And through all of this, I have been touched not one single time.
No stray bullets, no robotic arms grabbing at me, no swamp muck splashing my legs as I run, not even a shoulder of bunker wall knocking me off course. I must have run through hell and back, run in the swamps and through the warehouse and up and down one bunker corridor after another, stepped on the various pieces of my comrades in arms, and nothing has touched me, not once, and so I stop and I open my eyes, and I look around me at a world that has gone inside out.
I keep expecting something to come back to me, memories, or a deeper sense of myself, my past, those relationships I’ve had and that I left behind when I joined up with the New Worlds Army to come fight here on Capra II, but for a long time, the oldest memory I could hold on to was the memory of the moment before, and even now, when it seems as if something has shifted inside me and I’m able to hold on to things, I can only really remember back to the beginning of the attack on the bunker and nothing at all before that.
So when I look at what I’m looking at, hoping some mechanism of memory might kick into gear to give me a clue as to what the fuck this thing in front of me is and what the hell I’m supposed to do to get around it, I’m not surprised, though I’m a little disappointed, when nothing inside my ragged brain magically comes to order.
Whatever it is, it stands nearly three stories high, and the high-pitched angry drone of it drowns out every other sound. The longer I look at it, the more details come into focus, and it begins to look like some bastard monster, the likes of which I’ve never seen, and comprising all the monsters this furious planet, Capra II, has seen fit to throw at us. It rises up on the jets of the swamp muck, even though we are clearly in the bunker, and out of its undulating torso sprout robot manacles and the hairy-tufted arms of the bunker beasts. Where there should be a head there’s that stereoscopic stalk, and in the center of that pulses the cold, red eye of a robot.
Any minute now I expect to see Ricky come running past me only to get his damn fool head lasered off by that red eye and then the rest of him shoved into the open, swampy craw of that thing, but it doesn’t happen. There’s no one else around. There’s only it and only me.
I stand in front of it waiting for something to happen because I’m sure as hell not going to be the jackass who makes the first move against this thing, but all it does is pulse and undulate and sway, and after a while I get the sense that we’re two players playing at the same game. That it can wait as long as I can wait, and that nothing will happen for an eternity until one of us makes something happen. I also get the sense — or not even the sense, but the clear and certain knowledge — that on the other side of this is Becky and her fine ass and her commissary uniform and her sweet smile and a life of goodness without reproach. And while I can stand here as solid and still as stone and never risk inevitable death and dismemberment, I know, too, that in this eternity of stillness never will I find true love in the sympathetic heart of a beautiful woman, and when it comes down to it, that’s the only thing I want.
Here is the future I see for us. Here is how things are going to go from this moment forward:
Things are going to go south. Between me and whatever that thing is that is between me and Becky, things will definitely go south, but not so far south as to go hopeless. I’m a trained soldier in the New Worlds Army, after all, and resourceful, and strong, and if there’s one thing I know now, it’s this: The love of a good woman will change a man, and the faintly attainable nature of that love will make him capable of implausible, death-defying acts.
Then — big bad beastie dispatched of — I will find my lovely lady, will stumble blindly toward her desk in the commissary, will crash unceremoniously, yet bravely, into the doorway, will slump down but not quite all the way down to the floor, will softly call her name, will close my eyes, will wait for her tentative, gentle touch. When she holds me in her arms and lowers me to the floor, I will open my eyes and look deep into her own and smile a rakish smile. She will say something along the lines of “You came” or “I didn’t think you’d come.” I will open my mouth to say something along the lines of “I could never leave you behind” or “I’ll always come for you,” but before I can say anything, she’ll silence me with the soft pressure of her finger against my lips, and I will pull her down to me and push her finger aside for her lips, which will crush against my own. And in that moment, nothing else will matter in even the slightest way. Then I will pull myself to my feet, buoyed by that kiss and her true love and her sympathetic heart. I will stand and pull her close to me and I will hold her in my arms and we will gaze at the unforgiving landscape laid out before us and I will say, “Let them do their worst,” and we’ll laugh and pull each other closer, and together we will root out what is evil about this place, root it out and cast it aside, and unearth that small something of goodness that must exist in every new planet, and by the power of our love, this tiny rock will flourish.
But even I know what really lies in store for us. Even I know I won’t get that far. Won’t make it five steps before that thing grabs me by my nethers and tears me in two and stuffs me down its craw and seeks out every last one of us and sunders the planet itself, but what do I care? With Becky on the other side of it, what other choice do I have but to close my eyes, throw down my knife, and make my run for it?
Juan Refugio Rocha: A Meritorious Life
ROCHA, JUAN REFUGIO (b. 1957). Zookeeper, animal trainer. Place of birth: Antigua, Guatemala. Very little is known about the 1979 Fuego del Zoológico Público, only that the grounds caught fire in the early morning of October 18, 1979, that the fire consumed the entire grounds and all its structures by daybreak, and that, in the fire, only four animals perished — one howler monkey, one chimpanzee, and two gorillas, one male and one female. The man who freed the animals from their cages and herded them out of their habitats was Juan Refugio Rocha, a twenty-two-year-old Guatemalan who had been working at the zoo for six months, during which time he had been trying to teach the gorillas to speak.
As a child, Rocha had been adept at communicating with animals through clicks, whistles, taps, nudges, snaps, and squeezes. His father had owned donkeys, which Rocha had cared for and which the family had used to earn money for food and clothing, renting the beasts out as transportation and pack animals. Rocha had trained each animal, and in all his years as keeper of the donkeys, no one was thrown, no packs were lost.