Visiting the Special Place

We tour the special place for people just like us. We are told if we should decide to eventually move to the special place we can do so in the snap of a finger. No questions asked. Just like that. It is our divine right.

On our tour we visit holy sites and wind through ancient ruins with dirt-covered floors and bone-colored walls that tell of the G-d-commanded heyday of our peoples’ existence. It is an existence denied to us, we are told, but one we try on at night in a lycanthropy of the dispossessed. That is, we flock to the neon dance halls of the special place and push into crowded hotel rooms so we can consume the flesh of our own people.

In the National Museum

Among the many stops on our tour the most important is at the national museum. It is an audiovisual tour of our peoples’ collective memory. The design of the national museum requires that we continuously go up and down flights of stairs as we make our way through the museum’s long hallways. For those who must go by wheelchair there are ramps that run parallel the staircases.

We learn the cumulative rise and fall of the staircases comes out to the total height if we stacked up the bodies of our people who have been hunted throughout time. Additional stairs and ramps are installed annually, we are told, because death by hunting is undeniable and indefinite. A never-ending hunt and evasion, whereby we must keep close to our hearts the knowledge that we have been hunted throughout time. We must keep this knowledge and feeling so close that it becomes our hearts—becomes all we know and feel. For what else is there but the question:

Who will hide us? Who will hide us? Who will hide us?

If We Are to Go Over the Wall

When we are in the special place we also see the wall. We are told the people on the other side of the wall are not taught to read and write. They are not taught to do simple things like how to share or wait their turn. No, we are told they are only taught to hunt people just like us.

Then, who are their bakers and firefighters and geologists and comic book artists? we ask.

We are told they do not become such things. No, it is only the deaths of people just like us that occupies their minds.

Well, what about asking a friend to borrow a tool? Or discussing the weather or thanking someone for their help?

They do not have friends over there, we are told. There is no weather to discuss or help to be had on the other side of the wall. Our death is their daily bread. Our blood and cries are their weather. People just like us are their reason for living and for dying, their reason for rising with the sun and falling asleep under the stars.

Considering all this we ask, what would happen if we traveled to the other side of the wall?

We are told, like sharks to blood, they would know the moment of our crossing and shear us limb from limb.

In this way the people on the other side of the wall become like wild predators of a different time. Justifiably hunted due to the threat they pose merely by existing. And in this way too, the soldiers in the special place become less like soldiers and more like huntsmen entering a dark forest to trap and kill what they refuse to understand.

We are told when the people on the other side of the wall are hunted they are given benevolent warning beforehand. Instructed via radio and television, internet and air-dropped pamphlets about which corners make the best hiding spots. We are told they cowardly use one another as human shields. We are told they place already-dead bodies among the bodies of the newly dead in order to garner sympathies beyond the wall.

We imagine the people on the other side of the wall pillaging their own cemeteries and morgues, exhuming the remains of loved ones for distribution to sites of new death.

What Is Found in Their Homes

After the hunting has concluded for the day the soldiers of the special place turn inside-out the homes of those successfully hunted. The soldiers do this, we are told, in order to gather intelligence. When the soldiers enter the homes we are told they routinely find boxes filled with photos. Photos of families gathered around tables and patios, prepared grins to bookmark moments, friends squeezing to fit a camera’s frame, ever-present cerulean skies, backsides and necks and legs mid-motion, and imperfect portraits of candid expression echoing the day.

We are told these photos do not belong to the people on the other side of the wall. Rather, they have somehow been pilfered from our people in the special place. A trick to make the people on the other side of the wall seem just like us. And us just like them.