She knew little if anything of his capacity for cruelty, but she knew he was unique and she worried about him. She was a dowdy woman and looking back, I realize that her prospects must have been slim. She doted on her son. He was all she had or would ever have.
I happened to run into him right after he returned from boot camp, a few weeks before he shipped out. He was gleeful. I knew him thoroughly and he felt no need for pretense as he told me of his plans. He savored the thought of killing people. No cause. No ideology. Just grinning death.
Coincidentally, his mother worked with my father, so I learned of his death in a casual conversation at the dinner table. The people he had intended to kill had been waiting for him and they knew their business better than he. His mother was shattered. Most of her past and all of her future had been ripped away.
Now, more than thirty years later, I looked for his name. I had considered doing so from the day the memorial opened, but it had taken me years to make the journey. Eventually, after much searching, I found his name and I reached to touch it, saying it aloud, an incantation with no purpose. For reasons I can not fathom, my eyes teared up. Something in the moment seemed powerful but I do not know why. He was not my friend. Perhaps it was more for his mother or because I knew his name had not been spoken in the decades since she too had died. Like the groan of hinges on a plundered ancient sarcophagus, his name from my lips split the air. The door to his vault swung open.
A boy near me of about ten was carelessly swinging a bag as young boys do, and it struck my leg. He was bored. He wanted to get something to eat perhaps, or to sit in air conditioning, certainly he wanted to leave this place. When he accidentally struck my leg, his mother moved to stop him, then saw the tears in my eyes, saw my fingers in the groove of his name. She grabbed her son's shoulders and pulled him to her side. She hushed him, a solemn look taking over her face.
She saw an old man at a memorial to an old war, touching an old name and weeping. Her sympathy and reverence were wasted though, her interpretation wrong. She could not know what had brought me there or what I was thinking or what I was feeling. I barely knew those things myself. I felt like a fraud. I backed from the wall. I walked away. She stood there, watching me, her hands on her son’s shoulders, saddened, saddened for me, for the name on the wall, saddened for the boy who used to hurt animals. It was all wrong, all misunderstood. I should never have gone there.
Old episodes cause episodes anew and I find now that the woman at the memorial and her son often occupy my thoughts. I see them stationary in a sculpture of compassion and indifference, their contrasts locked together always in my mind regardless of how their shapes may have changed in the time since, ghosts built upon previous ghosts of war, layers of metaphors, all four ghosts not just people but reflections of their different times as well.
The End