The Face (Recovery Part 5)

There comes a point when you're walking that you're afraid to look head-on at reality, because you know something is wrong. And by reality I'm talking about the flesh around your ankles and toes. The intense burning, the soreness, each stabbing pain in my feet told me that it was going to be best not to take off the boots and look. I did what I could to push out the thought of what was happening down there, and commit to just staying in motion.

It was two or three days of following the river north before I reached my destination - but I reached it.

Rather, I reached its remains.

Like my home, the fire base lay in ruin. Charred stumps jutted up like rotten fingers amid the scarred concrete slabs, and a hideous stench hung over the entire land. It appeared to have been destroyed about the same time as my base, and although this one was smaller, the thoroughness of its demise seemed comparable. With one exception.

Bodies. They had left some of the dead to collect along the pathways.

The good news was that the base was insignificant enough to not warrant keeping soldiers posted here after the attack, so as long as I relied on my training to spot booby traps and cover my face against the overpowering smell, I could be reasonably confident of safety. No one was going to ambush me. That thought - feeling a sense of relief among the decomposing cadavers of my compatriots - would have submerged the heart of a normal person.

I found rations and fresh water hidden in a cache and, savoring each movement of my own tongue across the first nutrients it had encountered for almost a week, felt a touch of joy, a sliver on sunlight in an endlessly dismal darkness. For a moment, life returned to my veins. I almost remembered the concept of beauty.

But of course, the moment was only a glimmer, and it retreated quickly. As soon as I stood up to stretch in preparation for moving out, I noticed a body in the corner that would forever crack my hold on reality.

Its face. His face. I don't know why exactly, but on his face was carved a gruesome grimace that was so unforgettable it could bring nightmares for decades. It's hard to describe it cleanly, but if you can imagine what a person might look like in the moment of the history's most excruciating torture, you're halfway there. However, that's not what made it uncommon - it was his eyes that marked him as something truly unique. They weren't wild with frenzy; they were focused. As if he'd been looking into someone else's face as he was burned alive, perhaps that of a primal entity beyond imagining, a freeze-frame of utmost inescapable terror, burned and solidified by fire in the instant. Looking past you, forever, into a living hell of which everything is a part, dual realities coexisting, divided only by the thinnest of veils.

It's a troublesome notion to consider that a person with severe visual limitations might, after many years of living in a foggy haze, one day wake up following a miraculous curing procedure, only to welcome, as his first dose of fresh sight, that he has no legs. The world is still an impassable source of suffering, and he has just traded one for another. The flower of hope is once again crushed beneath the sole of someone bigger and less soulful than you.

I had looked head-on at reality. And with my mind unable to cope, something snapped. And new emotions sprouted. The tears that had plagued me all the way here suddenly dried. There was no more "Why did this happen? How could it?" Instead, a blossom of rage took shape in my heart. The incredible pain in my feet fueled it with each rhythmic beat of circulation. A steady tempo of slowly growing wrath.

Somebody needed to suffer for this. I grabbed the radio and yelled into it, yelled in my language for those in other languages to come and get me, because I had a great surprise for them. I don't know if they understood anything, but the adrenaline dump satisfied me just as much as the powdered meatloaf I had ingested an hour earlier. I could do a lot of damage with a Bowie knife before being overcome.

That's when I realized something. Looking back at the distorted face, I couldn't help but notice. And I put down the radio.

Was the enemy bathed in the same rage when they tore through and laid waste to everything and everyone? They left the dead to pollute and corrupt the whole area - their home - without stopping. Why would they do that, if not out of a pure, distilled anger?

It was a sobering thought, and suddenly I felt as if my entire experience had deepened. Emotions are just emotions. Constructs. Futile and fleeting. There was no emotion to attach to the wisdom of what I had just gone through. Where does the anger go? Of course: our expression of it forms it before us, and before long it triggers the same anger in others. Slinging it at somebody else only doubles it.

The enemy wasn't a pack of bloodthirsty barbarians. They had been invaded, and their friends had been killed, and they were brimming with unreserved, untreatable anger.

There was no answer to this cruelty. No one to take responsibility. And yet the anger remained. I dropped the radio and, in an act of desperation, drew the blade strongly across my wrist, seething with a rage that had nowhere else to go. The pain, extraordinary and elite, blocked out all others. Blood streamed out. I cried again, this time with a self-accusatory howl against the sensational absurdity of being alive. There is no answer, only the state of being or not-being.

Then the radio crackled, and the voice was so startling that I screamed in fear and grabbed the wrist to try to stop the new outflow. "Hey! Is that Otimbeaux? Are you alive? This is Rooster! If you're there, please help me!"