The Apocalypse of John

Into the heart of darkness of the Ohio campaign

Michael Young | September 9, 2004

(Page 4 of 4)

"That's classified sir."

"Not any more, captain, wouldn't you agree. What did they tell you?"

"They told me...They told me that you had gone totally insane and that your administration was unsound."

"Are my methods unsound?"

"I don't see any method at all, sir."

"Are you an assassin?"

"I'm a soldier, sir, just reporting for duty."

"You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill. You know I've seen horrors. Four years in Washington will show you a few. You have a right to kill me... But you have no right to judge me. It's impossible for words to describe what is necessary to those who do not know what horror means. Horror. Horror has a face—it's tumbleweeds of congressional investigations; a vice-president who thinks you're an idiot, but to whom you're manacled because everyone else thinks he's smarter than you; a national security advisor who's got a rod up her ass, talks like an answering machine, and thinks she knows the world because she wrote a book on a commie army. But you must make a friend of horror. Horror and moral terror are your friends.

"You know captain, I watched a snail crawl along the edge of a straight razor. That's my dream. That's my nightmare. Crawling, slithering, along the edge of a straight razor, and surviving. I'm sticking around Kerry, but that's because you or me, we're the same thing at this point, doesn't make a difference. We're the same thing."

They could have made me a president for killing him, and I wasn't even in their fucking army anymore. Everybody wanted me to do it, him most of all. I felt like he was up there, waiting for me to take the pain away. He just wanted to go out like a guardsman, standing up, not like some poor, wasted, rag-assed renegade. Even the jungle wanted him dead, and that's who he really took his orders from anyway. But I wasn't doing it.

I looked at Bush and he understood. I didn't have it in me. Then he began laughing, a hysterical, burbling laugh, an overflowing, salsa-laden enchilada of a laugh, then he said it, as tears flowed into saliva: "Horrible, horrible, horrible."