Prophecy (VII)

It was a city once—now it is charred concrete blocks. The body that lies beneath me belongs to a boy—really, he has seen no life. His age is seventeen, no doubt—he had seen so little, and when I was his age I knew nothing at all. Well, that’s not quite true—for I knew what I needed, except it was buried. Let’s say it took a decade or two to extract the essential truth. His face is disfigured, it has imploded from the impact—it’s sooty. A handsome face, harder than my face at that age—but I grew up in soft times, whereas this boy grew up in the hardest times. He had become remorseless, even at this age—he killed his first man two years ago, I couldn’t imagine such a thing at his age (though I talked big then, like all young people—that is to say I was what some people call “innocent”, but today I would call “ignorant”).

There are other bodies around the place—the outlanders, the outsiders. The people who were brought to replace us—a woman in a veil, her body collapsed over two children (she withered under machine-gun fire—an importune attempt to cross the street in a gunfight). In other sectors we proceed in a systematic and scientific way—that’s called “sarin”. There are a great many—they die easily, there is minimal suffering (and for people at their psychical level it is a release—they were brought here to consume, to own v.7.3 of a phone; you can’t call such an existence life—just the desire to consume).

Even now, people do not understand the old days—“consumption”, it was disease that ate the lungs (meant you died with bloody froth on your breath). We have had enough consumption in this country—self-consumption, self-pleasure (the doctors used to advise it to “prevent prostate cancer”—if you can believe it; well, some people will believe anything).

I am responsible for all this—for this death. I don’t mind. I killed a sparrow with my own staff years ago—it sang a sweet tune as it died, if it was a distress call I didn’t recognise it as such. I remember that sparrow, but for these faces—black, brown, yellow (brought to replace us by Semitic flesh-traders) I don’t feel anything. Heap their bodies up, turn the flamethrowers on them—the bodies are a sanitary risk.

I’ve never been the leader, I’m not the trigger-man—I’m the one who stands behind it all (an ideas man, as my father said—or, you could say, I get the big picture; aka, a philosopher).