Project Itoh - Genocidal Organ

The afternoon after the letter arrived was terrifyingly silent. I felt that people were watching over me to see if I would use the account to read my mother’s online memories. When I say people I meant the dead, of course.

After fifteen minutes of hesitation, I accessed my mother’s account and commanded the Life Graph to compile her biography for me.

John Paul had passed me a notebook back in the jungle. I flicked through it to skim its contents, but it was full of obscure academic jargon too difficult for me to understand.

But there was one thing in the notebook that was to prove useful later on. The user name and password of an email account.

An interesting development was that the press somehow found out the true reason for the former senate majority leader’s abrupt withdrawal from public life. I never discovered where the leak came from. An investigative committee was formed and Congressional hearings were held. Even as the whole affair was dragged out into the media, the former senator seemed unrepentant. He made a bold declaration—that we in the US of A always needed the spectacle of war. At any given time, we needed a war to be happening somewhere in the world. And above all, we needed the tragedy of war to be happening somewhere else , in some place where it couldn’t affect us directly. He explained that he had come to this realization some time ago, and that only by being a witness to these sorts of wars could people truly self-actualize and become aware of the potential of their own selves.

This wasn’t the old-fashioned theory that all people in a country needed a common enemy so that they could pull together as a unified nation. No. It was about wars happening overseas, somewhere, vaguely, and being able to pick up on the rustles and murmurs, like background music in a shopping mall. That was what we needed for the twenty-first century, the former senator explained. And John Paul had been the man for the job—he had been able to ensure a steady supply of war.

As a former member of the Special Forces, and as a former member of an elite top-secret assassination unit that performed the government’s dirty work, I was given a huge amount of face time at his hearing and given ample opportunity to tell my stories again and again, just the way I wanted to. Because of my revelations, Washington was plunged into the greatest scandal yet of the twenty-first century, possibly one of the biggest of all time. Of course, my actions violated the State Secrets Protection Act, which was why it came to pass that the US Armed Forces Intelligence Captain Clavis Shepherd was indicted.

In the end, though, the long arm of the law never did get around to dealing with me. There was rioting across the nation by that stage, and the powers that be found that they had far bigger fish to fry. Various state National Guards found themselves opening fire on ordinary citizens, and in turn their armories were being swept away by insurgents who were arming themselves to the teeth to fight back.

Finally, I settled down to read the Life Graph, under the beady eyes of my ever-vigilant spectral companions.

My mother’s life, as regurgitated by computer software.

The story of the pair of eyes that constantly watched over me.

So why was there was no room for me in this story?

Traces of my mother’s gaze. The feeling that I was constantly being watched. These were my childhood memories. And it seemed that they were betrayed. If my mother’s biography according to the Life Graph was anything to go by, I barely featured at all in her life.

I wasn’t completely absent, of course. The important events and landmarks were all there, but with minimal detail. Almost as though I were an afterthought. The person who really came to life in my mother’s memory was my father. Overwhelmingly. The man who had blown his brains out and suddenly disappeared from my mother’s life. And yet he had not disappeared at all. Not from her memories.

Mom wasn’t looking at me. She had never been looking at me.

I could now say with confidence that the person who’d scrubbed my father’s splattered brains off the walls after he shot himself was my mother.

Everybody’s life story is interwoven with sections of other people’s stories. My story contained elements of Mom’s story, of Williams’s story, of the stories of Lucia Sukrova and John Paul. But Mom’s story barely mentioned me at all.

But …

I tried to work out what had actually happened in my past then. That constant presence, the gaze that I always felt on the back of my collar. It had to have been real. It had to have been. Even after all these years I could still remember, vividly, the goose bumps I used to feel when I met my mother’s gaze from the most exquisite of angles, such as from that little slip of space between the kitchen and the hallway to the bathroom. We were like two snipers targeting one another, discovering the spine-tingling coincidence that the other was looking at you through their scope at the very same instant that you had found them with yours.

And yet the record that was supposed to confirm that this constant gaze I’d felt upon me was indeed a mother’s love was curiously, bafflingly, bewilderingly absent.

So what the hell was it?

If I thought that I was empty after that last mission, well, I hadn’t seen anything yet. Because now I was empty. Now I was hollow. Now there was a gnawing void inside me.

And John Paul’s notebook filled that void. It was a perfect fit. Maybe it was even the case that the notebook sensed the void in me and picked me out.

So I’m feeling pretty satisfied because I’d been able to squeeze in plenty of appropriate grammatical forms into the news clip I’m now watching. The email account that John Paul left me contained a text editor that could generate a grammar of genocide for the English language.

John Paul had used this to imbue all kinds of words with the tincture of death. He had disseminated those words around the world. Well, that was then. This was now. I’m weaving my own tale of genocide.

John Paul’s grammar was, in a way, like sheet music. As an homage, I decided to make my version as close to music as I could.

So I chanted it and I recited it. The sound. The rhythm. I prayed, deliberately, intensely: I want you to start killing each other. Just like so many people outside America have already killed each other. All the while I thought how nice it would be if someone noticed what I was doing, noticed the simple, functional evidence that this was a prayer, a song.

My words started to take shape, and gradually they penetrated the fabric of American discourse. My words, my songs, my images, my tone of voice, all started seeping into the collective psyche of the people who watched or listened to or had any interest whatsoever in my Congressional hearing. Even if a person merely accessed the Congressional Record after the fact, there was enough latent deep structure embedded into my transcribed speeches for my grammatical tune to kick in inside their minds.

In no time at all the original scandal stopped being an issue. I rammed home the grammar of genocide into this country, the USA, a country that previously never even showed the slightest of omens that a civil war might be brewing. I was a puppet master, a god riding the crest of an unstoppable mechanical force, ruthlessly, relentlessly changing the course of the lives of mere mortals. It was a smooth process, almost automatic.