Dominoes - A story by Rafi Aamer
In the middle of a forest surrounded by deserted and long destroyed villages many miles south of Hanoi, Vietnam, crickets and cicadas were chirping in a deafening chorus in the middle of a hot a moonless night. And suddenly all of them went silent.
All of them…not a single chirp. An equally deafening silence following by deafening chorus. The insects must have sensed that something was about to happen. Insects have this sense of knowing the things-that-are-about-to-happen. And then the silence was pierced by a loud, painful, ear-drums shattering scream—a human scream. A scream that the snakes in the forest felt on their skins and writhed in anguish. Apes fell from the trees and started scurrying around to find a place where they could stop hearing the scream. It was the kind scream that goes on and on. And then it died. And after a brief silence, there followed a cacophony of hisses-barks-roars-tweets-squawks, all animals registering their protest for this alien auditory invasion. And they kept protesting till the dawn.
------------------------
Years ago, at the same spot of the same forest, Private James “Jimmy” Saunders of the 3rd brigade of the 4th Infantry Division of United States Army, was hiding in a ditch panting. He had arrived in Vietnam a week ago and on that particular day his company had faced the biggest ambush of Vietcong they had ever faced in that particular region. It was a surprise because their company commander had a truce with the local villagers promising them safety if they didn’t give protection to Vietcong. Seemingly, the Vietcong from other areas had been using the thickness of the forest to secretly gather and mobilize their troops. When the ambush happened, Jimmy’s company was taken completely off-guard. Jimmy saw many of his comrades just being cut in half by the salvo of incoming bullets. They took heavy casualties and started to run away in all directions. Jimmy had been running for 20 minutes straight. He didn’t know where the rest of his company was. He found this ditch and decided to hide and catch his breath.
He hadn’t completely regained his composure when he heard footsteps coming through the thick foliage of the forest. He squinted to see and wiped the sweat off his brow. Slowly a figure emerged. Jimmy crouched and straightened his rifle trying to hold his breath. The person was heading straight towards Jimmy’s hiding place. The person was wearing traditional loose Vietnamese unisex top and bottom of the same color. It had a bag slung over its shoulder. “Is it a stray Vietcong?” Jimmy thought. The person was still heading towards him. Then it reached into the bag and got something out. Jimmy could tell by the way the person’s hand was enveloping the object that the object was spherical…and then the person brought the object to its mouth…”Shit!” Jimmy’s mind yelled…”It’s a grenade and this Vietcong bastard is going to throw it at me”. Faster than the blink of the eye, Jimmy aimed and shot. The bullet hit the target and the person fell down. Jimmy rushed towards it, rifle still aimed at the fallen figure. When he arrived at his intended destination, he saw that “the Vietcong bastard” was a lean, about 16-year-old, girl holding her shot leg crying loudly. Her hat had come off and her bag was on the ground. About half a dozen apples had spilled from the bag.
“What the hell, what the hell, what the hell.” Jimmy started shouting in the air while stomping the ground walking in circles around the wounded girl.
“What the hell were you doing here?” he yelled in the girl’s face leaning down, saliva dripping from his lips. The girl tried to utter some Vietnamese words between her sobs. But Jimmy kept shouting at her face the same question. The girl got scared and started to crawl backward till her back hit a tree trunk. She grabbed the trunk and used it to stand up on her one good leg. Jimmy’s mind was still aflame with a mixture of fear, anger and frustration that he had been accumulating all day and which had now started to grow like a jungle-fire, setting Jimmy’s throat, ears, eyes on fire. The girl yelled at him in Vietnamese but the only word Jimmy could understand was “truce”. “Oh fucking beautiful!” Jimmy hit his helmet with the butt of his rifle. “Now I am going to get court-martialed for violating the truce” he shouted. His anger started to take over him completely. He started walking towards the girl. She wrapped her arms around the tree trunk behind her back and pressed her back against the tree as if trying to somehow get inside the tree-trunk to hide from Jimmy. “First your Vietcong brothers kill most of my friend, and then you show up, God knows why, in the middle of the forest biting an apple like taking the pin out of a grenade and now you are gonna tell your people that I shot you and the Captain’s gonna have my ass.” His rage had completely taken over his mind. He was mad angry now. “You know what! Not gonna happen!” Saying those words, Jimmy plunged his bayonet into the girl’s chest. It went through her chest and got lodged in the tree trunk. “That’s what you get for not minding your own fucking business in a goddamned war.” He yanked the bayonet back. Since it was lodged deeply into the tree trunk, it came off the rifle’s muzzle and fell down beside the dying girl’s body. There was slit where it had pierced the tree trunk, and the girl’s blood was dripping from the slit. It looked as the tree was bleeding.
---------------------
A week later, Jimmy was discharged from the unit because he had threatened to kill some of his fellow soldiers and was sent back home to Houston, Texas. The Army had termed him mentally unfit for the duty and his friends were perplexed at his sudden metamorphosis into a crazy maniac who would pick fights on the smallest of things. But the officers had seen many such episodes so they were not as perplexed.
--------------------------
Once back home, Jimmy’s life was divided into brief episodes of jail time, mental asylums and even briefer episodes of employment. He could never keep a job because no provocation was small enough for him to not react violently. One April day, when he was driving on Highway 90 going home after losing yet another job, he spotted a hoarding on the side of the highway with a brown flower of some sort under which there were bold blue letters forming the words “Vietnam Airlines”. There was a picture of Vietnamese girl right next to the brown flower holding a bouquet. As Jimmy’s car got closer to the hoarding, Jimmy looked at the face of the girl and pushed the brake pedal with all his might. His car screeched to a halt in the middle of the highway. He couldn’t believe it. This was the picture of the girl—the girl he had killed decades ago in a Vietnamese forest. The cars passing around Jimmy’s car started honking and Jimmy had to drive away but he did give the picture another glance and he could see, right beside the bouquet she was holding, there was a wound on the girl’s chest.
-----------------------------
A few weeks later, when Jimmy had written the hoarding-girl incident off as an illusion, as his mind playing a trick on him, he discovered a plant that had sprouted out of nowhere in his backyard. He didn’t pay much attention to it but when he came back after three weeks—he had gone to Arizona to borrow money from his brother, most of which he lost in Las Vegas later—the plant had grown into a huge tree that had occupied almost all his backyard. He didn’t know the names of the trees but he recognized this one. It was the same tree. No, not the same type but the same tree because it had a slit in the middle of its trunk oozing blood.
Jimmy ran out of his house, panting and profusely sweating, got into his car and sped away from his house. He got onto the highway. And there they were, hoarding after hoarding, lined neatly alongside the highway, all advertising Vietnam Airlines with a girl wounded in the chest holding a bouquet. Jimmy drove hundreds of miles for many hours but the hoardings never stopped. When he ran out of gas, he ditched his car on the highway and ran into the shrubs like a maniac…into the trees with blood-dripping slits in their trunks. Jimmy crashed down sobbing and pounding the ground with his fists. He spent hours there into the dark night and then stood with some sort of determination in his eyes. “That’s it!” he said to no one present. “I know what to do. I have to go there and cut that goddamn tree down.”
--------------------------------
Jimmy was standing outside the ticketing office of Vietnam Airlines with a huge poster in the window displaying the same wounded girl. This was the first time Jimmy was looking at the girl’s picture this close and there was no doubting. It was the same girl. Same pale face, same narrow eyes, same thin lips, same short black hair parted neatly in the middle and falling straight down on her cheeks. For a moment, Jimmy thought of the stupidity of his plan. “OK. I can go there but what are the chances that I will be able to find that particular tree,” he thought. The poster girl’s lips parted. “You will”, she said.
-------------------------------
Jimmy rented a Jeep at the Hanoi airport. He bought a chainsaw, a map and some food items and drove south. Once he started getting close to his destination, the population started to thin out. There were small pockets of houses here and there but the closer he got, the fewer of them he could see. When he arrived at the edge of the forest, he hadn’t seen a single house or a human being for tens of miles.
Jimmy saw a trail entering the forest and he started to follow it. About a mile down, he saw that the trail was forking into slightly left and slightly right. He was thinking of which side to go when he saw a boy, about 5-year-old squatting on the ground playing with branches. His presence startled Jimmy but the boy did not seem surprised or scared. As he saw the headlights of the Jeep, he stood up and as the Jeep crawled closer to him, he raised his arm and pointed to the right side of the fork. Jimmy followed his direction. Once he passed the boy, he looked into the rear-view mirror. There was no sign of him.
As it grew darker, it started to become harder to follow the trail with any good speed. After one sharp turn, Jimmy had to slam the breaks because, there, standing right in the middle of the trail, was a girl, maybe a little older than the boy Jimmy had encountered previously. She was pointing to a clearing on the left. As Jimmy steered his vehicle into the clearing and the headlights hit the girl’s face, Jimmy could see that the entire side of her face had gone and he could see her exposed jaw-line.
On all the turns and forks, Jimmy kept getting directions from children of the ages ranging anywhere from 3 to 15-year-old. Some had blown skulls, some had bullet holes in their bodies and many had charred skin.
Around the midnight, Jimmy’s jeep drove into an unexpectedly clear area and in the middle of the area was the tree. It felt as if the other trees surrounding it had just walked away from it. As Jimmy’s Jeep’s headlights illuminated the tree, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The tree had changed its shape. Its trunk had become smooth like a child’s skin, close to the top where the trunk divided into branches, there were two perfectly symmetrical holes like eyes. And the branches? No, they were not like any other branches. They didn’t rise up like branches do. They were parted neatly in the middle and fell evenly on the sides of the tree like hair. Jimmy got a little closer and saw the things that were weighing them, the branches-hair, down. At the tip of every branch-hair was a glistening, sharp, bayonet. Jimmy got out of the Jeep and with the chainsaw in his hand, he moved tentatively towards the tree. Once he got a few feet from the tree, the branches-hair started to swish and wave and suddenly Jimmy saw all the bayonets aiming at him.
“This is a not a girl only armed with apples that you would be able to kill so easily.”
Who said that? The voice was unmistakably the dead girl’s but it seemed to be emanating from the tree.
“I told you, you would find us.”
“Who is ‘us’? Who are you?” Jimmy asked in a puzzled voice.
“You know who I am. I am the girl you killed right here, right at this place.”
“Listen, I know what I did was wrong. But it was war. War makes you insane.”
“Yes, it does.” The voice from the tree said. “It makes you insane so it can live and rage. People don’t have wars. Wars have them. War makes you insane because sane people cannot kill strangers without any reason.”
“There is a reason. There is always a reason. One has to defend his country.” Jimmy said shaking his head. He was getting a bit calmer now for some unknown reason.
“A country is an abstract idea. By country, you mean the proximity in which you were born, which is real, and you didn’t make a choice in that matter. You defend that using insanity but insanity is nothing in itself. It’s just the absence of sanity. Like darkness is the absence of light. When sanity is taken out, it leaves a hole behind it. Rudderless boats don’t get anywhere and holed existences cannot survive so our proximities--call them societies civilizations neighborhoods--have devised pieces that fill the hole left behind by the departure of sanity. Religious duty, patriotism, tribal pride, family honor, these pieces go by many names but their purpose is the same, to fill the hole of sanity so when there is no hole and there is nothing felt missing, insanity can be waged upon the others.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Everyone is a slave of their proximities and these proximities guide everyone’s lives. They tell you how to behave, who to marry, what to eat, what not to eat and what is “acceptable”, only they call it “normal” and what is not. And then they tell you that everything is relative and there are no absolutes. What is considered a bad thing within the proximity is declared good, even honorable, when done outside the proximity. If someone starts killing strangers within the proximity for now reason, he is imprisoned. If someone does that to the people of a competing proximity, he is given medals for his valor. You killed me one day but did you ever think about killing the boy paddling madly towards you on his bike in your town last week?”
“That kid wasn’t trying to kill me.”
“Neither was I. I was just coming here to meet my lover. We were going to kiss for the first time. But you killed me, only because you were not in your own proximity. You see, you killed me and went your way thinking that that was it. It wasn’t. When my lover came here and found me dead, he went back to the village with my dead body in his arms. He convinced the elders to break the truce and mobilized all the youth with the help of Vietcong. They mounted a spirited resistance in the following months after which your proximity sent planes with Napalms that burnt our proximity to the ground. You didn’t just kill me. You toppled the first domino.”
“The first domino?” Jimmy asked, confused.
“Yes. You know the game where they make a long row of little tiles standing on their sides close to each other in complex patterns and then you topple the first tile onto the next one which sets out a chain reaction of dominoes falling one after another. Only the pattern of dominoes is not complex but random in a war. It has its own insanity. It’s random so it’s not predictable. It doesn’t follow any particular direction. It goes forward, backward, upward, downward, sideways and all other dimensions we cannot fathom. By killing me, you started this insane sequence. All the kids that you saw on your way died because of you started this domino sequence. They are all small domino tiles that fell because of your single act.”
Jimmy was silent for some moments and then he asked the question: why was he guided to this place.
“Because war dominoes are insanely random and insanely long. They take their own time to complete the sequence. You were guided here so that the sequence is completed. There is one domino, the last one, still standing. And that last tile is you.”
Jimmy couldn’t find anything to say.
“But,” the voice said, “I will give you a choice, although you didn’t give me one. You have to fall sooner or later. It is your choice to go back and keep living miserably and then fall. Or come into my embrace and I will give you serenity and peace.”
Jimmy’s hands couldn’t hold up the chainsaw anymore. He dropped it to the ground. At that very moment the cicadas and crickets stopped chirping. There was silence--such silence that Jimmy’s footsteps could be heard from miles. He walked up to the tree, leaned against it with his back and wrapped his arms around the tree trunk behind him. Hundreds of bayonets rushed towards him.
------------------
A few days later, the rental company tracked their Jeep in the forest and saw Jimmy’s dead body sprawled on the ground with an old, rusted bayonet in his chest.
------------------------
Years ago, at the same spot of the same forest, Private James “Jimmy” Saunders of the 3rd brigade of the 4th Infantry Division of United States Army, was hiding in a ditch panting. He had arrived in Vietnam a week ago and on that particular day his company had faced the biggest ambush of Vietcong they had ever faced in that particular region. It was a surprise because their company commander had a truce with the local villagers promising them safety if they didn’t give protection to Vietcong. Seemingly, the Vietcong from other areas had been using the thickness of the forest to secretly gather and mobilize their troops. When the ambush happened, Jimmy’s company was taken completely off-guard. Jimmy saw many of his comrades just being cut in half by the salvo of incoming bullets. They took heavy casualties and started to run away in all directions. Jimmy had been running for 20 minutes straight. He didn’t know where the rest of his company was. He found this ditch and decided to hide and catch his breath.
He hadn’t completely regained his composure when he heard footsteps coming through the thick foliage of the forest. He squinted to see and wiped the sweat off his brow. Slowly a figure emerged. Jimmy crouched and straightened his rifle trying to hold his breath. The person was heading straight towards Jimmy’s hiding place. The person was wearing traditional loose Vietnamese unisex top and bottom of the same color. It had a bag slung over its shoulder. “Is it a stray Vietcong?” Jimmy thought. The person was still heading towards him. Then it reached into the bag and got something out. Jimmy could tell by the way the person’s hand was enveloping the object that the object was spherical…and then the person brought the object to its mouth…”Shit!” Jimmy’s mind yelled…”It’s a grenade and this Vietcong bastard is going to throw it at me”. Faster than the blink of the eye, Jimmy aimed and shot. The bullet hit the target and the person fell down. Jimmy rushed towards it, rifle still aimed at the fallen figure. When he arrived at his intended destination, he saw that “the Vietcong bastard” was a lean, about 16-year-old, girl holding her shot leg crying loudly. Her hat had come off and her bag was on the ground. About half a dozen apples had spilled from the bag.
“What the hell, what the hell, what the hell.” Jimmy started shouting in the air while stomping the ground walking in circles around the wounded girl.
“What the hell were you doing here?” he yelled in the girl’s face leaning down, saliva dripping from his lips. The girl tried to utter some Vietnamese words between her sobs. But Jimmy kept shouting at her face the same question. The girl got scared and started to crawl backward till her back hit a tree trunk. She grabbed the trunk and used it to stand up on her one good leg. Jimmy’s mind was still aflame with a mixture of fear, anger and frustration that he had been accumulating all day and which had now started to grow like a jungle-fire, setting Jimmy’s throat, ears, eyes on fire. The girl yelled at him in Vietnamese but the only word Jimmy could understand was “truce”. “Oh fucking beautiful!” Jimmy hit his helmet with the butt of his rifle. “Now I am going to get court-martialed for violating the truce” he shouted. His anger started to take over him completely. He started walking towards the girl. She wrapped her arms around the tree trunk behind her back and pressed her back against the tree as if trying to somehow get inside the tree-trunk to hide from Jimmy. “First your Vietcong brothers kill most of my friend, and then you show up, God knows why, in the middle of the forest biting an apple like taking the pin out of a grenade and now you are gonna tell your people that I shot you and the Captain’s gonna have my ass.” His rage had completely taken over his mind. He was mad angry now. “You know what! Not gonna happen!” Saying those words, Jimmy plunged his bayonet into the girl’s chest. It went through her chest and got lodged in the tree trunk. “That’s what you get for not minding your own fucking business in a goddamned war.” He yanked the bayonet back. Since it was lodged deeply into the tree trunk, it came off the rifle’s muzzle and fell down beside the dying girl’s body. There was slit where it had pierced the tree trunk, and the girl’s blood was dripping from the slit. It looked as the tree was bleeding.
---------------------
A week later, Jimmy was discharged from the unit because he had threatened to kill some of his fellow soldiers and was sent back home to Houston, Texas. The Army had termed him mentally unfit for the duty and his friends were perplexed at his sudden metamorphosis into a crazy maniac who would pick fights on the smallest of things. But the officers had seen many such episodes so they were not as perplexed.
--------------------------
Once back home, Jimmy’s life was divided into brief episodes of jail time, mental asylums and even briefer episodes of employment. He could never keep a job because no provocation was small enough for him to not react violently. One April day, when he was driving on Highway 90 going home after losing yet another job, he spotted a hoarding on the side of the highway with a brown flower of some sort under which there were bold blue letters forming the words “Vietnam Airlines”. There was a picture of Vietnamese girl right next to the brown flower holding a bouquet. As Jimmy’s car got closer to the hoarding, Jimmy looked at the face of the girl and pushed the brake pedal with all his might. His car screeched to a halt in the middle of the highway. He couldn’t believe it. This was the picture of the girl—the girl he had killed decades ago in a Vietnamese forest. The cars passing around Jimmy’s car started honking and Jimmy had to drive away but he did give the picture another glance and he could see, right beside the bouquet she was holding, there was a wound on the girl’s chest.
-----------------------------
A few weeks later, when Jimmy had written the hoarding-girl incident off as an illusion, as his mind playing a trick on him, he discovered a plant that had sprouted out of nowhere in his backyard. He didn’t pay much attention to it but when he came back after three weeks—he had gone to Arizona to borrow money from his brother, most of which he lost in Las Vegas later—the plant had grown into a huge tree that had occupied almost all his backyard. He didn’t know the names of the trees but he recognized this one. It was the same tree. No, not the same type but the same tree because it had a slit in the middle of its trunk oozing blood.
Jimmy ran out of his house, panting and profusely sweating, got into his car and sped away from his house. He got onto the highway. And there they were, hoarding after hoarding, lined neatly alongside the highway, all advertising Vietnam Airlines with a girl wounded in the chest holding a bouquet. Jimmy drove hundreds of miles for many hours but the hoardings never stopped. When he ran out of gas, he ditched his car on the highway and ran into the shrubs like a maniac…into the trees with blood-dripping slits in their trunks. Jimmy crashed down sobbing and pounding the ground with his fists. He spent hours there into the dark night and then stood with some sort of determination in his eyes. “That’s it!” he said to no one present. “I know what to do. I have to go there and cut that goddamn tree down.”
--------------------------------
Jimmy was standing outside the ticketing office of Vietnam Airlines with a huge poster in the window displaying the same wounded girl. This was the first time Jimmy was looking at the girl’s picture this close and there was no doubting. It was the same girl. Same pale face, same narrow eyes, same thin lips, same short black hair parted neatly in the middle and falling straight down on her cheeks. For a moment, Jimmy thought of the stupidity of his plan. “OK. I can go there but what are the chances that I will be able to find that particular tree,” he thought. The poster girl’s lips parted. “You will”, she said.
-------------------------------
Jimmy rented a Jeep at the Hanoi airport. He bought a chainsaw, a map and some food items and drove south. Once he started getting close to his destination, the population started to thin out. There were small pockets of houses here and there but the closer he got, the fewer of them he could see. When he arrived at the edge of the forest, he hadn’t seen a single house or a human being for tens of miles.
Jimmy saw a trail entering the forest and he started to follow it. About a mile down, he saw that the trail was forking into slightly left and slightly right. He was thinking of which side to go when he saw a boy, about 5-year-old squatting on the ground playing with branches. His presence startled Jimmy but the boy did not seem surprised or scared. As he saw the headlights of the Jeep, he stood up and as the Jeep crawled closer to him, he raised his arm and pointed to the right side of the fork. Jimmy followed his direction. Once he passed the boy, he looked into the rear-view mirror. There was no sign of him.
As it grew darker, it started to become harder to follow the trail with any good speed. After one sharp turn, Jimmy had to slam the breaks because, there, standing right in the middle of the trail, was a girl, maybe a little older than the boy Jimmy had encountered previously. She was pointing to a clearing on the left. As Jimmy steered his vehicle into the clearing and the headlights hit the girl’s face, Jimmy could see that the entire side of her face had gone and he could see her exposed jaw-line.
On all the turns and forks, Jimmy kept getting directions from children of the ages ranging anywhere from 3 to 15-year-old. Some had blown skulls, some had bullet holes in their bodies and many had charred skin.
Around the midnight, Jimmy’s jeep drove into an unexpectedly clear area and in the middle of the area was the tree. It felt as if the other trees surrounding it had just walked away from it. As Jimmy’s Jeep’s headlights illuminated the tree, he couldn’t believe his eyes. The tree had changed its shape. Its trunk had become smooth like a child’s skin, close to the top where the trunk divided into branches, there were two perfectly symmetrical holes like eyes. And the branches? No, they were not like any other branches. They didn’t rise up like branches do. They were parted neatly in the middle and fell evenly on the sides of the tree like hair. Jimmy got a little closer and saw the things that were weighing them, the branches-hair, down. At the tip of every branch-hair was a glistening, sharp, bayonet. Jimmy got out of the Jeep and with the chainsaw in his hand, he moved tentatively towards the tree. Once he got a few feet from the tree, the branches-hair started to swish and wave and suddenly Jimmy saw all the bayonets aiming at him.
“This is a not a girl only armed with apples that you would be able to kill so easily.”
Who said that? The voice was unmistakably the dead girl’s but it seemed to be emanating from the tree.
“I told you, you would find us.”
“Who is ‘us’? Who are you?” Jimmy asked in a puzzled voice.
“You know who I am. I am the girl you killed right here, right at this place.”
“Listen, I know what I did was wrong. But it was war. War makes you insane.”
“Yes, it does.” The voice from the tree said. “It makes you insane so it can live and rage. People don’t have wars. Wars have them. War makes you insane because sane people cannot kill strangers without any reason.”
“There is a reason. There is always a reason. One has to defend his country.” Jimmy said shaking his head. He was getting a bit calmer now for some unknown reason.
“A country is an abstract idea. By country, you mean the proximity in which you were born, which is real, and you didn’t make a choice in that matter. You defend that using insanity but insanity is nothing in itself. It’s just the absence of sanity. Like darkness is the absence of light. When sanity is taken out, it leaves a hole behind it. Rudderless boats don’t get anywhere and holed existences cannot survive so our proximities--call them societies civilizations neighborhoods--have devised pieces that fill the hole left behind by the departure of sanity. Religious duty, patriotism, tribal pride, family honor, these pieces go by many names but their purpose is the same, to fill the hole of sanity so when there is no hole and there is nothing felt missing, insanity can be waged upon the others.”
“What? What are you talking about?”
“Everyone is a slave of their proximities and these proximities guide everyone’s lives. They tell you how to behave, who to marry, what to eat, what not to eat and what is “acceptable”, only they call it “normal” and what is not. And then they tell you that everything is relative and there are no absolutes. What is considered a bad thing within the proximity is declared good, even honorable, when done outside the proximity. If someone starts killing strangers within the proximity for now reason, he is imprisoned. If someone does that to the people of a competing proximity, he is given medals for his valor. You killed me one day but did you ever think about killing the boy paddling madly towards you on his bike in your town last week?”
“That kid wasn’t trying to kill me.”
“Neither was I. I was just coming here to meet my lover. We were going to kiss for the first time. But you killed me, only because you were not in your own proximity. You see, you killed me and went your way thinking that that was it. It wasn’t. When my lover came here and found me dead, he went back to the village with my dead body in his arms. He convinced the elders to break the truce and mobilized all the youth with the help of Vietcong. They mounted a spirited resistance in the following months after which your proximity sent planes with Napalms that burnt our proximity to the ground. You didn’t just kill me. You toppled the first domino.”
“The first domino?” Jimmy asked, confused.
“Yes. You know the game where they make a long row of little tiles standing on their sides close to each other in complex patterns and then you topple the first tile onto the next one which sets out a chain reaction of dominoes falling one after another. Only the pattern of dominoes is not complex but random in a war. It has its own insanity. It’s random so it’s not predictable. It doesn’t follow any particular direction. It goes forward, backward, upward, downward, sideways and all other dimensions we cannot fathom. By killing me, you started this insane sequence. All the kids that you saw on your way died because of you started this domino sequence. They are all small domino tiles that fell because of your single act.”
Jimmy was silent for some moments and then he asked the question: why was he guided to this place.
“Because war dominoes are insanely random and insanely long. They take their own time to complete the sequence. You were guided here so that the sequence is completed. There is one domino, the last one, still standing. And that last tile is you.”
Jimmy couldn’t find anything to say.
“But,” the voice said, “I will give you a choice, although you didn’t give me one. You have to fall sooner or later. It is your choice to go back and keep living miserably and then fall. Or come into my embrace and I will give you serenity and peace.”
Jimmy’s hands couldn’t hold up the chainsaw anymore. He dropped it to the ground. At that very moment the cicadas and crickets stopped chirping. There was silence--such silence that Jimmy’s footsteps could be heard from miles. He walked up to the tree, leaned against it with his back and wrapped his arms around the tree trunk behind him. Hundreds of bayonets rushed towards him.
------------------
A few days later, the rental company tracked their Jeep in the forest and saw Jimmy’s dead body sprawled on the ground with an old, rusted bayonet in his chest.
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