The Future Is Japanese by Unknown Page B

heart.” The doctor looked into my eyes. “You’ll find out soon enough for yourself.”
    Condescending fucker. Keeping things from me.
    “So, why exactly have you CMI guys come here?” I asked.
    When the doctor next spoke it was with the same calm tone of voice, but this time laced with a hint of pride and conviction. His voice now had the same determined quality as we’d had when we used to chant our SDA slogans. And I recognized that gleam in the eyes.
    “We’re here to put a stop to war in this country once and for all.”
    “The war’s already finished,” I said.
    “Well, then. Let me ask you a question. Has the war finished for you?”
    That stopped me short. Why was this doctor trying to stir things up, I wondered. The teachers here had been banging on about just the opposite. The era of hatred was over; the era of war was over. We weren’t supposed to hate anybody anymore. We weren’t supposed to kill anybody anymore either—that’s what they had told us. Even though these adults knew full well that our lives so far hadn’t exactly been picnics in the park, they had somehow managed to convince themselves that all they needed was to repeat these platitudes over and over, like a broken record, and all the bad things in our lives would somehow magically disappear. I wanted to stab the shit-spouting teachers over and over with a sharp knife, a scenario I’d daydreamed about many times. But externally I always ended up putting on a show—a brave face, stoically holding back my tears.
    “All the people here say the war is over,” I said. I doubted that I sounded convinced, or convincing.
    “All the people here don’t really believe that though, do they? Not for a second,” the doctor continued. “Surely you’ve worked that out for yourself by now?”

    Perhaps it was Ndunga’s battlefield execution just after the end of the war that had stripped me of any illusions. I seem to remember agreeing tacitly, unquestioningly, with the captain’s pronouncement that protocol was protocol and that military order needed to be upheld. I was devastated that my friend had been killed, of course, but there was no denying that he had disobeyed a direct order. Regardless of whether the fighting was due to continue or not, the fact was that he had to be punished.
    So that’s how the war ended. Five seconds before my best friend died.
    At least, that’s what everyone kept on saying. That the war had ended. But, I wondered, how was I going to put an end to my own personal war?
    Let me tell you how my war started.
    I was on my way home from school, two rivers and a mountain away. Around the time I’d crossed the second river I noticed a plume of smoke rising from my village. As I got closer, the smell closed in on me. Not the usual smell of goat droppings or plants or animals, but a revolting stench. Before I knew it I had discarded my bookbag by the wayside, and I was running toward my village.
    I stopped in my tracks at the entrance to the village to behold houses reduced to ashes and corpses scattered about the place. There were limbs piled up next to the chopping block where we cut our firewood, and the evil SLF were responsible. Later on I learned the full extent of what exactly they had done—after all, I ended up doing more or less the same thing myself to the other side. But at the time I couldn’t even register what the mound of severed arms and legs, piled up like so much kindling, even was.
    Overcome with dread, I rushed like a lunatic toward the place where my house once stood.
    So, first there was Mom. I wasn’t so concerned with the fact that her shirt was ripped to shreds and that her face had been beaten so badly it was a swollen mass. Mainly because she was prostrate and there was blood flowing copiously from the numerous open wounds on her back. The earth around her had drunk her blood and was stained reddish black. Next to her was Sis’s body. Or rather Sis’s corpse. My clever little sister