Memories from Hell

It was dark. There was a bare lightbulb sticking out of the folds of a ceiling padded with dark red velvet. As I sat up, a heavy steel door unlocked and a man in riot gear entered.

“Come on.” He ordered.

He lead me through long, tight hallways lit with only a few bare light bulbs, covered in the same dark red velvet as the room behind me, matted and stained in places,with steps in the walls like stadium seating.

We weaved through sharp corners for hours. Any questions I tried to ask went unanswered, but finally we turned another corner into a brilliantly lit office. There was a blinding glare from a horizon beyond endless rows of cubicles. The fuzzy gray partitions stretched forever in every direction as we made lefts and rights through the maze, until the man in riot gear stopped in front of a desk.

“She’s all yours.” he said, turned, and left. 

I started to follow him, but the woman at the desk stopped me. 

“Stay here. I’ll answer your questions.” She was beautiful, in that skillfully artificial way people are with heavy makeup. Her skin was perfectly, chemically smooth, eyebrows artfully done, platinum blond hair locked into a stiff pompadour, her lips and suit the same candy red color. 

“Where am I?” I asked. 

“You’re dead,” she said, with an awkward, forced smile. “Sorry.”

First I thought I misheard her. Then I realized she said exactly what I heard, and started to laugh.

My laughter made her look melancholy. “I know it’s hard to accept–”

“You’re fucking with me.”

“No, sorry.”

“Right. Ok. If I’m dead, is this hell?”

She gave me that awkward smile. “Not unless you make it hell.”

I smiled back. “Could you and I make it heaven?”

Before she could answer, another woman popped her head over the partition. “In my day, there was no heaven or hell. We knew exactly what to expect after we died.”

The blonde woman looked at her as if they’d had this argument over their cubicle every day for years. “If everybody was the same, then why did you bury the Kings with armies?” 

“We didn’t; they did,” she said. “They couldn’t stand the idea of facing their fathers empty-handed.”

“She’s seen it all.” The woman in red explained.

“Nothing will make you lose faith in the divine right of kings faster then watching thousands of them fight like rats.” The brown woman said. 

“Just Kings? What about Napoleon? How’d he do?” I asked.

She rolled her eyes. “What about Alexander? Or Genghis Khan? The Emperors made all the same mistakes the Kings did, when they said their rights were more divine then the others. All politicians are the same.”

“She’s a poet.” The lady in red said.

Whether this was the afterlife or not, my imagination ignited with pictures of Genghis Khan, Alexander the Great and Napoleon in an epic battle. “Were there wars? What happens to the people who fought in them? They got hurt, right? Did anybody die? Can you die, here? Is there a death after death?” 

Instead of answering, she gave me a knowing nod. “Exactly. Fighting here is futile,”

“Damn,” I said, caught up in the image of an endless cycle of invulnerable soldiers stabbing each other. “I guess this is hell for Napoleon.”

 “You’re already dead, you don’t need to think about death anymore.” The woman in red crossed her legs, tightening the curves of her thighs.

“So where is Earth? Above us? Below us? Left or right?”

“No one knows.”

“But there are stars, right? Is this a planet?”

“One of many,” the lady in red said, then paused to give me a conspiratorial smile. “Inhabited ones.”

All my disbelief went out the window with the sudden surge of excitement. “You guys have interplanetary travel!?”

“Sort of.”

“A daredevil shot himself to the moon in the 20’s.” The other woman said.

Death was beginning to sound like a lot of fun. “Do animals come here, too? Are there dinosaurs? If nothing can die again, is meat still alive? Like, how’d you get the leather for your shoes?”

“Slow down,” the woman in red said. “Let’s take this one day at a time. I’m here to help you get adjusted to life outside– you’re about to take the first, and biggest step in your new life, but you can spend all the time you need taking the second.”

We sat together in her cubicle, filling paperwork with my name, date of birth, and the last date I could remember. She said many people chose to celebrate both dates, some only celebrated one. 

I asked her if she knew how I died, but it was just as much of a mystery to her as it was to me. There was no communication between our world and the world of the living, except through the news brought to them by the recently deceased. The world of the dead was just a few steps short of the world of the living.

“Dying young is so awful,” the other woman said wistfully. “If your loved ones don’t follow you, they have an entire life without you. Sometimes, when you see them again, they’re entirely different people,”

When we were finished they turned off their computers and packed their bags. They walked together, steps in sync, chatting about work drama, while I followed behind them through the tight, dark, ugly hallways.

“So, like, what do people do around here for fun?” I asked the woman in red. 

She looked at me like I had cut her off mid-sentence. “The usual.”

“Dancing and drinking.” Her friend agreed.

“Care to show me around some time?” I asked. 

They laughed, and disappeared around a corner before I could ask for her phone number, or at least her name.

I was struck by how stupid I acted around beautiful women. I was alone, with nothing but a folder full of paperwork and a long, dark hallway. I took the same corner, but the path forked again beyond that point. I took the left hand path tentatively, thinking I could turn back around as soon as I saw where it led, but the hallway forked again, and I was lost faster then I expected. 

I kept wandering around, looking for other workers, or another man in riot gear. Maybe a security guard would send someone after me if they saw me on the security cam, or I could just sleep there in the office and try again in the morning. Since I’d just been told nobody could die even more after death, I supposed I could wait indefinitely. Maybe I’d run into a shantytown full of people who never managed to leave. 

I stopped to rest and let my head fall against the wall. As it connected, I noticed the wall was different there. Before I could register exactly why I lost my balance. I struggled to get myself back on my feet but the wall seemed to fall away behind me, and as I tipped over backward, I made out the word TRASH and DANGER written on the wall where I had been standing.

I reached out to grab the walls of the chute, but after a few seconds of struggle, I fell.

At first I was furious. This should never have happened to me in the first place, and being left to plummet down a garbage chute was all the fault of whatever shithead built this ugly office. Then panic set in, and I wondered what was going to happen to me when I landed. A brief, optimistic image of landing without harm flashed through my mind, then replaced by more painful images of being broken and paralyzed, destined to live the rest of eternity on the floor of a dump. Despair flattened me like a balloon. Then a brilliant flash of blue blinded me as the chute abruptly ended. I threw my hands up to block my face, and before I could lower it for a good view, I landed.

It hurt more then anything I ever felt. My whole body was shot through with agony, where before I had only ever felt it in pieces. I lay on my face screaming while I waited for it to end, not caring whether I was safe or in danger or even still whole, just wishing the pain would stop.

It didn’t feel like it would. Instead, I just got impatient to find out whether I could still walk. The impatient itch of being immobile, soaking in my pain placidly, was just as bad as landing. I tested my hands to see if I could feel them. Everything but the pain felt surreal, like a memory, but I tested my strength and pushed myself up.

I rose. Every fragile bone in my hand was solid and unbroken; even my nose was fine. Shocked, I checked my legs, but everything looked sturdy and whole even while my ribs seemed to quiver in the aftermath of the fall.

I sat up and looked around me. There was an unblemished blue sky all around me, and the earth was a desert that stretched across the horizon. There was no sign of the office.

Once the pain was distant enough not to distract me, I got up and walked. 

Hours passed. The sand reflected the moon, and shadows poured from the curve of the dunes. The sky was filled with stars, so many that trying to take them all in just made me dizzy. 

At last, I saw a dark shape in the distance that was squarer then a sand dune. It was some kind of shack, full of sand, broken boxes, a few old bottles and a blanket of uncomfortable wool. I took the blanket and some bottles, thinking one could work as shelter and the other could hold water, if I ever found any, and began to walk again. Over the horizon, I saw a light.

When I followed it, I came up to a wire fence with loops of barbed wire at the top. Inside the fence was dark; I could just make out that there was a compound of one-story buildings standing over long, sharp shadows. The gate was locked. With nowhere else to go, I lay down and went to sleep. 

I was awoken before sunrise by someone pulling my arms behind my back.

“Hey!” I shouted, trying to wriggle free. 

“Relax,” said a voice. “This is just a precaution. We’re taking you to the Sergeant,”

He lifted me by my armpits, put me on my feet, and dragged me through the open gate. The compound was a different place in daylight. It looked square, clean and military.

The soldier dragged me by the elbow around a few corners before parking me in front of a door. We only needed to wait a handful of minutes before an aide opened it from the inside and led us to the desk.

The Sergeant was a skinny white man about fifty years old, with prominent bags under his eyes and lines around his mouth. His white hair was short and thinning, coming to a peak high on his forehead.

“Good morning,” he said. “And where did you come from?”

“From up.” I said, gesturing there with my chin.

He smiled. “Fall through the trash chute? Happens all the time. Don’t worry, we’ll get you back there.”

The soldier next to me inhaled sharply. “But, sir—“

“Not immediately,” he added. “Why not get her some food, first?”

I thought someone would take the handcuffs off me, but when the soldier took me to the mess hall, he just hooked one cuff to a table joint. I could use both hands, provided I leaned in to the corner, but it was slow, and awkward.

I tried to talk to the soldier, but he was annoyingly silent. Not even bitter jokes about my position got a reaction stronger then a self-aware frown.

I had to sit there with my empty plates until the Sergeant was ready to see me again, and two soldiers came to relieve the soldier who’d been watching me. They hooked my hands behind me and took me to the back of the compound, where there was a helicopter whipping the sand with its blades. The Sergeant stood with one foot in the aircraft, smiling cheerfully at me.

They put headphones and a visor over my head. The Sergeant’s voice spoke in my ear;

“Ever been in one of these before?”

“No!”

“Bout time, huh?”

The two soldiers flanking me strapped me into my seat, then climbed into the cockpit. Nothing seemed to happen for a minute or so, and then there was a weightless drop, the legs of the craft hovered over the ground. The blades roared above us. 

The craft dipped, and beneath us I could see the compound, and the shack I found the night before. In daylight, from above, I could see that it was part of a series left half-demolished to the desert.

“You picked a good time to come,” the Sergeant said, his voice blasting into my ear with a roar of static. “Any later and I wouldn’t be here; any earlier, and you’d have to wait.”

I nodded. He wasn’t looking at me. The door was open, and he was holding a strap near the roof as he leaned out, staring down at the ground.

He looked at me and smiled. He had reflective blue sunglasses, the kind I associated with surfers and skateboarders until I was thirteen, and with men over fifty ever since.

“What did they tell you while you were up there?” He asked. “They tell you who built this place?”

I nodded again, and he laughed.

“Nobody built this place,” he said. “It’s not something you can build; do you think human hands could put together something this big? Even if they had all the time in the universe? This is bigger then any of us. It was hard for me to understand, when I first came here, but I had a lot to take in. You excited to meet any celebrities?”

I nodded. The helmet was too big and slipped up and down as I moved.

“Think they’re excited to meet you?”

I shook my head.

“Yeah,” he licked his lips, dry and cracked from the desert. “But it’s exciting, isn’t it? Everybody you read about in the history books is here, somewhere, and you can meet them. You can talk to them and find out what makes them so great, or you can kick them in the balls, if that’s what you want to do. It doesn’t matter. That’s what’s so scary and exciting about this place; you can do whatever the hell you want and get back up again at the end of the day. And you can do that forever. There’s no consequences,”

I felt cold for the first time in days.

“Do you know what that kind of freedom does to some people?” He shouted, leaning into my face. He would be spitting if he had any moisture to spare. “Some of them keep measuring it out one day at a time like there’s still a limit on it. Some of them work and sleep and play in little units of measurement like they need to save some for tomorrow, and that’s fine, they’re the ones who keep the world running smoothly. Those nice ladies up there keep the records and the rules so that there’s some measure of order, but it’s hard to enforce them, because what are you going to do if someone breaks a rule? Put them in jail?”

He laughed.

“Yeah, fine, jail them. Then they get out, in a few months or a few years. It really doesn’t matter, here, and there’s nothing else you can do to people. You’ll see. You can shove a stick of dynamite up their ass and they’ll be back before the sun sets,”

He saw the look on my face and laughed even harder, holding his stomach as he swung his weight on the grip under the roof, leaning out into the air and then back.

“Nobody wants to hear it, but nobody knows how bad it can get. Nobody wants to believe that people can get that bad. Especially not if you’re happy up there, at a desk, keeping time, repeating your life. I like to think of our time on earth as a kind of adolescence, like practice for here. It helps. Everybody finds a coping mechanism after they die. Do you know what killed you?”

I shook my head.

“Me neither. A lot of people don’t. It means nothing. I’ve met people who remember grisly, violent deaths, and people who know they died in their sleep—“

He was interrupted by official-sounding radio chatter.

“Sir, we have visual on the motorcade at oh-one hundred,”

He leaned out to look, and I leaned out too, trusting my harness to hold me in the helicopter but not especially concerned if it didn’t. I looked up, squinting in the glare of the sun for a hole in the sky, or maybe some kind of floating office building. I even half-expected to learn the sky was a painted dome and the sun a giant spotlight, with the office and the world of order above that. All I could see was sunshine and the sky, with the earth so low below us it seemed to tilt.

Crawling through a trail of dust on the desert floor was a line of cars. My brain was so unused to seeing the earth from on high that I felt like I was looking at a flat image only a few feet away.  

“Ok, bring ‘er in,”

The sounds of the blades softened for just a second, and the whole craft dipped to the side. The world and the little cars on the surface rotated beneath us. 

A gunner next to the sergeant produced, assembled, and loaded a rocket launcher with quick, efficient movements. The sergeant took it from him without taking his eyes off the motorcade. He briefly double-checked the work, then carefully braced it against his shoulder and fired it at the ground.

The jeep he’d been aiming for drove out of range just before the rocket could land, but the sand below it burst into an enormous fireball of burning glass. The Jeep flipped and crushed the rear fender of the truck in front of it, toppling it off-balance. The next three cars stopped, but the first took off, still driving out into the desert as fast as it could. People poured out of the cars and pulled passengers out of the wreck, while up in the helicopter, the Sergeant loaded another rocket.

“Don’t worry,” he shouted into my ear. “They’re fine.”

Next he aimed high and shot the sand in front of the escaping truck, clipping the hood and flipping it roof-first into another cloud of sand. 

He took another rocket and aimed his launcher. He fired, but rather then load another, he looked up sharply.

I didn’t understand what was happening at first, but then I realized there was a small, red and white pill traveling on a spiral of smoke towards us.

The sergeant turned to the pilot. “Pull up!”

Whatever, I thought. We’re already dead.

The missile struck the top of the craft. The whole ship lurched in space, and a burst of air as hot as steam blew apart the roof. A shard of burning metal struck the gunner and carried him out of the helicopter, while another pinned the pilot to the window. He struggled in vain to free himself, while the sergeant laughed and grabbed the strap on the shell of the roof.

“Wild, isn’t it?” He asked me. “Better than a roller coaster. Better then a joyride,”

“How am I supposed to get back upstairs?” I shouted. 

“You’ll be fine,” he said. “You’re a civilian,”

“Do you or do you not know what happens to civilians in war!?”

“You have two options; stay with us, or step outside,” he said, and gestured to the spinning disk of sky and earth. Even after my long fall into hell, I could not make myself release my seatbelt and let it take me away.

The ride didn’t end quickly. We toppled head over heels, burning shards falling into my face, the sky flipping above and below. My stomach lurched end over end, threatening to spew no matter how much I choked back the reflex. I tried to reason with it to hold together for a little longer, when we’d crash and have all the sands in the desert to puke on.

In the middle of my bargaining, the ground finally hit us. The impact burst the shell of our chopper like a bubble. The ground swallowed us— sand and rocks struck my face, and then a hard layer of compacted dirt crushed me like a bug. Waves and waves of churned earth covered me, and all I could do was squeeze my eyes shut and wait. Suddenly, puking in the air seemed like a much better option.

I don’t know when it stopped. I feel like I lay there for a long time afterwards, waiting for more. When enough time had passed, I tried to open my eyes. There was nothing but packed earth all around me, filling my nose and pressing against my eyes. I tried to push it away, but I couldn’t move. I panicked and thrashed in the dust, and one arm finally came free. I pushed down and tried to yank my head up, but just struck it against the metal shell of the copter. With my face still in the sand, I dug my other arm out, and then my legs, and carefully managed to turn myself over. I was buried under the remains of the chopper, a foot or so deep into the ground. On my right was a sharp stab of light. I rolled back onto my belly and crawled toward it.

The bare sliver of blinding light between the earth and the copter’s dome was too small for me to squeeze through. I tried to push the dirt out with my hands, but the earth on the other side of the cockpit was too hard-packed by the sun. I went back into the shell of the helicopter and felt around blindly until I grabbed a hard chunk of metal. With it, I managed to pick away at the heavy rock outside the cockpit until I had enough space to push sand and dirt out of the way. 

Slowly, I had a hole just big enough for me to crawl through. The squeeze was tight. My hips were caught in the sides of the hole, and I had to kick and pull my way out, but I popped free and back into the sun.

I sat on the boiling hot sand and took deep, gasping breaths of the baked air. In a minute, I thought to myself, I would dig a bigger hole under the helicopter and camp there for the rest of the day. But as I sat there, shivering despite the heat, a shadow fell across my back. There was a shadow standing over me, contrasted against the sky like a flat black cut-out. I didn’t even see the hand that reached out and pulled me to my feet. 

On my feet, struggling to keep my balance, I felt something hard and metallic press between my shoulder blades. I flinched, and the gun pushed me again. I staggered forward, and my eyes began to adjust enough to make out the dark shape of a Jeep in the distance. With one harsh shove I was pushed inside and the Jeep took off.

The desert looked flat from a distance, but in the car it was like driving on boulders. We jostled roughly in the backseat like the numbers in the lotto ball before the Jeep gently turned to the site where the missle landed. The wrecks were still burning, but the people in them were sitting on the hard ground nearby. 

Someone opened the door and the man behind me kicked me onto the desert floor. Before I could catch myself, someone grabbed me again, handcuffed me, and locked me to a length of chain. There was a long line of us, chained together at the wrist. The man in front of me gave me a grim smile. I could barely recognize him under the dirt smeared across his face, but with the smile I could see a shadow of his previous cockiness; it was the base Sergeant. 

An armored bus arrived, and everyone climbed on, pulling prisoners behind them. We were re-cuffed to the floor, two to a seat. I was left stuck to the commander.

“What’s going on?” I asked.

He stared at his shoes and didn’t answer.

“Jesus! I’m not even a combatant!” I said. I raised my voice. “I’m a civilian!”

“Shut up,” he said, at last.

“No!” I shouted back. “You said it first! I’m a civilian!”

 Three men in the front seat— uncuffed, still armed— stared straight through me. I felt a sudden bolt of cold fear shoot down my spine, and lowered my head.

The bus started and we drove through yellow sand and blue sky for what seemed like hours. The men in front with their guns and freedom played songs I’d never heard on the radio, talked, and laughed. We in the back did not.

The air in the bus was cooled by the open windows overhead, and finally we slowed to a stop. Instead of clipping us back in to a line, one man each took our chains and lead us off the bus like horses, two at a time. The commander stood and followed with his head down, while I strained to see where we were. 

The wall of the facility in front of us dominated my field of vision. An alarm was ringing as a metal gate slowly rose. Just above the wall I could see a round, brick hexagon, like a tower, or maybe a taller building, but on the other side of the wall was just another wall, another gate, and more soldiers. At this gate they separated me from the commander and took me to a solitary room to be processed.

They asked for my name and to surrender my belongings.

“I don’t have any,” I tried to explain. “I’m a civilian, I fell down here from upstairs, I’m a neutral party in you guyses’ fight!”

He ignored me and took down my information, even without me saying a word. Then it was a shower in a tiled stall, and a bright orange jumpsuit, and a cell. My processing number was scrawled in marker on a piece of construction paper and pinned to my front and back.

I was alone again. I stared at the red brick wall of my cell without seeing it.

“Holy shit.”

There was banging from further down the hall, and howling like a dog chained outside in the cold. There were two cots in my cell, and I trembled to think that my last comfort— solitude— could be taken from me.

I slept when I got tired. There was no sense of time in that place; I had no window, and there was no lights out. They woke me up and brought me down to the mess hall to eat. We had an hour of time in the yard. As far as I knew, the sky was always blue, and the sun always blazing.

They walked us in a circle for our exercise, and this was when we did the majority of our talking. The tension in the jail was like a rope around my neck, never breaking, just hanging on my shoulders, always heavier every day.

While we were walking, a man behind me spoke; “What’d you do?”

I wanted to look at him, but I was afraid to turn around. I never saw anyone try. “Nothing,” 

“Oh, really?” 

“She came in with our crew,” said another voice behind me. I just barely recognized the gunner from the helicopter. “She came down from the upstairs, found our outpost while wandering around.”

“That’s rough,” the man behind me muttered.

“Is there anyone else here like me?” I asked.

“Yeah,”

“What do they do?” I asked.

“The same as everyone else.”

Our exercise regime was watched from above by men with guns and body armor. After our daily exercise, we ate and were sent back to our cells. Every time they walked me to my cell, I wondered if today was the day I would find a cell mate. 

One day, as I was waiting for dinner, a guard came in with two men. They looked as if they had been interred within the past two weeks; the nicks on their face and scalps from the shaving were scabbed over and covered with a heavy dusting of hair. They locked them in with me, and we all stood around staring at each other.

The first man said; “There’s only two beds.”

The second man said; “Maybe they’ll bring a cot.”

Fortunately, the dinner alarm sounded, and I was given reprieve from my new cell mates. I should have stayed to talk to them, but I fled instead into the solace of the men I’d made friends with.

“They put two new men in my cell!” I cried.

“Two? There must have been some mistake.”

“They don’t care. They’re never going to change it,”

“You’re right. You’re stuck with them, just like you’re stuck here,”

After dinner was another round of exercise. The sun was still high in the sky. The guards were still standing at their position along the walkway. I couldn’t even tell if they were different men from day to day. My new cell mates caught up to us as we were walking circles around the yard, introduced themselves and got our names in turn.

“So we’re stuck here,” said one man. “With no explanation.”

“No chance of a lightened sentence for good behavior, right?” The second man asked hopefully.

“There’s no such thing as good behavior out here,” said a new, familiar voice. Looking behind us, I recognized the speaker as the former commander of the military force. One eye was swollen shut under a huge red bruise. “We’re here forever. Or until the walls come down. It’s not that bad— when it does, it’ll feel like no time has passed.”

We walked in silence, each of us picturing untold amounts of time falling away from us, emerging as new as the day we came in.  

“This is fucking bullshit.” I muttered, and all I got as consolation was the muttered agreement of the men around me.

 
    The next day was the same.
    The day after that was the same.
    After that, the same. 

When the walls came down, there was no warning, no sign to warn us it was coming. I can’t pretend the air was more electric then before, or that the weather was any different. There wasn’t even a cloud in the sky to dim the blazing sun. 

We were walking circles in the yard, each of us at our own pace. There was a shout from somewhere far, far away, joint by another. Answering calls back and forth from way over our heads, along the guards’ walkways. No one looked up or slowed their exercise until the shooting began.

It was distant, at first. It wasn’t the first time we’d heard gunfire, carried across the flat expanse of desert with no obstacles to hold it back. Men always stopped to savor any small change in our daily routine.

But the guards were responding, and the gunfire didn’t stop. In fact, the more it continued, the closer it sounded, until there were other sounds mixed in with the staccato of gunfire. Engines revving, the hot, dry burst of an explosion. The sounds of men shouting, not just cries of pain or short direction but extended conversation over the rattle of buttons firing. More of the men around me stopped to watch and listen, and when I came across the still and staring figure of the former Sergeant, I too stopped to look up. 

The blue sky was streaked with clouds of smoke.  Heavy tendrils of ash hung down like curls while the soldiers swarmed the battlements above us, swearing and firing into the desert below. I’d never seen so many soldiers in one place, pushing each other aside to reach the edge. Then, as I watched, they broke apart. The crowd split in two and ran in opposite directions in groups so thick they pushed each other over the edge and down into the exercise arena. Then there was a rumble, like thunder, and the wal began to bulge. Chunks of brick flew out and struck men in the head as they stared. The Sergeant took three quick steps back and slammed into me. He pushed me back without seeing me, urging me into a run as the wall burst in a rain of broken shards of brick. Mortar rained  down across the exercise arena. A cloud of dust rolled across us and burst against the far wall. A wave of dust swept into my face as I tried to retreat. I slammed blindly into the man in front of me, and before I could recover, someone else slammed into me from behind. The stampede collapsed in on itself in a mass of frantic, churning limbs. I protected my head as people scratched and fought each other for freedom, aggressive in their panic. As the dust settled around us, the sounds of battle grew quieter. There wasn’t screaming or gunfire. Instead, there was just the more sedate sounds of engines revving and boots slamming against the ground. 

As we disentangled ourselves, someone grabbed me by the arms and lifted me to my feet. The solid concrete floor was hidden under two inches of thick dust, a combination of debris and sand. The sun was barely visible above us, like a lamp behind a screen, and every shape was muddy in the fog. I could see people walking around, and the halo of light around the hole in the wall. But there was something sitting in it that I couldn’t make out. As I got closer, the shape became sharper. It was big, boxy. A tank, I thought, more because I thought it made sense then because the shape was fully visible.

“What happened?” I asked, to anyone who might be listening. There was no answer. I walked toward a crowd former near the hole and worked my way through to the front.

“This motherfucker.” Someone said darkly as I passed. As I got to the front I began aware of someone shouting, giving us some kind of explanation for what happened.

When I reached the front, it was mother fucking Napoleon.