fiction by matheo mesny

The Abyss

A man was dying.

He lay writhing on the ground and crying.

Evoking a kindness he had once done for me.

He implored of me some act of mercy, or what I saw as a needless waste.

For human suffering is complex, and the observation of this complex event provided me with much pleasure and interest.

I did not understand why such a spectacle was to me as pleasurable as the sight of familiar land surely is to a castaway after a voyage into Earth's unknown hellishness.

For, in this field of northern France, while shells fell as meteors would have at the dawn of our planet's existence, I found in this man’s suffering a comforting feeling I had not felt since leaving for France a few months previously.

Cameron’s yelps finally extirpated me from my reflections, and I raised my rusty rifle and gave him the gift of death.

This was the first time I realized I was no longer a man but an animal, a thing void of empathy and joy. A dark chasm in which light and human emotion had long ago expired.

This war had served as its only purpose to convert men into these dark abysses, stripping men of their humanity and reverting them to their natural state. The incessant shelling resumed as I finally began to move, walking slowly towards the enemy who had offered my companions an early audience with God.

Only Samuel and I remained, the rain mixing with the soil to create a muddy grave that swallowed a number of our fallen comrades.                  

Samuel turned to me, eyes red with fatigue and body shivering in fear of the certain fate that awaited us. He had joined us but a month ago after our last medic was blown to nothingness by an enemy shell. He was young, the kind that still cultivated hope and good spirits. Stubble had, like the morning dew on a morning of pleasant weather, barely settled on his round and god-fearing visage. He always carried a picture of the woman he longed to join once back from Lucifer's realm: a pretty young woman named Lucy who he explained was in the business of baking. “She smells of fresh bread,” said Samuel when reminiscing about their time together, when trying to fall into Morpheus’s rare but warm embrace. He was afraid but remained hopeful that he would one day be with her again, and taste her warm bread.

As Samuel turned to me to inquire about what to do next, an enemy bullet fired by a Scharfschützen struck him in the brow, and as fast as he had been alive, he expired, gray matter oozing from the cavity that had once contained his soul.

His body stood upright for a few moments as if to show the enemy that even in death he was defiant and would patiently await their arrival at Heaven's doorstep.

As Samuel fell, I retreated to a small hole that had been burrowed by a shell into the soft soil.

Was this God’s way of punishing me for my sins? Allowing me to continue with my life as my comrades fell? I suddenly had the realization that I did not feel melancholy for them or horror at their demise. My spirit could no longer experience these human emotions; the abyss had surely consumed all of me, leaving only my thoughts and survival instinct intact, for even my body was ravaged by malnutrition and fatigue and I remarked that I now resembled the castaway I had thought of previously. Wasn’t I also a castaway, in between enemy and friend, my island the small hole I found myself lying in, the rats gnawing at my legs my only companions, and the ocean the vast extent of mud, shells, and decaying corpses? 

I lay on my back, swatting away the remaining rodents, and amid the constant shelling and gunfire I began to find peace, this hellish cannonade which I had grown accustomed to helped guide my way to the realm of sleep. For in the trenches of Northern France, only silence awakens a man.

As I drifted to sleep, I heard a murmur: “Sie sind alles tot?” And although my German was far from being conversational, I understood the phrase as if it had been uttered by the most educated and eloquent of Englishmen: “Are they all dead?” This question evoked in me not fear but curiosity. Was I dead? Was I in a state of living that could be characterized as one of being? To these questions I had no answer as I felt as if I might be in Hell already, the purgatory providing me with an endless supply of pain and suffering but not allowing me to feel or escape.

As they approached my new home, I saw it was a party of three, men as disheveled and empty as I was; men forced to sell their souls and humanity by a corrupt elite who saw only pawns and hand-drawn maps of borders and thought only of personal vendettas and the acquisition of wealth. These puppet masters were the true devils of this all; surely, they had been sent by Satan himself to punish mankind for its excesses. Was I to be its next victim, a man whose body and memory would be buried beneath the mud just as his comrades had been?

The three men approached, and gathering around my still body began conversing. As I was feigning to have perished, I could not move but for small breaths through my nostrils, I, however, could understand small parts of their discourse. The words “afraid,” “mother,” and “soon” were repeated with great pain and uncertainty by the youngest of the trio. He was a young boy, whose age could have not exceeded twenty and who had not yet grown any facial hair, a testament to his youth and innocence which was evident by his sickly expression. He had not yet been absorbed by the abyss, but it was approaching, its precipice nearing every time he took another man’s life or lost a friend he loved dearly. The two other men, both close in age and appearance, both had ragged beards and tattered and bloody uniforms.

They both had dark and matted hair, malnourishment had dug their cheeks and they looked ghostly, like ghouls who had been brought back to life to fight this cruel war. One man taller and stockier than the other had clearly been shot, blood pooling by his foot, but his glassy eyes and removed look betrayed that he too, like me, had fallen from the precipice long ago. His counterpart smoked a wet cigarette, the glowing end the only source of light in the nebulous night, like the light of a galleon’s lanterns in the middle of an ocean of death, stink, and pain.

The three men, still conversing quietly, turned to return to their holes, for in this land we were all rats, living among the dead and dirt, burrowing, and eating whatever scraps providence sent our way, scavenging like the animals we had become. But the young man would never see his mother again; the skinny man had just smoked his last cigarette and the injured man would not need to suffer from his wounds.

My pistol shots echoed in the night like a church bell, three shots for three men, the sound somehow roaring in my ears louder than any shell or cannon I had ever heard. I crawled to their side to check if I had been able to end their suffering swiftly, recognizing in them my equals, men whose lives had been cut short by my deceit. But had I not saved them from falling further into darkness? Had I not just saved the young boy’s innocence, sparing him the feeling of the void that now engulfed me so fervently that I could do nothing but weep emotionlessly?

As I dragged myself to the edge of my hole, I peered over the top and saw the rising sun, which like brandy after a cold day, provided me with some form of comfort. I took my pistol, cocked it, breathed in, breathed out, and put the tip of the barrel over my ear, the cold end of the barrel now burning me with anticipation, anticipation for what was to come, I stared at the sun once again. No one would remember me. And, as the bullet entered the chamber and shot through the barrel of the silver pistol, I felt emotion for the first time in months and smiled.

The darkness had dissipated, and joy overcame me as my cranium exploded into a thousand pieces and my body slumped next to that of the three German men. Our blood mixed with the soil, returning to earth what we had stolen from it, life.

We had all escaped the abyss and found peace.