And yet she wasn’t just a thing. I refused to see her as just a thing. She was still Lucia Sukrova, even dead. She wasn’t just a mass of flesh. She might have been a corpse, but she was Lucia’s corpse.
“Of course I’ve seen corpses before,” I said. “But this time it’s just so personal. When the person is important to you, they can’t become just a corpse.”
I gritted my teeth and we pushed on. John Paul and I made it into the jungle.
It wasn’t easy moving through the jungle with John Paul. He might have been familiar enough with war zones, but he was still a civilian. It required quite a bit of skill to be able to maneuver through this sort of terrain. Jungles weren’t designed for late-night leisurely strolls.
To make matters worse, John Paul had also sprained his right ankle when he jumped from the second-floor window. It wasn’t that far to the Tanzanian border where our recovery team should be waiting, but there was a limit to how fast we could move when his leg was like this.
“There’s no way I can hand you back to the Lake Victoria Shores Industrial Federation,” I said, my eyes on the path in front of us. “If you were to go back you’d just start singing your song of genocide again, I know.”
“I’m not interested in going back,” John Paul muttered. The confidence he had back at the guesthouse had now all but disappeared. “Lucia said that I should explain what I had done to the world. She wanted me to tell the world just how shaky a foundation their ‘peace’ rests on, I guess. Well, I will stand trial, and I may be sentenced to death. Or perhaps I’ll just be dismissed as a lunatic and laughed out of court. Whatever happens, I’ll accept it, because that’s what Lucia wanted. It’ll be my way of apologizing to her, however pathetic and inadequate the gesture. I was the one who brought her into all this. I had only intended to stop in Prague long enough to get a fake ID, but then I found I wanted to see her face again for old times’ sake. That was all …”
I listened to John Paul’s story without saying anything. I just hacked through the jungle with my machete.
“I betrayed my wife and child and now I’ve also killed the woman I once loved.”
“What about all the people who died in the massacres you caused? Don’t they count at all? That’s quite a solipsistic sense of guilt you have, don’t you think?” I was feeling pretty cynical by now. “Don’t forget that there’s a staggering number of corpses behind you at all times.”
“No, of course not.” John Paul nodded. “I know. It’s something I’ve carried with me from the very first time I used the grammar of genocide.”
I realized that, in talking to John Paul, I was telling him to do as I said and not as I did. I was telling John Paul not to forget about all the corpses, and yet I had no idea what to do about the burden I carried with me. All of my sins, not just my matricide. The sin of killing people without having chosen to kill them myself. The sin of dodging my responsibility. I wanted closure. From Lucia’s mouth. Redemption—or condemnation.
But Lucia had died. And there was no one left in this world who could either punish me or forgive me.
This was hell, right here, right now. I was trapped in a hell called myself. “Hell is here, Captain Shepherd” was what Alex had said. And he had been right. I was in the deepest pit of hell. I had come here to be punished and, at the end of the punishment, find a glimmer of hope, the possibility that I could be redeemed. That was why I had come to Africa. But shortly after I arrived, the prospect of punishment and forgiveness slipped away forever; it disappeared, broken.
Maybe this was my punishment. To be doomed to walk the earth till the end of my days, weighed down by the burden of corpses.
“I want to ask you something,” I said. “Now that Lucia’s dead, do you regret what you did? Laying the groundwork for so many people to die?”
Now that he had lost Lucia, I wondered whether John Paul felt any sort of solidarity with the people who had died, or the people who had lost loved ones.
John Paul shook his head. “No. Not at all. I have no regrets on that front, at least. I put two sets of lives in the scales. The lives of the people in our world on one side, and on the other side were the lives of hostile people who lived in poverty and hatred and cast a shadow over our happiness. I went into this thing eyes wide open and made a completely sober and rational decision. I even had a good idea of how many people would die in the process. Once you know what you are capable of doing, it becomes impossible to escape from your own potential.”
“And what will you do next?” I asked.
“Well, I was originally planning to continue bearing the burden all on my own. But if we get to the stage where, per Lucia’s wishes, the world learns of what I’ve done, then I suppose the choice will be theirs. They’ll have to make the call as to whether they want to keep their world without terrorism, even if it means building it atop of a pile of corpses.”
“And you think that’ll make you feel better? If you hand the baton on to someone else? Will that excuse your crimes?”
“By no means. You can never escape from your own decisions. They are with you always.”
We walked on without rest.
All things considered, and taking a long-term historical perspective, the world was probably becoming a better place over time. The world did occasionally fall into the clutches of chaos and regressed, but broadly speaking the story of humanity was a story of progress. Relativism only gets you so far. There always comes a point where you can say that one culture has more sophisticated or enlightened values than another, and this can be a good thing in absolute terms. The story of civilization is the story of the battle of human conscience against the instinct to murder or rape or steal or betray, and how even against the harsh backdrop of the world, the conscience is still moving inexorably in the direction of altruism and love for family and friends and neighbors.
But we still have a long way to go before we can accurately describe ourselves as moral actors. As ethical beings.
For humans can turn our eyes from all sorts of things.
John Paul limped along behind me, desperately trying to keep pace. He was panting hard.
Now he asked me a question. “What about you? What will you do after this? Will you go back to assassinating people? To making the world a better place?”
“I’ve never been fighting to make the world a better place. I just did what I was ordered to do because they were my orders.”
“And is that all going to change now?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But what I do know is that I’m starting to see things a lot more clearly than before. At least I think I am.”
The jungle ended. Suddenly.
There was a clear sky that stretched out forever. Dawn was breaking, and a white horizon unfurled before us.
There was a Jeep parked up in the distance. It was still a little too far away to confirm with the naked eye, but it looked like there were two soldiers waiting there. According to our pre-mission briefing, these guys should be deployed from the Tanzanian army, here to help us.
I took a deep breath, and then John Paul and I started walking across the flat, grassy savanna.
A hollow, dry explosion echoed all around.
One of the soldiers in the distance was pointing a gun in our direction. I spun around. There was a small hole in John Paul’s forehead and he was lying on the ground.
“Welcome back, Captain Shepherd, sir! And congratulations on your successful mission.” One of our sergeants was there to welcome me—a black man, no doubt chosen for this mission because the color of his skin helped him blend in with the local African soldiers.