The Humanity of Inhumanity
Short Fiction
It’s funny, how the word “humanity” is used to imply kindness, mercy, forgiveness… in practice, humans always seems to produce the opposite.
The old man coughs, sick and broken and old, terribly old, but still holding on to — to what? He reaches for the bottle of gin, takes a swig. Fuck, but it hurts. The memories won’t ever leave, will they? It is a curse. His curse. There is no room for anything but pain.
He pushes the memories away. Time for them later. “Elise!” he hollers.
“What?”
“Come here.”
And she comes. Good ol’ Elise comes, stumbling in and half-drunk herself but here nonetheless. “What do you want?”
He smiles. “Nothing,” he says, and he holds on to her hand as she sits with him on the beer-stained couch. He says he wants nothing and yet he smiles. He’s happy. “Nothing,” he says again.
“Company!” yells the sergeant. “Company, ready your weapons and get down no — “ A mortar sears through the officer’s immaculate body and, just like that, the man is no more, his life extinguished in less time than it took his parents to make him.
Holy shit, the young man thinks. Holy shit, holy shit, holy shit…
Around him, a cacophony of pings and zings and dying screams. And he runs; he just runs. Runs until he can hardly run no more. Runs until his legs burn with the desire to give way. That’s all he does — run, run, run. His heart beats faster than his feet beat the ground. From behind he hears some soldiers hail him back, yelling for him to get into formation, but fuck that. Fuck all of it. He’s not like them; he never bought in to the fiction that this tribalistic war disguised as grandeur was important enough to demand his life, to steal any of their lives. He thinks: He’ll keep running and he’ll hide under a rock and he’ll be craven and he’ll live, that’s what he’ll do. Live.
He slows down, dives under a rock and away from the heavy Pacific sun; he bites his tongue until it bleeds. He’s wet his pants and he is crying like a newborn babe. He wipes a piece of the sergeant’s intestines off his cheek with one hand, starts another spurt of his crazed weeping even harder.
Then he hears it: Japanese. The sounds of gunfire had receded, but apparently in his craze he’s somehow run off into the center of a Japanese camp. But the boulder is large, fat enough to hide him, surely, and he falls asleep. A few moments later he hears a high-pitched voice, feels a blistering pain rage across his back. His vision is wrenched upwards.
Straight into the narrowed, dark eyes of a Japanese man no older than he.
A tear escapes the old man’s left eye.
A tear escapes the young man’s left eye. Death has come. There is no doubting it, and he only hopes it is quick. But the Japanese soldier is, apparently, sick of this tired age-old play, too; he does not kill him, despite striking him but moments before, despite having him at bayonet-point.
No, he only stares at him, a predator gazing at cornered prey. Perhaps he has never seen an American soldier so close. What is he waiting for? The young man wonders this but he does not know. “Fuck it; do it!” he yells, anxious anticipation the spur. “Come on!”
But the soldier only wrenches him up and pushes him away, out of the camp, into mercifully thick brush, away from the voices speaking Japanese. The young man is too surprised to react. The previous events goes against every known sequence of warfare, goes against all logic, goes against everything he knows and has ever been taught.
He turns around. “Thank you,” he whispers, then he hears the hallmark sounds of airplanes, the harsh engine noise, watches as the Japanese base explodes in a cacophony of American bombs.
“Thank you,” the old American man whispers years later, as he holds the parchment-white veined hands of his wife — fast asleep — and closes his own eyes. “Thank you for the extra seventy years. Now I join you.” His breathing is raspy, his body thin and terribly fragile. But he has done it. He has said the last words that needed to be said.
He shuts his eyes.
He sleeps.
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