No Control

A loss of control. No control. Took hold of the serpent by its neck and it wrung me dry. It left the bunker hissing projectiles aligned in a semicircle around my body. The enemy forces are gaining ground, thousands of soldiers in the hillocks outside our bunker, too afraid to approach us, too afraid to approach me. How many of us our left? There’s Timoshenko in the corner, bleeding the slow death. There’s Sasha in the opposite corner with a rolled cigarette between his teeth. Then there’s Lady Margaret in a white gown in the middle of the bunker, holding up her left hand like Jesus, blessing us for our struggle. What are we fighting for? To stay alive, I suppose. To not lose ground, though there is no more ground to be lost. What little ground is left is dirt and dust. You need agriculture and villages to make sense of the barren landscape. If you don’t plant a seed in the desert, then no crops will grow, the children will grow malnourished and dumb and we’ll be left with a weakened civilization to tend the fields. What fields? No fields, only dust and rock and masses of enemy forces. I refuse to shoot at them any longer. I know they’ll overtake the bunker as soon as they overcome their cowardice. What do they suppose they’ll find here? Trails of blood and smoke. Timoshenko’s limp, Russian body. Sasha’s flowing gypsy hair. He smiles and shows me his stained teeth. I toss a grenade backwards without looking, hoping it’ll kill a hundred or a thousand of those bastards, if there’s such a thing as hope without desire. There’s a dull explosion, a thud, a few cheers from the enemy forces. They love us. We give sense to their calling. Without us, what would they be doing? They’d be scraping their nails against the dust and rock in search of worms and serpents. My snake is long gone, and with it the taste of blood. Its presence would have attracted a locus of flies, but it didn’t stay long enough. No, it’s just us and the bullets at my feet. I rub my knees with my hands. Another dull thud, an explosion. Memories from a childhood in a desert village. Goats and numb feet. The taste of wine at thirteen. Premature tastes of violence. Take a gun and surrender yourself to the cause. We are the chosen people. We are the chosen people. And it starts all over again. Except it’s never stopped, that’s only what we tell ourselves, it’s how we delude ourselves into believing their tales of progress and goodness. The good side is the winning side always. The other side is simply a justification for the slaughter. There can be no victors without victims, no innocents without the damned.

I stand up and look out so as to be shot more quickly, this is taking forever. Thousands of shots are fired, an endless unholy storm of steel and fire. Not one of the bullets hits me. I walk over to Lady Margaret and take her hand. She kisses my lips with facile passion. I’m moved to tears, fall to my knees and take the spray of bullets on my back. The song is sung by a choir in a chapel higher up in the mountains, some hymn to the glory of man and the happiness of His eternal struggle. Pretentious swine, the mountaineers. Fallen in a pool of blood, I ask Sasha for a cigarette. He says he doesn’t think he’ll have time to roll it before I expire. I say that’s fine, put out my tongue and wait for the serpent to roll back into the bunker and bite it.