Project Itoh - Genocidal Organ

“Why did I kill everyone?”

“Shut up.”

“But why?”

And that was that. I just couldn’t take it anymore.

I drew my blade across his throat. Fresh blood splattered and turned the mosque wall into a Jackson Pollock painting. Before he had time to choke on his own blood I quickly hamstrung him so that I could force his once-imposing body to the ground and thrust my blade into his heart. As I did so, blood bubbled from his mouth and his eyes flared open.

The former brigadier general, the man who had called himself defense minister for the interim government, was dead.

The great commander of the estimated thirty-five thousand armed insurgents who terrorized the countryside was dead.

I felt as if reality had snapped back and hit me in the face. I realized for the first time that the piano melody that had been filling the room had long since faded without a trace.

Moonlight Sonata had finished without my noticing. I shook my head to clear my thoughts before looking around. It was as if I’d been in some sort of magical alternate dimension and forgotten to breathe while I was there. I gulped again for air.

Rat-a-tat-tat. Rat-tat.

The night that had briefly been caressed by the Moonlight Sonata had returned to echoing the sound of people killing each other.

“What on earth happened here, sir?”

I turned around to see Alex’s troubled expression. All I could do by way of response was sigh. I didn’t even want to start thinking about how to explain the old man’s extraordinary behavior.

“Are you all right, sir?” Alex asked again. Ever the professional, even as he spoke to me he was checking the corpse of the ex-brigadier general that lay on the floor. He was using the recording capabilities of the nanolayer implants in his eyes to confirm and record the old man’s death from as many angles as possible.

“Yeah. It looks like Target B isn’t coming here tonight, though.”

“Oh. Unlike Intelligence to get that wrong,” Alex said calmly, going about his work.

I could hear more gunfire in the distance.

The atrocities in this area aren’t quite over yet , I thought to myself.

1

Hell is here , Alex had said.

You can’t escape from hell. Because hell’s right here, inside your mind, and you carry it around with you.

Two years had passed since the night I killed the former brigadier general, but to be honest I seemed to be doing a good enough job of evading my own personal hell. I did occasionally return to the land of the dead in my dreams, but that was too peaceful a place to really be called hell.

I never knew what Alex’s personal hell looked like to him. He never did tell me, and now it was too late. As I looked on at his coffin being carried out of the church I wondered whether he had finally made it to that heaven he’d talked about. After all, Catholics had moved on from their unforgiving dogma of the past, hadn’t they? The pearly gates were open to all these days.

Even to those who chose to die.

That’s how it was possible for Alex to have a Catholic funeral service even though he had taken his own life. In medieval Europe, suicides were buried at crossroads. People couldn’t forgive the grave sin of taking away the most precious gift given by God, and so the sin was punished by forcing the ingrate’s spirit to roam the earth without respite until the ultimate release of Judgment Day.

These days the Catholic Church didn’t feel the need to punish the dead who had, presumably, already suffered enough. Alex’s ceremony and burial were just like any other Catholic funeral service—solemn, dignified, and grave. The eulogy was given by the same old Irish priest who had delivered Alex’s first communion.

We were all notified immediately on the night that Alex gassed himself in his car, and it was our job to enter his lodgings to find his last will and testament. His room was orderly to the point of obsession. His book collection consisted entirely of theological monographs and various editions of the Bible. Once upon a time Williams had asked Alex to recommend him a good book. I’ve finished all mine and I’m bored, he had said. What sort of book do you like, sir, Alex had replied. I dunno, something entertaining, plenty of sex, drugs, and violence, Williams said. Then Alex just laughed and proudly presented Williams with a Bible.

We scoured the apartment but found no sign of a will or a suicide note. Alex had evidently made up his mind to sail his ship alone, without saying anything to anyone.

Alex was actually the second suicide I had known in my life.

As a result—and no offense to Alex—his death didn’t have as much of an impact on me as it might have. After all, the first person I’d known who’d killed himself had been my dad, and they say there’s no greater trauma than that—although that’s horseshit, frankly, as I was still a little brat when my dad offed himself and had no real conception of what death meant, so how was I supposed to be shocked by it? All it did was set the precedent for people close to me dying all the time, something that I could never quite get away from.

Why had my dad chosen death? Best rephrase that question. I doubt my father had the capability to choose. Suicide isn’t a choice; it’s what you do when there are no choices left. At least I’m sure that’s the way it was in my father’s mind—blank, except for one final course of action.

It might not be correct to say that he chose to leave this world, but he sure did choose how he left it. After a number of failed attempts at hanging himself when no one was at home, he fell back on the nation’s favorite default method of suicide. In other words, he blew his brains out. The method of choice of roughly fifty percent of all American suicides, statistically. That’s how it was twenty years ago when my dad did the deed, and it’s still true now. It’s such an easy way to go. When you look at the demographic of people who already have access to firearms—most adults, in other words—you’ll see that for them the statistic is closer to seventy percent. From the bum on the street to the mightiest CEO, the gun was the great leveler: all citizens were alike when their brains were splattered on the wall. Hemingway and Hunter S. Thompson and Kurt Cobain all used this method; and as it needs no special preparation beforehand it can be as quick and easy as whipping it out of your pocket and blasting your head off. There’s still footage circulating on the web of Budd Dwyer blowing his brains out at a press conference. In a sense it’s unfortunate for minors that they can’t easily get their hands on guns, and thus have to resort to hanging themselves or some other inferior method. Hanging is the second most popular method of suicide in the States.

They couldn’t pin down a precise time of death for my father. Well, back then they didn’t yet have the Firearms Registry that we have now, and it goes without saying that guns weren’t routinely tagged at the point of sale either. These days, if you used a gun to kill yourself, the Federal Firearms Registry tag implanted in the grip would take an exact record of when the shot was fired, and the data would be transmitted instantly to the central database of the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms, Tobacco, and Explosives, so it’d be possible to get an accurate time of death, or rather the exact time the bullet ripped through its owner’s brains. The time recorded on the BATFE database was a de facto gravestone. My father didn’t have the benefit of this modern technology to mark his legacy, though, so his epitaph had to state “died at some unspecified time one afternoon when everyone else was out of the house.”