“My hands feel naked without my gun. They’re shaking.
They’re twitching for that familiar feel of a trigger. Before
I turned myself over to you, I’d taken to sleeping with my gun,
kind of like a kid sleeps with a stuffed animal. Can’t tell
you how many times that saved my life.
“Okay, you’ve got me. I’m rambling, but I’ve
spent the past month living with the sound of gunshots. All this silence
is a little difficult for me to take.
“Man, I feel like screaming right now. Whatever you’ve
injected me with makes me feel like I’m being cooked alive like
those kids in Hansel and Gretel. Whatever’s in this stuff would
make an evil man good, a live man dead.
“Can you hear me wheezing? There are other things—things
going on the sensors can’t detect. My sweat, for example. I’m
drinking a gallon of water every hour, and I don’t even have
to piss. Everything inside is twisting, expanding.
“You know, there are some things I didn’t consider before
I came here to be a lab rat. The one that’s occurring to me
now is that I have to die surrounded by these white walls—all
this white, all this nothing. It’s like I’m already dead.
“Before you bring the next poor sucker down here for experimentation,
you should get some wall paper—you know, the kind from the seventies
with the nature scenes on them. Anything to ease the sense of being
nowhere, of being a part of nothing.
“Damn all of you, I’m a soldier! I’ve been a soldier
my whole life. I deserve to die on the field with a bullet in my gut,
not here trapped by these walls.
“Hey, does anyone out there have any old war movies? I could
really use one of them right now. I just want to hear the sound of
gunshots. I want to pretend that I’m on the field, that I’m
dying a proper death. I want to feel like I’ve died for a cause.
A shrink would have a field day with me, a man who finds the sound
of gunshots soothing…
“Let me out of this room, damn you! Let me out of this room!”
This story is inspired by my feelings about war. I
believe it is always important to support soldiers even if you don’t
believe in war.
