What Rapt did was intensify reality to the point of blindness. It pushed everything up into the stratosphere, made the light behind the leaves even darker, made height so tall it disappeared, warmth so hot it became cold. It made everything so intense you could only repress it. Every hour was a series of blackouts, of forget-tings. You’d find yourself half a mile down the track and have no recollection of having got there. You’d look at some guy you’d been talking to and realize you had no idea what the conversation was about. You’d look down at yourself and realize you were holding a man’s head by the hair, and that you’d blown it off the body with repeated rounds from your gun, and you had no idea of how it had all happened.
The mind pushed it away, blanked it in real time minute by minute, but all the while there was this voice which knew what was going on. However much Rapt you took, this voice drip-fed the truth to you second by second like a string of filthy lies told to himself by a psychopathic schizophrenic. So what did you do? You took more Rapt to shut the voice up.
You were there only three quarters of the time. The rest you were somewhere else; fucked up into oblivion by the cocktail of The Gap and heavy Rapt. We called it being “Gone Away,” and it was the only way you could get out of The Gap. You came to recognize a look in the eyes of other people, the look that said they’d just come back from being Gone Away. You envied them those moments of peace, but at the same time you were frightened of what Going Away might mean.
We didn’t get much instruction. We got guns. Some of the guys had been there a little longer, lieutenants and stuff, but that just meant they were even more fucked up than the rest of us. It was a war fought on the ground, behind trees and under bushes. There were gunships, but they were strange and experimental and shaped like fish, seldom used except for the brass to hide in. All we had was our basic intelligence, and maybe that should have been enough. An eight-man unit among themselves ought to have been able to figure out how to fight—or at least, how to hide effectively—but you’ve got to remember that we were out of our heads the whole fucking time.
Rapt’s effects are not just intense on a dose-by-dose basis: They are also cumulative. After a couple of weeks Rapt remaps your neural paths to the point where you don’t know where the hell you are—and we were on it for over two years. We’d be tramping through darkness, not knowing where we were or what to do next, and then suddenly we’d see this big clump of bushes and someone would say, “Okay, let’s go through that bush.”
“What bush?” someone else would ask, confused.
“That bush.”
“What fucking bush? We’re surrounded by the fuckers.”
“That bush, man: the one you’re almost standing in.”
Relieved: “Oh yeah. That bush. Okay.”
“Wow. Look at it. That’s some bush.”
“It’s beautiful. Look at those leaves.”
“Great leaves.”
Then suddenly: “I don’t like it.”
“Like what?”
“The bush, man. It’s giving me The Fear.”
“It’s just a bush. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, man. It’s giving me the fucking Fear.”
“Okay. Forget the bush.”
“I can’t forget it. It’s right there in front, of me, man—”
“Not that bush. The other one.”
“Fuck—that’s even worse.”
“Shit. You’re right.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’ll go round it.”
And so we’d go around the bush, and get caught, and get the shit kicked out of us and half of us would die.
Getting around a bush in one piece isn’t so fucking hard. We should have been able to work that kind of thing out—but we couldn’t. Running like hell was a very big part of the tactics out there.
It was a war fought against demons, by men who had become demons themselves. Maybe that’s the biggest thing I took away from it. The fact that anyone, your comrade, your friend, your brother, can in the right circumstances become something you don’t want to believe exists. Once you’ve seen it’s possible, you never look at anyone the same again. And The Gap itself, what did we do to it? It can’t always have been that way. Or maybe it was, and it was just the fact we have the wrong kind of minds, applying consciousness to things that should have stayed buried.
This isn’t making any real sense, isn’t some polished account. I can’t do anything about that, because I can’t remember it with any more cohesion. I guess I could go back over what I’ve done and try to order it, but I won’t. It wouldn’t be true to the way it was. Cohesion, order, chronology; The Gap was the place where you learned those three words meant nothing at all. This was a place where one guy I knew was Gone Away for three days once: three entire days. We could tell he was Gone Away, and we put up with it. You generally could. It was part of every day, and you got used to it. But three days…
When the guy came back, he was different. Being Gone Away wasn’t like sleep, or unconsciousness. You were still awake, but you were somewhere else. Short stretches were okay—I don’t think it did too much harm. But three days—that changed him. This guy used to sometimes say things about it, try to talk it out. But he couldn’t. Wherever he’d been was buried too deep. He sometimes talked like it was a whole other place, as if while his body had been with us, shivering in the trees or cutting the faces off villagers, his soul had been somewhere else, somewhere that was different but no better. I don’t know about that, but I instinctively recognized there was an element of truth in it. About a third of the men around me at any one time would be Gone Away, flicking on and off in ten- or twenty-minute stretches, and it was like marching with a bunch of fucking zombies. Jesus, I used to think, these guys are my friends, the people on my side, and it’s like a sponsored walk with the lobotomized dead.
Most people reacted to Rapt about the same, but some went really weird on it. There would be soldiers who regressed when they were Rapt, started running about like terrible children. Some of these guys regressed in a way that made you think what they were regressing to was the childhood of something that wasn’t entirely human. Or maybe it was human, but humanity of a different evolution. It was as if there had once been two tribes, identical in appearance, but subtly different at every emotional and psychological level. Maybe between the trees in The Gap there wandered the childhoods of Gap people, lost but still alive. Maybe they got into some of the men.
As soon as we saw that a guy was prone to react that way we tried to turn him into a drinker instead. It was just too disturbing to see them being like that. We couldn’t deal with it.
Problem was, all any of this did was hide it. Not all of it, just enough. It didn’t go away. All that fear is still inside us, and even now we’re slowly using it up. People try to hide it different ways, by being strong, being weak, being a cop or being a gangster. But everyone feels it. Everyone is still afraid.
When the first surge of Rapt planed out into lucidity Vinaldi and I stopped running, our chests suddenly filled with liquid fire. I reeled off into the bushes and vomited uncontrollably, my body revolting against the exertion and trying to make it clear it wasn’t having any more of it. Bodies are great, and I wouldn’t go anywhere without mine, but sometimes they’re so disappointing. If we mistreated them as badly as we do our minds then everyone would be dead, and yet there they go, complaining all the time. Someone needs to get all our bodies, sit them down, and give them a good talking-to.
All I could think of as I hurled up my guts was a hope that I wasn’t losing any of the Rapt this way. I knew I was going to need it, and was already thinking of the remaining two packets. What I had was all we’d got, but it was already all I could do not to just shoot it up there and then.