tower

Her bare breasts were in my face at the worst moment. She was always a bit of rebel. Maybe she knew it was the worst moment, but my grip on what intentions were wasn’t great anymore. I’ve spent so many years lying, deceiving, pretending, and justifying that I don’t know what it means to intend with purpose. I don’t know what anything means, only what I’m told to do.

My commanding officers would be proud. I could no longer remember what I was risking for them. Or what I had already lost for them, and the nation, of course. Once you lose sight of what you can lose, all fear is gone.

I’m sure she thought we were all going to die in the next few moments, just like I did. Maybe she wanted to go out with a bang—which is a terrible play on words and a bad joke a desperate comic would tell to get a laugh, forgetting that it’s been told too many times for any of us to laugh at it. 

Much like revenge and violence. 

Yet there I was chuckling to myself. There we were. Her and I. Even if the mission succeeded, we were already dead. Breathing, sure, but dead to the humanity that once burned inside of us. So maybe she was right. Maybe we could both feel something again, for the last time. Maybe we could make love out of the ashes and ruins of our allied existence to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. All of which had been absent from me for as long as I could remember. 

I pushed her away more roughly than I wanted to. Most everything I did was rougher than I wanted to and I immediately regretted it. I could feel the embarrassment seep out of her. I could see it in the way she quickly picked up her shirt and covered herself, in the way she slid off of me, in the way she couldn’t look at me, in the way she turned her back and forced herself to mumble something derogatory about me under her breath. 

“I’m so sorry,” I uttered with no emotion to back it up. “I didn’t…” I didn’t have any more pretend words left in me.

“It’s fine,” she responded in a robotic voice with a metallic stare. “I just thought…”

They invaded us three years ago. They didn’t take us over, they just brought in tanks, soldiers, and a new way of life that meant our old ways of living were no longer worth living. To make sure, if we tried to live that old way, they killed us. 

Beyond that, they were generally friendly and they followed all the rules of the Geneva Convention. At least on the surface. I had heard the stories and seen the scars on the bodies of my friends. I had seen the ghosts that took over where humans once lived. I had seen the stacks of corpses and I had seen the tools they used to inject pain with the hope of truth on the other side. 

It didn’t matter. No one plays by the rules, even if they say they do. Those are the real rules. Say you play by the rules and pretend to—enough—so that the propaganda departments can keep the population at large believing in the correct good buys and bad guys. 

Yes, they stole our gods too. We were allowed to worship in certain ways, at certain times, with rituals and language that was approved. That had been the final straw. You can mess with our women and children but stay the hell away from our gods. 

I had been sent to live with the enemy. To become one of them. To learn their language, to eat their food, to go to their schools, to date their women, to make deals with their men, to understand their technology and to completely disappear. To vanish below the radar. It was only beneath the surface, in the dark ocean of ambiguity and disguise, that we could implement what we had been hired to do. 

She and I were the leads. It had taken us three years. Three years that would take three lifetimes to try and unpack or understand. At that moment, I didn’t have more than three minutes. 

I turned my attention back to the news. A television was in the corner of the room. The room that had become our home. The room buried in a corner of a home in a corner of a neighborhood, in a corner of a city where they wouldn’t be able to find us. That would most likely change very soon. 

Two minutes and thirty seconds. 

She sat next to me, now in her uniform. The flag sneered at me. I had given it everything and it had given me nothing in return. To be fair, I didn’t let it. People. That’s who I fought and lost for. At least that’s what I told myself. Not symbols. 

Two minutes…

We sat in silence. 

One minute… 

What were we going to say at a time like this?

Thirty seconds…

I assumed it had already happened. I was just waiting for the man on the news to disappear to a live report of downtown. 

Zero seconds. There was some kind of commotion outside the doorway of our room. They knew. They were coming. Which meant we had succeeded. 

The television changed. I stared. An airliner had crashed into the tallest building in the country. Smoke was billowing out of it. The enemy was jumping to escape the fire. 

I smiled for the first time in years. She was crying. The door slammed open followed by a river of soldiers with guns. I kept smiling. I should have probably enjoyed the breasts when I had the opportunity. I probably would never have it again.

I would die a winner. For us and for you. 

For our people. 

Who is that?