“Are you Rapt yet?” Vinaldi asked.
“No, but it’s coming,” I said.
“Good. It had better. Because I’m getting The Fear.”
“Perhaps we’d better run.”
“You know something? I think you could be right.”
We started trotting then, hopefully in the direction Ghuaji had gone, but I was already none too sure. For now the forest seemed quiet; as if ignoring us, but we both knew that wouldn’t last. Leaves started running beside us then, like children playing. Vinaldi kicked out at them, but I stopped him.
“Little fuckers,” he said.
“Better them than the trees.”
We ran, faster and faster, as The Fear came. Its coming was like a return to everything you thought you’d left behind. Not just our memories, but everyone’s, until we were no longer really following Ghuaji but just fleeing from everyone and everything. Men, dead and wounded, spread in pieces around the floor and their blood not lying still yet. Children, jerking spastically toward us. None of this was here now, but it had been, and The Gap remembered. The Gap was full of ghosts, of the thousands whose bodies had disappeared before anyone had a chance to grieve or offer thanks.
Vinaldi’s face flashed white beside me, our breaths labored and ragged; both of us had been smoking far too long to enjoy this kind of shit. The feeling of having a hand squeezed round my temples grew stronger and stronger as The Fear froze into my bones, and still we ran.
“I can’t stay in here long,” Vinaldi panted. “I can’t do this for very long at all.”
“Me, neither,” I said, as terror found yet more speed in our legs and we sprinted between the trees, a trail of leaves following us enthusiastically, pretending they couldn’t keep up but not getting left behind. The bark on the trees sniggered at us, but that was all right. It couldn’t move quickly enough to do any real damage.
“Where are we going?”
“I don’t know,” I answered, and then suddenly the light went out Vinaldi moaned beside me and we found ourselves in a huge bush, slicing against needles and spines. We kicked and thrashed our way through it, but the bush got thicker and thicker, and the worst part was that I knew that if we ever got through it then the other side would be even less fun.
We found ourselves in the middle, face-to-face, unable to move or to see each other’s eyes. All we could hear was each other’s breathing, the sound sinister and loud. Vinaldi wanted to kill me, I knew. He wanted to reach out and pull the eyes from my head and chew them while he clawed the skin from my face. I wanted to do the same to him, but then suddenly the bush was no longer there, and the light was back—but it was yellow now, curdled and old.
Vinaldi stared at me, stricken. “This Rapt isn’t strong enough, Jack. It isn’t helping at all. I was going to—”
“Yeah, I know. But it’s all we’ve got.”
“This is a mistake. We shouldn’t have come back.” “What the fuck’s that?”
Vinaldi whirled to follow my gaze, and I realized: It was Ghuaji’s jacket The bush we’d clawed through was now several yards away and a bloodstained fatigue jacket was hung across it The cotton started unraveling itself, and the dried blood revivified in midair to form a small hanging droplet A twig from a nearby tree reached out and greedily sucked it up.
Then Vinaldi grabbed my arm and pointed behind me.
Ghuaji’s remaining clothes were standing fifty yards away, facing us. The clothes turned slowly, as if on a revolving pedestal, and then quickly glided away into the gloom.
We ran after them through more trees, more shadows, until there were so many leaves around us that it was like falling into a tunnel of dryness. And finally the Rapt kicked in with a vengeance, and for a while we didn’t know where we were, or what we were doing, or who we were chasing after. For a little while, I don’t know how long, we were just two shadows in motion toward nothing, and it was exactly like it had been back then.
I don’t think I could describe the war in The Gap reliably, not a single tree or village or death, despite the fact that I still see them in dreams and probably always will. I see the ferns and leaves, the blue light which sifted between the trees; I see the little towns, nestled amidst them like fairy-tale villages. But that’s not the way it really was. Part of being there at all was a knowledge that we weren’t really seeing what things were like, however hard we looked. Somehow the reality of it was always just round the corner, or hidden under a layer of light. We couldn’t trust the people, we couldn’t trust the land, and in the end we couldn’t even trust ourselves. We were like baffled, terrified children alone in a dark multi-story parking garage full of sadists.
Partly it was the drugs. Eight out of ten people were off their face all the time. It was encouraged. It meant you coped better with The Fear. The other two out of ten were either drunk or crazy.
I realized this within minutes of being sideslipped into The Gap, and made a pact with myself. I was going to do this thing straight, scared though I was. From the moment you set foot in The Gap you knew something was wrong, and every breath you took confirmed that knowledge and made it a part of your very metabolism. Fear ran through people like blood. Whether you were looking at someone huddled shaking into the roots of a tree, or standing proud with shoulders back and gun spitting, you were looking at someone who was mortally afraid. As I stood in the base camp on that first day and saw the shells of men around me, I hoped to God that I had slipped into some dream and would wake up very soon. “This can’t be the way it is,” I said to myself, already shaking. “They can’t all be like this, and even if they are I’m not going to join them. If I’m going to be this scared, I need to know what I’m doing.”
Within hours a horrified dread began to fill every extremity of my body, slowly flowing toward my core. It was like the “Oh no,” moment, the moment when you realize that you’ve been caught doing something bad, when you’ve made a mistake that will have disastrous consequences, or when you hear someone close to you has died. For a moment, your mind becomes cold liquid, and a calm denial is the only thing you can feel.
That’s the way it stayed. The feeling didn’t pass. It just kept growing. That’s why my resolution lasted four days. I got respect for that, of a grudging kind. Four days was a long time to hold out, and it set me apart from some of the other men. One of the things men will fight hardest to hide from each other is fear. You just don’t show it. In The Gap it was different. Fear couldn’t be hidden, and so all the time you were surrounded by the most childlike, vulnerable, desperate part of everybody else. There were people in The Gap, and that’s whom we were supposed to be fighting; but they were the very least of our problems. The children, dead but with hydraulic frames nailed through their bones so they could scamper poison-laden toward us; the blankets of fire which appeared from your pockets and swept up to incinerate your skin; these were fears, but nothing like The Fear of The Gap itself, which was all of this and the promise of everything more.
In the end, I recognized that I was endangering the rest of the men in my unit. I was simply too terrified all the time. It felt as if each individual cell in my body were cold; as if someone were constantly running a killing knife over the hairs on the back of my neck; as if I were lying asleep, the plank of my back exposed and bare and waiting for an ax which would surely come. The fourth day I was there I followed a couple of the guys to the tent where it all happened. I’d never taken drugs at that time. I was frightened of doing it. I was frightened of not doing it. I was frightened of everything.