"The Comet" by Giovanni Dania

The Comet
Giovanni Dania

I've heard the tapes a hundred times, studied the inflections of each ghost-like voice. I place the interviewers as being from somewhere slightly south of the Mason-Dixon Line, to judge from their mild accents, accents you could tell they'd tried to hide. There were no other clues as to the location of the interviews. All I've heard beyond the questions, answers and occasional outbursts was steady downpour.

In the first tapes he hadn't even sounded like my father, not remotely. It may have had something to do with the fact that I'd last seen him about twenty years ago, when I was six or seven years old. But hearing his voice, and listening to his words, I got to know him again.

I have over thirty hours of tapes, the interviews in their entirety, in private storage under an assumed name, for which I pay in cash. My attorney and I are the only people privy to its location.

The first few hours are absolutely devoid of drama; mundane stuff, really. I guess they were gauging him, testing his sanity, shit like that. They were, after all, the ones who'd induced his psychosis. I can tell by their questions: they knew their shit. Only those responsible for his transformation would know about it, what questions to ask.

It's strange, but in the end, my dad almost sounded human again. When he'd begged to see the comet, Haley's comet, before they gassed him and the others, I knew he still had it in him: the thoughts, fears and emotions we all have. A soul.

As I listen, I could almost smell the cigarette smoke and burnt coffee, feel the cloying, hot humidity choking my dad, see vibrant hallucinations in the artificial clarity of fluorescent overheads. For whatever reason, I see them in the basement of a soot-stained warehouse in an industrial zone of New Orleans. I can imagine the gray existence of all the augmented soldiers, bumping against each other in a dark basement hold, and the sweat. And they, occasionally losing it, occasionally gripped in the cold, tight embrace of cabin fever, bludgeoned each other with their modified left arms. Although unloaded, they made effective melee weapons.

Five hours into the interviews I'd figured out what had been done, but I'd had to go over it twice. I was sick for days.

The tapes had come to me certified mail, which probably hadn't been terribly smart. The sender's name and return address had been fictitious, and, therefore, untraceable. Untraceable by me, at least. I remember reading in the paper several days later, underneath an article about a rash of disappearances of white male teens from their homes in which the Tong, the Chinese mafia, had been implicated, about a freak accident that had taken place on a lonely two-lane, roughly six miles north-east of Pensacola. A single-car accident that had taken the life of some sleazy lawyer who'd had a talent for sniffing out government scandal on all levels. I remember reading that and feeling a slimy chill down my spine. The idea that one car, by itself on a relatively desolate stretch of highway, could explode so violently and so completely, was a little suspicious to me. They'd had to identify him with dental records.

By my consultations with almanacs, encyclopedias and the like, the interviews had been conducted roughly twelve years ago, which would coincide with the facts that I'd garnered from the tapes. My father has been dead for the last twelve years, and I hadn't known.

Thirteen years ago, the United States had declared war on South Germany, siding with the Chinese and the French. In a bold scheme to guarantee victory, they'd set in motion a plan to augment a select troop through prosthetics, induced biochemical change, cyborganic implants. The idea was to jack up a trained soldier's nerves to decrease reaction time, lop off his left arm at the elbow and fit it with a mini machine gun, then place circuitry on his amygdala, that reptilian throwback that has never been fully evolved out of the human brain, to control his aggression.

The plan had succeeded, to a certain degree: the cranial implants were able to induce aggressive behavior, but then signally failed at stopping it. The augmented soldiers were driven half-mad by their unfulfilled desire to kill, and their bloodlust grew at a frightening, exponential rate. I suspect that there are reports somewhere detailing the maiming of at least one careless research scientist. Then, six months later, South Germany surrendered, leaving the troop with no theater to which to report.

I have no idea how long it took them to decide on what to do with the homicidal maniacs they'd created.

The battalion of drugs injected into the bloodstreams of these soldiers not only sped up their reflexes; it increased their strength. A rather unfortunate side effect was induced psychosis. Every single one of them was a raging psychotic with the strength of five average men, and there was no way to reverse the process. They would not be allowed to live.

Apparently, my dad had retained something of his former self, and recalled something his grandfather, my great-grandfather, had told him. My great-grandfather had told him about Haley's comet, and how it passes the Earth once every seventy-five years or so. Like I mentioned earlier, I've studied the almanacs and encyclopedias; the last time the comet came was during the time of post-war reconstruction taking place over there in South Germany. More than anything else, this is what convinces me that the tapes are real.

My dad had pleaded with them to allow him to see the comet before they gassed him. By the final interview, it had become a litany, the only thing he would discuss.

An unanswered prayer.