I realized that, in talking to John Paul, I was telling him to do as I said and not as I did. I was telling John Paul not to forget about all the corpses, and yet I had no idea what to do about the burden I carried with me. All of my sins, not just my matricide. The sin of killing people without having chosen to kill them myself. The sin of dodging my responsibility. I wanted closure. From Lucia’s mouth. Redemption—or condemnation.
But Lucia had died. And there was no one left in this world who could either punish me or forgive me.
This was hell, right here, right now. I was trapped in a hell called myself. “Hell is here, Captain Shepherd” was what Alex had said. And he had been right. I was in the deepest pit of hell. I had come here to be punished and, at the end of the punishment, find a glimmer of hope, the possibility that I could be redeemed. That was why I had come to Africa. But shortly after I arrived, the prospect of punishment and forgiveness slipped away forever; it disappeared, broken.
Maybe this was my punishment. To be doomed to walk the earth till the end of my days, weighed down by the burden of corpses.
“I want to ask you something,” I said. “Now that Lucia’s dead, do you regret what you did? Laying the groundwork for so many people to die?”
Now that he had lost Lucia, I wondered whether John Paul felt any sort of solidarity with the people who had died, or the people who had lost loved ones.
John Paul shook his head. “No. Not at all. I have no regrets on that front, at least. I put two sets of lives in the scales. The lives of the people in our world on one side, and on the other side were the lives of hostile people who lived in poverty and hatred and cast a shadow over our happiness. I went into this thing eyes wide open and made a completely sober and rational decision. I even had a good idea of how many people would die in the process. Once you know what you are capable of doing, it becomes impossible to escape from your own potential.”
“And what will you do next?” I asked.
“Well, I was originally planning to continue bearing the burden all on my own. But if we get to the stage where, per Lucia’s wishes, the world learns of what I’ve done, then I suppose the choice will be theirs. They’ll have to make the call as to whether they want to keep their world without terrorism, even if it means building it atop of a pile of corpses.”
“And you think that’ll make you feel better? If you hand the baton on to someone else? Will that excuse your crimes?”
“By no means. You can never escape from your own decisions. They are with you always.”
We walked on without rest.
All things considered, and taking a long-term historical perspective, the world was probably becoming a better place over time. The world did occasionally fall into the clutches of chaos and regressed, but broadly speaking the story of humanity was a story of progress. Relativism only gets you so far. There always comes a point where you can say that one culture has more sophisticated or enlightened values than another, and this can be a good thing in absolute terms. The story of civilization is the story of the battle of human conscience against the instinct to murder or rape or steal or betray, and how even against the harsh backdrop of the world, the conscience is still moving inexorably in the direction of altruism and love for family and friends and neighbors.
But we still have a long way to go before we can accurately describe ourselves as moral actors. As ethical beings.
For humans can turn our eyes from all sorts of things.
John Paul limped along behind me, desperately trying to keep pace. He was panting hard.
Now he asked me a question. “What about you? What will you do after this? Will you go back to assassinating people? To making the world a better place?”
“I’ve never been fighting to make the world a better place. I just did what I was ordered to do because they were my orders.”
“And is that all going to change now?”
“I don’t know,” I said honestly. “But what I do know is that I’m starting to see things a lot more clearly than before. At least I think I am.”
The jungle ended. Suddenly.
There was a clear sky that stretched out forever. Dawn was breaking, and a white horizon unfurled before us.
There was a Jeep parked up in the distance. It was still a little too far away to confirm with the naked eye, but it looked like there were two soldiers waiting there. According to our pre-mission briefing, these guys should be deployed from the Tanzanian army, here to help us.
I took a deep breath, and then John Paul and I started walking across the flat, grassy savanna.
A hollow, dry explosion echoed all around.
One of the soldiers in the distance was pointing a gun in our direction. I spun around. There was a small hole in John Paul’s forehead and he was lying on the ground.
“Welcome back, Captain Shepherd, sir! And congratulations on your successful mission.” One of our sergeants was there to welcome me—a black man, no doubt chosen for this mission because the color of his skin helped him blend in with the local African soldiers.
“What happened to Williams … ?” I asked absentmindedly.
“Killed in action, sir. According to a wireless transmission intercepted by an NSA team, sir.”
I was overcome by a fatigue that seemed to penetrate every last nook and cranny of my body. I felt like a lump of wax. As soon as I climbed into the Jeep and sat down I was assaulted by drowsiness. Williams, Lucia, John Paul. All were now distant, half-forgotten memories. The emotions that I thought I had felt and the insight that I thought I had gained—all seemed so unreal now. It was as if I could only remember the whole journey in a series of blurry low-resolution snapshots.
“Let’s get out of here.”
The Jeep started rolling. Moving gently toward the white horizon in the distance. For a moment I imagined that this Tanzanian savanna was the only place in the world that was real, that it stretched across the whole world, and that the Prague and the Paris and the Washington and the Georgetown that I knew were all just a bad dream—a nightmare called civilization.
Somewhere behind us in the vast savanna was John Paul’s final resting place. There his corpse would decay gently under the African sun. His sun-bleached body would be preserved for some time to come, and in this respect he was just like Mom, whom I’d had embalmed so that she would never rot away. John Paul, though, would eventually be able to return to the soil. Maybe the thought of that would have made him happy.