John Shirley - A Song Called Youth

Now he made a decision. He would need the food now, for the strength to talk. The day’s ration would come soon, if it came at all, and he had to talk before the ration came. He had to talk to everyone.

He moved to the heap of trash to the right of the steps, where there was an overturned sofa whose synthetics, churned by acid rains, had collapsed into a gummy, shapeless mass of shit brown. He knelt behind it, reached into the plastic frame, felt for the package. Panicked. It was gone. Stolen! He bent over, stuck his head in the mildewy, soggy stuff, clawing it away from his eyes… saw the glint of shiny plastic wrapping. There. He drew out the little rectangular transparent plastic container, with shaking fingers hit the open-tab. Its top peeled itself open, and he ladled the stuff into his mouth with his fingers. Tasted of vat-chicken and mold.

Maybe his great decision was a sham, was just an excuse to eat the food, he thought.

He felt the warmth and mood-lift of the sugars, the proteins roll through him, lifting him inside like a summer updraft, and he sucked it from his fingers and thought: Now.

He turned and began to run to Gabrielle, thinking he’d share the last of the paste with her; then told himself: don’t run. Conserve your energy. He strolled to her, glancing at the camera on the opposite building, knowing the guards could be monitoring him. Hidden food was contraband. He saw foxfaced Dindon watching him sharply, eyeing the plastic box. “Give some me, or I tell the guards,” Dindon said.

“Fuck off,” Roseland said. “You say anything, I’ll kill you in your fucking sleep. No, I take it back. I’ll wake you up first.” He felt positively eloquent now.

He hunkered next to Gabrielle and offered her the food. She just stared at it. He took her grimy hand and dipped her fingers in it; he put her fingers to her mouth. After a moment she sucked the paste away, and kept sucking absently on her fingers. He took her hand from her mouth and fed her the rest of it, except for a thin coating around the edges of the tin. He tossed the package to Dindon, sensing that Dindon and the sallow Lebanese guy beside him were going to jump him for it anyway, and then went into the building. Someone said, “If you go in, the guards won’t let you come back out again.”

He didn’t reply. He took Gabrielle’s arm and dragged her after him, went into the all-consuming stench of the place and gagged a moment—you could smell it more when you had strength—and then he climbed the stairs and went into a room, and everyone looked up. He paused, looking at them, overcome by an unexpected amazement: it was as if he was seeing them for the first time. Sagging faces, dull eyes, pallor, cueball heads, misery shared between them with stunning uniformity. He knew that he looked just exactly the same. And he began to talk. After a while, urged by Roseland, Gabrielle fell into the rhythm of translating. The urgency, the mood, the insistence they took from his tone; the sense from Gabrielle’s affectless translation.

At first no one really listened. They were faces emptied of volition, like a room full of cancer-eaten children watching cartoons—children bald from chemotherapy, sunken from disease—turning incuriously, briefly, to see who was at the door of their terminal ward. But in about an hour, near dusk, the guards came with the ration pail, and prisoners had a little strength after that, they were adults again briefly, enough to listen, to stand, to consider, as—once the guards had gone—Roseland kept talking. Driven by the rage of six months’ confinement and degradation, driven by a sacred memory—the Holocaust—he kept talking. Articulating their feelings for them, talking their feelings alive again, like breathing CPR into a drowned man, bringing him back. He talked, and he kept moving, even after he felt his strength ebbing, adrenaline spurring him on from room to room. He spoke of dignity. He spoke of slow, degraded death and quick glorious death; he said, “Who will die with me today? Who will die in freedom? Who will die with me so that they see us as we are? Who will die so that our people remember us? Who will go with me now?”

Some of them followed him up to another room, and another, and he kept talking. The SA hadn’t bothered to wire the rooms; they could talk all they wanted, if they had the strength, and he used that luxury, used it up, kept talking, talking till he was hoarse and then mute…

But by then the others were talking, saying things that had been said before but never acted on. Only now Roseland was the activating spark, and they felt a conflagration growing in them, a burning strength in the mutuality of their choice and their conviction. They felt it all around them, charging the air, growing toward a Moment.

The Moment came when two SA guards came to the first room downstairs and shouted, “What the bloody ’ell is all this noise? No more talk! Lights out!”

And then the call went up from hallway to hallway, stair to stair, room to room, “ Maintenant! Now!”

And the surge began, a lava eruption of people from the volcanic recesses of the high-rise, the first two guards borne down and disarmed, their armor pried at till it came away and they lived only long enough to kill twice and to shriek once apiece. All the while the others surged past them and down the stairs and out the doors, chanting, a chant led by Roseland, “ Jamais plus! Jamais plus! Jamais plus! Jamais plus! ”

Never again! rolling endlessly and raggedly from two thousand parched throats as they poured from the building.

Some of them slung offal at the cameras, trying to block the lenses, and partially succeeded, but the guns found their targets anyway, guided by the sensors in the microwave fences.

The mass of starveling detainees surged across the microwave barriers, setting off the sirens; the cameras swiveling, the guns barking like startled dogs, people screaming, others remembering what Roseland had drilled into their heads: Don’t turn back when the shooting starts, because they’ll only kill us all anyway. No matter what, don’t stop. Die with me today.

Your sister falls beside you, shot in the back: don’t stop.

Your husband stumbles and falls: don’t stop.

Your best friend spits blood and screams for help: don’t stop!

“Don’t stop!” Roseland bellowed in the midst of them, dragging Gabrielle along beside him, “ Jamais plus! ” Never again!

The dying words of a hundred people, two hundred, three hundred, mowed down by thundering guns equipped with hundreds of thousands of rounds… machine guns with computer guidance, guns unceasingly fed, capable of aiming themselves and firing for days if necessary…

Roseland was distantly aware that detainees in the other building were watching, across the compound, from cracks in the sealed-over windows and from the front steps; a few making tentative motions as if to join the rebellion—until they saw the lake of blood spreading out from the fallen…

Roseland kept going, past the empty bunker, dragging Gabrielle along, hearing bullets whine past his head, hearing her scream.

Turning to see her brains flying out her mouth.

Letting go of her. Choking with grief—but, Don’t stop.

The machine guns never pausing, cutting methodically and almost flawlessly, rows of men and women falling like harvested wheat…

The security system was flawed: the machine guns were programmed to concentrate their fire at the compound’s perimeters; if they’d concentrated their fire on the building doorways, almost no one would have escaped.

As it was, of fifteen hundred who’d run, some four hundred won past the guns; leaving eleven hundred dead and dying, a reservoir of carnage, of suffering and blood. As the buildings shook with the whoops of sirens, the yammer of guns, almost drowning out the screaming and the chanting. Jamais plus.