteous anger, his anger for his fallen comrades, could be called a manifestation of the conscience. To be angry on behalf of somebody else. To hate on behalf of people who were not yourself.
I didn’t have that feeling. I did feel sorrow, but that sorrow steadfastly refused to blossom into anger. And who was I supposed to hate, anyway? Our assailants? The mastermind behind the attack? John Paul?
I was empty. I had no idea who I was supposed to hate.
Not that I could share this fact with anybody. Not my buddies, not Williams, not Colonel Rockwell, not the counselors.
We had orders from above to receive post-combat counseling. To avoid developing PTSD.
Williams was angry. Really pissed, just as a real soldier should be. “Who needs that shit! Just let us at the bastards who attacked us! I’ll shove my PTSD so far up their asses—”
He didn’t feel any emotional trauma. Just anger toward the ambushers. That was what he was trying to say.
I tried to adopt the same attitude. I put on a show of being angry. Esprit de corps and all that. But then it was announced that any soldier who failed to turn up for his prescribed counseling session would face court martial. You Special Forces troops are highly valued human resources, we were told. It’s our duty to make sure you’re properly maintained.
I didn’t need any counseling.
What I needed was punishment.
I needed someone who could punish me.
I desperately wanted to be punished for all the crimes I had committed.
“This beats any counseling bullshit.” That was what Williams said when he left his wife and daughter at home to come round to my house. What did he want? Why, the usual holy trinity, of course: Domino’s Pizza, beer, and a movie. I wasn’t really in the mood, but then I had no good reason to say no, so I let him stay.
This was what we’d done when Alex died too, I realized as I opened a Bud. And Williams wasn’t necessarily wrong when he said that this was better than any counseling. Whenever Williams or I experienced anything traumatic at work, beer and junk food and lazing around really did seem to relieve the stress.
I took a sip of my Budweiser. Definitely a different taste from the Budvar. Williams was chomping down on the pizza and choosing a movie from his own archive.
Williams didn’t have much to say for himself today. Well, not compared to his usual self. I could tell he was fed up with the counseling, tired of forcing out the emotions that were allegedly trapped inside him.
The film started. King Arthur appeared from the mist, closely followed by his squire, who was tapping a pair of coconut halves together to emulate the sound of horses trotting. It was Williams’s favorite, Monty Python and the Holy Grail. He laughed loudly at all the jokes as usual, but every once in a while he cast a glance at me as if to seek confirmation. It’s okay to laugh at this stuff, isn’t it?
Williams had been out for the count during the whole ambush, safely out of harm’s way in the rear car. So he hadn’t been hit, and he did not take part in or even witneess the battle of the soldiers who felt no pain even though they knew it was there, the soldiers who turned one another into mincemeat. I was sure Williams couldn’t forgive himself for not being there. Not being part of the battle that saw his comrades slip away one by one. The shame and the frustration of not being part of it was hitting Williams just as hard as the reality of losing his comrades.
“None shall pass! None shall pass!”
In the movie, the Black Knight was speaking to Arthur and his squire. The battle began.
Williams spoke. “It’s scary how much Terry Gilliam looks like a servant in this, don’t you think?”
“Well, he’s supposed to be the servant, no? He plays the squire, right?”
“Nah, I don’t mean that. You know. He’s too convincing. Makes it hard to believe he went on to be a famous director.”
I turned back to the screen to continue watching the film. King Arthur had just sliced the Black Knight’s left arm off. Orangey fake blood spurted from the stump where the arm had been.
“ ’Tis but a scratch!” The Black Knight continued fighting.
Just like the battle in the train, I thought, gulping back some beer. Except we had all been Black Knights, the enemy and us included.
In the movie another one of the Black Knight’s arms went flying off. “Just a flesh wound!” The knight carried on, kicking Arthur, hurling insults at him, bleeding from both shoulders. By the end of the scene he had lost all his limbs and was a stump on the ground, but he was still threatening to bite Arthur to death right up until the very end.
I remember, back in the mortuary in India, just before the bodies were about to be stitched back together, staring at the mounds of flesh laid out unceremoniously on slabs and thinking some dark thoughts. That the wings of the Meatplanes and the flesh of the Intruder Pods under their cellulose husks and the Achilles tendons of the Chicken Leg Porters were all made of the same stuff. The only difference was that one was human flesh and the others came from dolphins. But flesh was flesh. Both worked in the same way, both needed blood and a pulse to function.
I remember thinking how convenient it’d be if our bodies had metahistories. If each cell had its individual tag full of metadata, then how easy it would be to slot these piles of flesh back together.
Metahistories. Alpha consumers could spend all day staring history in the face in the form of the provenance of whatever consumer good they were considering purchasing. You could trace each individual ingredient of a Domino’s Pizza back to where it came from. A microhistory of each constituent part: cheese, jalapeños, ham, pineapple, the wheat and egg in the dough. All were fully traceable, not just back to where they were made, but how, when they were harvested, which distributor transported them, how they were prepared. The history of the flour. The history of the cheese. Once known as “smart consumers,” these influential early adopters did at least have the collective modesty not to want to have to refer to themselves as “smart,” so their name was changed to “alpha consumer” in order not to offend their own sensibilities. They were a highly influential bunch, not afraid of spending great time and effort discussing the products, founding consumer forums, gently or not-so-gently encouraging producers toward improved best practices.