Spares - Michael Marshall Smith [96]
Rapt’s effects are not just intense on a dose-by-dose basis: They are also cumulative. After a couple of weeks Rapt remaps your neural paths to the point where you don’t know where the hell you are—and we were on it for over two years. We’d be tramping through darkness, not knowing where we were or what to do next, and then suddenly we’d see this big clump of bushes and someone would say, “Okay, let’s go through that bush.”
“What bush?” someone else would ask, confused.
“That bush.”
“What fucking bush? We’re surrounded by the fuckers.”
“That bush, man: the one you’re almost standing in.”
Relieved: “Oh yeah. That bush. Okay.”
“Wow. Look at it. That’s some bush.”
“It’s beautiful. Look at those leaves.”
“Great leaves.”
Then suddenly: “I don’t like it.”
“Like what?”
“The bush, man. It’s giving me The Fear.”
“It’s just a bush. It’s okay.”
“It’s not okay, man. It’s giving me the fucking Fear.”
“Okay. Forget the bush.”
“I can’t forget it. It’s right there in front, of me, man—”
“Not that bush. The other one.”
“Fuck—that’s even worse.”
“Shit. You’re right.”
“What are we going to do?”
“We’ll go round it.”
And so we’d go around the bush, and get caught, and get the shit kicked out of us and half of us would die.
Getting around a bush in one piece isn’t so fucking hard. We should have been able to work that kind of thing out—but we couldn’t. Running like hell was a very big part of the tactics out there.
It was a war fought against demons, by men who had become demons themselves. Maybe that’s the biggest thing I took away from it. The fact that anyone, your comrade, your friend, your brother, can in the right circumstances become something you don’t want to believe exists. Once you’ve seen it’s possible, you never look at anyone the same again. And The Gap itself, what did we do to it? It can’t always have been that way. Or maybe it was, and it was just the fact we have the wrong kind of minds, applying consciousness to things that should have stayed buried.
This isn’t making any real sense, isn’t some polished account. I can’t do anything about that, because I can’t remember it with any more cohesion. I guess I could go back over what I’ve done and try to order it, but I won’t. It wouldn’t be true to the way it was. Cohesion, order, chronology; The Gap was the place where you learned those three words meant nothing at all. This was a place where one guy I knew was Gone Away for three days once: three entire days. We could tell he was Gone Away, and we put up with it. You generally could. It was part of every day, and you got used to it. But three days…
When the guy came back, he was different. Being Gone Away wasn’t like sleep, or unconsciousness. You were still awake, but you were somewhere else. Short stretches were okay—I don’t think it did too much harm. But three days—that changed him. This guy used to sometimes say things about it, try to talk it out. But he couldn’t. Wherever he’d been was buried too deep. He sometimes talked like it was a whole other place, as if while his body had been with us, shivering in the trees or cutting the faces off villagers, his soul had been somewhere else, somewhere that was different but no better. I don’t know about that, but I instinctively recognized there was an element of truth in it. About a third of the men around me at any one time would be Gone Away, flicking on and off in ten- or twenty-minute stretches, and it was like marching with a bunch of fucking