CHAPTER 01

I’m writing this all down in the hope of someone reading it that has never met me. I don’t think writing memoirs for people who know you is a very wise decision. The thoughts, emotions and ideas you share might offend those you care about. Writing to people who you will never see has a different feel to it, however. What thoughts one can impart on others can be great gifts, or horrible burdens. I only hope these words are a gift, not a burden. The burden has been among us for some time, it is time for it to be lifted.

The time in which I have to do this is short, I expect, so if I skip things from time to time I apologize. I keep thinking that perhaps I will just keep writing and living forever. Mysteriously my life will be prolonged as long as my hand can transfer these words to the paper smuggled in by an unsuspecting guard. In the end, my death comes not with the completion of this manuscript, but when He sees fit. I have never written anything like this, so if it is crude or incorrect I ask for your grace again. My mother always said when you tell a story to start at the beginning or you will never get your point across. It’s kind of a funny saying because when people tell stories to each other they often don’t have a point at all. Do I have a point? Does all this have a meaning for you? I think the point is to allow you to make up your own mind. I suppose this is my troubled attempt to answer the ancient “what is the meaning of life?” question we have asked ourselves since we could think that deeply. Each of us decides that answer for our self in the end, however, based on what we believe, think, and experience in our separate existences. Each of our lives is tainted by experience. There are factors that contribute to who we are that weigh heavily on how we build upon that foundation.

I spent a good part of my childhood in the foster asylum system downtown. Downtown where the people are crushed into a life deserved by none yet offered to all. I believe it’s been torn down now, that asylum, though I haven’t really been down there to look it over. That’s been a long time ago. Before the asylum I lived with my mother in the Western Projects of the City. We came there just before I was born; one more displaced pregnant woman who had been allocated a hovel in which she and her illegitimate young son would cower away from the world around them. That is before they scourged the problem of unplanned pregnancy from a society burdened by dependency. Although mother never mentioned my father, the neighborhood was seething with his legend. That is to say, everyone has something to say when it comes to the identity of a bastard’s father except his own family.

I heard he had been a soldier on the frontier, a sailor during the Outer Pacific Campaign, and an astronaut during the Satellite Projects and a host of other possible men with some positive connotation associated with it. But in the end, the negative possibilities of the rumors that floated about the building like dark bats with invisible wings far outweighed the others. I overheard someone say my mother had been raped. Others said she had served as a prostitute for the enlisted men at the Academy, she had left my father who was an alcoholic, he had been murdered because of gambling debts, he was just a scumbag, and a myriad of other explanations that somehow I doubted.

I think in my own mind he evolved into a combination of those possibilities. But eventually, since my mother forbade my questioning, he became a hero of the frontier who had sacrificed himself for his platoon as they overran the Mormon Saints in Salt Lake, which actually happened some twenty years before. I realize there could be no natural way for him to be my father if he died ten years before my birth, but that was the story I chose for myself. It motivated me and inspired me to succeed. It enabled me to follow in his footsteps, even if they were imaginary. It was my secret identity for him and it served me for a long time, filling a void in my heart with a manufactured comfort. People comfort themselves in many ways and lying to one’s self is often a form of smoothing out the rough spots in life. Like all lies, though, it was a shallow substitute for reality.

Amidst the chronic poverty of the inner City (realizing of course that there is no outer City since the Protectorate created the megalopolis thirty years before) I managed to grow up and passed my sixth grade entrance exam to the State School. This was after mother had died of smallpox the winter before. I had been at the foster asylum nine months by that point. The test opened doors that would change me from a future degenerate to a soldier with a career path and a chance for a family of my own. I spent the next twenty years as an upstanding member of a society I didn’t choose, didn’t form and would finally not accept. But during those years leading up to my personal rebellion, I plodded along like every other good citizen of the state. I did what they told me, when they told me, how they told me to do it. I believed what they taught me. I felt what they wanted me to feel. I carried out their terrible plans to the best of my ability. I was a career man with everything going for him. I had managed to crawl up out of the gutter and show myself I could have value – even if that value was hollow and superficial and laced with deceit, evil and ridiculous notions of success.

I often lay awake at night and wonder about a great many things. I bring this up because when I think back, I realize that I lost that ability in my childhood and really only gained it again recently: that ability to think for myself. It’s funny what one thinks about when finally resigned to the fact that everything is really not under our own control, even those petty things we think are.

Can my heart beat much longer or will it stop of its own volition sometime before dawn? My lungs process oxygen and distribute it to my blood stream as they have done since my birth, but how much longer will they function? Will I remember what my mother’s face looked like until the day I die or will she eventually fade away like other early memories? Idiotic questions, some, but very real in the mind of a young boy with no family and no one to turn to but gruff drill instructors and fellow cadets. None of them had the answers.

My studies didn’t go well at first and I found myself an outcast by the end of my first year. The other cadets didn’t consider me bright enough to make it, so they stopped trying to be my friend and simply ignored me. The instructors were constantly embarrassing me in class. My grades were barely acceptable.

I cried myself to sleep at night and finally vowed to push the past behind me, and stop jeopardizing my future. I didn’t want to end up on the streets, begging for what little there was to beg from others who had nothing. I didn’t want to end up in prison. I didn’t want to be ignored. I wanted to make a difference. I wanted to be somebody, anybody, besides the poor, fatherless little wretch I had been born.

I said goodbye to the memory of my mother and embraced my studies. I promptly accepted the fact I had no father and never would. I graduated near the top of my class. My military career had promise and I had now filled the hole in my heart with blind patriotism and a desire to perform my duty to the utmost extent of my ability.

The years to follow are not years of joy and achievement, but pain and suffering, inflicted by me on the lives of others all in the name of duty, honor, family, success, acceptance. It was only a beginning… and I wouldn’t ask myself difficult questions until some years later. But, I did ask.