Final Struggle
“I shall never see you again” are the words he told his classmates during graduation. A joke, perhaps, and a bit of being over-dramatic for attention. Such were his original intents.
“If I die, I shall die with my head held up high” were the words he wrote as lyrics to his song. An oath, yet a meaningless one: he did not think he would be backed into a situation in which death is inevitable, and his only choice was his manner of death. Such were his original thoughts.
“To the universe, the existence of a man is no more than the life of an ant; the death of a man, therefore, is not so consequential” were the words he told his classmates during his speech. Such was his original thesis.
Now he is being held responsible for these words, the dread and relief both flooding unto him like a tsunami as he stared into the barrel of the gun. The barrel, as visible in his retina, was turning gradually red from the heat of the combustion of the gunpowder embedded within the 7.62 mm diameter bullet about to be fired, manufactured by the hands of impoverished, starving men in another country, and shot out of the gun controlled by another impoverished, starving man from that same country.
Flood. That’s an interesting word, he thought.
“Inondation” is “flood” in French, he learned that in French class. In one of the video games he played, the background music screams “like a flood of pain” in its metallic lyrics as his character stabbed the enemy over and over again. In Henan, China, the ruling class – as represented by the KMT and its leader, Chiang Kai Shek, blew up a dam in an effort to induce a flood that may stop some of the invading Japanese soldiers. It did not complete such a goal at all, instead killing tens of thousands of locals whose lives, houses, and livelihoods were destroyed by this flood cast upon them by their own government. As a result, those who survived rose in rebellion, since in their eyes, the Japanese and the KMT are no better than one another.
Just like the Chinese, the French – who called floods “les inondations”, also rose in rebellion when their government slashed their sinews, taxed their last piece of bread in the basket, and cheered as they scraped for survival. Just like the Chinese, they cut off heads after heads, yet unable to cut out the root of the evil within the weeds of greed.
The gun barrel has turned fully red. His brain – the brain carefully and methodically organizing this knowledge and many more, will predictably escape his head through the small hole created by the bullet, splattering onto the ground in a few milliseconds, thus turning into a pile of meaningless non-Newtonian fluid, which will be ran over by the impoverished, starving man in front of him, and the trucks behind him containing hundreds and thousands of impoverished, starving men…
He almost sees the spark at the end of the barrel.
He wants to scream, but no sound came out of his throat. What shall a man do when he is uniquely condemned to realize his inevitable mortality? He asked, like many philosophers before him. Pray, perhaps – but he is not religious. Then perhaps he should close his eyes, but if eternal darkness is to enshroud him in a few moments, why must he hasten its arrival?
If the war was different, had he fought against his own government in rebellion, instead of being sold to the battlefield by his government, he would smile against the same barrel and embrace death, because then he would know, for certain, that his blood will be used to water the seeds of a better world. But now, now he is about to die for no purpose at all, and the people back home would only need to slave away harder as a result.
Unmistakably, the gunpowder in the bullet ignited, sending the tip of the bullet flying out of the barrel at 3,000 kilometers per hour.
Of course, he concluded, his death would be meaningless. What is about to happen is merely a repeat of what has been occurring for hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades… In front of him or outside of his sight, people have been dying meaninglessly. As such, after all, his situation is not particularly tragic or heroic. However, is it wrong to then pursue a life of meaning?
No answer came to mind. Of course, it is unlikely for him to solve the issue that has troubled many for decades in mere milliseconds. Despite the decade-and-a-half worth of education he received, his brain will nevertheless not deliver an answer; as such, most of that education remains useless as his brain undergoes manual shutdown.
Absurd. Absurd, he told himself, is his death – absurd is the death of millions and billions before him! Why must we die? He asked, almost in desperation. Why must we even be born, educated, struggle, just to lead to a meaningless death? A cruel joke, perhaps, much like the comedy in old silent Chaplin films, in which the comedic value of the film is only increased the longer the protagonist spends their time pursuing an impossible goal. Perhaps some cosmic audience points their fingers at him right now, laughing as they hold their belly…
Suddenly, and without warning, staring at the terrified yet angry face of his killer, moments before his death, he saw the answer – the reason why he was here, the reason why he must die, and the reason why many, like him, must embark on the same path.
The bullet tip now passed through the end of the barrel, where the rifling induces drag force on the bullet such that it begins to spin, at first slowly, then rapidly accelerating. Such a design is made to ensure that the bullet tip can easily create a gaping wound in its victim despite its small size, and that it travels in a straight line despite air interferences, guaranteeing its accuracy therein. At the same time, the shell that used to contain the gunpowder propelling the bullet tip is ejected.
The answer is much simpler than imagined. He, and many others, have to be here – and die because it had willed it to be so. In this sense, it is effectively God. The only difference between it and God is its trace is genuinely observable in reality, whereas God’s existence remains ambiguous. The flood in China, the starvation in Imperial France, the failure of the revolution in both places – it is omnipresent. Not only is it so, it directly caused the aforementioned events. His brain goes into hyperactivity one last time before it was deactivated permanently.
The bullet escaped the barrel and flies directly towards its target’s forehead. Yet, instead of seeing the bullet’s trajectory, another image appeared in front of him: a bayonet, his bayonet, cutting through thick weed, the weed that protects all absurdities in this world, the weed that the Chinese, the French, and many others failed to cut through. He cuts through it, and pierced the beating heart below it with the same bayonet.
Avenged he was. His life was far from complete – sure, he thought, but he at least did what ought to have been done. Should there be one thing that a man who knows his mortality dawns must do, he thought, it is this – and it has been completed by him.
Avenged was the millions that died today, on the same field.
Avenged was the billions that lived, clutching their chest, their head, and their limbs, curled in a fetal position, crying and wailing about their misfortunes.
Avenged was the hundreds of billions that passed, perchance peacefully, likely painfully, in absurdity.
Avenged was the world, the world plagued by it, the world that may never recover.
Avenged was all, through his imagination, through the mere imaging of his brain unto his retina.
In his mind, he raised his bayonet in victory, with the still-beating heart pierced on its tip.
In reality, the bullet made contact with the skin on his forehead, then immediately pierced through his skull with ease, barely slowing down at all. The bullet completely destroyed his brain, which, as predicted before, flowed out of the exit wound onto the ground as non-Newtonian fluids. The man who had shot the bullet will then breathe a sigh of relief, dwell on his victim’s body for a while, unaware of the consciousness that once occupied the corpse having avenged the whole world, including him, and with such a lack of knowledge, continue with his absurd crusade – until he meets the same fate at some point in the future.
Yet none of these events matter for the protagonist of this story, as he sinks into the comfortable bed of darkness, deeper, yet deeper, covered by the blanket weaved from the brief relief, the relief that he had finally avenged everyone…
-2024.6.1, Rothesay NB, Tony Su
Art Credit: Adobe Stock
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