Cain Reflections (age 22)
From eight in the morning until six in the evening, every weekday, for somewhere close to 20 years, my father’s mind contemplated the destruction of bodies. At times it was his fingers and hands that sliced, cut, shot, chopped, bludgeoned, and tore at the bodies of living people until they were dead. Father was a special reconnaissance assassin for a military force representing a pact among 10 nations--his job was to slice the throats, shoot the heads, and maybe disembowel the bellies (among other things) of hundreds, and likely more, of people who the Covenant deemed worthy of death.Father got up every morning around 6:30. He always ran for exercise. Took his shower, then drank his coffee when he read the newspaper, then went to work in his office or in the field. When he went on assignment or official business he put on his Covenant uniform. He always shaved on these days, coating his cheeks in foam, before putting on the carefully ironed uniform with brass buttons. He would clean his weapons also coating them in various oils, checking the mechanisms, honing a blade. He would read maps, building specs, field operative reports, and directives over and over and over. Taking notes. And scratching them out. Pacing. Plotting. Planning. As a child observing him, I remember marveling at his preparation and wondering why he got so crisp, so clean, so immaculate just to go out there and come back so disheveled and dirty and worn.
“I have a process.” He was ever his vague response when I asked him what he was doing and why.
I think, when he went into the field or the office, he knew it was a theatre of politics, destruction, cruelty, bureaucracy, and horror. Yet still, he did not want to be just alive at the end of it. He didn’t want to just survive another day. Father wanted to be the best, the most intimidating, the most brutal, the most efficient soldier and strategist in the history of the Covenant. He seemed to operate under the sense that there was an audience for his work that didn’t include just the Commander, the Generals, or his immediate colleagues. Although he wasn’t a particularly superstitious or religious man, he seemed to be performing also for the men who preceded him, his own father and fallen comrades. And he was certainly performing for the men coming next, who would try to replace him.
When he came home at night, after an assignment, sometimes creeping into the house with his weapon in bloodied hands, and blood and grime on his body, I’d run downstairs to hug him.
“Hey son,” he’d say, moving away from me, “let me wash this off before you touch me.” He never called it what it was to me. Blood. Gore. But I think it wasn’t just the blood itself that he didn’t want touching me. It was also the unseen seed and source, the root and residue of brutality and violence, of greatness, and terror that had to be washed away.
The blood was merely where life and death came and went.
Bitch, I'm limited edition.
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