Spear Carrier
During my first day I was in shock. A many-armed demon-thing brought me to this huge field that was full of millions of people and alien creatures and tents and structures. The only normal things around me were the mountains in the distance. The demon took me to a little trench and said, “Hey dude, you’re just in time. This is the last day of enrollments. The battle starts tomorrow.”
Those were the last English words I heard that day.
A brown-skinned guy in bronze armor came up and corralled me and the other new arrivals—few of us spoke the same language, and most weren’t even human beings, as I’d define the term—to show us how to use our new equipment. Then he formed us into rough lines and taught us the rudiments of what I guess was a military formation: when to lower our spears and when to raise them, mostly.
Afterward he passed out jugs of some kind of liquor: moonshine, pretty much. Everybody started quaffing, and the whole place disintegrated into a nightmare of drunkenness. The—er—the things next to me tried to talk to me by making little drawings, but I shied away. Which sounds cowardly I know, but you would’ve too if you could’ve seen them. They were twice my height and had the body of a man and the head of a lion.
I didn’t drink. I didn’t speak. I went circling around, looking for somebody, anybody, who could tell me who we were gonna fight and why. I guess a part of me figured that the strange man—the one who’d appeared to me in my car and brought me here—had to be around somewhere. When I’d agreed to his offer, it was because I had thought I’d be a hero. But a hero wouldn’t be so lonely and so afraid. A hero wouldn’t shout for help, and then, hearing only silence, go back to his trench and cry.
When the sun rose, a hand shoved me over, and I stood, groggily. The man from last night—our sergeant? drillmaster?—mimed for us to get rid of all the random crap we’d come with and put on our armor over the bodysuits they’d given us. I collected all my things: jeans, my T-shirt, notebooks, phone, pens, watch, and class ring. When everything was in a pile, I weighed it all down with a rock and tried to memorize the pattern of the pits and ruts around me, but I think I knew I’d never recover any of it.
Our bodysuits were incredibly warm, and you could piss and shit inside them with no problems. The suits were from somewhere farther in the future than I’m from. Or maybe some other world; I still wasn’t too sure about the cosmological underpinnings of this place, and nobody was eager to explain.
The suits were skintight, and I was a little embarrassed—I’m not in the best shape. Maybe I’ve got a little extra around the middle. And there were plenty of human girls around who, er, well—the suits showed off a lot. . . .
Armored in the stuff they’d given me—a white skirt-thing, a bronze breastplate, and a long spear with a wicked point—I stood in line with everybody else.
Though not everybody here was human, I also didn’t think they were aliens. They were too humanoid: They had heads and mouths, and we all ate the same food, whereas if we were actually from different planets, our biologies would’ve been too radically different to allow for that. (On the other hand, what do I know? Maybe it was all magic.) Sometimes they were weird, chimerical combinations of Earth animals. A few were human, except they had the heads of tigers. Others were tiny as ants, and had as many legs, and the only way you’d know they were people was by looking at the little spears they carried with them. Huge snakes lay still, caked in mud, almost invisible unless they moved. The snakes talked, but of course I couldn’t understand them.
Our sergeant did his best to shove us into some kind of order.
The day before yesterday I’d been at school, and now I was in this immense valley, tucked between two sets of mountains, and something electric and awesome was taking place. And maybe it didn’t matter that I was alone, because I was experiencing something so new. Except . . . this place made me feel so small.
We were shivering, waiting. A scream went up. Two tigers embraced, farther up the rise. I heard grunts, and several elephants came into view. The army had woken up. And all around me camps of people were chatting and arguing and fighting. Some people had come with their families. Or maybe with their friends. The other possibility—perhaps they had made friends here?—was something I didn’t like to think about, because it meant maybe I was wrong to be so terribly lonely.
Most weren’t sleeping rough like me. I was surrounded by huge tents. Some were familiar: canvas stretched over aluminum poles, held together by cords staked into the ground. Others weren’t. Furs and skins draped over wooden poles: a yurt, right? Teepees and covered wagons. And other things: a network of tiny tubes and wires that ran along the ground; a huge glass structure full of blooming vines and flowers; a starship with wicked rocket engines that were always hot. The night had been full of fires and music and shouts, but I’d covered my ears and eyes with my shirt and hidden from all of it.
Cold clouds of visible air blew out of my nose and mouth. I was shivering. My toes were wet with muck. I’d slept all night in mud, but my bodysuit had shielded me from the damp. Now I was exposed. Next to me, a crab thing turned its googly eyes on me. This creature was enormous. It was about as tall as a human being, but many times as wide, and I could easily have fit a tent or a picnic table on its back.
“Hey,” I said.
We both looked away at the same time. Its pale fleshy body reddened. The creature said, “Hello.”
“What?” I said. “You speak . . . English?”
“It’s a language I have access to.”
Please believe I don’t have the words to convey how goofy this thing looked. Its eyes were as huge and flat as the ones on a teddy bear, and the pupils bopped around inside them just like, well, like googly eyes.
“Okay, wow,” I said. “Wow. This is . . . wow.”
“You’re American?” the creature said. “Perhaps you can tell me . . . I wasn’t given that much information about why to come here.”
“That’s just . . . That’s fantastic,” I said.
The crab’s voice was so human. A baritone, cultured voice that came from a slit somewhere in his stomach. I’ll spare you the long line of questions about where he (it? they? the voice was male) came from and how he’d gotten here. It turns out that they’d engineered him, somewhere in the American South, to live and work in the toxic delta of some river. He was from the future, my future, obviously. And he wasn’t some combat-soldier supermutant type of deal. He was a farmer: his tiny little legs were to pick their way through the rice paddies without hurting anything, and his claws were designed to bend and twist complex irrigation works.
He’d gotten out. Gone to college. The whole bootstraps story. And then a guy had appeared to him with an offer.
“Yeah,” I said. “That happened to me too.”
“I took it,” the crab said. “But now . . . I don’t know.”
He gestured over my shoulder toward the enemy army. I didn’t like to look in that direction. Strange things were brewing over there, within the mists: flying chariots, massive beasts, and showers of light. We had the same things on our side, I hoped, but I wasn’t sure that’d help me much during the battle.
The crab had a spear, too. Did I mention that? The spear lay against his side as we spoke, and now he picked it up. His claws had crushed little grooves into the metal handle. He held out the spear, point forward, then tucked the end behind a leg. Then he tried to march forward (rather than side to side), putting one leg carefully in front of the other. The movement was so ungainly and slow.
“This is what they taught me,” the crab said. “This is not good. This is not a good use of my body.”
“Yeah . . . ,” I said. “Stabbing is gonna be a little hard.”
“I’ll die here. They’ve brought me here to die.”
Two days before, I’d been sitting in my car, parked at a vista point up on Skyline Boulevard: a place where kids from my school sometimes came after dark to drink. I was there with a bottle of vodka and a bag of pretzels, even though I knew if they showed up, I’d only stare in silence. I had no friends, and sometimes wasn’t that sure if I even wanted one. My thoughts were so expansive, and I knew, from experience, that boiling them down into words made them soft and weak.
Night hadn’t yet fallen, but the sun was low over the bay. A haze enveloped San Francisco, out on the far side of the water, and closer by, the golden sunlight fell on the rows of houses that ran across the hillside.
The passenger window was down, so it was cool, but there was no cross-breeze. My hand was on the outside of the car, slapping the roof, and I was thinking. That’s all. Just thinking.
People pay so little attention to thinking. I mean, I would come home and my mom would ask me what had happened during the day, and I’d say “nothing” and she’d ask who’d I eaten lunch with and I’d say “Nobody. Just some people.” And on and on and on, and she’d act like I was stonewalling her, but really she wasn’t asking the right question.
Because, to me, real life wasn’t something your body did: it wasn’t food and sleep and sweat. And real life also wasn’t social. I didn’t care about the delicate tangle of relationships: the fights and resentments and jealousies that make up a group of friends. Real life didn’t even lie within the flicker of lust and desire and romance that everybody around me pretended were somehow equivalent to love.
No, real life happened in your mind. Real life meant dissecting your sensory experience—the evidence of your eyes and ears—then analyzing the pieces, using knowledge you’d gained from books, and reassembling it all into some semblance of a self. Yes, that was exactly it. Real life was about deciding who you were.
But that wasn’t a thing you could tell to someone. If I had come home and said to my mom, “Yeah, I thought for hours today about whether there was anything in life that was worth dying for, and decided, ultimately, that there wasn’t,” then what would she say?
I thought a lot about that particular topic: heroism, and the nature thereof. Because it’d occurred to me that most of my intellectual and emotional life revolved around fictional depictions of heroism. In Fallout, I was the Vault Dweller who went out into the post-apocalyptic wastes in order to preserve life for my people. In Star Wars, I risked my life to defeat the Empire. Even in my doodles of gigantic space battles that sprawled across many pages of my notebooks, I understood exactly what each of my space soldiers was giving up. It was a very simple thing: Heroism = risk + altruism + victory.
A hero risks something very important—often, but not always, their life—in order to help others.
Everybody would agree with this, I think.
But it’s the third element that I was obsessed with: victory. Heroes win.
If the Vault Dweller died before bringing back the water chip or the Garden of Eden Creation Kit or whatever else . . . if Frodo hadn’t destroyed the ring . . . if Luke hadn’t blown up the Death Star: Would they still have been heroes?
The instinct is to say, “Yes, of course.”
It doesn’t feel good to mock a loser. But what does losing really get you? They say that oftentimes when you jump into the churning ocean to save a drowning person, you’re just creating two corpses instead of one. Because if you’re not a very strong and careful swimmer, the drowning person will only pull you under with desperate flailing. But doesn’t the would-be rescuer deserve to be praised? After all, you risked your life. And yet . . . and yet . . . now two mothers have shattered hearts. Now two lives—the lives of human people who might’ve lit up the world writing a killer pop song or making friends with that one lonely person or, I don’t know, doing some other great stuff—are gone forever, when otherwise the cost might’ve been just one.
That was my problem. Every day, I read about heroes. And when I wasn’t reading about them, I was dreaming about them. I wanted so badly to be one. I looked up astronaut careers, so I could be like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin and Sally Ride and John Glenn and Alan Shepard (but not like the astronauts who burned to death in Apollo 1 or in Challenger or Columbia . . . other than Christa McAuliffe, do you remember their names? I don’t). Or I looked up careers in the military or in spycraft. Again, what about the guy who’s so full of guts and honor—the guy who charges forward, determined to save his unit—and immediately gets mowed down by machine-gun fire? Is he a hero?
I would be that guy. I knew it. I would be that fucking guy.
So in my car that day, I was thinking, shit, if someone came up to me and gave me a magical sword and told me I was the chosen one and asked me to defeat some cosmic evil, I’d say, “No thanks,” because you know what? Death is real. And death is really the end of everything. And I know how insignificant I am, and I know any threat worth fighting is probably way more powerful than me.
My head was still resting on the window. The air was damp, and a caterpillar dropped down suddenly from a tree and swung back and forth in front of me. I stared at the little ridges contracting and expanding along its damp body, and for once my mind was empty.
This was the exact moment the other guy appeared in my passenger seat.
His first words were: “Jump scare.”
I screamed, and my hand went for the lock, but I couldn’t open it. He grabbed my chin and said, “One two three, no you’re not dreaming; four five six, I’m about to make you an offer; seven eight nine, shut up and listen.”
His eyes were a deep, warm, molten brown, and his skin was very dark.
“You’re ready,” he said. “Take my hand. We’ve gotta go.”
“Who the—?” I said. “Are you—?” But I knew—maybe I shouldn’t have known, but because my mind was already there—I knew that this was the guy: He was Gandalf, he was Dumbledore, he was Merlin. . . . This was the fucking guy.
“I won’t lie to you,” he said. “If you take my hand, you will die. But I swear it’ll mean something. So come on.”
My hand jerked back. “Are you fucking kidding me? I’ll die? You’re not gonna try to sell me harder than that?”
His eyes bored into mine, and then his body went slightly out of focus. The man was very dark-skinned, but he didn’t quite have the features of a black or African person, so I can’t really say what race he was supposed to be. “Do you understand that I am a god?”
And I knew we weren’t going to banter. He wasn’t going to answer my questions or lead me around. We were not friends or allies. I’d been chosen, but I was so small and so low that I wasn’t worth the ten seconds it’d take to answer my questions.
He didn’t hold out his hand again, but I grabbed for it, and once I’d caught hold, he wrenched me sideways and threw me onto the dirt. When I stood up, he was gone, and I was in this valley, surrounded by millions of people.
You know the rest: a many-armed demon grabbed me up, marched me off to get all my equipment, and showed me how to find my place. I went through a day of drill, and I ate the food they gave me, and then I went to my little hole and tried to sleep, and during that day and night, I had a lot of time to think.
And, and, and . . . my life might not’ve had a lot of meaning. My parents maybe didn’t care much about me. I maybe wasn’t interested in much or good for very much, but I enjoyed life. Death was nothingness; it was a black mass at the edge of my mind.
I mean, okay, the fact that I was here meant magic existed, and if magic existed, then maybe so did Heaven or Nirvana or the Elysian Fields or the Grey Haven or whatever, but . . . Death. I mean . . . that’d be it. My life as I knew it would be over. I guess. Maybe. Or maybe not. I don’t know the meaning of death! All I know is that I was terrified of it. Shit, I wish I could explain this stuff. I wish I could tell you what it’s like to be alone and sleeping in muck and to not know what is happening or why. What it’s like to see a valley covered in monsters and to know that this is real. To test the point of a spear and then to feel this unasked-for pain right in the diaphragm as you imagine it sliding into you.
Hadn’t even taken any convincing. I cried that night and berated myself for being so stupid. All my life I’d said I was too smart for this. I was the person who knew that heroism was just a story! And yet I’d come to this place anyway.
Our sergeant motioned for us to march, but even if he hadn’t, we’d have gotten the message. Our whole army oozed toward the riverside and carried me with it. We left behind the camp, and we marched across the still-unmarked grass between the armies.
The enemy came into view. They were like us: a mass of tiny figures, interspersed with chariots and horses and elephants. They moved slowly out of a line of campfires. People ranged over the distance between us. And for the first time I saw real heroes.
One of them rode on a chariot that floated above the ground. Another took a shot with his bow, and that one arrow multiplied in midair until the sky was dark with shafts. I was sure the enemy army would be completely destroyed by that one shot, but another flurry of arrows appeared, slicing our guy’s arrows into mulch that rained down harmlessly. And that wasn’t the end. Another of our guys was a fucking giant: hundreds of feet tall, he soaked up enemy arrows without noticing.
The giant stepped into the enemy lines and began swinging his club. The first rank of our forces detached, striding forward. Arrows flew out in their hundreds of thousands. The fighting was too far away for me to hear the screams, but I am sure that I saw people fall and not get up.
We waited, not talking among ourselves. The sun grew higher, but water was plentiful, passed out in paper satchels that dissolved when we were done drinking. My friend, the crab, rubbed the edge of his claw against my armor.
I was numb. This was it. I would die on this battlefield.
And that’s when I caught a glimpse of the dark-skinned man who’d brought me here: the god. He was just a few dozen feet away, driving a huge golden chariot and moving toward the rear lines. The god was bare chested and unarmed, but a man in golden armor stood next to him, holding a bow. The horses neighed, forcing their way forward through our army. I dropped my spear, and I tried to push through the ranks, but the press of people was too strong. All day I’d been looking ahead, but now for the first time I got a good look back, and I saw the millions—literally millions—of people behind me.
Sure there were snakes and giants and rat-men, too, but they were all people. And they had every face you could imagine. Torn-up, weary, fearful, stern. I just—I—I—they were a sea of gold armor and black mud. And the whole valley rippled, like a breeze across a meadow, as they moved.
They seemed so insubstantial from where I was standing, but when I pushed, the nearest guy got a harsh look and shoved me back. I fell, and then a huge bulk appeared above and saved me from being trampled.
“What are you doing?” The tiny mouth was set in a fleshy belly. My crab-friend was standing over me.
“We need answers,” I said. “We cannot—absolutely cannot—just rush forward into that shit.”
The crab stood there for a long time. So long that I feared he’d given up, but then I heard the clangor above me. Somebody was beating a spear against my friend’s hard back.
I scrambled from under him, and then I moved next to him, jabbing one guy in the side to make room. The crab scuttled into the space, and with that wedge drawn up, we managed to slowly make our way through the army.
When I saw the chariot again, conscious thought didn’t even come into it: I immediately hopped up onto the sideboard. “Stop!” I yelled. Our sergeant grabbed the back of my armor and grunted at me in some foreign language. I fumbled for the clips holding together my breastplate, trying to detach it, but he yanked back, throwing me into the mud.
The muddy trot of the horses was all I could hear. A foot lashed out, connecting with my stomach. I shouted, “Help! Help!”
Suddenly, a groan. Weapons flashed. I got up, free of my armor, and ran through the crowd. Cries went up around me, and I heard a sharp scream, but I didn’t turn.
The man in the golden armor—he was no taller than my sister—was holding a bow whose bottom edge was braced against the floor of the chariot. His torso and face were covered with colored powder; he wore golden earrings and golden necklaces, and I saw for the first time the thin crown of gold that held back his long hair.
The chariot driver didn’t notice me, but this guy, the one with the bow, moved faster than I could see, and other arms appeared from behind his back—they were attached to him and yet somehow independent—so that he was in the center of a cyclone of limbs. And each of those arms held an arrow.
That’s why my feet were stuck. A forest of arrows rose from the edges of my sandals. They’d pinned me to the wooden sideboard without piercing my feet.
“Wait!” I said, pointing to the god who was driving the chariot. “You know me!”
The charioteer made a motion to knock me to the ground with the butt of his whip, but the man with the bow said something, and the charioteer turned, responding.
“Please,” I said. “We don’t want to d-die here.” I turned back, looked for the crab-guy, who was pinned down beneath the fist of a giant. The chariot had stopped. In fact, the entire army seemed to have gone still.
The archer and charioteer engaged in a heated argument. The archer turned to me, sweeping out an arm, and he said something in his strange liquid-gold language.
“Come on,” I said. “What’d he say?” My eyes pleaded with the chariot driver. “You know English. Come on!”
The charioteer turned sharply. “He wants to know what your problem is and such; I’m explaining that you’re a coward.”
“What?” I said. “Excuse me? That’s not true.”
Thousands of people were looking at me. Spears rose up methodically, and I felt the sharp clack as they banged against one other.
“I, uh.” I looked at the archer. “I just want to know what this is all for. I mean, why are we fighting? What’d we come here for?”
The charioteer rolled his eyes and then focused them on me. They went dark, and the swirling of the cosmos was reflected inside him. His arms unfolded, multiplying, and heads spilled out sideways from his head. This nightmare vision—all swinging limbs and sneering mouths—stared at me from dozens of eyes, and I knew it saw everything I had ever done or thought or seen. Then I fell into them, and I saw, well, I saw the swirling of the cosmos. I saw that everything is fire. All of us, we are just a mass of fire that is moving so fast and so ecstatically that it’s come to believe it’s alive.
The vision went on for a long time. The fire that was me—the little bit of fire I thought I owned—joined in with everything else in a gigantic conflagration that burned and burned and burned and burned until, I, er, blinked. I mean, I blinked my eyes. And then the vision faded.
I looked around me. All was silent. Every face within visible distance was holding still. As I watched, a tick-tock motion began. Heads lolled as they snapped out of the trance. Behind me, the crab rose shakily to his legs.
“Do you see now?” the charioteer said. “Can you finally see?”
“Er . . . ,” I said. “Yes . . . in some sense.”
“Good.”
He bent over and began to pull the arrows from around my sandals. “Then let us be. We have a war to prosecute.”
The archer laughed. He reached out a hand and tapped me on the shoulder.
“But—” I said, “in a more direct and immediate sense, I’m still confused. What is happening? Who are those people over there?”
The charioteer started to—
“No,” I said. “Are you the one who’s in charge? That guy over there’s wearing the crown.”
“I am quite literally a god,” the charioteer said.
“But are you in charge?” I said. “Wait, can you translate this for your friend? What is happening? I get that the fate of the universe in some way hangs in the balance, but can anybody tell me who those other guys are!”
I thought the charioteer was going to blow me to bits right there, but I’d gambled right. The archer had stopped him before; the archer wore the crown; the archer was clearly giving the orders here. So he spoke to the archer, and the archer chanted some words, sparkled briefly, and nodded at me.
“You had questions?” he said.
“And you speak English?”
“In a sense.”
“What is happening? Why are we fighting?”
The archer looked to the charioteer. “I said to you this was not the right way to raise an army. They will come willingly from throughout time and space to die for you: this is what you said. But this one does not seem willing.”
“He is willing,” the charioteer said. “He prayed for this chance.”
Then the archer looked at me. “This is . . . It is complicated. My brothers and I are the rightful heirs to the kingdom of Hastinapura. You are on the side of justice.”
“Wait, so we’re fighting so you can be king?” I said.
I wanted to make a joke about democracy, but I didn’t have quite enough chutzpah.
He pointed across the field of battle at the other army. “My cousins, the Kauravas, stole my kingdom. They insulted my wife. They attempted to murder us in our beds. They aren’t worthy to rule.”
I waited a bit longer, to see if anything more was gonna come out. I looked back at the crab. He raised his claws. Maybe he was confused as I was, or maybe this explanation was enough for him.
“Is that it?” I said.
“I very much understand these concerns,” the archer said. “I too had these same questions. Do you think I wish to kill my cousin-brothers? To kill my uncle Bhishma? To kill my teacher, Dronacharya? I would give my life to save his. Believe me, this is something I do only with the utmost reluctance. But believe me, it is necessary.” He looked at the charioteer. “Could you show him the vision? The vision is what truly cleared my head.”
“I just did that!” the charioteer said. “We don’t have time for this!”
“Well,” I said. “It’s just . . . Are we really supposed to just, like, trust you? This could all be a lie or a trick. . . . The vision was cool and all, but it was a little like you were hypnotizing us, and—”
The charioteer broke in: “Americans.” He looked then at the crab. “Both of you. Americans. I knew we’d have trouble . . . Well, okay, fine. You can go back.” He snapped the head off an arrow. He tossed it at me, and after some fumbling I caught it. Then he did it again, throwing it to the crab, who was more graceful, cupping his gently between two claws. “Scratch your hand with these if you want to go home.”
“I don’t . . . ,” I said. “Home is not . . . I just . . . I want it to mean something. I mean, we’re not fighters. We’re not immense giants. Or snake people with what I can only assume is powerful snake venom in their fangs. My friend here can’t even hold a spear! And you want us to fight for you? Why? Would it even matter?”
The charioteer looked at me. “It would,” he said. “If you died here, it would matter more than you can imagine. The fate of the universe, it in some way depends on your choosing to die for this. It’s a combining and commingling of energies. Without this expenditure of forces, everything you know and love will dwindle and die. I tried to show you—”
“Maybe you could show me the vision again?” I said.
Then there was a clap of thunder in the distance, and I saw four other chariots race out from our army and pull ahead, right out into the space between the armies. The archer shot a single arrow up into the air, far ahead of us, and then he shouted something.
“No,” the charioteer said. “Time to decide.”
I looked back. The crab locked his odd googly eyes on me, and then he threw the arrowhead down onto the ground. “Come down,” he said. “We will face this battle together.”
But I was afraid, and the moment passed. As I waited, the chariot raced ahead. I shrank down, and the battle began to rage around me.
I was only on that chariot for a few moments, but I saw terrible things. Swirls of mystic energy. The crash of powerful forces. Thousands of arrows. Spears. Swords. Screams. Every second, hundreds died. And I knew I’d not survive.
There, crouching down on the sideboard, with my arms locked around the chariot’s flagstaff, I very carefully jabbed the arrowhead into the palm of my hand.
When I opened my eyes, I was back in my car.
And, of course, an arrow had stapled my hand to the steering wheel.
At first I screamed, but screaming got me nowhere.
The windshield was covered in leaves, and cold air blew in through the window. I would have died there, maybe, bleeding out slowly, except that my key was still in the ignition. Thank God I had an old beater that still used an actual key in the ignition, or I would’ve been trapped here because the fob would’ve been in my pocket, on that battlefield, along with my other shit.
I broke the shaft of the arrow, and I carefully pulled my hand off of the bloody shard of wood. Then, holding the bleeding appendage clenched in my lap, I reached over, putting the car into reverse.
The road behind me was a big commuter road. Lots of cars, and I had to wait a long time for an opening to pull out. Blood streamed into my lap. The drive to the hospital was long and confused; I had no phone, so I followed my memory and the highway signs, rolling across sparse roads for ten minutes before I finally got it right. Shock faded, and pain sizzled through all my synapses, rising and falling.
I got to the hospital in time, of course, and they bandaged me up just fine.
The doctors didn’t believe me, but my parents did, because they believe in mystical stuff like God and karma and fate and the battle of cosmic good versus cosmic evil. Most people do, I’ve found. After I came home, my parents had lots of questions for me, but I eventually shut them up by saying I didn’t like to think about what happened (though of course that’s not true).
On the surface, nothing has changed for me: I’m still pretty quiet; I still don’t have many friends; and I still sit alone in the afternoon in my car. But whenever something goes wrong with the world—whenever there’s a disaster or a bombing or an injustice—I do wonder, sometimes, if one more corpse on that distant battlefield might somehow have changed everything.