The War Comes Home to Jockamo |
Issue 18
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The war was coming to Jockamo, and it was my job to sell it before it did. I had been given my briefing in the future before being deposited there in the past. It looked how I left it then. I hopped aboard the first train, trying to stabilize myself while making small talk with a soldier. He did the same job I did. He asked where I was from and why I looked so clean. And so familiar. “Out of town,” I said. That was all he needed to know. He used the tip of the rifle to scratch his head. He was sweaty from standing around all day. I watched him do this and held my breath. What are they teaching these kids? I sized up all the buildings in town that the administration didn’t want razed to the ground if it could be helped. The college was one of them. The museum was another. I dawdled there waiting for further direction. I’d heard the speaking tour so many times, I felt I could tell it myself, and better, but I was there to keep the peace before it was shattered. In three years, there would be new information to upend our conclusions about the mummy in the showroom. I wasn’t supposed to know that though. My personal feelings were not part of this equation. There were larger costs when a person cared. I picked up the payphone in the lobby which rang on schedule. I wrote a fake name in the guestbook right above the name of the man I was tracking. He made up a name too. His fake persona was female. This was the first joke I ever knew him to make.
I sipped a diet soda in the food court, impatient, wishing that the incident was five weeks into the future so I could try the new vanilla flavor when the museum signed a new contract with their vendor. I sucked air through the straw and rattled the ice around. Eating a cube, I saw my target check his watch and round the corner. He picked up speed past the fountain and ran to the demonstration. There was a tension there in the square as demonstrators tried to quiet the little pockets of agitation that swelled up and burst. Most of the protests and happenings in town were quiet little things that did nothing to threaten those in power. They were usually just contests between middle class people to outdo each other with funny signs, but in recent years, with the economic downturns, they’d taken on a new ragged quality. The more the state used violence to enforce their preferred brand of peace, the more amped up the protest movement became. My target caught sight of me and panicked, running right into a small, short-tempered man who was using the protest as an outlet for a murderous rage he felt against a system he couldn’t effectively change. The small man pulled out a pen knife and stabbed my target repeatedly until he collapsed to the cobblestones spraying his insides out like a colander. In the heavy crowd, it took a while to notice, and the people who did notice were so unused to violence like that, they thought what they were seeing was some kind of simulation. If only. I checked my watch. This happened right on schedule. One of the students fainted while a small group rushed over to the target, now dead. The small man slipped away in the fracas. I stole after him quietly. He’d nearly got away with his crime. I had a pistol strapped to my ankle, but I was told to leave the body somewhere and be gone. I rushed the small man behind the dumpster he was squatting behind, panting like a dog, and I grabbed him by the ears and slammed his head into the pavement until his pulse was just a faint flicker. Three days later, there would be a rally for justice for my target. Conspiracies would proliferate, and this was good for the movement. I was a little late in ending the small man’s life, but there’s always room to wiggle. The only thing left to do was ensure that a small domestic robot would be shipped to a retiree, and then I was supposed to wait at the pickup spot to be brought back to the future. I didn’t know what these three people had to do with each other. If it was important to know, I would have been given that information. There was an anti-intellectual movement that coincided with the labor demonstrations. We were meant to foster that up to a point and hope it didn’t grow legs and run away from us. Only a dummy burns a book. That was my position. I didn’t read a lot of them, but I also knew if I found one I didn’t like, I was not forced to read it. I liked the look of them though. A book is a wonderful instrument. I was glad for their greater accessibility, but I missed the way that people with money used to create them special for their home libraries. I loved the acid swirl of ink on a beautiful hardback. They covered most of the pages. I had no idea how someone learned to do that, but I was glad for the effect. Maybe it’s instinctual, like the way a spider shits out an entire society behind them. They were built backwards, at least compared to us, and they lived backwards. They look behind themselves to see the future, which was also backwards from my vantage point. I didn’t know if I lived in the past or the future. For me, it was always the present, even if it wasn’t actually the present. More things I can’t define and don’t need to. At various points in my work travels, my children are elderly, newborn, middle aged, and nonexistent. When I felt sentimental, I would take my allotted downtime between assignments and try to figure out where they are then. They went forward in their lives. I jump around as needed. One of them bought an old vessel and pointed it towards the horizon. I was never able to find her again because she was lost and never found. Out of the historical record forever. The oceans are immeasurably big. She found something worth paddling towards and sailed after it. I thought I might be able to find her. I certainly didn’t lack for time, but I never could, no matter how often I went over her marked maps and tried to follow the coordinates. She never wrote down what she was looking for, and I knew better, when she was younger, than to plant the seed. After a few centuries, I knew for certain she was dead. Same for her brother the accountant. He sat in an office all day until a stroke forced him out. I would pass him sometimes on the sidewalk. I swore he did a double take, but I just nodded and kept walking. I’ve been told a lot of people look like me. I wondered if both of them found what they were looking for. My wife died trying to give us a third, and I think that was when I snapped. There was safety to be had in my work. I wanted to ask to correct this fork in my life. Maybe there was an abortion pill, or I could have used protection that night. Maybe a long conversation would dissuade her from wanting a larger family. I knew that displaying a personal bias towards meddling with the past would mark me as weak and unqualified, so I watched her die instead, and I threw myself into my work because I saw two reminders of the family I nearly had. Even if my kids did figure out who I was, I don’t think they had much to say to a stranger, even if he sired them. My wife looked at me without recognition at the hospital for a long moment before her face turned grey, then white. She seized and died right there on the bed, and my world went with her. I looked up at the stars, knowing they had no comment on the situation. People who believe in things chase after nothing. I have it in abundance and I can’t give it away. I was sent for a while to watch and wait, so I reported what I saw. There was a lot of noise and fury down the hill. It sounded like a couple thousand people all hopped up on their ideals. They passed around enough papers to fill a boat. I dropped some as I ran around the chaos, wondering what they meant but without the time to consider. We stuffed a lot of our papers into every crack in every building. It felt like cheating when you know the answers already, but we also had to be present to ensure that things unfolded as they were meant to. I never understood that aspect of the work. I got the feeling that nobody could explain it in a satisfactory way, so some mysteries remain. The inciting event was when the crowd surged and stampeded through city hall. The doors gave way quickly. The security officers fired then ran. Within an hour, there were large plumes of smoke pouring from the smashed windows. You could smell burnt metal and wood the rest of the summer. There were reprisals against the leaders of the march. The politics were a little dense for me, so I didn’t keep up with it. A good summary was enough. Some people desire nothing while some people demand it. The stars hold their dignity at least. The opposition was better organized than anyone was expecting them to be. Shots officially rang out on the outskirts of Jockamo. The leader of one of the satellite cells holed up inside a burned-out house and picked off a lot of foot soldiers. There was an issue with supplies though. A guerrilla network taking on an industrialized military monster couldn’t hole up in one place like that, so the siege was over quickly. Some goons in heavy armor ran through every opening at once and splattered the man against the walls, and that was that. All the sloganeering was moot in the face of that might. There were little problems here and there, but Jockamo largely caved in. Driven mad by the pressure, the lieutenant opposition leader climbed to the top of the largest redwood in town. She exchanged some potshots with the people on the ground, and when they cut one of the trees down, she leapt to another. This farce went on for a while until an unmarked helicopter appeared a couple hours before dawn. She seemed to go willingly into it, and she broadcast in exile for a long time after that until she disappeared out of the record. Nobody heard from her since. The future archives are full of nothing but speculation. The administration in place at the time could turn the grid off whenever it was advantageous to them, so a small resurgence in letter writing sprung up. There in the future, you could read drivel like letters from a sharpshooter in a sick tent to a girl back home named Hannah. “My dearest, these hours are a gossamer cloud. I may nod off and wake up on the wrong side of creation. I hear the dusty saws of the troop violinist. We’re all sick of hearing it, but the concerto continues. There’s nothing else to do here. My chin dips forward and I snap awake again. I’m writing this by candlelight. It grows thinner as the night gets darker. The food is horrible pap that has been mushed beyond recognition. For a treat, we strip the meat from lame horses. Something to look forward to. The violinist has broken a string, and I couldn’t be happier. I feel the windy hands of death tapping on my inner ribs. I’ve coughed up a lot of dust. I’m worried someone will get ahold of a banjo and that’s the last thing I’ll hear. My body is wrapped up, but the wounds aren’t healing. When I wheeze, it sounds like a broken accordion, so I’m grinding out this goodbye to you. The wind threatens to put my candle to sleep. My left hand locks up and my right is gone.” A quick search of the archive says this man fell into a coma and passed three days later. Love, Gerald. Sickening stuff. When the power came back on, we caught the surreal sight of a bland TV news crew trying to report in an active warzone. There was an anchor who found increased viewership in working as opposition for a while. TV news always seemed like odd pageantry to me, so I welcomed these bizarre intrusions. Cheryl Desmond, that was her name. She has a singsong voice, but she screams the news. The regime leaned on her to pretend to care when the sitting president died. She was expected to emote, but she just didn’t feel it. She pulled out a cigarette she’d hidden in her sleeve and blew the smoke into the camera. An order is given to cut the feed. Military men charge this short, round woman. She pulls a hunk of metal from the desk and stabs the first intruder, then the second before they pull her away and the station goes dead. It was a joke to imagine her sitting there with her hunk of metal felling the entire army, then the navy, and all the reserves too. At least the ones who hadn’t split and joined the opposition. I dream of her sitting there at her desk, unopposed, with her cigarette staring defiant into the camera which has long been abandoned. “Goodnight,” she says, and I wake up. It’s a hard sleep. I reached the last pickup point when agreed upon and nothing happened. I sat there all day and part of the next. Stranded in the past, I figured my time was coming. I didn’t know what complications would ripple through the future, but it seemed like my problems were nearly over. In a sense. I heard the big bell toll in the town square. A comfort I hadn’t felt in years wrapped over me. Routine is a lifeline in times like this. A bunch of us refugees found a habitable home on a farm. I didn’t know how to explain I was stranded from the future, so I didn’t get into it. “Where are you from?” A man with a rifle cracked the door and looked me over. “Out of town,” I said. That must have worked. They opened the door slowly. After a vote and some further questioning, they allowed me to stay. We had room temperature tea brewed in the sun in great glass jars. It was a shrinking delicacy. We spoke in low murmurs. Only when necessary. A cuckoo clock on the wall started to life and made everyone jump. I ran over instinctively and smashed it under my foot. Some routines could kill you. A small splinter group held quiet church services, and I attended a few as something to do. They had long discussions about sin, fornication, violence, what was acceptable, what wasn’t. Nobody knew for sure. There wasn’t a bible in the house to point to. We had to go from memory. My mind wandered. I’d never ridden a horse up a mountain. That meant I’d never ridden one back down either. Two things I thought I’d never do. It was during one of those meetings which always dragged that there was a sudden sound of blasting. Dirt and shrapnel rained on us through the busted window. I took off running. I’d never moved that fast in my life. Even with all that adrenaline coursing through me, I was rounded up and marched for several muddy miles with my captors. They brought in six of us, shot two in combat, and the rest dispersed into the woods. Someone had noticed suspicious activity up on the mountain. I didn’t know what gave us away. We diverted the smoke from the fire below ground. We did everything right, I thought. I had a lot of time to think while we moved around. There didn’t seem to be a fixed base of operations, and this seemed promising to me. Even with all that firepower, it’s hard to keep a place occupied. Listening to their conversations, our captors had waited hours to engage. They marched us back to the ruined farm. I couldn’t figure out why. There was half a boy lying dead against the barn. His insides were out of him after all those bullets. Another body lay on the ground. He’d been clipped in the top right corner of his head trying to run through the crossfire. They burned the bodies in a heap as casually as piles of old newspaper. We marched up the side of the ridge to take stock of a different, fresher massacre. A bunch of young men lay in piles of blood, breathing heavy with pain. One of them reached for his rifle with quivering arms. A soldier picked his gun up and moved it away from him as casually as a baby being relieved of their rattle. He lay there crying and shook until he went to sleep for good. A few of the occupiers were bandaged up and assessed. One of them was in terrible shape. The officers deliberated before shooting him in the head. It was half mercy and half economics. In the time I’d spent hiding out, the occupying force had suffered more losses than I’d expected. The future didn’t seem so certain now. A young man ran out of hiding with his arms up, and the soldiers minced him out of reflex. I looked down at his corpse. He had a thin, scraggly beard. Probably his first. The most he would ever grow. One less mouth to feed. We marched back to the base of the hour, and I heard the soldiers asking their captives a lot of leading questions. They had a big, hungry dog in a cage, and they called out a number. 61. Turns out 61 had been ambushed, scalped, and thrown in the river. Oh well. 42 came forward and was allowed to pick out a captive. He saw one of his former bullies and screamed in his ear as the boy knelt. “Richard? Jacob? Jordan?” I didn’t know the significance of the names. 42 opened the cage to set the dog on him, and immediately, I heard the whizzing sound of bullets kicking up dirt. 42 fell over with a wounded hip as his intended victim ran away. The dog started tearing at him as he groped around for his rifle, a stick, a dead man’s arm. Something. I didn’t stick around to see the rest. I ran into the trees, tripping end over end, rolling down hills slick with mud, shoving branches out of my face. I got away, and I hunched down in the dark, waiting to be sure this time. I walked around until I heard a creaking sound. From the moonlight, I saw a young woman who put her hands up. She stifled a sob until she saw my dirty civilian clothes. I wanted to explain my situation to her, but I knew better than to give us both away like that. Words are sometimes a burden. It was so dark, we couldn’t even grope our way forward. We stumbled and held our breath each time, but something compelled us to keep moving. We sometimes heard the far-off sound of rage and slaughter, and we froze. The occupying forces were dwindling, but there could be drowsy sentinels out in the dark. I walked behind her, figuring if someone snuck up on us, she could bolt into the gloom with a better chance of escape. We were out of breath and smelled horrible. It’s the dirtiest I hope I’ll ever be. We were one with the muck, and I heard footsteps from an unseen third party run through the woods. They were cut down with an unfriendly gargle. I didn’t know if this was good or bad. We stood there for a long time before I nudged her forward. Indistinct voices there in the dark. Reverberant drips. We followed the sound to the mouth of a massive cave. I nearly knew where we were. We went to the cave on a scouting trip when I was in elementary school. I remembered it as a bust because it rained all day, so we couldn’t go all the way through like we wanted. The son of the scout leader said he saw a wolf, but no one believed him. I couldn’t tell if we were hearing moisture dripping from the vaulted ceiling or if the sounds were more deliberate. It didn’t matter. My blood paused, but something forced me forward. She stuffed her mouth full of her own hair so she wouldn’t whimper and give us away as we climbed over the edge, silent as we lowered ourselves. The sounds of faraway fracas faded. I thought I heard the rip roar of a human sniffing and snorting and I pissed down my leg. There was a musk in the cave like death commingling with blood. Millions of blind cave critters tripping over each other in the dark. They didn’t need eyes in there, so they stopped growing them. My companion ran off in a panic the second time we heard the snort. Just me and the dark now. We didn’t know if we had a pursuer or if we were the ones stalking after someone on accident. The black was on our side. I’d never been so quiet in my life. I couldn’t tell what the sound was. It could have been a lout pinching some snuff. Maybe a deserter who’d seen plenty. Someone sick from the drizzle perhaps. I craned my neck, not sure where I was looking. For all I knew, I was inches away from a wall. I slipped on some wet pebbles underfoot and caught myself. I wondered how many vestigial eyes were scanning the cave without result. I slipped again and felt the icy grip of a human hand wrap around the crook of my elbow from behind. I was glad she was okay. How she found me, I had no idea. We huddled together to warm up. This wasn’t how I planned on spending my evening, but life has a way of changing suddenly with no base of stability. We slid down together into the muck with teeth clenched and tried not to shiver so loudly. She had me in a grip of real terror. Time was elastic. Half a minute, maybe an hour. She held me possessively, so close I could feel her held breath mingle with mine. Our possible pursuer retreated. Departing steps on wet stone. The arms loosened as the sounds faded. I was used to sleeping through the night, not surviving it. I was just starting to process these thoughts when my companion suddenly grasped me from the front. Her arms hooked around each of my arms as the arms that held me from behind withdrew deliberately back into the dark. The young woman spoke for the first time. She whispered a benediction in my ear, sobs interrupting her whispers. Something about deliverance. She grabbed my hand and led me back the way we thought we came. We felt our way along the walls, slipping often, catching our shoes on knots in the earth. We made it back to the ledge we’d lowered ourselves into, up through the dirt and out the mouth again. The first rays of the sun beat the night into retreat. I was so happy to see it, I could have cried. We cut through the fields with cricks in our necks from all the stooping, and we found ourselves in front of a friendly outpost. Hands raised, she was recognized by her uncle, and she vouched for me. We cleaned the muck off as best we could. There were a couple spots left in a wagon overflowing with refugees, lice, and dirty straw. We itched terribly, but I was happy for every louse I pinched from my skin. I squeezed my blood back out of them. Mine. I didn’t want to give them the satisfaction, but I knew they were bound to their instincts in a dopey sort of way. I started putting together some strong words. If I made it back to the year I left somehow, I might even use them. |
CARRICK MCDONALD is an assistant librarian and writer from Evansville, Indiana.
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