In the movie, the two of us stand shoulder to shoulder, looking over everything we’ve destroyed.
It’s a gut-wrenching scene, medium shot, the two of us mere silhouettes in the foreground, looking in the same direction as the audience as the rainforest is consumed by fire and smoke. Beat, beat, flip the shot; now on our faces as we stand in the relative safety of a clearing. Sweat beads in our pores, rolls off our faces. We are stoic.
We have won. But at what cost?
In reality, the forest has long since stopped burning. Now it is black and eerie, belching smoke at uneven intervals. Nothing moves, not even the tropical birds that have been following us for weeks. I think the locals used to feed them.
I stand there, staring out at the ruins. Yesterday, before we’d set the charges, it had been so loud you couldn’t hear yourself think. Today, the valley is a tomb.
In the movie, the superstar who plays me doesn’t have smoke-yellowed teeth.
Or the heavyset lines around her mouth, or the weak jaw. She's pretty and charming and roguish – everybody likes a rogue – and she banters with her higher-ups. When she does something cocky, she gets a slap on the wrist and an adage about her excellent instincts.
They will make a movie about this. You don't walk away from this kind of operation without being lionised.
Click. The sound of me reloading. Like a clapperboard being snapped shut. It’s pointless. I’m out of ammo. But I’ve been doing nothing but reloading and unloading for three weeks. I’d rather hear that click a million times than feel the recoil of a bullet flying ever again.
It’s over, I tell myself, eyes closed. It’s over.
I don’t believe it.
Scene: Thalissa flings herself through the door of the hut, slavering like a mad dog. She’s been ordered not to put a bullet through that monster’s head. I hold her back, calm her down, and she agrees to wait for Commander Artemis with steel in her eyes.
Reality: We stand in the shadow of the only building left for kilometers, watching the clouds descend over the mountains like some sort of invading force.
Thalissa stands on one side of the doorway, straight-backed, gun-slung. Her trembling upper lip is the only remaining fragment of the heavy, gouged-out look she’d had when she’d stepped back over the threshold. She’d make a great actress, I’d thought to myself when I first got deployed and saw that look on her face. I’d never seen anything like it before – so haunted and expressive and tragic.
I know that face as well as an old friend, now. After all, it mirrors mine.
I slump beside her, on the other side of the doorway, hat pulled low over my features, rifle collecting moisture where I’ve dropped it in a puddle. My hands tremble in desperate need of a smoke.
“Pick up your weapon, soldier.” Thalissa doesn’t even look at me when she speaks.
“It’s out of ammo,” I shrug. “And we won, anyways.”
That gouged-out look returns; persists until Thalissa closes her eyes, clenches her wrists, bites her teeth. Water drips uncomfortably down from the roof – I shiver, shrink back towards the wall, and pull the hat closer.
“She’s still alive in there, solider.” Thalissa bites out every word as if it’s causing her physical pain to say it. “And she’s going to stay alive until Commander Artemis gets here. We haven’t won until I’ve checked her body for a pulse.”
Her final words are embrant, like the spent end of a cigarette. She falls back into her general’s stance, glaring out towards the corpses of trees. I stay awhile, in the uncomfortable silence, and the humidity, and the dripping rain. The puddle my boot is squelching in is filled with blood.
“I’m going inside,” I say, eventually. “How long until Artemis gets here?”
“Couple of hours.” Thalissa doesn’t look back when I slink inside. “Pick up your rifle. That’s an order, soldier.”
Scene: History's Greatest Monster growls like a bound animal, beaten and battered but drawing on some superhuman strength that they have sacrificed their humanity to achieve. They tug against their bonds, and sneer at me. "Kill me, why don't you? Give me what I deserve!"
In reality, she's bound and flightless. The beating she's taken is brutal - my stomach turns over when I notice just how broken her nose is. Her jaw isn't in much better shape. She doesn’t look anything like the pictures – gone are the wire-frame glasses, the mowhawk that is tradtional for her people, the bright coloration. Her features are a mess of gore.
She opens her eyes weakly at my approach. She doesn't say anything. Likely she has learnt that speech will beget violence.
I sit down silently, observing. The room, with bullet holes in the clay walls and every piece of furniture piled into the hall. Out the window behind her, where a fire still smoulders high in the mountains.
But she’s impossible to avoid, her rigor-mortis features glassy; the blood on her face seems out of place, like stained porcelain. I have the irrational urge to wipe it away.
“I used to be a filmmaker,” I admit.
She doesn’t respond. Her chest has fallen still since I walked in – she could have died, and I wouldn’t know. I don’t want to touch her.
“I had a family.” I say. “Did you?”
No sound. She might as well be a statue, splayed like the figurehead of a ship.
“Did you think I was responsible? That my husband was responsible? That my children–”
In the movie, I weep, and she weeps with me. A humanizing moment.
I know why she did it. I'd watched the news. I worn a pin, once, to an award ceremony. Silent resistance was enough, I'd contended.
Then came the bombs. And the deployment. And picking through the rainforest, shooting anything that moved and anything that didn’t.
At some point I had become that barbarian on the news, the one that normal people pitied.
“I don’t want to kill you.”
She looks up at that. Her mouth is scraggly, cruel, crooked. Some teeth have been knocked out of her gums, leaving bloody craters behind.
“I don’t want another death on my hands. I – I know it’s selfish. And there’s already so much. But I can’t stand any more, I – I can’t-”
I fall silent. She doesn’t responsd.
“Please.” I don’t know why I say it. Why is it this woman? Why not the one in the village two weeks ago, the teacher? Why not the informant? Why not the sister who’d been trying to protect her brother? “Give me something I can use to get you out of this. Why – why are you fighting this?”
She stares at me. Shot.
I stare back. Reverse shot.
Tension builds. I wait for the optimal moment for her to break it.
The moment passes.
“Why?” I ask again. “Why? Why?”
She speaks, finally. “You have chosen your path, and I have chosen mine. The story is already written.”
Click.
I pretend the rifle is a camera as I lift it and point it at her face. Heft the weight, steady it, brace it against the crook of my elbow. Adjust the focus. Stare through the viewfinder. Ensure the subject is in shot.
In the movie, I turn before the order to fire is issued. I take down Commander Artemis, and tell the other members of the firing squad that there will be no more violence.
We will find that elusive third way that has been discussed in hushed tones this entire war. We will break the cycle of violence. We will do something, anything, poetic and tragic to put a stop to this, even if it is just symbolic, even if she is already dead.
In reality, my shot is only a little behind the fray.