Compartmentalization (Part 20)

Part 20: The Pain of the Mistake

The helicopter turned out to be a very cramped craft. It looked much bigger on the outside, but I assume that is because we are packing a lot of fuel. I never really bothered to look where Nouveau Porc is relative to where we are going, but I don’t really care. I need to go here, no matter how long it takes, and knowing how long it would take would just make me more anxious. The land quickly gave away to a sprawling ocean. I guess we were close to the coast, though the fact that I didn’t notice that earlier is disconcerting to say the least.

Maxwell was sleeping in the back, and Jordan was concentrating on flying and trying to input something on the helicopter console. There was barely enough room for all three of us in the cockpit, and it looked like it was supposed to fit two adults in the front and two children in the back. There was something either sad or funny about seeing Maxwell stuffed in the back seat. At this point, I was leaning towards sad. Maxwell has been through a lot, though the fact that he seems to be sleeping so soundly sort of betrays that.

“There!” Jordan explains while leaning back in the pilots chair, “I finally programed the autopilot. It’ll take a while, but we’ll get there,” Jordan smiles to me, “I probably should have done that before we took off, but I am just so excited! This feels like a dream come true!”
“Yeah,” I mean to say more enthusiastically, but I knew at this point that from this point, it is all deception. I just need to figure out what the significance of McNabb’s facility never being finished is and this is all over. I think.

“I have all the news networks and websites I want to broadcast to all set up. Even if the UWG censors the networks, the fire that will be lit as doubt spreads will be too much to put out. All we gotta do is land and take the equipment out,” Jordan says to me.

I forgot whether Jordan told me this before or not, but I act like I know, “Alright, let’s do this.”
Jordan looks in the back and asks, “Is he still asleep? Hey! Get up! Early bird gets the worm, and all that jazz!”
Maxwell wakes up, but he doesn’t look too pleased. He responds sleepily “What is it?”
“I wanted to ask you something, you awake?”
“I am now,” Maxwell says with a sneer.
Jordan, seemingly oblivious to this, says, “How is my place holding up? Any of those land mines explode yet?”
“No,” Maxwell answered immediately and succinctly.
“I also saw that you wear all of my clothes!”
“Well, if there were any clothes stores in the middle of that desert, maybe I wouldn’t have to.”
“Oh c’mon, you like my style! No need to be shy! You look good in it!’
Maxwell decides to stop looking at us and stare out the window while saying, “Unlike you, I don’t have the money or privilege to sew my name into all the clothing I wear.”
“Ooo, that stings, doesn’t it?” Jordan says while he nudges me.

I don’t like where this is going.

“I worked hard as hell to get where I am,” Jordan says, looking right at Maxwell, “But you’re right, I don’t deserve the ‘privilege’ any more than you do. I worked hard to break the rules, and you worked equally as hard to work within them. And yet, here we are, I am the leader of a highly prestigious organization, and you are struggling to get by, with the best anti-assassin still working, no less. Is that fair?”
“I don’t see what ‘fairness’ has to do with anything,” Maxwell says, looking out the window.
“Exactly! We don’t live in a fair world, even before the Catastrophe, fairness was but a dream, but now it is dead. Any sort of ambition or goal is stamped out by the hopelessness of not being able to even scrape by. Why is that?”
Maxwell seems to not even want to even pay attention to Jordan anyway, and keeps on looking out to the sprawling sea, as the sun begins to rise.
“Because we have accepted the world as it is,” Jordan continues, “Because every time somebody tries to rise up, they are pounded back down. I worked for the UWG for years, defending their people and their interests, and where did it get me? Nowhere. The bottom of the food chain. Once I left, everything changed. And look at Josh here!” Jordan says as he points at me (and the last thing I wanted was for anyone to ‘look’ at me), “Josh worked as a UWG bodyguard for a fraction of the time you were a anti-assassin, and they gave him full access to the UWG intelligence! What kind of world has the UWG wrought?”
Maxwell, still looking out the window, responds, “Do you mind? It is hard to sleep when you keep on talking.”
“Oh!” Jordan looks at me, then looks at Maxwell, “Am I bothering you? Do you think what I am saying is wrong, or is it something you heard before?”
“No, I am just sleepy and you are too crazy to really take seriously.”
“My goodness! Crazy, huh?” Jordan looks at me, a part of me wants to tell Maxwell to shut up, a part of me wants to see where this goes, and the other parts just want to jump out of this helicopter, “He thinks we’re crazy!”
I try to diffuse the situation and say, “Uh, let the man sleep. We got plenty of time before,”
“The man thinks we’re crazy!” Jordan interrupts, “Well, that’s fine. That is what everyone thinks. We wouldn’t be taking this trip if people took us seriously, and you are the perfect cynic to bear witness to the truth!”
Maxwell sighs a little bit. He looks like he is resigning any sort of nap he thought he was going to have, and looks at Jordan as if his eyes were daggers that were trying to stab him, “The truth?”
“That the UWG are of bunch of opportunistic weasels, and the only reason the world is this terrible place is because they are both too lazy and too incompetent to do anything about it! Without them, the Catastrophe never would have never happened!”
“And what proof could you possibly find of that?”
“Don’t misunderstand me, I am not saying that we wouldn't have had to pay for the sins our our fathers, that was coming no matter what. What did the predecessors of the UWG do to prevent all the loses? What did they do to try and keep our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, and the rest of our families from dying? Nothing. They did nothing. And now they rule the world because everyone was too heart broken and afraid to say any different. That needs to change. Once we have the proof, then you will see who is crazy!”
Maxwell sighs again and looks out the window, “Has it ever occurred to you that being ‘right’ doesn’t necessarily mean that you aren’t crazy?”
Jordan turns to me, “Haha, maybe I should have waited until morning? Looks like Maxwell here is a little cranky. No matter. I can’t expect to change people overnight. Let’s make sure we are rested,” Jordan says and puts his hands behind his head and closes his eyes. Maxwell is still looking out the window, and I shut my eyes a well. I try thinking back to the list I gave myself. I am on step eight now, if I remember correctly. Step nine is to ‘Remember password (AN).’ AN? I am pretty sure it is an acronym, but for what? AN? That doesn’t sound right. Isn’t it supposed to be AM?

Wait, why do I think that? Why does ‘AM’ make more sense than ‘AN?’

As the helicopter flies over the ocean, my legs begin to cramp. Both Maxwell and Jordan seem to be asleep. I have been trying to sleep, fading in and out of consciousness occasionally, but now I am fully awake, and I have no idea how long we have been on here. I look through the helicopter windshield and see nothing but ocean below. There is no indication of any land anywhere. I have this odd feeling of how silent it is. I look up to the top and see the helicopter blades spinning rapidly. I begin to get hypnotized by how the blades go by so fast that it looks like I can focus on one slowly going around. A trick of things going faster than the brain can conceive. Which I suppose is exactly what this journey has been, faster than I could think. I sure did a good job tricking myself. I just have to figure out what the hell I was thinking.

The silence is almost deafening and it dawns on me suddenly that there is no way that a normal helicopter could be this quiet. I don’t think I have ever rode on a helicopter before, but I can’t imagine something with spinning blades being so quiet. I try and figure it out in my head. It is either that the cockpit is so thick that no noise is coming through, or maybe there is a noise canceling device in here, or maybe a mix of both. Fascinating what technology can do. It can normalize even the most impossible of situations.

Maxwell suddenly whispers to me, “You know, I had no idea I was in for something like this when I brought you on.”
I make sure Jordan is asleep and respond, “Yeah, neither did I.”
“I always knew that it was a gamble, and it isn’t quite working out the way I wanted it too.”
“How did you want it to work out?”
“For one, I thought you were going to make me a lot more money.”
I think about it for a while and respond, “I guess I’m sorry, but I never needed money. In fact, I never really needed anything, well, material.”
“Don’t you live a charmed life.”

Maxwell closed his eyes and I was alone again. The more I think about it, the more I realize how lucky I was. It is sad that I don’t remember ever appreciating it. I was too wrapped up in myself to ever see how lucky I was compared to everyone else. I was just so miserable all the time. At least, that is all I remember. I don’t remember the happy times, I only remember the set of unfortunate events that lead me here in the first place.

I think back to that first date with Amelia; one of the few happy times I can remember (and even that was filled with anxiety and dread). “How can you make it so you can remember the lessons from experience, without the pain of the mistake?” I remember her saying it so clear, though I wonder if I have remembered it so much that I have overwritten how it actually went. It is now the ideal, and the reality is abandoned for convenience's sake. I wonder how many mistakes I have made, and how many I have forgotten to learn from. My plight doesn’t sound too much different from other people’s, I just wish I could feel secure about that.

I look at the autopilot computer and see that we have about an hour before we get there. I never took account of how long the trip was supposed to be in the first place. I finally got some sleep, and I am feeling a bit refreshed. I still have no idea what AN or AM mean. I think about how the tenth step is ‘reset.’ Am I going to forget everything again after this? That could be for the best. I have no idea what is going to to me happen after this. The tenth step begins to relax me a little. No matter what happens, I am going to forget this all anyway. Why stay stressed out about something that I can’t remember?

But, ah yes, “the pain of the mistake.”

“Josh, wake up, we’re here!” Jordan says as he shakes me.
I see that we have landed on a black, grated platform in the middle of the ocean. Just like in that vision.
“It is exactly where you said it was! You are a genius!” Jordan celebrates as he presses a large button. The cockpit opens and Jordan gets out.
“I am going out to the back and get all the equipment ready. You take Maxwell out and you two stretch your legs! We gotta be awake and limber to see what we’re going to see!”

I lift myself out slowly and by the time I get out, Maxwell is already stretching on the platform.

It is a lot smaller than what I imagined when I dream about it. I thought it stretched out for kilometers and kilometers, but as I look at it, it barely looks 300 meters long. It looks like a perfect grated, black square, just in the middle of nowhere. No idea why they call this the ‘obelisk.’ I begin to remember that man running away, and me lying down, accepting my fate. Here I am, again. A bile begins to rise in me. I never wished to be here again. I wanted this place to stay in my nightmares. This is the place where I killed myself. I baptized myself in flames and hoped that I died. But here I am again.

I wanted to leave, but I had a job. I want to destroy this place, but really, I just want to destroy the world. I want everything to fade away so I could be alone in my hate. I turned myself into a demon, and I am still too powerless to

Wait!

Wait

This isn’t me.

This is the me I killed.

This is the me I thought I killed.

I thought there was no one in the world who loved me and that the world was out to get me. I blamed the world. But ‘the world’ isn’t a thing. It is a large body of so many ideas, people, and things.

It’s okay, now. Everything is going to be okay. I imagine seeing myself as a child, I want to comfort him. I want to tell him that what he did was wrong, but I’ll fix it. Everything is going to be fine.

“Uh, Josh, uh, are you okay?”

I made wrong choices, I trusted the wrong people. I thought there were answers, but there are none. I made a promise to myself. I promised that I would fix this. I am going to atone for my mistakes, my selfishness, my ignorance of the outside world. I will atone by being the only one that can kill The Beast.

Jordan. I called him ‘the beast,’ because I thought he was evil. I am not so sure anymore. I am not sure if good or evil exist. All I know is that his attachment to his ideas will only bring ruin. I helped him become who he is, not because I encouraged him, but because I knew that he was wrong, and I did nothing to rise up and stop him. If I was really his friend, I would have told him that changing the world because of fear, paranoia, and revenge could only bring sorrow.

I am not sure if I am right or wrong, but sometimes that doesn’t matter, and if I honestly thought it was right, then I would be just as wrong or worse than Jordan. This isn’t about right or wrong, it is the decision I have made. It is my attempt to make the world a better place, the world I used to hate so absolutely.

So many mistakes. So much pain. “The pain of the mistake.” Amelia McNabb.

AM

“Josh!” I hear Jordan yell as he shakes my shoulder, “I almost got all the equipment ready, you remember how to open this place right?”
I answer almost robotically, “Yes.”
“Good! I was afraid that you forgot! Alright, I am going to set a few more things up. You get the thing opened, okay?”
“Sure.”

The only thing they finished on this false obelisk was the security system.

I turn towards Maxwell and get 5 centimeters away from his face, and say with a deadly seriousness, “Maxwell, when I say ‘now’ I want you to lay down completely flat on the platform. If you do not do this, you will die. Understand?”
Maxwell looks at me confusedly, as if he doesn’t even recognize who I am anymore and says meekly, “OK Josh, anything you say.”

There is a part of me that wants to confront Jordan. To ask him why he did the things he did. Why he thought what he was doing was okay. A part of me wants him to give one last speech before he goes. I realize that isn’t what I actually want. I want him to be the Jordan I knew before I knew what he did. I want him to say something that would make me remember why I admired and loved him so much.

In the end, I figure I want him to feel the least pain, emotional or physical, that I can. That is the only humane way to put down a Beast.

“Alright! All ready! Let’s start this revolution!” Jordan says enthusiastically as he runs towards me and Maxwell.
“NOW!”
I make sure Maxwell and I are lying completely flat.
“Huh...?” Jordan asks.
“ACTIVATE AUTO-NEUTRALIZATION SYSTEM PASSWORD AMELIA MCNABB!” I yell.
“What are...?”

Suddenly, the grates below Maxwell and I shift and lower us below the platform. Instantaneously, flames erupt above us and creates a burning mass. What looked like grates before, have wrapped us up and now protect us from the purge above. The flames are so loud that I could not hear Jordan or anything else.

I look over through the ‘grates’ towards Maxwell, and he looks terrified, but I can’t help but feel elated. It worked. I have finally done what it took me so long to do. I want to reach out to Maxwell  and tell him that everything is going to be fine, that this journey is over. I reach with my hand, to see if this is even real, but the bubble like material makes it impossible. I begin to realize that I am losing consciousness a bit.

Wait. waitwaitwaitwaitwait. I don’t want to reset I want to remember I want to remember  I am free now I don’t need to forget I change my mind don’t let me forget don’t let me forget don’t let me fade a