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When a new sun rose over Boston, when thunder lapped at the edges of the city and tickled the roiling waves of the Pacific, when all the parents and the children and the murderers and rapists and all the little rats and pillbugs that lived in the basements and gutters were burned away, you were nowhere to be found. When the surging fire scorged silhouette portraits of life into the ground, when the air filled with dust that would burn poison for decades, when the suburbs were flattened into plateaus of wood and twisted metal and seared flesh smeared like ants along the silent ground, you were already gone. Some days before you took a car in your name to an alley, and you left the keys inside, and you walked fifty paces to another car. This car was in a name that was never yours, but that was printed on a driver's license in the front seat. You took the license, turned it over in your hand. Your own image stared out at you, smiling. You stared grimly back. And then you put the key in the ignition, and you drove.
Eight hours and you are in unrecognizeable country. Cornfields and endless lakes slip past the windows of your car. Images flash in your visual cortex like disjointed frames of some long-forgotten film. They find no meaning to attach to, and vanish in milliseconds. Eight hours and your eyes are burning with exhaustion, or maybe staring into the setting sun. You can't see that sun and forget what happened to your hometown. Eight hours, and your whole body aches from holding in the tension, the tiredness, the sense of being hunted. And all the while the radio plays, crackling voices reading all the breaking news like a list of crimes. You are arraigned, you stand on the precipice of judgement, and the hellfire of the red sun hanging low above the fields and the houses and the gentle rolling hills is a portal into the torment you so soundly deserve. After eight hours you pull off of that burning sunlit track and remember what shadows look like. Signs advertizing the restaurants stand spectral above the earth, painting the buildings with long blue strokes. You find a motel and check in for the night. They offer you help with the huge case in your trunk. It weighs nearly as much as you do, but you carry it in yourself. This is your burden alone.
You step into the shower. The water is scalding hot, but you don't change it. With the complimentary soap and towels you begin to scrub your skin. You rub yourself down raw until the bar of soap is gone, and then you move on to the shampoo. When you are finished your skin is red and stinging. As are your eyes.
You run the hand over the case. This was the cause of it all, you think, not me. But you feel the cool, still leather under your fingers, and you watch the coffin-sized case lying inert, lit by flickering motel lights and wreathed by stained and reeking sheets, and you know with a bone-chilling certainty that the fault, the agency, is all yours. Your hand wanders to the clasp, and you begin to open it, but you're struck by a sudden and vivid torrent of mental images. A huge metal insect on spindly legs grasping the shell of the sky, one acute red eye scoring the surface of the earth. A plane, couched somewhere in the misty vault of heaven, its silicone brain primed to raze you from the earth. Or maybe one man, all in black, a rifle resting on his shoulder. He knocks a new magazine in with the heel of his hand and peers through the scope, expectant. Your hand withdraws from the case like its been burnt. A few seconds later and against your better judgement you are watching CNN. The arraignment is over; it's time to deliver the sentence.
-- -or the first time in history. Now, do we have any estimates quantifying the damage done by this strike?
--At this time, Sarah, The government of Massachusetts has yet to release any kind of information on the the bombing except to confirm that it was nuclear in nature.
--Thank you, Frank. Now we go to- Ah- we have a clip just in of an interview with president Hollande about this inexplicable action. We'll go to that.
You know he cannot see you through the screen, but you heart still sizes as you see his doughy face appear. He is smiling, a genuine smile, and his eyes are bright with mirth, and then you know beyond any shadow of a doubt that your life is forfeit.
"Mr. President," asks the interviewer, dubbed-over in English, "The United States have served as our allies since their Revolutionary war in the 18th century. Why have you decided to declare war now?"
Hollande turns his face to the camera, and you feel more violated by his gaze than you have ever felt before.
Hollande speaks in English. "She knows," he purrs. "She knows."
Exhausted as you are, you do not sleep. Rather you doze fitfully. Your consciousness ebbs and flows but you never stop being aware of your raw and tingling skin, the sweat-stink of the sheets, the light filtering in through the drawn blinds (gleaming on the metal clasp on the case that contains the single object for which thousands if not millions have already died), and above all of the profound despair that seems to weigh on you like a lead smock at the dentist's. It is the most powerful thing you have ever felt in your life.
And when you sink, sporadically, into the still black pool of dreams, you see the face of Francois Hollande, smiling and smiling, because he knows he has you under his talon, and it is only a matter of time until he takes his revenge. It is the face of triumph.
It is the face of madness.
