[This is a section from the longer story “Jump”, posted yesterday. It’s a war story; maybe an oblique rethinking of the story of Arjuna on the Battlefield, dealing with the meaning of duty and selflessness and illusion. Not that it was rationally planned as a story with that intent. But it intertwined with those issues, while also metabolizing the writer’s own demons regarding the nature of reality and illusion, which had seriously bothered him as a teenager].

The boy slept poorly and awoke early in anticipation of the mission that night. Then he threw up several times. It was a familiar dread, pre-jump jitters. Not just performance anxiety, or the fear of death, nor the heavy regret of knowing he placed himself in this extreme, and insane predicament voluntarily, nor the envy he feels at breakfast, seeing the carefree jocularity of the ground crew, and the meteorologists, who would never directly enter battle, let alone fly to the roof of the atmosphere itself, and leap into almost pure, frozen space, a half-assed astronaut, a momentary falling spacewalker, until the double-bag static line finishes unfolding, and holds him in a tug-of-war between the canopy pulling up, and the heavy load of his equipment, pulling down.

And then of course, what follows.

But something else was weighing him down now, and had been for quite some time, slowing his every step, as if he were sinking in sand. And it was preventing the boost of adrenaline he’d soon need.

A few hours prior to rigging up, he was hanging out with his “stick” (his paratrooper team) and they were ribbing each other and shooting the shit. Their last moments of relaxation.

But he could never banter very well. He sat on the floor with his back against a door-jam, enjoying the mild grinding pain of the spine against the edge of the jam.

This was his first serious combat jump, a HAHO deep into enemy territory to take out a relay post, and then bushwack back to safe ground, in what’s called an overland exfiltration. In about an hour, they’d start the elaborate procedures and checks and rechecks that took up the better part of 3 hours, prior and during the flight, which was going to be a long one.

Then they’d ride the canopy for a long way this time, about 30 miles, to a drop zone (DZ) in a narrow clearing in the fairly dense coastal forests and then make their way to their objective.

And only then would the real work begin.

His stomach was caught in a nest of butterflies, which no amount of puking could dislodge.

Although he was confident by now in his own body’s knowledge, he couldn’t slow his thoughts. He’d been slipping in his resolve over the last few weeks. And worse than that: On the edge of an old, familiar sinkhole, which he thought he’d finally outrun for good.

He was half-listening to the banter, which occasionally targeted him, but was mostly high-spirted and brotherly.

The eyes of Sergeant Max, who was both the jumpmaster and the stick leader on this operation, shifted sharply into his own. To avoid the eyes, he looked at his hands, wringing themselves repeatedly, trying to get out of this world. He apologized to them. He spoke to them in his head, as if they were individuals. He was trying to squeeze his consciousness into the refuge of their little world. It was something he did since he was a small child. He became a finger hiding in a pocket, oblivious of everything.

What if they knew he was thinking these thoughts?

For some reason, he started recollecting the rhyme, “there was a crooked man, who walked a crooked path.” There was something that haunted him in those old fairy tales and rhymes. As a little kid, he’d read them over and over again. They were like flares of a lost memory, a world that was no more or less real than this one, but dim and unearthly. The sky in that world had a mild orange sheen that was ominous and sickly, or like a storm brewing. And yet it was appealing in some crooked way, because that world seemed more gigantic than ours, ungoverned and unmapped. A twisted place of promise and peril, closer to hell than our world. And maybe closer to Heaven too. Because this world seemed to float in a distant pretense that was farther from either. Or, maybe that world was a shadowy reflection of this one. All those horrible lives peeking out from between the sanitized rhymes and disinfected remnants of strange old tales, a starving old woman with her empty cupboards and whining dog, another stranded woman living in a worn-out shoe with all those kids, the horror of the Juniper Tree, and the Robber Bridegroom, cannibals, curses, witches and giants.

But this world was no less weird and absurd, flying 30 miles through the air in a battle between vague digital kingdoms, a tug of war to add unimaginable hordes of wealth to already unimaginable hordes, while all the subjects of these kingdoms were becoming ever more impoverished.

Every experience he’d ever had in this sharp, cold, metallic reality faded quickly into memories that were less real than the stories he knew as a kid.

“Green and yellow,” he kept whispering to himself, rocking, almost hypnotized. He was always the yellow greenhorn, the boy who could only grow up in fits, starts and quick retreats.

But the others were looking at him now, so he sat still and closed his eyes.

The brave thing would be to stand up right now and leave. That would be a reasonable rebellion from this madness. To give up the cowardly pretense of being brave. Kept here only by a fear of what they’d think.

He glanced at the Sergeant, which caused these dreams to fade, and allowed the dream of what lay ahead to rise to the surface.

It was one dream or another, no matter what he did. But the surface of his mind was being agitated by the magma of an older fear deeper than death. Everything was melting into illusion once again. His thoughts were chewing through every solidity he thought he’d found since the first eruption of that hell-hole in early adolescence. And now, at the worst moment.

He got into the special forces by way of a late adolescent surge of adrenaline — a mirage of confidence and daring.

And by the time his enthusiasm for all this wore off, he’d already immersed himself deeply enough in the training and memorizing and web of mutual support (which felt at first closer to love than anything he’d ever known), until he realized he was trapped by nothing less than peer pressure and false pride yet again, and felt he had no choice but to double-down.

And only now, with minutes remaining until the whole routine starts, the rigging and checking, the slow self-encasement in one layer after another, all that tech setup, the mental exertions, the focus that finally quiets all this thought, or let’s hope it does, and all the while sucking pure oxygen, draining the nitrogen from the body, just a weak monkey-body encased in artificial skeletons and skins, encased in a material illusion, and chanting all these vows and cliches, which might as well be nursery rhymes. He has only minutes of slack remaining. It’s already pitch dark outside, the plane is fueling. At the edge of this immense task, his thoughts are openly rebelling.

He’s not meant for this. He knows he’s been driven to these extremes by forces that were always external to him. A hollow center filled by the flung bullshit of madmen. The sharp rebukes and heavy hands that molded each of them into madmen themselves. I’m going to kill people I’ve never met, with whom I have no argument. It’s all on someone else’s word. And someone else beyond that. Nobody knows what’s real. Either they fear reality or the bottomless absence, the hellhole, where all the demons hatch.

He was in high dudgeon within himself now.

All this bullshit about being their own men, when all they did was take orders. He almost said this out loud.

Some did, now and then, openly admit they’d enslaved themselves to fools. But they’d laugh! They’d soften it into a cliché! Taking orders from leeches, educated pedophiles in high places. We’re just punks to these fools, some would say, after a jump, while dreaming of promotion.

But he’d go farther in his head: When they need bodies to die for their profit, or because they were bored by the usual circus, they’d dredge up the high and mighty language of patriotism and honor, and we’d lap that shit up like starving dogs.

He didn’t say it out loud, but they saw it in his eyes, and didn’t like what they saw.

Even now, he thinks he’s sitting quietly against the door jam. But his eyes are giving him away. He is blaming the others for his own cowardice. They can smell it.

All those sacred vows they took! What’s the Pledge of Allegiance but a nursery rhyme? If they admitted it, they’d start sliding like him. That hole would open. They’d know what he knew. And if they knew what he thought right now, all these comrades in arms, this warm embrace of this stick, would turn on him like a pack of demons. Unity was a lie they couldn’t admit. The nation they were killing and dying for, where was that? There was no unity there either, just demons tearing at each other, and calling their temporary alliance a nation.

Breathe Breathe.

“Hey, Junior, what are you mumblin’ to yourself?” says a bear of a man, the DPL (or deputy team leader of his stick), who might or might not have been nick-named “Bear”, because his real name was “Floyd Daniel Baer”, a corporal.

The boy couldn’t help admiring him. Even though Bear always made him conscious of his own immaturity and weakness, and ashamed, now, of all these critical thoughts he’d been having. Because Bear was no starving dog. He wasn’t a naïve white boy like himself, disappointed when the fairy tales of American virtue turn out to be fairy tales.

Bear shakes his head and laughs at the boy. But the laugh is more disarming than critical. He flings it out there like a small mercy to head off a stronger rebuke from the Sergeant. But now all eyes have turned to the boy.

“Just getting ready Sir,” the boy mumbles, rubbing his sweating palms.

“You think too much, boy,” the Sergeant says.

Bear looks almost worried for him. But he speaks like a slap in the face: “Buck the fuck up, kid.” And everyone goes silent, and back to their own forms of waiting.

He feels the deceitful softness of his scrawny child’s body under all these artificial skins. Even the slender female combat medic, Jody Caine, seems sturdier than he did.

She lets straight yellow hair grow long, and almost dares you to call her “a blond”. And her thin-lipped smile contradicts her unsmiling, metal-blue eyes, which never waver until his own finally do. And then she always looks at him like a judge and jury, which always knock the wind out of any attempt to engage her in conversation. Even though he towers over her, he always feels like he’s straining his neck up to meet her level gaze.

She’s still studying his behavior, even as they all move into the staging area of the hangar to start suiting up.

Every one of them has a feisty edge to their smiles, and a gravitas he can’t even fake. He felt inferior the moment he met them. And yet it was easy to push their buttons. Just a wrong facial twitch could get them agitated. But they weren’t “starving dogs” either. They seemed solidly grounded, but in what? They moved with a measured grace that made him conscious of his jittery instability, and seemed unfamiliar with the demons that drove him to these extremities of thought and worry.

And yet he couldn’t trust their quiet calm. They might concede that the world’s whole framework was constructed by demons, but they had a job to do, and the rest was beyond their pay grade. Staying humble and sane, they called it. But is it sane to serenely submit yourself to this insanity? Are they any saner than him?

After all, his father had been like them, and look how he turned out. He was also a large-boned man with a voice of grit and gravel, who breathed easier at the first sign of danger, but vibrate like a bursting pressure cooker in every idle moment.

Even before the bottom fell out of his business, he could see the demons nibbling softly on his father’s limbs. But afterward, they devoured him completely.

The boy thought he saw a nobility in the way his father absorbed the brunt of that demonic energy within himself, although acids leaked through his tongue, and many inanimate things took a beating. But otherwise, he seemed to hold the demons in check within his body, until there was nothing left but an arthritic skeleton that shook the coffin with rage in the hands of the DT’d pall-bearers, when they laid him “to rest’ that previous fall.

And rumor is, even Old Man Hadey used to be a man of substance, a veteran of the second world war, who survived a brutal Japanese internment camp and won all sorts of medals. And now look! He’s nothing but maggoty corruption.

And there was a farmer in his village who was a big, gentle, slow-moving man, doffing his cap at ladies and never getting excited under any circumstances, who woke up early one spring morning and butchered his wife and children, and set his cowbarn ablaze, the screaming of the cows haunted the boy almost nightly. And then this gentle giant sat on the front lawn and tenderly placed his crying infant granddaughter next to him, the only survivor, and blew his own brains out.

So, he didn’t trust these signs of quiet maturity whatsoever. They were steadfast and mature only because the demons that drove them were sated for the moment.

That’s how he deflected his feelings of inferiority. And this deflection gave him a stink of superiority that made some dislike him. He felt superior in being aware of the demons feasting on him. He could feel it in a way the others didn’t. So, the others lived in blessed ignorance of their madness, as far as he could tell. That’s what kept him skinny and nervous, keeping the demons at bay. And the demons weren’t happy being half-exposed in him like this. They needed the dark to take full control.

The boy reckoned that they all bargained with the devil in joining the military. And it’s the kind of deal that can’t be completed in broad daylight. The fine-print of the deal needed to remain unconscious. But in bold print it justified the surrender of their autonomy to a chain of command. They tried not to notice that the chain extended all the way to Hell’s front door.

What they got in exchange for that surrender was a lot. A meaningful role in a world they already knew as dog-eat-dog anyways. A stable order, as opposed to the chaos of home-life. A temporary freedom from conscience, although he knew they’d bristle at describing it that way, but it was right there in the fine print – without it, they couldn’t be good soldiers. And all in all, they got a respite from the demons gnawing at them.

It was like attaching themselves to a static line and letting the whole sequence of events unfold automatically from there, without having to bother with bigger questions. Only now, the boy was trying to renege on his deal, which caused the demons in him to erupt.

However, the others saw their own surrender to this chain as a form of humility. It wasn’t the loss of autonomy the boy accused it of being, but the conversion of a floundering, rootless, self-centered Self into a Self that is grounded in a larger order, the larger being, of a country, a military, a unit. 

Meanwhile, the boy is only fleetingly reflecting on all this – mostly silenced by the complex assembly of equipment, which is happening now.

No, the weight of the assembled harness is so great that pretty much everyone is seated and sealed by now. And now and then the Sergeant calmly speaks a command or reminder over the tactical radio. But at this juncture, all they can do is wait, prepare themselves mentally (which the boy was not doing), and keep breathing that bends-preventing pure oxygen, which always made him a little dizzy for a while.

The Sergeant completes his last pre-flight inspection of everyone in the stick, and even gives the boy an encouraging tap on his headgear. Then he silently signals that boarding begins in 20 minutes.

The boy loved the military at first because he understood that logic of surrender to something larger and more real than his own fictitious self. But that trust in the chain connecting them to something larger wasn’t possible for the boy to maintain. He had no real confidence in the reality of a country or its military leadership, or any of them, for that matter. He wasn’t exactly the naïve white boy, born with a silver spoon up his tight ass, which Bear took him to be.

And yet, the boy also missed the point here. The others didn’t trust in these things either, not really. The flag, the pledge, even Jesus Himself – these things were only vaguely understood ideas, but firmly held signifiers of belonging. In fact, they preferred all those things to remain vague. The point was sharing a common loyalty to these gang symbols (and Jesus, don’t ever call them “gang symbols”!). Whatever the fuck a God or a country is, they didn’t really know. But they’d kill anyone who threatened one, because they were the things that gave them an identity, no, let’s not use that word: It gave them, specifically, a place in this mad world, a more predictable family and a way to feel esteemed in the eyes of those who matter to them.

Besides, Lord knows, an identity is too vague to survive on its own without such props. Besides, “identity” isn’t exactly what they wanted to call it, not with all these liberal air-heads tooting their own identities everywhere you turn.

At any rate, God, guns, country, and Leaders they could “trust” to keep this whole charade going was how they made order out of the chaos of their pre-military world. Or, it was the only order they ever knew. An order that had to be hewn rock-solid from the slacker’s drift of otherwise meaningless existence.

So, all the boy’s talk of what’s illusion and what’s not sometimes came close to placing him in enemy territory. Don’t think too much, kid, he could feel the cold-blooded warning behind the snickers and mild rebukes.

“Ten minutes”, the Sergeant spoke quietly into his earphones.

What they really trusted was the material reality of the world, this hard-nosed task they faced, this physical activity, this trained body.

But the boy couldn’t even trust his body.

For some reason, his body slid through adolescence almost unchanged. He was more or less still built like a 12-year-old-boy who’d been elongated until he became wiry. But he never outgrew the thin frame, and never lost the whisker-incompetent, red-cheeked face of a boy, which had been a perennial goad to rednecks and jocks.

Admittedly, this sometimes gave him the advantage of surprise, especially when his tired and timid demeanor finally boiled over into volcanic rage that burnt bright, before quickly burning itself out.

And while the righteous rage lasted, he could whip his limbs and twist his narrow upper body at a terrific velocity, punches that snapped with just the right timing, and he could absorb punishment with pride. But he lacked the thick coal-beds of murderous resentment that could keep such a rage stoked long enough to finish the job, which the Hadey Boys and even some of these soldiers had in abundance.

Of course, he had a somewhat higher opinion of his ability to fight than he should have had. And his touchy demeaner suggested he knew this on some level. He knew his only chance sometimes lay in leaping into the elevated orbit of blind rage, like a berserker of old, as when he fought the youngest Hadey kid, who flicked a lit cigarette in the goad of his apple-cheeks, and (as the boy talked it taller over time) nearly “decapitated the motherfucker” for his insolence.

That is, he started to choke the kid, revenging himself on the whole monstrous world in the form of this one kid’s neck, until he saw the boy’s scared and sad eyes and abruptly fell from righteous orbit, relented, collapsing into apathy, and leaving the miserable young Hadey kid no other option but to return to Hadey’s Holler with his tail between his legs and get his ass kicked for real by his brothers, who would obviously hear what happened.

So, when he joined the army, he expected the same gauntlet of ridicule he’d already unevenly survived back home, and therefore came into the army nursing his small pile of white-hot-coal-rage just in case, which earned him an almost heedless reputation for irritable immaturity that wasn’t exactly what he intended.

So, he toned it down, and was mildly surprised when the army turned out a little easier than his home town crowd. Probably because the army worked them hard enough at first to tire everyone out, while constantly scolding everyone into thinking more or less as a team.

But he did, in fact, end up in a fight, once, with a big, muscular recruit, who was even more childish than himself. And he didn’t surprise himself, but everyone else, when he knocked the guy down.

But then a familiar pity erupted for the hurt-looking brute mid-fight, which quickly translated into apathy and shame, becoming something like an out-of-body experience, as he observed the whole shitshow with distant dispassion, even as the embarrassed man, bleeding from his mouth, rushed at him mad with shock and shame, and lifted him like a sack of feathers and threw him to the concrete.

He took the beating with a familiar satisfaction. Almost the same feeling he had in the confession booth, when he still believed in all that. A cleansing erasure of his own persistent guilt. He bathed in the pounding fists and kicks to the head and stomach, and felt reborn when the spectators finally stepped in with something close to tenderness, to save him from the overzealous vengeance of the larger man, who had not yet recovered from the shock and shame of the “skinny faggot” who made him look bad in front of everybody.

This earned him some genuine respect, he knew it would. That’s all he wanted. Enough respect to mislead the majority into thinking he belonged here. Capable of hurting and being hurt. Enough respect to earn him a teasing nickname, Snapper, like a guy who snaps, or maybe the snapping turtle coming out of its shell for a moment. But it was a familiar niche — being a mascot to tougher guys. Sure, they’d maintain the right to obliquely (carefully) ridicule him, but now they’d also protect him to a degree. And thereby free him from the need to be brutish himself. Plus, he wasn’t just weird now. He was “crazy”. Crazy was a minor promotion. Sideways maybe, into a category that left him somewhat apart but also somewhat beyond judgement.

And being set apart gave him space to nurse his private fantasies of being superior in a way he couldn’t articulate, which he also knew was bullshit, but which arose automatically as a soothing compensation for his equally indefinable feelings of inferiority. After all, let’s note in passing, conceit is impossible to separate from feelings of worthlessness, and vice versa.

At last, they are boarding the C-130 Hercules and going through another series of checks and listening through the headphones to what the pilot has to say about the weather and adjustments to the flight path. Now, the portable oxygen system is being tested, and now they resume flushing the nitrogen from their bodies.

His stomach has settled, but his focus is still wavering dangerously.

Now, they are all sitting on canvas wall seats facing the center of the cargo bay, and they’ll be making an exit out the rear cargo ramp. There are 12 of them in the stick. And as the plane leaves the ground, his mood momentarily lifts. He feels the mild turbulence as a kind of soothing caress that almost puts him in a state of vapid euphoria. And although he has to maintain his focus and listen to the sparse commands that come over the tactical radio through his headset, he breathes easier, being hidden from view under his mask and gear.

But the euphoria itself is held in check by the heavy responsibilities ahead and by an even heavier dread approaching from the past. Because under all this fleeting rage and mild social anxiety, and sinking feelings about the work they would do, there lurks a bigger and “more real” problem, which nobody knew anything about. All they can see is the strange outline of a “man” who’d been stretched into adulthood without ever emerging from the cocoon of early adolescence.

But in fact, he is in some ways grotesquely stunted by a secret insanity (he knows!), which sounds harmlessly ludicrous whenever he makes the error of trying to tell anyone about it. And even though it is (in fact) ludicrous, it’s no less horrifying for its ludicrousness.

It is a terror that nobody could ever detect or properly address. And this combination of ludicrousness and terror caused wide shifts in his own regard for himself, as well. And it was also the reason for his streaky jumps in capacity, which included his unexpected success in earning his way into an elite group of paratroopers.

Back home, people were less bowled over by the unexpected news of his inclusion in the paratroopers, than deflated by it. Teachers had always felt almost insulted by these infrequent leaps in capability, because they could honestly detect only abundant signs of incapacity, and had (with reasonable justification) written him off. And when he unexpectedly did well on a test, they were inclined to believe he was cheating, rather than be forced to admit that their previous judgement of him – though honestly obtained – was, in fact, false.

And half the time he probably did cheat, but not always.

His own father — ravenous for signs of growth — could still only say “good boy”, when he heard of his acceptance in the paratroopers.

“Will I ever be more than a boy to you?” he asked with uncommon bluntness.

“No,” his father said bluntly in return. And they left it at that, because there was something undeniably incomplete in his nature, no matter what he did. And they both knew it, and both resented it.

What his father didn’t know is that the boy was slowly emerging from something that can’t be labeled too easily, but let’s start by calling it insanity or a hellish hallucination, which started when he was 13. And signs of this condition remained invisible even to a psychologist (a fat and stupid pedophile, he recognized the signs immediately), which the school hired to scan the junior high student body (and him in particular) for signs of budding depravities.

The psychologist recommended Ritalin to 70% of the 7^th and 8^th grades (which came to 52 students), and dismissed the blank and unresponsive boy as a simpleton, nothing more.

What they didn’t know was how desperate his psychic condition actually was. And he was very afraid (reasonably so) that he would end up in an asylum, just like his uncle and aunt before him.

But what he didn’t know was whether he was hallucinating, or worse yet, not hallucinating, for there was nothing solid in the world against which to measure the deviation of his perspective. He believed that his perspective was not hallucinatory but (unfortunately) true, and that the blood-draining terror he felt was a reasonable (and uncurable) response to what he’d discovered, and which nobody else seemed to notice, mainly because they didn’t exist (that’s the ludicrous part, but chilling, if believed).

Simply put (or as simply as he could put it), one November morning in his 13^th year of life he realized (realized!) with the ferocity of revelation – arriving like a high-voltage jolt — that everything was hallucination, and that neither he himself, nor his now obviously fake friends, nor illusory parents, nor even his formerly beloved dog, nor the crisp fall air, nor the smell of bacon in the morning, were real. This deflated the pleasure of everything instantaneously. They were revealed (revealed!) to be projections of an inexplicably isolated singularity of awareness, which invented every sensation of sunlight and love in a desperate attempt to fill the emptiness of its eternal and claustrophobic isolation. And it’s impossible to disprove. (Oh, he tried, he tried!).

How would he know this, you might ask? Because a figure appeared in his room that morning at 8:10am, and he instantaneously realized that this figure was a reflection of himself, but monstrous. And there was no way to peer past the mirror into any reality that wasn’t already this self. Thus, it was a figure that reflected the entire universe.

This was an insight, for sure. And it occurred to him in a quick succession of shocks. If there is no way for an awareness — for any individual — to arise on its own, then this individual consciousness is a singular phenomenon, meaning he alone existed. Others were merely projections of himself. After all, other people only appeared when he was conscious of them in his mind.

And this is also a surprising insight, well beyond his years. In fact, so far beyond his 13-year-old understanding of things that it didn’t land as a unifying vision of wholeness, as it might for a more mature individual. But it landed as a terrifying contraction of experience to a single rootless awareness without connection to anything or anyone else, as if you woke up in an MRI machine, from which there was no escape, no outside world. And this insight also revealed the imaginary nature of his own reflected existence as well. A reflection without a source. A world without any being at all, only the illusion of being.

So, this didn’t inflate his consciousness into the more typical mania, which asserts, “I am God.” Here there was no space for a God, and there’d be nothing for Him to command. So, it didn’t enlarge his sense of Self, but squashed it into a hellhole of non-being, a mere beheaded consciousness floating in a waveless sea.

In effect, one morning he woke up in an empty universe; a waveless sea ten feet deep, with just enough space for his head to stick above water to remain conscious of his predicament. In other words, the problem seems too outlandish, unless you experience a claustrophobia of that sort as a persistent reality (the only reality!).

So, he was forced to keep paddling day after day with no hope of getting anywhere or being saved. But he kept paddling because he was convinced that if he surrendered to drowning, the drowning itself would never end, because consciousness of his predicament could never cease. In fact, suicide might make his suffocation even worse. So, he had nowhere to turn accept to heartlessly pretend he had heart and continue with the charade of living as long as he could hold out.

But the difficulties of trying to live with persistent, draining terror, while going through the motions of life, had initially caused – from 13 to 17 –enough collateral social issues to raise eyebrows. These secondary social symptoms were worrisome to others, but not the actual perspective that haunted him, which was too ludicrous for anyone to take seriously.

Therefore, he paddled through life with a heavy, tense, lethargic, hopeless, manic indifference, but not enough indifference to sink, punctuated by irregular eruptions of adrenaline to keep afloat.

In other words, he was an undiagnosed schizophrenic. But it was the ordinary world he was hallucinating. Otherwise, nobody else would exist. He hallucinated them to hide from his own isolation.

To call this “lonely” would be to make it sentimental. It produced a blood-draining coldness that no warm touch could penetrate.

When he told his closest friend what he was suffering, the friend said, “how cool! You can do anything, just like a lucid dreamer!”

And that was the last time he ever tried to mention it, or ever again believed in the notion of a “close friend.”

For he was far more lucid than the most lucid dreamer. Unlike him, lucid dreamers remain blessedly duped into dreaming that they exist as a reality over and above the dream, which only means they are unconsciously asleep in a way he was not. And thus, they hallucinate being able to “wake up”, which he recognized in his non-hallucinatory insight as a delusion. For every sense of Self is only another dream.

Thus, his hallucination and his insight became hopelessly entangled and unable to resolve themselves. He was a prisoner of infinite regression, which is why he remained a boy, no matter what he did.

So, he had to keep paddling with uneven enthusiasm from one inevitable mirage to another in order to distract himself from the real nightmare that nothing, nothing at all, exists, except this claustrophobic emptiness clustered around an unshakable illusion of himself as a paddler without end.

And thus, he remained stuck in a hell too absurd for anyone to notice. But he was trying not to think of all this while sitting on the plane, because he needed the intoxication of adrenaline to believe in the situation enough to survive, allowing himself to get pulled into the dream with enough passion to keep afloat a while longer.

“Twenty minutes”, the Sergeant says blandly through the tactical radio.

They switch their oxygen supply to their portable bailout bottles. Another safety inspection.

The urgency of this “real” predicament forces him to focus. None of this is a game to him. The war and his unresolved state of mind have merged into a single horror. They both demand a resolution. He has to end this fear for good.

By his senior year, he’d already studied the problem long and hard enough (like Papillon on his prison-island, he thought), to obtain glimpses of a resolution to this isolation. And his moments of adrenaline often coincided with these flashes of a way “off the island”. He couldn’t hold these breaks. But by age 18, the fear had diminished, although it remained a dread and could erupt at any moment and leave him feeling as if they had never gone away.

Those periods of adrenaline and wild eruptions of euphoria are what turned him into a minor hothead at times. Being a social ignoramus, he abided by the reverse cliché that the best defense is a strong offense. It kept his father at bay too, glad, for once, to see the boy acting like a man.

The Sergeant’s voice: “Ten minutes.”

And then, in what seems like no time: “Stand up”.

“Hook up”.

Then they perform one final equipment check on one another.

“Stand by….”

His stomach immediately falls and threatens to come back up very fast.

The cargo bay door is open now. The cold rushes in and the sound of engines and wind intensifies.

“Go! Go!”

A sudden rush of frigid air, and the mild double-jolt, surprisingly soft, which miraculously turns him into a bird. And then the always astonishing, almost disconcerting peace that follows. The peace of floating in the dark of early morning. But through his dual tubes (enhanced night vision goggle/binoculars), the slender curve of coastline becomes starkly visible and overwhelmingly saturated with the white lights of human habitation and long white lines of roadways.

The glide will last over 30 minutes and take them 35 miles into yet another undisclosed war zone.

Despite the layers of clothing, the intense cold penetrates his body and his consciousness, and makes him shiver. But it coincides with a quick thrill that momentarily erases the dread.

He has to pay attention to the Sergeant’s occasional commands to adjust their direction, and he must keep peripheral attention (at the very least) to the infra-red light at the top of the canopy below him. They are flying in a stacked formation, all 12 of them pretty much directly over one another, but stretching out steeply in front a little. For the most part, he can only see the canopy directly below him.

But he can’t resist turning towards the horizon for a moment, to see the curvature of the earth, and seeing also the all-too bright white glow (in the dual tubes) of what (to ordinary eyesight) is only a dim hint of red sunrise that won’t be visible on the ground for several hours still. He turns away quickly, before the faint glow of sunrise causes the mechanism to flash and temporarily blind him.

His thoughts turn to the job ahead of them, the stealthy bushwack towards the relay facility, the possibility of encountering a small patrol in the vicinity, the hope that they can get in and out without being noticed, without having to kill anyone. Or, be killed.

His doubts about the operation become overwhelming now. They’ve been driven to this extreme without even knowing why, without even caring to investigate the issue from all angles. The chain of command is all they focused on, staying “humble”. Was this humility, he wondered, or a failure to be responsible to themselves? Don’t blame them, to himself? Everything he ever did to erase the unreal feelings placed him in situations that were even more unreal and ludicrous. Floating here above a war zone, enjoying the view, regressing further and further from his commitment to the operation. There is nothing sane and realistic about any of this.

He is a fulcrum between two uneven weights, balanced slightly in favor of survival – the 300-pound weight of his pack, oxygen tank, body armor and weaponry pulling him towards earth, and the life-saving restraint of the canopy, which clings to the empty air. 

The bright white dawn along the stark curvature of the earth shrinks and fades as they fall farther beneath the edge of night.

They are at about 10,000 feet, now. In about 15 minutes they’ll reach the drop zone. In this area, the lights are scattered, just some villages and quiet roads. But he can also make out a thin difference in the shading that marks the shape of the coastline. The waves near the green-tinged coast are producing a narrow line of glowing white light through his dual tubes. 

Five-thousand feet. Now the bright white line of surf along the shoreline becomes clear. And the mountains and forest edges can be discerned as gradations of green shadow. Apparitions of fog rise from the upland forest, which also glow a greenish white, and glide towards the long bay, almost a fjord, which curves deeply inland.

A memory flashes of his mother singing to herself, while he played with his wooden train by her feet, the sun slanting through the motes of dust and making lines for the train on the kitchen floor. And the curve of the coastline just visible now brings to mind that peculiar bend in the branches of the “rope willow”, which used to make him think of a slender girl bending over to watch them swim. That tree had been a witness to his whole childhood, the overlooked grace of the tree itself, these almost playful caressing touches of the warm and cool breezes rising from below are the same breezes he felt on a summer night, when he and a small group of friends were all bullshitting on the bank of the crick, sitting on soaked tee shirts and roots, when that blue, green and yellow fireball stopped all the chatter.

In an instant these bodily memories of summers so brief, of crushes on girls too fleeting and unrequited, as if he’d always been falling through a fading paradise into hell. As if the body desired nothing more than the earth, now, and all that lost and betrayed beauty, the heartbreaking faces of girls he pretended to ignore, that time he sat on a school bus going to the lake, next to a slender and graceful girl in a bikini, their hips touching, who said something to him softly he couldn’t hear, the euphoric inebriation, the slow syrup of his blood, the crushing touch of her body too near to bear, she meant everything to him in an instant, but he couldn’t talk to her or look at her, it would be like looking at the sun, he could only wallow in her wake, and when the bus stopped at the lake, she rose quickly and disappeared into the giggling crowd, while he sat there until the bus was empty, smelling the ebbing tide of her delicious scent, and the smell of sun tan lotion and the lake, and now it was the world itself which seemed to be leaving before he had even realized he was alive, and that space and color were real.

Three-thousand feet, only a few minutes remaining.

He remembers that they had been rowdy that evening, arguing over baseball, sitting on the bank after sunset, the adventure of a 13-year-old’s summer night stretching infinitely before them, just a month before the fear erupted, sleeping out as they called it, but mostly just roaming around trying to get drunk on warm cans of Budweiser and a sliver of a joint, walking around the sleeping village, more intoxicated by their own mildly criminal presence in the dark-houred underbelly of the village.

Later they were at their campsite near the swimming hole on the crick, under that same tree, arguing about baseball, yet again, and who was stronger among them (yet again!), fighting their exhaustion, when the blue fire ball with a shimmering green edge streaked through the sparse branches of the rope willow, giving the fireball a wavy appearance, as if huge yellow flames were rolling in its wake.

It was so close overhead, like a burning house falling on them – he marvels even now! – a gigantic, blue ball of green-tinged fire, with a flowing cape of yellow flames, falling across the vast star-fields of his last fearless summer night, as if bound to land in the woods across the crick, so close it seemed, and they jumped up and uttered inhuman sounds and all their chatter stopped.

For a long while they had no desire to even shout the obligatory “holy shit!”. They just sat there. And felt ashamed of themselves and all their boastful banter, and then the summer night, the last summer night, was done.

One-thousand, five-hundred feet.

The chain holding him to this insanity seems unbreakable. If he glides away right now and tries to reach that secluded beach, and ditches his beacons and monitors, he’d still have little chance of survival, and he’d place his comrades in danger. They were chained together.

He hadn’t been obligated to join them. It had been his choice, or so it felt; an insanity of his own making. And now he was obligated to fulfill the deal he made, the mutual dependency, the pact, they formed. The cowardice of breaking this bond was too much to consider.

But obligation is a strange power. Because the power doesn’t reside in other people. They don’t actually hold you to anything. They can only threaten, despise and punish you if (when!) they catch you. But nobody is obligated to continue being insane. Why not fly (fly!) away now and leave them stranded? Say it, what is a worse crime? Or, is it a crime to feel obligated to maintain a mutual hell? It is one betrayal or another. He does damage to human beings in any case. What is he doing here except violence on behalf of corrupt organizations? Living a life that is never ours. Celebrating this self-betrayal as a virtue. Carrying out the work of demons. 

As if a deal with the devil is worth keeping, or as if the inertia of one’s own corruption obligates a continuation of corruption. I don’t walk away only because I’m already a coward, a worse coward, afraid of spoiling nothing more real than a so-called reputation, this illusion of myself (and them!), this unending hell.

He is sinking into the quicksand of terror. It rises from the graveness of the predicament itself. And the predicament gives him no room to avoid (finally) a direct confrontation with the old devil itself, who has prospered so long at the bottom of that sinkhole. He is done running. He is sick of himself.

For a moment, the ludicrous (unimaginable) isolation and claustrophobia return. It had never really left, his freedom had been another illusion, that’s all.

The night vision goggles are adding to the feeling of entrapment. So, he flips them up.

And then it happens. His perception jumps. The immediate spaciousness! The stars, the dark mountain wilderness and curving coast stops his thoughts. And in that spacious cessation of himself, he sees something in that fear that he’d never seen before.

From a location beyond his reach, beyond the source of the brain, or body or figment of himself, he laughs. Surely, he is going mad. But it’s a quick, disarming laugh that takes him by surprise and shakes the devil in his empty hole.

Over a war zone, he laughs! And then he laughs harder when he realizes he’s laughing.

A resolution of his whole problem explodes into being and sets off a rippling avalanche of understanding. What he sees surpasses anything he could reach on his own. It’s something instantaneously recognizable as an intelligence beyond any possibility of identification. And in that quick, healing blast, he realizes that the horror of being stranded in an empty world was also only another illusion.

All those years ago, he had genuinely discovered the surface unreality of everything. Except the stranded sufferer himself, his own surface identity.

And then, in the spontaneous absence of himself, everything is blooming. Reality rushes in to fill the vacuum where he had once existed. And in the few seconds that remain until the landing commands would be given, he notices the unfamiliar newness of every thought. They rise only as a tension between two opposing fears. Every small truth he resists becomes an opposing enemy within him, or small demon. And the moment he loses resistance to his own repressed wisdom, the whole thought (the me and its shadowy demon) dissolve into this splendid and infinite intelligence, which has nothing to do with who he thought he was.

But it’s a flash, yet again, just a flash. The devil was certainly, badly shaken. But the devil has home-field advantage in a war zone. He may have lost some limbs in this explosion. But he has one more trick up his sleeve.

One-thousand feet: Crack, crack, crack. Muffled snapping sounds can be heard, and when he flips his night vision goggles back down, he sees the red heat-indications of gunfire. And then the urgent voice of the Sergeant over the tactical radio: “Break, break, enemy fire on the DZ! Execute Alpha. Now, now now.”

The pre-briefed plan to abandon the primary drop zone is engaged. He breaks left with six others in the stack, the others brake right. His group fans out about 45 degrees from their original line of descent and perform flat turns. The jumpers lower in the stack – Sergeant Max and Corporal Bear, among them – perform sharper turns to avoid fire, while those at the top of the stack (and he was the last jumper), have to perform far wider turns to avoid mid-air collisions.

They are all forced to land in the thick woods surrounding the original DZ. That means he has to keep his emergency rucksack attached (its load-lessening release on a tether would complicate the landing severely). They’ve practiced these procedures, but the moment of truth is here. He tucks his chin tight to his chest and wraps his arms around his neck and head and clamps his legs together as hard as he can. His left forearm takes a heavy blow, but the landing isn’t as bad as some he’d experienced in training.

Then he immediately extracts his lowering rope, ties it to a tree limb with some difficulty, and unbuckles unbuckled his canopy lines. When he is securely hanging from the lowering rope, he slides out of the heavy harness, unclips his reserve parachute and lets it fall. And then he repels to the ground without too much difficulty.

He flips up his night vision goggles and adjusts to the natural dark.

These woods aren’t nearly as thick and dense as the woods back home.

He can’t hear any gunfire for the moment.

Then he removes his helmet, and takes the Go-Bag from his rucksack, pulls out the emergency beacon and other signal equipment and throws them to the side. Then he also ditches the GPS unit on his wrist and leaves that with the other equipment.

Then he removes his freefall suit, heavy jacket, fleece layers, gloves and balaclava and is dressed only in his thermal underwear and military uniform.

His name, “R. Juna” had already been ripped from his uniform prior to jumping, as well as all insignia that might indicate his division, rank or national origin. He is nameless and homeless now.

And he also leaves his weapons on the pile of discarded equipment, although he keeps the fixed-blade knife.

He is deserting.

He has no real hope of surviving, but he pulls out his maps and compass and vaguely aims to make a wide detour around the likely landing spots of his former stick, and avoid the alternative rally point (ARP).

He is vaguely planning to make his way deeper into the mountains, away from the centers of resistance, if possible, and see how long he can survive.

But then he retrieves his communications equipment and listens to the dead silence. They are in a tactical period of quiet, called the “lurk” period, waiting to see any enemy patrols in the area.

A wave of fear and guilt rise, erasing the certainty he had felt in the canopy. It was stupid, he realizes. There’s no chance. And he moves to regather his essential equipment, when he sees a flash of movement in the brush, no more than 5 meters away.

His body freezes. It’s a jackal, its eyes glowing greenish yellow. It seems to marvel at the nature of this broken bird, which had fallen from the sky.

They are staring at one another without moving.

He eases himself down slowly against a tree. The jackal cautiously lowers its head and takes a timid step towards him, and then turning its head in a neutral direction, sits down.

The sudden appearance of this ghostly, Golden Jackal overwhelms and quiets his mind. What if I interpret this moment as a dream? “I dreamed I saw a Golden Jackal with greenish yellow eyes staring at me kindly in a dark woods and felt at peace with the world. What does it mean?”

The last 24-hours seem impossible. It is no more believable than a fairy tale. But maybe realism is the most delusional fairy tale of all, because it doesn’t know it’s a fairy tale.

The animal is so beautiful. They seem to form a bond. The moment he starts to feel anxious about his predicament, the jackal stirs, rises. And as soon as he recognizes how the fear tears a false division within his field of perception, which creates the illusion of a Self separate from the world, the division heals within him, and he ceases to exist as a self-conscious entity, and immediately the jackal relaxes and sits back down.

This happens several times until the bond between them expands back into that vision of wholeness which had erupted when he was floating in the canopy. Every subtle form of resistance that rises in him is a break in being, and a severance of that strange bond with this jackal.

It is a world without boundaries, without a concept of the real and unreal, the me and the you, in anything more than a practical and transient sense. Like a fairy tale that he recognized as a fairy tale, which keeps him at peace. These thoughts rise and subside without leaving any trace of a stranded and isolated self.

He had always had glimpses of this, but now he was living it. It seems to click in place, and as he feels an actual “click”, the jackal lies down and goes to sleep.

There are strange things in the world, but the strangest is ourselves. If we’re not self-conscious, we move in secret harmony with others, with plants, animals and the earth itself, which sometime surprises us as coincidence. But these are coordinated rhythms that aren’t always discernable, because selfish concerns drown out everything else.

He often wondered if the clouds, for instance, are sometimes more than clouds. They are surely part of the coordinated rhythm of an orderly and intelligent earth. They are sometimes, not always, the complex patterns of a dreaming, knowing world.

He knows now that there are also are demonic forces in the world, but they are weak by themselves, and can only build on what we start. They take sustenance from our energy of resistance, which is always a resistance to a broader perspective, or a truth that undermines a sanctuary of self-enclosed illusion. He notices that every time he speaks to himself in his head – every thought – creates an artificial division in his consciousness, a kind of militarized border within him, which makes an enemy of his own rejected wisdom.

And demonic forces, weak though they are, encourage the formation of stronger and stronger borders within us, strengthening resistance by the perpetual whisper of what might happen, of what needs to be done, or who we need to become – compulsions that are unconscious panic.

And yet, the demonic forces are so weak they can only barely emit a whisper of memory, or a glimpse of imaginary danger. And then we supply the added energy and build the solid structures according to a demonic plan. Eventually, we are even convinced to give these demons a solid form of their own, by lending them our own bodies and dissolving into the whispering minds of the demons themselves.

And he recognizes the whole military chain of command, the whole enflamed world, its systems of government, its economics, even its institutionalized charities, its schooling, the way we make our living, the roads and housing we build, so much of it has been heedlessly and ravenously built by demonic plan, driven by the stolen, hypnotized energy of human beings, who have mistaken themselves for the reflections of their own small demons. These forces have possessed the world through a whisper campaign, which has no power in itself.

But they have whispered for countless generations that we are inherently evil and that nothing can change. And it is this small-minded message which has blinded us to ourselves. They have made a tapestry of small arguments in our minds, which wrap us into confusing patterns of argument and counter-argument. But it is a tapestry of illusion.

Despite its success, it remains utterly powerless to stop any single human being from doing what it could. Anyone, anyone at all – not special people, not geniuses, not experts, but anyone — who sees the illusion as an illusion, and recognizes the weakness of evil, and its ludicrous plans for the world, dissolves this illusion.

A human rebellion from this ancient enslavement to hell amounts to nothing more than walking away from every hand that clutches at your sleeve with appeals to honor, duty and decency. And you will see the fear and suffering, anger and panic in the eyes of the human souls bedeviled into trying to keep you chained.

But these are the last fragmenting strands in the tapestry of illusion. Because it’s the devil’s decency we are preserving, the devil’s duty and honor we are promoting. You feel the devil’s cries of pain and fear that he is losing you. And the poor, betrayed souls of human beings possessed by these demonic values will accuse YOU of betrayal.

Ignore them, ignore them for the sake of life itself, no matter what happens. You can’t save anyone. But in saving yourself, you’re not saving a separate human being. It’s humanity itself that awakens in you. It’s the dissolution of who you thought you were. And your example – though ridiculed and condemned – sends shock waves through the whole ocean of being. It is the only way to save the prisoners themselves. Walk away from prison for their own good, not yours. They won’t thank you, but you are breaking a chain around their necks, which they don’t see.

Leave, and bear the ignominy of desertion. There is no compromise with the devil. Betray this world fully, or humanity itself will remain trapped in hell. Only the dissolved individual, the anonymous human being, can free the world. They will not be known, even to themselves. But they will be an unprecedented agent of rebellion.

He puts his night vision goggles back on and quietly rises from the base of the tree and has no more doubt. The jackal reacts by leaping to its feet and running in the direction he was already intending to take. He has no settled plan about where he should go. He had looked at the map earlier and found no easy route between the hostile forces, but it’s a wild land and mountainous and he’d travel cautiously towards those mountains, and let be what comes.

The jackal pauses in his trot, turns and looks at him, yet again, as if he were waiting. Perhaps suspicious, perhaps just curious, but he wonders if he should keep following the jackal, even as it finally turned abruptly and moves towards a deep ravine, which he doesn’t believe he can easily traverse in the night.

So, he moves more cautiously in a radius around the ARP, hoping nobody is there yet. The jackal has disappeared.

Then he sees a figure about 40 meters away, hanging in a tree. He walks cautiously to the base of the tree and sees Bear hanging in his harness, bouncing slowly in the branches. He must have drifted a long way from the DZ. His arms and legs are moving rhythmically, as if bear is dancing, suspended in his strings, dead, because he can see that the man’s head has been ruined.

He leaves the area as quickly as he can, taking cover, in case his body has become an ambush.

Then he sees two figures close together, about 30 yards away, the one tending to the other. He has no hope of getting past them, so he steps behind a tree and studies the body shapes for quite some time, before confirming it’s the Sergeant and Corporal Jody. He makes a sound signal to alert them to his presence and moves cautiously towards them.

“Is he OK,” he asks Jody.

“Just some puncture wounds on his arm and leg, from branches,” she says. “I’m handling it. The others are making their way here. Keep a perimeter watch.”

He feels an urgency to get away before the others arrive.

“Bear is dead,” he tells them. “He’s in a tree about 300 meters from here, maybe 10 meters up.”

“Oh, shit, no, are you sure?” Jody asks. “God damn it!” the Sergeant whispers furiously from the ground. His gun is lying next to him, while his arm is being bandaged.

“Yes, I’m sure,” he says.

Then Jody lifts her eyes from the Sergeant and looks at the boy, flipping up the goggles.

“Where’s your weapon?” she whispers furiously.

He hesitates to tell the truth, but then doesn’t care anymore what happens next. One way or another he is done. “I’m leaving,” he says. And he starts to walk away.

“What the fuck?” she says, cutting him off. The Sergeant stands up and turns to look at him. “What are you saying?” he asks. The Sergeant also takes several steps towards him, limping, forgetting his gun. Perhaps his injury, or maybe he’s unconsciously afraid of what he might do to the boy at that moment.

Judy is pacing in front of him, scanning the woods.

“I’m deserting,” he says.

“You’re not going anywhere,” Jody says, still scanning. “If you try to walk away, I’ll shoot you.”

“Yes, mam,” he says.

“Oh, aren’t you the brave coward!” she hisses and spits at him, then turns and scans.

Both of them are walking in slow, menacing circles in his vicinity, cursing him out quietly, watching the woods.

Then the Sergeant turns abruptly and in a low voice: “I was mentoring you, didn’t you see that? You impatient, stupid boy. I gave you credit for a potential you don’t have. You’re nothing but a coward, a traitor.”

He keeps pacing a close circle and says: “You could have quit after the mission, instead of putting the mission and everyone’s lives in danger.”

They’re both pacing in small circles, scanning and cursing under their breath.

He thinks about keeping his mouth shut, but then says: “No sir, I’ll never get out if I compromise this moment. I have to break the chain now, I’m done.”

“Oh, you self-important dick. And don’t call me sir, you fucking hypocrite,” the Sergeant says: “You chose to join the service, you clawed your way into the paratroopers, barely. And don’t speak anymore, you’re under arrest.”

Jody and the Sergeant move away to talk briefly in private.

“We’re tying you to that tree until we get back,” the Sergeant says. “Keep a perimeter watch.”

The coordination of events is not chance. The chaos of the world is a secret order.

He sees a green shadow moving in the brush behind them. If it had been a member of their stick, he’d have made a sign. And in one smooth, unalarming movement, he reaches for the Sergeant’s gun, lying at his feet. And while Jody and the Sergeant are digging out some rope to tie him to a tree, he raises the gun, and three quick shots, two of them his own, ring out.

While Jody falls to the ground, the green shadow of a man falls from a tangle of brush no more than 10 yards away, both dead.

He walks quickly over to check on the man he killed, while the Sergeant is tending frantically to Jody, telling the boy to keep watch.

The dead man was skinnier than him, smooth-faced, delicately constructed, like bird bones, a beautiful boy, nothing more.

The stupid momentum of his whole hitherto life led inevitably to this murder. The guilt fell on his former life.

And then he walks away quickly, without a second thought.