This Happens
Stillness. There was clattering chaos, and before that the stunning clap of unbearable sound. Now nothing moves. No bird dares sing. No one stirs from the ducked-down hiding holes and instant shelters and cowering corners in the street, the caught-out cars, the other houses, the entrances and gardens and the tiny park two blocks away. No screams, no shouts, no sirens. No one looks up. Not yet.Even the wind holds its breath.
The world, in this moment of unwanted magic, is suspended.
One house is erased. Its existence has gone. Next door to it stands an open-sided shell which teeters over a frozen maelstrom of debris – the smashed transfiguration of what was its guts, its innards, its soul. The shell, a scoured skin of masonry and plaster shards, would shiver, wondering whether to fall, if the wind still stirred.
But the world, in its meaningless vacuum of shock, can’t move.
Until something changes.
The air above the debris fills with fog. The pulverised architecture cloaks itself. The space beneath the stripped wall turns grey. At first in silence, the air congeals and begins to move. The missing house, the void next door, mushrooms into opacity.
Something happens. The suspended world unhappens.
Little things spit upwards out of the fog. Fragments of wood, splinters of stone, a roof tile magnificently intact, a whirling parasol made of many sheets of paper – which dance, and twirl, and clump together like congealing shavings of coherent words, until a sheaf of printed white leaps interleaving into the sky.
The fog is denser, swirling, coarser. And noisier. Pattering becomes clattering, becomes a cascade of escalating sounds. A wooden beam, a glazed cup, a stripped and twisting picture frame vomit out of the convulsing dust and arc into the air. A whip-thin snake of electric cable rolls upwards like a flying thing and goes hunting the sky for its torn-free origin. A pulse sucks inwards through the dancing dust and debris. The cloud begins to boil. Secondary crashes crescendo into a scream of integrating pieces – and an imploding fountain shoots a severed chunk of brickwork up towards the sky. The brickwork tumbles. It travels sideways. It perches like a perfect acrobat at the end of an inverted dive. It’s the top of the chimney which runs like a reinforcing column through that one remaining wall. It’s the hacked-off head, which re-embodies itself. Next to it, bricks and mortar fragments snap into place. The wall grows.
Now there’s more noise. Much more. It siphons agony out of the ears and stitches it into a boiling symphony of ruin. The place which wasn’t there, the house next door which had turned into a rubble beach in a gap-toothed street, is now a roiling body of fragments. This house, which had been stripped to a single wall, becomes a whirling confusion of pieces, and the pieces bump and grow. Glass, brick, stone, concrete, porcelain, shreds of furniture, a flapping carpet, a pan, a torn-out tap, evacuated wardrobe clothes, a shoe, a plant pot with burning bougainvillaea still rooted inside – all of it is screeching through the air and clumping, joining, coalescing into things.
Recognisable things.
But you didn’t see where the doll came from. It’s somersaulting through the furious air. It’s starting to singe. It’s beginning, in patches, to glow. It bounces off a piece of wall that’s materialising in the midst of the reinvented upper floor. Now it’s burning. It arcs back, faster and faster, towards a space that’s clearing itself in the middle of the mess. Something has set the doll on fire. It meets the flame front…
The first house, the empty house, the one that will have vanished by the time that this is done – it blew apart. This second house, its neighbour, was shattered by the blast and by the impacting fragments of the first. It would have fallen, but it didn’t get the chance. An explosion isn’t simply a concussion. It’s also an expulsion of air. Immediately after – immediately before in this unhappening – the air slams back. In the snapshot interval between detonation and restoration, there’s an underpressure right beside the house. But not inside the house. So its shattered shell, still standing, bursts.
The spool-back of that burst is a miraculous congealing of kaleidoscope into form. The appearance of light-seared shape. A shake, a shudder. A stop –
Suddenly, in the flash-bright brilliance of a next-door sun, the house is there. It’s windows are gone. Painted stucco melts off its wall. But it’s there.
What’s unhappening inside?
There are walls. Solid walls, cracked block from standing block by the passage of the shockwave. Dry walls with split joints, expelled nails, and sheeting shivered into layers of separating plasterboard. There are floors which rip and rend. Ceiling plaster powders the air. Boards whirl like mad Mikado sticks. Stairways – basement to ground, ground to mid-floor, mid to top – hang like exploded working drawings of what the builder once had done. Unswirling in between it all are the homogenised contents of this home.
And the inhabitants.
This one was the grandmother. She’s been buried between bricks and tiles and beams. She was bent sideways. She was flattened across her pelvis and her chest, and caked in a carapace of grit glued together with blood. Even an aged grandmother, if suitably crushed, exudes a lot of blood.
Now she’s tumbling upwards, slower and slower. Her body is bouncing off bits and pieces, scraping against the re-incorporating house, picking up strips of herself that will have ripped free as she falls. She isn’t crushed any more. The gouts of blood that will be expelled as she comes to rest under the roof rubble haven’t happened yet. She’s sucking back small sprays of red that vanish as each rip and tear heals itself as she flies. She’s no longer dead. But she doesn’t know what’s going on. Excruciating agony and fear, yes – but too much has happened far too suddenly to understand.
Now she’s landing on the upper floor, and the floor is prising itself into place beneath her feet. One foot is bare. Here comes the slipper. It’s an old Arabian lady’s slipper with a brocaded upper rim. It expels the splinter of wood that will have torn it, and the tear zips out of existence. Perfectly, abruptly, it wraps around her reddened toes.
She pirouettes, arms outstretched, baggy trousers and voluminous blouse and damask scarf snapped wide like flags. Her white hair thrashes with a blast of new life. It’s the last illusion.
She no longer has time to know it, but at least she isn’t alone.
Her daughter, the mother of the house, was in the hall. She was on her way from the kitchen to the study, a bottle of water in her hand. It was half full and laced with freshly squeezed lemon juice – very refreshing on what’s going to be another hot day. The family is middle class, though that doesn’t mean much these days. It allows them only occasional access to bottled water. Or fresh lemons. The family is also highly educated. Foreign educated. Her husband studied medicine in Tübingen. Mona took law in Manchester, UK.
She was on her way back to the computer, which has been working this morning because the power is on. That doesn’t happen often, so you take every chance you can. Mona was updating their files on torture victims lucky enough to be released after inconclusive interrogation by the police. Law and medicine – a combination that compiles a potent condemnation of crimes against humanity. Of course, for years they’ve had to work in secret on the project, but now the electricity supply has become so unreliable that no one thinks you’d use a computer, and the paper records they assume you’d stash away are far too easy to find. Aside from which, paper’s also in short supply. So are little computer disks. But they’re remarkably transportable and very easy to smuggle.
Mona was passing the stairs when the parlour wall, against which they’re build, exploded.The parlour had somewhat neglected French windows in each gap between its outside piers, and one of the peeling window sets was open to the garden. The open French windows offered no protection. The closed sets weren’t much use, either. The blast, together with the pulverised pieces of garden wall that came with it, hit the inner wall with completely unattenuated force. Mona really didn’t have time to know. She might have had a momentary memory from just before of something, something… But it didn’t last for long.
It’s a stair tread that’s sliding back out of her waist. Its departure restores the innards it tore in two. The amazing burst of blood from her ripped-open stomach has already sucked itself out of sight. Her neck has uncracked. The banister that broke it is now snapping back on top of its exquisitely carved spindles. Internal wall – a dated, clay-brick, load-bearing structure – is reforming and expelling the furious storm that’s come from the parlour. The staircase is reassembling itself. It mates with the wall and is suddenly fixed in space. Mona’s face, at last, has a recognisable expression. She’s a middle-aged woman thinking something, going somewhere, doing something.
She’s alive.
At this moment, when everything is about to be wiped out, she’s thinking briefly of Siham, her mother. The stairs have prompted the passing awareness. Siham took an armful of fresh linen up to the boys’ room, on the upper floor. That’s a long climb for an ageing lady. Hope she’s all right.
Right now, as her own life is about to be ripped to nothing, Mona isn’t thinking of her husband, nor her little girl. On reflection, if she was ever going to be given the chance, she’d probably wish she had thought of them. But it’s too late now.
Mona’s daughter, her youngest child, is Mervet. Or was. She isn’t quite back with us yet. Things have to unspool a little further.
The shockwave has already left the house. With it has come its freight of architectural shrapnel. With it, too, travel the ripped limbs of the cracked old date tree that stood for so long, unwatered, in the dry-as-dust garden. Ever since the powers that be took a vicious dislike to the city, mains water has been as fickle and infrequent as the electric power. And groceries, clothes, petrol, Diesel… Once it was a great oil-exporting and refining terminal, the linchpin of the national economy. You wouldn’t credit what’s been done to this city. And that’s before this sudden war.
Tree branches scream themselves against the trunk. Shards of garden wall jumble together and wobble back in line. They create an old shield of whitewashed brick. It wasn’t a very good shield. A lot of pulverised house came clean through from next door, and the shield became nothing better than a bonus of chisel-sharp bits mixed in with the supersonic murder. It was the shockwave, plus the sheer force of flying pieces, that defeated it. The defeat was lost and done in less than a hundredth of a second. It let through exploding house, the explosion itself, and the flame front.
The doll hasn’t met the flame front yet. We’ve rolled back to a point before the flame has passed through. The doll is intact now. It’s squeezing itself into a five-year-old hand. Mervet, the owner of the hand, has barely noticed the disconnection between doll and hand, between hand and arm, nor the thread of brilliant blood erupting in between. Her head is turned to look across her little shoulder. She’s heard some sound, noticed that something is about to happen. But it’s been far too fast to grasp.
Besides, how does a five-year-old girl grasp this?
Mervet’s been playing, dancing with her doll around the garden while there’s still some shadow draped across it next to the house. She’s been getting thirsty. In a minute she was going to go in for a drink. Granny’s in there somewhere, and with luck Granny will find a sweet pistachio pastry, too. Granny makes lovely pistachio pastries.
Mervet isn’t an unusual girl. She’s bright and beautiful, as little girls always are. She wouldn’t normally be alone in the middle of the morning. She’d be playing with friends, either here in this garden, or in the friend’s garden a few houses down the street. But since the sudden war started, the streets – even in this residential zone – have become a lot less safe. Law and order has broken down. She heard Mummy and Daddy say so. It means you mustn’t go outside the garden gate alone. Not until someone’s taken law and order somewhere and put it right again.
Some people do go out of the gate. Adults. Mervet’s father and Mervet’s uncle, Mona’s brother, have taken the car. With them are the other children – in ascending age, boy, boy, girl. They’ve risked the use of precious petrol and gone in search of a market that’s supposed to have materialised across town. When they get there – if they find it – they have enough numbers to protect the car and at the same time to march through the market buying and carrying. The object of the exercise is food, which they’ll buy with devaluating cash and whatever they can bear to barter. They have enough bodies to look after themselves and keep control of their purchases until they get home. The police won’t help. Nowadays the police are only concerned with security issues, which means persecuting anyone the governor doesn’t like. The governor’s been appointed because of his intense dislike of everyone.
Bodies. The food seekers have enough bodies to protect themselves. They’ll be back before midday.
They’ll find a bomb site. And real bodies, when they dig them out. Mervet, Mona and Siham. Bodies and obliteration. The surviving children, one day, will learn to live despite a vein of horror buried inside. The two men won’t.
And they’ll always wonder why?
The answer’s fairly easy. It’s the house next door, the empty one that’s about to be obliterated in a detonation that will also destroy the home standing right beside it. The emptiness is the problem.
The enemy – the coalition – has received intelligence that the governor is constantly moving from place to place. The intelligence is unverified, but plausible. The advantages to the governor are two-fold. As security forces become stretched and chaos engulfs the city, he’s more vulnerable than ever before to an assassination attempt. The locals, after all, hate him. And as a very senior member of the government clique, he’s a prime target for the coalition strategy of decapitation. Two reasons for his head to roll.
And an hour ago the general charged with taking the city was told the governor is here. In this empty house. They have a fix on the man. Precise, and hot. So it’s decision time. Call in a strike? Yes or no?
The machinery that does it is already here. It’s been here for some time, ensuring they’ve identified the right house. After all, they’re very humane and don’t want to kill any more innocent bystanders than they have to. It’s up there above us now, though you probably wouldn’t see it no matter how long you stared into the blinding, sun-dust sky. A remote controlled reconnaissance drone, modified to carry a single bomb and a TV guidance pod, is a tiny thing with whisper jets and the radar profile of a pigeon. And it’s five thousand metres away, straight up.
The bomb isn’t.
Someone’s guiding it. Far away, in a desert-netted mobile home filled with electronic wonders, he’s hunched over a TV screen and is tweaking the bomb’s steering vanes with his joystick. A colleague is controlling the drone. Their unit commander cleared them to arm and release the bomb. An officer further up the line cleared the mission and then ordered them to engage the target. Someone else passed it down from the general’s office, and the general launched the entire attempt on the basis of the intelligence report, the decapitation strategy, the guidelines from his immediate superiors and, ultimately, the go-ahead for the whole damned thing from his government.
Pity the intelligence is wrong. There’s no one hiding in the empty house. It’s been unoccupied for months.
Mervet knows that. She doesn’t know where the family went. Daddy does. He said liquid-something by the Party agents, and Mummy said nothing at all. Mervet doesn’t care. It’s an empty house. It might as well have been empty for ever. Its little garden, which she can see over the wall when she leans out of her upstairs window, is even worse a mess than their own. It isn’t the least bit interesting.
Though there’s some sort of sound, very quiet, that she doesn’t recognise from all her eager, busy, fortunate five years. Something that’s making her turn with a trace of possible interest to the whitewashed garden wall.
Mona can’t hear it. Not consciously. Now, in backwards time, she’s just left the kitchen, open bottle in her hand, and is noticing momentarily how the fabric of her clothing sweeps the sweat on her thighs that beaded, unfanned, while she was standing still and pouring the lemon juice into the bottle’s neck. Her head is full of thoughts. They jostle and demand, they sweep in and out of her attention. The computer files, the victims, the contents of the larder, the power-starved and useless fridge, the options for the evening meal, the stockpile of bottled water, her husband, her brother, the two boys and their older sister, is the car still working, have they found the market, how does she do anything useful in this ruined, murderous, lawless world, and will her law degree find an application again once the governor is gone and the enemy’s taken over, and is there really a risk that the chaos will get even worse and the fundamentalists will move in and a woman’s world will shrink back to the prison behind the domestic door? She hopes not. Not for her mother, not for herself, not for her precious little daughter playing outside.
Siham’s by the closet in her grandsons’ room on the top floor. She’s just put the folded linen inside and she’s closing the door. Her thoughts, too, are that ceaseless quiet riot of being alive, leavened by the additional experience of years. Some things simply don’t matter any more. Other things – her husband, his illness, his death, the fact that he can never brush her cheek, hold her hand, smile at her – those things have to be. Newer concerns clamour increasingly in the constant background. Old bones, complaining muscles, inadequate eyes, muffled ears, and that dizziness every time you take too many stairs. But there’s her son and her daughter and her son-in-law, and her grandchildren – that headstrong worrisome girl, the proud and splendid men to be, and the little one, the dainty one. Life always goes on. Life, she knows, is good.
And outside, in the air above the neighbouring house, hangs the bomb.
It’s falling almost vertically now. We’ve frozen the fall. It sits motionless in the solid air, suspended on its cross of steering fins. Drab in battle-ordnance sand, it doesn’t even glint under the sun. That’s a pity. Considering what it’s about to do, it almost deserves a moment of impersonal beauty. The power to dispense death, a privilege supposedly reserved to God, is a pretty momentous gift.
The bomb is invested with this power because it was created for that purpose. It’s been made. Just as someone ordered it, loaded it, sent it, released it and is guiding it, someone else designed it, manufactured it, shipped it to the war. These weapons are here, with their delivery systems, control systems and the labyrinthine mass of support systems – in fact the whole infernal military machine – because someone does it, someone else has created it, and yet someone else earns money from the providing of it all. It’s a very clever economic invention. It distributes the guilt to the point where every individual concerned can claim to be honourable, moral and clean.
It distributes the guilt. But doesn’t dilute it.
And it doesn’t delete the blame.
Every person who’s decided that the goal is worth the cost, that duty calls, that the regrettable deaths are a price worth paying – everyone from the soldier guiding the bomb to the politician who sent him – every single one of them is doing this. Right now. To these people. Who are living people. Not collateral damage statistics. Everything they are and were, every potential and hope and expectation they have, their lives – it’s all about to be extinguished. And it’s no excuse to have wrestled with the moral issues, no get-out to insist that you’ll answer in the end to God. This isn’t a moral issue. It isn’t blessed by God. It’s death.
It’s about to happen. The universe won’t tolerate violations of the possible. What occurs stays true. There’s no cosmological court of appeal.
Look at this. Look very closely. When someone says it has to be for the benefit of others, and the killing of innocents is justified – these are the ones.
Siham’s at the closet door. She’s feeling at this moment old, and wobbly, and not as solid as she’d like to be. Mona, back where she leaves the kitchen doorway, feels solid, thoughtlessly corporeal, confident, real. The obscenity of being slashed and ripped simply can’t be accommodated within her living mind. Mervet is singing happiness at her doll and is totally unaware that less than a second from now she will have heard something – and then will be torn to scorched pieces which fly asunder with everything else in a spray of boiling blood. Right now, every day is five years old and fun. Life is lovely. Anything can happen.
And it does.
The suspended bomb moves. The bomb strikes. The warhead explodes. The target building disintegrates. It’s transformed in one instant into shockwave and chaos and a maelstrom made of shrapnel and debris, which shred, pulverise, obliterate everything in the path of this God-bright, merciless, momentary hell.
This happens.
And they die.
All content © David Mace unless otherwise credited. All rights reserved.