My younger self is right before me. “I told you not to tell Peter! You’ve ruined me! Us!”
I fall to my knees from a brutal headache, and they carry me to a chair. My hands start to seizure again. “Because I told about what really happened. And they don’t like that!”
My younger self is on top of me and I scream pushing him back. “Peter! What the hell is going on?” says Mr. Reeves. “Calm down!”
“I told you not to tell Peter!” He closes the door and the darkness surrounds me.
“Leave me alone! Please just leave me alone for once!”
The Psychologist is trying to hold me down while Mr. Reeves holds a handkerchief to his cut lip I must have punched. “Peter you’re just having a panic attack again!” he says.
“Oh no, this is way worse than a panic attack sir,” says the Psychologist, while he feels my pulse and tries to make me mimic him in breathing normal again.
I look up and it is the face of my younger self. “I warned you Peter.”
The darkness takes over the room with a deeper intensity. “Peee-teer.”
“No not again! Not fucking again, go away!”
“What’s happening to him!” says the Commissar as they hold me back and I kick at them.
“Peee-teer, remember me?”
I kick the Psychologist’s kneecap and he falls cussing. I roll out of the chair.
The monster is above me, dangling from the ceiling. “I told you not to tell, Peee-teer.”
“No please, please, let me live!”
“I told you not to tell!”
“Hold him while I get help!” says the Psychologist.”
I feel the tight grip of the Commissar around me.
The monster comes closer, screaming at me, “NOT TO TELL! I SAID NOT TO TELL!”
“GO AWAY!”
“I SAID NOT TO TELL!”
“Peter.”
The monster is gone but the darkness remains. “Who, who’s there? Who is it?”
“You will find peace in the Blue Eye, Peter. Rest easy in the Blue Eye.”
“The Blue Eye, what does that mean?” I ask hastily.
I hear a bang. MP’s come in detaining me while the Psychologists jabs a cold needle into my arm.
“Peter!” says Mr. Reeves.
“Take them both away,” says the Commissar as my eyelids shut.
The calming voice continues repeating the same avowal. “Rest easy in the Blue Eye, Peter.”
XXXVI
“Peter, morning medication,” says a military nurse entering through the door, frustration already in her voice.
I rise out of bed. “You know what I am going to say.”
“Sir,” she looks at me with resentment, but also concern, “I know you tell me you’re doing better, but I can still hear you talk at night. You say some of the most horrible things.”
“Horrible things have happened to me.”
She puts the small cylinder container by the trash bin, and looks at me. I nod to her. She opens the bin and drops the medication in it. “See you tonight for your next dose.” She is out the door.
I rise and open the blinds, letting the sun invade my tiny room. I go to my desk. A doctor’s note informs me of the doses and medication I should take. It’s to help fight schizophrenia. So this is what they gave me. I haven’t taken a dose yet since the entire month I’ve been here though. I must hold strong to my resolution to never take drugs again. It is also the only way I have any strength over Cloud, and I must be free. Replacing one hallucination with another is not a great tradeoff. So I rather deal with the fictions when I am fully myself, even if being my self means I will live surrounded by fiction.
I am the product of my doings. Somewhere I must begin the path to recovery. So be it if it means I am to remain insane. I look over at a pile of letters from my family. It’s not all that bad. They visit me almost every week now. I have the time and joy of receiving their love that I never truly appreciated till I came back from a war I never thought I would. This love, especially the time I can spend with Creon before he becomes an adult, is all the medicine I need—even if I can never tell them the truth.
I look up at the mirror above my desk. My Soul said that I won’t realize how bad I miss it till it’s gone, and that I can only wish where it went to. I miss my old life. The Peter I was before the war. Who went to college and aspired to be a change for the world. Occasionally, I watch from the courtyard at young students advancing in their med degrees helping patients. It breaks me down that I am no longer in college. God it hurts so bad, knowing I will never do this in my inhibited state. I try to smile into the mirror, my scars smile back.
On the beginning of my second month in the ward, I am woken one morning by the last man I would expect to see. Marshall Hannibal walks into my dorm. They have finally come to get me! To kill me! My younger self stands in the corner screaming bloody murder and laughing, “I told you! I told you!” I fall off my bed onto the ground with my hands against my face. I can’t take it again! My insides fill with terror.
“Son, get up,” he says calmly.
I raise my head from my snot covered hands to look at him. This is the man I hate the most in my life. He destroyed me.
“I am not going to hurt you. Your little stunt a few months ago has cost me my generalship—hell my job. But I wanted to come here first before retiring, to thank you.”
I wipe my nose on my sleeve, what?
“I regret everything I did back there. I was no longer fighting for humanity but the bigger sellout that could slip me the larger check. This corruption, it went all the way to the top. My only alternatives were to pull a you and get canned for it, my job and life that is, or bite my tongue. But then you gave me the best alternative I didn’t even know existed, another way out. Discharged for questionable commandership—that’s what they’re telling the press to keep them happy at least. I am free of it all now.” He takes the chair next to me. “So thank you.”
“You, you, you let them do this to me? Destroy me?”
“Son, I had no choice—“
“No! No, you had one. You know what no choice is?” I can’t hold the tears back anymore and they fall a second time, but now they are of a familiar rage. “No choice is not being able to save your friends—the ones you love!”
I look at my arms, scarred from the shit I carried around for a year and the firefights I nearly escaped. I hold them out to him. “I couldn’t save them. Julian, the girl,” I drop my face into my arms. “I couldn’t save Isaac! He, he just lied there in the snow. He just kept saying ‘Peter we got to go, help me Peter, come on Peter, please Peter’ and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t help him. He died. He bleed all over me, all over the snow, they, they kicked him out. He didn’t even get to come home! He’s still over there, still in the snow! But I had no choice! Not you! Me! I didn’t ask to join. I didn’t ask to fight. You asked me you took me away. You took them from me. My friends, my brothers! They died, I couldn’t save them. I couldn’t, I couldn’t do anything. The drugs, they controlled me. I had no choice. They told me what to do.”
I crawl to the base of my bed to lean against it. I can’t take this abuse. “I killed them too, so many of them. Children, mothers. I killed them and watched them get killed. But I had no choice! Then I got out? Why! Why did I escape when no one else did?” I try to look up at Hannibal, but even here, when confronting him after all he took from me, I am defeated once again. “Why did you try to kill me? Fucking ruin my life! I never had a choice in it all. I never, I never—couldn’t, they died, all of them.”