THE MONUMENT: 14
John lies in bed, his head propped up on a pillow, his back facing the cold stone wall of his cramped room. The lamp casts a beam of bright light on the book in his hand, the rest of the room lost in blackness. He reads a history book about the war, hoping to fill in the gaps in his knowledge of what happened. So far it’s just much of the same information as the other books he’s read, although there have been a few new discoveries about the events that took place leading up to the war, which give him some more clues about the world in which he was born. He remembers sunny days playing in lush green grass, when his father would toss him up in the air and catch him in his arms, and warm evenings when his mother would sing and laugh. He remembers brothers, two of them, both older, would who run fast and throw balls back and forth, and he remembers a little curly haired sister, whose giggles are as vivid in his mind as the colorful dresses she wore. He remembers he was six years old.
The book begins as they all do, describing two powerful religious factions, caught in a power struggle for world domination, and the powerless masses caught between them. One side had devastating weapons and the will and the money to use them. They slaughtered the enemy in countless skirmishes but millions of innocents were caught in the crossfire. The other side had a seemingly endless number of soldiers, despite having fewer weapons and resources. Both sides played dirty, and the civilians bore the price. For years the war was fought abroad, but slowly it encroached on John’s homeland, and crept closer still. There were ravaging air raids, which kept his family awake at night, huddled closely together, and by the time the fighting had literally reached their backyard, his father had had no choice but to join up. There seemed to be no sides anymore, as the war affected everyone the world over. The day his father left, John remembers him telling him that it wasn’t about one religion or the other; it wasn’t about what was right or wrong. “Now,” he said, “it was about survival.” After a time, so many cities had been razed, so much countryside had been destroyed, so many people had died, that there just wasn’t much left. Many of the people who did survive a bombing were badly mutilated by shrapnel and/or irradiated by the bombs, and died miserably slow deaths, later in the quiet of the Aftermath.
And still the war raged on, until finally the leaders on both sides, corrupted and despotic, were killed. Historians believe now that the leaders were assassinated by their own forces, there being no official end to the war because no one was left to declare a ceasefire or a truce, and rogue murders carried on for decades whenever any individual gained too much power. But the estimated three million people remaining in the world survived in isolated pockets, because, fearing for their lives, they had fled their towns and homes and were hiding in caves in the mountains and coves on the coasts. Everything else was in ruins. Then it was truly about survival, John thinks. He believes his mother watched her three other children die the night the bombs fell on their house. In a blind furor, his mother scooped him up out of bed and ran, a bloody gash in her arm, and ran and ran and ran… Days passed. When they reached the safety of the Monument, he recalls, they waited, but he does not know for what. Nothing changed. The war continued to blaze around them and around the whole globe until it slowly fizzled out and eventually stopped. And the next fifty years, called the Aftermath, are a blackout in the history books. Today, it is surmised that people at that time were simply existing in any way they could, eventually returning to demolished towns and rebuilding, having families, trying to forget the horrors they had witnessed. Small breakthroughs were being made—people communicating on shortwave radio, other people piecing back together some of the modern conveniences that had lasted through the war, such as electricity generators. Greater communication introduced ideas and inventions from one part of the world to another, and people began to travel, and the population grew. They entered a three-decade-long burst of rapid development and breakneck expansion, an exciting rejuvenation. And now, some twenty years later, they have made great strides in understanding the war and the lives of their prewar ancestors, with tools to discover and interpret the information on the Internet and what few physical documents remain.
John reached adulthood during the blackout of the Aftermath, but his mother refused to speak of the war or of what happened to their family. She thought it best for John not to dwell on the memories he retained of life before the war and rather to think only of the future. Food and water were scarce, but John and his mother struggled through it. And they lived in peace and solitude for many years. Occasionally they would have visitors, lone people wandering aimlessly, people who had lost everyone and everything. The travelers would come dismayed and distraught, but then they would see the Monument and leave reinvigorated by its Tenets. John presumes word of mouth helped spread the news of the Monument and people started to visit more frequently. Inquisitive as he was, John always asked the travelers for news of where they’d been, heard firsthand accounts of the bloodshed and nightmares these people had witnessed during the war, and put together a history in his mind that one day he intended to commit to paper for others to read and study.
But now John realizes that he needs to do it soon. He is old, older than seems plausible. Sometimes he doubts his own mind, that the time and the memories are alterations of reality, or mere figments of his imagination, or some means of rationalizing the irrational. But he remembers with pristine clarity the tales those people shared with him, and he knows that back then all religious idolatry and imagery and books were destroyed as effigies of the war, but that the Monument was viewed as something new and secular and positive and free. John has always been determined to keep it that way, and when his elderly mother died, he refurbished the building and repaired the roof and opened it for the public who desperately needed a place to come to heal.
He needs to explain the Monument’s place in history within this context because in recent years there has grown a more fervent attachment to it; from the nomadic Journeyers who visit each year to the rabid anti-Tenets communities springing up on the Internet, emotions run high when it comes to the Monument. Sure, several authors had interviewed him for their books, but John knows that without his lifetime of wisdom and his loving attention to detail, the story cannot be properly told, never mind the fact that no one else believes he’s 117 years old. He looks and feels not a day past 60, but his brain has recorded each of those years, and inexplicably he just keeps on going, though he cannot guess as to how much longer he’s got.
Slapping the history book shut, he tells himself, Tomorrow I’m goin’ to start to write. In the evenings, he will trim short his cleanup time then devote the rest of the night to writing his book. Even the most highly praised autobiographical accounts of the prewar days written by other survivors have never mentioned the Monument. Most often these books have a dreamlike quality of bizarre things from the prewar days that the author can’t quite recall and which make no sense in the world today. Among the first were these bubbles of metal called cars that people remembered using to get from one place to another, and they knew that they had run on gas, but they had no practical information about how a car worked or about where the gas came from, and scientists and inventors were at a loss for a quarter century. But then someone created a solar-energy panel that could be retrofitted to these antique husks of metal and they drove just the way the survivors remembered. Other things, though, such as large areas cordoned off for animals called zoos and so-called rocket ships that could fly to the moon, have not been reconciled in the modern world. John huffs a little laugh at the silliness of keeping animals penned in one area just for people to look at, and the absurdity of putting a person way up on the moon. What were those people thinking?
But John has little choice but to assume that he is the only person currently living with any knowledge of the Monument at the time of the war and that it was not a well-known icon in the prewar days, and he hopes that these tidbits alone will make his story essential to the public discourse and will provide greater insight into understanding the Monument, and perhaps the war.
John places the book on his bedside table, catching a glimpse of the blurb on the cover, which calls it, “A Comprehensive History of the War.” Comprehensive, huh? John smirks knowingly. My book’ll be more comprehensive than this. Reaching up, he switches off the lamp and settles himself into bed, pulling the covers up to his chin, and stares into the darkness momentarily. Blinking doesn’t help his eyes to adjust; the room is absolutely black, no light coming in whatsoever. Closing his eyelids, he yawns with a soft sigh. Then he chuckles again, wondering if they ever put an animal on the moon. Then he whistles into the dark, loudly enough to echo off the thick stone walls, so as to harmonize with himself, shrilling to the tune of his mother’s lullaby, “The Apple That Doesn’t Want To Get Eaten Will Still Fall Off the Tree.” The third time around, he softens his whistle to an airy blow, tapering off slowly until he drifts to sleep.
The book begins as they all do, describing two powerful religious factions, caught in a power struggle for world domination, and the powerless masses caught between them. One side had devastating weapons and the will and the money to use them. They slaughtered the enemy in countless skirmishes but millions of innocents were caught in the crossfire. The other side had a seemingly endless number of soldiers, despite having fewer weapons and resources. Both sides played dirty, and the civilians bore the price. For years the war was fought abroad, but slowly it encroached on John’s homeland, and crept closer still. There were ravaging air raids, which kept his family awake at night, huddled closely together, and by the time the fighting had literally reached their backyard, his father had had no choice but to join up. There seemed to be no sides anymore, as the war affected everyone the world over. The day his father left, John remembers him telling him that it wasn’t about one religion or the other; it wasn’t about what was right or wrong. “Now,” he said, “it was about survival.” After a time, so many cities had been razed, so much countryside had been destroyed, so many people had died, that there just wasn’t much left. Many of the people who did survive a bombing were badly mutilated by shrapnel and/or irradiated by the bombs, and died miserably slow deaths, later in the quiet of the Aftermath.
And still the war raged on, until finally the leaders on both sides, corrupted and despotic, were killed. Historians believe now that the leaders were assassinated by their own forces, there being no official end to the war because no one was left to declare a ceasefire or a truce, and rogue murders carried on for decades whenever any individual gained too much power. But the estimated three million people remaining in the world survived in isolated pockets, because, fearing for their lives, they had fled their towns and homes and were hiding in caves in the mountains and coves on the coasts. Everything else was in ruins. Then it was truly about survival, John thinks. He believes his mother watched her three other children die the night the bombs fell on their house. In a blind furor, his mother scooped him up out of bed and ran, a bloody gash in her arm, and ran and ran and ran… Days passed. When they reached the safety of the Monument, he recalls, they waited, but he does not know for what. Nothing changed. The war continued to blaze around them and around the whole globe until it slowly fizzled out and eventually stopped. And the next fifty years, called the Aftermath, are a blackout in the history books. Today, it is surmised that people at that time were simply existing in any way they could, eventually returning to demolished towns and rebuilding, having families, trying to forget the horrors they had witnessed. Small breakthroughs were being made—people communicating on shortwave radio, other people piecing back together some of the modern conveniences that had lasted through the war, such as electricity generators. Greater communication introduced ideas and inventions from one part of the world to another, and people began to travel, and the population grew. They entered a three-decade-long burst of rapid development and breakneck expansion, an exciting rejuvenation. And now, some twenty years later, they have made great strides in understanding the war and the lives of their prewar ancestors, with tools to discover and interpret the information on the Internet and what few physical documents remain.
John reached adulthood during the blackout of the Aftermath, but his mother refused to speak of the war or of what happened to their family. She thought it best for John not to dwell on the memories he retained of life before the war and rather to think only of the future. Food and water were scarce, but John and his mother struggled through it. And they lived in peace and solitude for many years. Occasionally they would have visitors, lone people wandering aimlessly, people who had lost everyone and everything. The travelers would come dismayed and distraught, but then they would see the Monument and leave reinvigorated by its Tenets. John presumes word of mouth helped spread the news of the Monument and people started to visit more frequently. Inquisitive as he was, John always asked the travelers for news of where they’d been, heard firsthand accounts of the bloodshed and nightmares these people had witnessed during the war, and put together a history in his mind that one day he intended to commit to paper for others to read and study.
But now John realizes that he needs to do it soon. He is old, older than seems plausible. Sometimes he doubts his own mind, that the time and the memories are alterations of reality, or mere figments of his imagination, or some means of rationalizing the irrational. But he remembers with pristine clarity the tales those people shared with him, and he knows that back then all religious idolatry and imagery and books were destroyed as effigies of the war, but that the Monument was viewed as something new and secular and positive and free. John has always been determined to keep it that way, and when his elderly mother died, he refurbished the building and repaired the roof and opened it for the public who desperately needed a place to come to heal.
He needs to explain the Monument’s place in history within this context because in recent years there has grown a more fervent attachment to it; from the nomadic Journeyers who visit each year to the rabid anti-Tenets communities springing up on the Internet, emotions run high when it comes to the Monument. Sure, several authors had interviewed him for their books, but John knows that without his lifetime of wisdom and his loving attention to detail, the story cannot be properly told, never mind the fact that no one else believes he’s 117 years old. He looks and feels not a day past 60, but his brain has recorded each of those years, and inexplicably he just keeps on going, though he cannot guess as to how much longer he’s got.
Slapping the history book shut, he tells himself, Tomorrow I’m goin’ to start to write. In the evenings, he will trim short his cleanup time then devote the rest of the night to writing his book. Even the most highly praised autobiographical accounts of the prewar days written by other survivors have never mentioned the Monument. Most often these books have a dreamlike quality of bizarre things from the prewar days that the author can’t quite recall and which make no sense in the world today. Among the first were these bubbles of metal called cars that people remembered using to get from one place to another, and they knew that they had run on gas, but they had no practical information about how a car worked or about where the gas came from, and scientists and inventors were at a loss for a quarter century. But then someone created a solar-energy panel that could be retrofitted to these antique husks of metal and they drove just the way the survivors remembered. Other things, though, such as large areas cordoned off for animals called zoos and so-called rocket ships that could fly to the moon, have not been reconciled in the modern world. John huffs a little laugh at the silliness of keeping animals penned in one area just for people to look at, and the absurdity of putting a person way up on the moon. What were those people thinking?
But John has little choice but to assume that he is the only person currently living with any knowledge of the Monument at the time of the war and that it was not a well-known icon in the prewar days, and he hopes that these tidbits alone will make his story essential to the public discourse and will provide greater insight into understanding the Monument, and perhaps the war.
John places the book on his bedside table, catching a glimpse of the blurb on the cover, which calls it, “A Comprehensive History of the War.” Comprehensive, huh? John smirks knowingly. My book’ll be more comprehensive than this. Reaching up, he switches off the lamp and settles himself into bed, pulling the covers up to his chin, and stares into the darkness momentarily. Blinking doesn’t help his eyes to adjust; the room is absolutely black, no light coming in whatsoever. Closing his eyelids, he yawns with a soft sigh. Then he chuckles again, wondering if they ever put an animal on the moon. Then he whistles into the dark, loudly enough to echo off the thick stone walls, so as to harmonize with himself, shrilling to the tune of his mother’s lullaby, “The Apple That Doesn’t Want To Get Eaten Will Still Fall Off the Tree.” The third time around, he softens his whistle to an airy blow, tapering off slowly until he drifts to sleep.
...continues tomorrow...
posted by jay x at 11:06 PM
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