HOME | DD

Description
His name was Lief and he only talked in the dark.
But when he spoke it was like armageddon,
with explosive gestures and wild urgency in every word.
His eyes burned like loose coals or cigarettes in a winter wind, and his words flew fast and fierce, crackling with gunpowder and curling smoke.
Everything within and without him was fire and brimstone, but by the time we realized this we were already burning.
We loved him, we really did, we couldn't help it.
He was a prophet without a scribe, Jesus without his miracles, Dorothy without her cranberry red slippers, and tragedy like that is inescapably seductive and repulsively electrifying.
We could not look away.

He lived in the forest behind our school in a treehouse made of driftwood and plastic and green glass bottles. He insulated it with pages torn from novels he'd read and hated, and wallpapered it with pages from novels he loved.
He drank Everclear like it was ambrosia, and choked on water like it was arsenic.
We would visit him after class and sitting up there in his creaking nest, with the moon bleeding through the cracks and painting ribbons on our faces, we would tell stories.

At first we would all talk, sharing funny anecdotes and personal trials. Little things, about interesting people we'd met on the bus, or conversations we'd overheard, or weird run-ins with police dogs, or beaches we'd been to.
Lief listened with all of his body; long limbs folded together like celtic knots, face drawn in intense concentration, silent and watching.
The rest of us, we'd chat throughout each other's stories - interrupting and jumping in and joking, always laughing.

But when Lief had a story, we grew silent.
He filled the quiet air with tales from victims of genocide; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Darfur and Uganda, the Holocaust and the Gaza Strip. He showed us videos of executions, read us interviews with survivors of carpet bombings or napalm attacks or military occupations.

Did you know that the first atomic bomb dropped flashed so brightly that seventy six miles away a blind girl claimed to have seen the light?
Lief knew - he knew everything about war.
How a armor piercing missile fired through a tank will create a vacuum that will rip anyone inside it out through a hole the size of a fist.
How depleted uranium bullets will remain radioactive for over four billion years, and that a single round is toxic enough to poison an entire household.
He knew how child soldiers were trained, down to the most gruesome bits,
and he spared none of the details.

When he was done, we would sit there and imagine women with melting skin running through dessicated streets screaming for their families, their eyes boiled and running down their cheeks like rain.
Or little boys half a world away lying naked and nameless in the baking sun with a gun in their face and army ants crawling over their small bodies, ripping out their flesh and souls and turning them into demons.

And then he would say something like
"This can be changed" or
"we can't let them do this anymore"
and we would beg him to tell us what to do with increasing desperation. Eventually we stopped telling our stories and just listened to his - each night hoping for an answer, a way to undo the wrongs that fed our guilt. We were hungry for absolution, and we waited with baited breath for Lief to give us a way to attain it.

After six months, he finally gave us his plan. And there was no way we could have said no - we were his by then. We were burning from the inside out.

So.

So now we're sitting here in the UN building in Manhattan with sticky blood in our hair, on our faces, clotting and filling our noses with the smell of bitter iron.
Our bodies are shaking; the guns are heavy in our hands, and the bombs taped to our bodies are slippery with sweat.

The sun is out, but Lief is talking.
It's strange, but to us that's the most absurd part of this whole thing - his voice in the daytime.

The world is watching us now.
The situation is not contained.
And we are all going to die, which is something we'd forgotten until just now.

Some of us are crying.
Some of us are already dead.
It's hard to walk into the UN with guns and not get shot at.
At least until they realize you're strapped to a bomb.
Lief fixed us up perfectly; we detonate if we die, if we crumple and fall, if we take them off, if he flips the switch. The two of us that were shot, they exploded before they hit the ground, reduced to pink mist fast as a heartbeat. That was in what used to be the entrance, and what is now boiled glass and broken stone, blood and bile, the smell of burning flesh and flags.

There is no way back.
We destroyed our bridges even before we stepped into the cool air of the General Assembly Room and the only way we can go is forward.
So we're sitting and waiting.
Gone are the anecdotes and the joking and the laughter.

All we have now is Lief standing at the podium in the front of the room, with his gun pointed into the crowd and a microphone at his lips.

There are news crews here in the corners of the room and the first thing Lief does is apologize to them. He says that they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he hopes they live.

Then he tells them who we are. Our names, even the dead ones, and our lives. He tells them about our fears and our dreams. We seem so small in his voice, so normal in our biographies.
Some of us smile when we hear our names, like we're remembering someone long gone and barely recognized.
Others just cried harder.

And then Lief tells them why we, average as we are, fought our way in here -
he tells them about war.
He's telling them the stories he's told us, and some he hasn't.
He's staring into each man and woman and speaking to them like he did to us, with such focused intensity and ferocity that he becomes nearly inhuman.
We all watch as he speaks,
even the crying ones stare at him through their glassy red eyes.
He doesn't yell.
He doesn't waver.
He's controlled.
He says what he needs to and nothing more.
He doesn't talk about an agenda or make demands.
He explains, with cold clear precision, exactly what we are here to do, and why.
He tells them we are here to die, and that most likely they will die too.
He tells them about the armor piercing bullets and the child soldiers
and the blood that is flowing over all of our hands.

He finishes with a quote and there is a flash of recognition as we all remember it scrawled above his bed in giant spiky charcoal letters. Almost instinctively, we mouth along with him:

"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living."

He glances back at us and we are shocked to see his face; the cigarettes in his eyes have burned away, and in their place is a brilliant calm there that catches our fears and shatters them like glass.
He nods once, then turns back to the crowd who look ready to run but unable to move - a scream at the edge of every tongue.
"We are all proof of that. And it ends here."

He pulls a small box from his pocket and takes a deep breath.
He flips a switch.
click
There is two seconds of weighted silence, and then we hear a gargantuan baBOOM and then another and another and the building begins to quake and fall.
The crowd moves suddenly, as if on cue, terrified as everything around them suddenly begins to break. The smell of urine and sweat rises as seats are vacated and the doors are clogged with people pressing and shoving their way out, trying to escape, trying to live.
Lief smiles sadly and half-shrugs, then turns back to us.

"We're ready then?" he asks, and we don't say anything.
There's nothing left in us, the burning is gone and we are hollow.
He walks among us, touching each of us gently, cupping our faces and wiping our tears. The room around us is screaming and crumbling but all we can see is the peace in Lief's face.
We watch as he crouches in front of the box, his finger sliding over the second switch, caressing it gingerly.
He looks up and opens his mouth.
He draws a breath to speak... And then we hear a

click.

I begin to rip apart, and I realize I am dying.

And it feels like nostalgia and deja vu and birth and ending and change and cold cold relief all at once.

As my body fills the room and my consciousness becomes abstract, in that last moment before my brain becomes rain and paint, I realize that this is absolution.

And oh god.
It is as sweet as love.
It is as sacred as memory.
It is as strong as freedom.
It is

Description
His name was Lief and he only talked in the dark.
But when he spoke it was like armageddon,
with explosive gestures and wild urgency in every word.
His eyes burned like loose coals or cigarettes in a winter wind, and his words flew fast and fierce, crackling with gunpowder and curling smoke.
Everything within and without him was fire and brimstone, but by the time we realized this we were already burning.
We loved him, we really did, we couldn't help it.
He was a prophet without a scribe, Jesus without his miracles, Dorothy without her cranberry red slippers, and tragedy like that is inescapably seductive and repulsively electrifying.
We could not look away.

He lived in the forest behind our school in a treehouse made of driftwood and plastic and green glass bottles. He insulated it with pages torn from novels he'd read and hated, and wallpapered it with pages from novels he loved.
He drank Everclear like it was ambrosia, and choked on water like it was arsenic.
We would visit him after class and sitting up there in his creaking nest, with the moon bleeding through the cracks and painting ribbons on our faces, we would tell stories.

At first we would all talk, sharing funny anecdotes and personal trials. Little things, about interesting people we'd met on the bus, or conversations we'd overheard, or weird run-ins with police dogs, or beaches we'd been to.
Lief listened with all of his body; long limbs folded together like celtic knots, face drawn in intense concentration, silent and watching.
The rest of us, we'd chat throughout each other's stories - interrupting and jumping in and joking, always laughing.

But when Lief had a story, we grew silent.
He filled the quiet air with tales from victims of genocide; Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Darfur and Uganda, the Holocaust and the Gaza Strip. He showed us videos of executions, read us interviews with survivors of carpet bombings or napalm attacks or military occupations.

Did you know that the first atomic bomb dropped flashed so brightly that seventy six miles away a blind girl claimed to have seen the light?
Lief knew - he knew everything about war.
How a armor piercing missile fired through a tank will create a vacuum that will rip anyone inside it out through a hole the size of a fist.
How depleted uranium bullets will remain radioactive for over four billion years, and that a single round is toxic enough to poison an entire household.
He knew how child soldiers were trained, down to the most gruesome bits,
and he spared none of the details.

When he was done, we would sit there and imagine women with melting skin running through dessicated streets screaming for their families, their eyes boiled and running down their cheeks like rain.
Or little boys half a world away lying naked and nameless in the baking sun with a gun in their face and army ants crawling over their small bodies, ripping out their flesh and souls and turning them into demons.

And then he would say something like
"This can be changed" or
"we can't let them do this anymore"
and we would beg him to tell us what to do with increasing desperation. Eventually we stopped telling our stories and just listened to his - each night hoping for an answer, a way to undo the wrongs that fed our guilt. We were hungry for absolution, and we waited with baited breath for Lief to give us a way to attain it.

After six months, he finally gave us his plan. And there was no way we could have said no - we were his by then. We were burning from the inside out.

So.

So now we're sitting here in the UN building in Manhattan with sticky blood in our hair, on our faces, clotting and filling our noses with the smell of bitter iron.
Our bodies are shaking; the guns are heavy in our hands, and the bombs taped to our bodies are slippery with sweat.

The sun is out, but Lief is talking.
It's strange, but to us that's the most absurd part of this whole thing - his voice in the daytime.

The world is watching us now.
The situation is not contained.
And we are all going to die, which is something we'd forgotten until just now.

Some of us are crying.
Some of us are already dead.
It's hard to walk into the UN with guns and not get shot at.
At least until they realize you're strapped to a bomb.
Lief fixed us up perfectly; we detonate if we die, if we crumple and fall, if we take them off, if he flips the switch. The two of us that were shot, they exploded before they hit the ground, reduced to pink mist fast as a heartbeat. That was in what used to be the entrance, and what is now boiled glass and broken stone, blood and bile, the smell of burning flesh and flags.

There is no way back.
We destroyed our bridges even before we stepped into the cool air of the General Assembly Room and the only way we can go is forward.
So we're sitting and waiting.
Gone are the anecdotes and the joking and the laughter.

All we have now is Lief standing at the podium in the front of the room, with his gun pointed into the crowd and a microphone at his lips.

There are news crews here in the corners of the room and the first thing Lief does is apologize to them. He says that they are in the wrong place at the wrong time, and he hopes they live.

Then he tells them who we are. Our names, even the dead ones, and our lives. He tells them about our fears and our dreams. We seem so small in his voice, so normal in our biographies.
Some of us smile when we hear our names, like we're remembering someone long gone and barely recognized.
Others just cried harder.

And then Lief tells them why we, average as we are, fought our way in here -
he tells them about war.
He's telling them the stories he's told us, and some he hasn't.
He's staring into each man and woman and speaking to them like he did to us, with such focused intensity and ferocity that he becomes nearly inhuman.
We all watch as he speaks,
even the crying ones stare at him through their glassy red eyes.
He doesn't yell.
He doesn't waver.
He's controlled.
He says what he needs to and nothing more.
He doesn't talk about an agenda or make demands.
He explains, with cold clear precision, exactly what we are here to do, and why.
He tells them we are here to die, and that most likely they will die too.
He tells them about the armor piercing bullets and the child soldiers
and the blood that is flowing over all of our hands.

He finishes with a quote and there is a flash of recognition as we all remember it scrawled above his bed in giant spiky charcoal letters. Almost instinctively, we mouth along with him:

"Ours is a world of nuclear giants and ethical infants. We know more about war than we know about peace, more about killing that we know about living."

He glances back at us and we are shocked to see his face; the cigarettes in his eyes have burned away, and in their place is a brilliant calm there that catches our fears and shatters them like glass.
He nods once, then turns back to the crowd who look ready to run but unable to move - a scream at the edge of every tongue.
"We are all proof of that. And it ends here."

He pulls a small box from his pocket and takes a deep breath.
He flips a switch.
click
There is two seconds of weighted silence, and then we hear a gargantuan baBOOM and then another and another and the building begins to quake and fall.
The crowd moves suddenly, as if on cue, terrified as everything around them suddenly begins to break. The smell of urine and sweat rises as seats are vacated and the doors are clogged with people pressing and shoving their way out, trying to escape, trying to live.
Lief smiles sadly and half-shrugs, then turns back to us.

"We're ready then?" he asks, and we don't say anything.
There's nothing left in us, the burning is gone and we are hollow.
He walks among us, touching each of us gently, cupping our faces and wiping our tears. The room around us is screaming and crumbling but all we can see is the peace in Lief's face.
We watch as he crouches in front of the box, his finger sliding over the second switch, caressing it gingerly.
He looks up and opens his mouth.
He draws a breath to speak... And then we hear a

click.

I begin to rip apart, and I realize I am dying.

And it feels like nostalgia and deja vu and birth and ending and change and cold cold relief all at once.

As my body fills the room and my consciousness becomes abstract, in that last moment before my brain becomes rain and paint, I realize that this is absolution.

And oh god.
It is as sweet as love.
It is as sacred as memory.
It is as strong as freedom.
It is