The Blackout
            I was alone at the moment and it was quiet. Violent shades of quiet. Confetti-colored contours all along the roadside – some piled, some scattered. Clean-hewn limbs with bleach blond bones and some radioactive decay; on battlefields do we all find peace, living or dead. I notice two hands, weak bare hands, my hands that hang on the wheel, blowing by the dead in silent severance. I feel something, tugging, wait – Burns is there beside me just in time to remember he exists at all. I study his face for some directions on a map. Pupils too big for a human. From it I gather nothing knows what is to be happening. I see turmoil like some volcanic brewing papered over by those slim eyelids; something’s wrong. I know it and go with it.
            “How do you feel?”
            My own question spins lines around my head; I fear my heart will come out in my hands, raw like earth uncovered in a quake. My mind refocuses its lens with a terrible slowness and the world stops being Burn’s eyes.
I realize I have stopped driving. How long have we been like this? Completely still and staring down zero communication. Time seems impossible to gauge in quarters this close. My message failed at any rate. Burns looks exactly as he did before. And after I felt so much of what I said, too; I can’t say it again, not like I did before, because I asked him how he felt.
            My mind’s flow is blocked from an acute angle, a robotic coughing earpiece –
“Warning…blackout leak high…warn…”
I cut it off and take no heed of the radio. Static and void guides my tired mind along, steadily. In a jeep, driving. Over a hilled meadow. Battle fatigues. ‘Pedestrians bleeding neon, they are full of the stuff’! Shelled complexes that are dusty. The same sky as always, a haze.
A clean and fully-loaded rifle, two rifles, with shoulder straps smartly equipped and smartly used. Obviously there is no room for complacency in these ranks.
            Wait.
            Blackout?
            Does that term mean anything to you? Should you be scared?
 I decide not. I’ve decided nothing scares me now and I press on with my foot down.
            Prior to his Scenario B I was only dimply aware of his shaking; what really tipped me off was the deathful heat billowing out the tip of his gun. I felt its unpleasant waves from over here. Burns was primed with the savage intent to kill, a loose and dangerously sparking switch; these things you are able to just tell after a long tour and I’ve been seeing things clearer than ever today. I throw some water on his face. The flame is subdued for now, but at least I know who my enemy is: the gun. Its evil is primary to our secondary murders.
            My eye connects with everything by now and sticks to it; a bee among pedals, infatuated by the next inch of space. I feel to take a close look at an interesting couple of shapes, so my coordinates roll a little to the right, east into the vastness of unremarkable territory. My body hums with verve more than capable of steadying my partner’s shaking or the blundering frame of the vehicle so timid on anything but asphalt.
The large military tires don’t even feel the bodies they strike, perhaps by design. I take no care to avoid them. Only a minute ago the plain looked an impressionist painting, just dots; now I see shades of various hues complex and pure, darker and richer than anything still real, like the royal velvet gowns of older and wiser times. Up, the blood spreads upwards; calm and obscuring like the ink of a panicked squid. That night the blood of our enemies sprayed like fountains in the sky to entertain and welcome us to our new home, us victors in arms. Never have I felt such pride.
Finally we reach a destination that could plausibly been a shape, at some point. Burns seems eager to walk so I let the old dog out for his paces. I take out the manual, I usually know it by heart but something has seemed off this entire time. Not just in the jeep, but before. A blanket of discomfort, encompassing and inescapable like sheets on a summer night; still nothing to point at, just the way things are right now, the mood of the earth. I run through Scenarios A-M, then:
 FIRST ORDER: SECURE AREA
            I must have lingered too long at the jeep because I could not see Burns anywhere when I look up. But we are professionals, and we always have ideas. Mine was to go into this building and take a nice little reminder of the first day of The Bombing, when mans’ triumph over history was complete. The structure itself is remarkably untouched and yet still as dead as its surrounding. It was the baby in the mother’s arms whose sacrifice was for naught. Hidden gems like these come once every hundred miles; I’m sure that what Burns is thinking as well. The building shows its inexperience immediately like a virgin in bed; a flag still flaps in the smoked-traced breeze. Nothing unusual, save this one happened to be completely white. Flawless otherwise, but nothing inside like an unused coloring book. I drew my knife, severed some unused flesh, and watched the red blot out some of the perfect flag’s pride. From whence it violently came, now it may return.
 
 
            SECOND ORDER: PROCURE VALUEBLES
            Children typically leave signs, and a man of this caliber can readily pick up on them. Children were here at one point. Their messy hands were all over the walls, they probably even dragged their feet up these stairs. The freedom of a bunker saved the promising ones; the others were left, as is custom, to fate. With no leader the rooms lost focus, the desks look askance to a master’s board no longer honing the craft of shaping consciousness. The empty black board itself hides so many secrets, to be known only by the few. My knowledge knocks against its boundaries and echoes into the deep like a pebble tossed down a well. So we are all constrained by the invisible abstract – knowledge. I fling rounds into what I do not understand. The bullet holes spell my initials.
            I back out of the room slowly; I know I committed a crime but its importance is still cloudy. At least the children were spared the image. Death may be preferable a blackboard of bullets. I hover in place and wait, to make sure nothing saw me; my reptile eyes can go in the back of my head if need be. Silence.
            Out of the muddle of standard grade-school produce I spot a virtuoso. Unmistakably this was the work of a failure, an artist. It shows Columbus on a mast, a great band of merry warriors departing for land, and the slaves already bound and gagged on the shore. It reads: “Columbus sailed in 1492 and found the New World. He ended his life insane and alone.” (On the back is scribbled: “F, historical accuracy essential”) It fits neatly into my pocket, and I take this as a sign of good omen in godless days.
 
 
            THIRD ORDER: DESTORY ALL THAT IS MEANINGLESS
            When I step out of the place my head, already light, ascends rapidly into the atmosphere; suffocation or the onset of a terrible illness? The corridors are bleak and my control is wavering, my steps become increasingly inconclusive. “Burns?”
            Burns looks like a demon-guard of the upper echelon. The fire is back, I can see that. He stands rigid, stern, and awake in front of an armored door that he has apparently wretched out of place. He lets me through as I pass but snarls when I point my gun into the blackness. I lower it, because his heat was just that intense. The uneasiness cast its line from this place; my journey, my day and my life feels to be the sum of a steady and patient catch. I flounder out of the water, and now, watched by Burns, I descend into hell, into the fisherman’s experienced so deadly hands.
            The room is plain. A single chair sits inside a glass cube. There are two pipes running into it, and one has been knocked off. A gas of clear substance has filled the room; my lungs and I feel fine. The bliss of a saint harmonizes with the sin of a prostitute, all at once, to my body’s rapturous applause. My head has long since fallen off, probably rolling around the floor but I don’t care to look. I only want to sit in the chair. I break the cube that looks like sugar. I get to the chair. I cannot sit on it or it would break. Of everything I have broken this would be the most tragic. This was not made for a grown man or a very grown person at all.  A huge mural, deep blue against alternating white and red, begs the question of the sitting child: “FOR WHOM IS THIS WORLD FOR?” In countless files and on numerous clipboards, drunken signatures of tipsy children read: “Whomever I am told.”

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