There Won't Be War

At the age of sixteen, as I prepared to attend my first peace festival, I knew that my father feared my going. I could have gone to the annual displays earlier, but he never went and discouraged me from going alone. We stayed in the family shelter when our area was targeted.

“I didn’t want you contaminated with their ideas,” he said to me on the day before I was to leave, “—until you could think for yourself.” His voice trembled as he shifted in his chair. “But the law says you have to go now.” He reached over and turned on the standing light. Its brightness seemed to terrify him for a moment.

He squinted and looked away from me as I sat down on the floor. “Don’t worry,” I said. “Maybe I’ll learn something.”

He scowled and leaned back; there was sweat on his face. “You’ll learn what they want you to, and nothing more.”

“Don’t you trust me?” I asked anxiously, afraid that he thought me a failure, unable to think for myself.

He smiled, but it seemed to me that knives were at his heart as he wiped his forehead. “Try not to believe any of it, even it you’re having a good time.” I knew that he always missed my mother, but I’d never seen him afraid. “They’ve got it wrong, son, their way of peace.”

I said, “But it’s been over seventy years. Doesn’t that count for anything?”

He seemed to be struggling with himself. “Anyone has to be able to kill anyone,” he said slowly, “—and that’s how it should be, always, as an extreme of behavior, not to be tampered with. The peacekeepers are just another genetics cult that wants to do away with our capacity for violence. The trouble with trying to improve us is that we don’t know what we are, where we are, what we want to become and where that’ll take us. Shut up/in their mountain enclaves, they’ve forgotten what it’s like to be a human being.”

I’d heard some of this before from him, but never so bitterly. “I’ve come to suspect,” he continued, pushing the words out with painful conviction, “that all these decades of the peace festival have been a preparation for a great change to some new human model. There’ll be no going back after that.” He leaned forward in his chair. “They’ll let things get out of hand, have what looks like a small war and blame it on ordinary human nature showing itself, then push their salvation on us. One or two bombs is all it’ll take for the keepers to close their grip on us.” He shifted in the chair and gazed into the far corner of the room, as if someone were hiding there, listening to him.

“I can’t believe they’d kill people,” I said.

He looked exasperated. “What you want to believe has nothing to do with it. They’d do anything to get their way, because they’re certain it’s right.”

I didn’t know what to say, except to remind him that he still had me, that he wasn’t alone. I looked into his eyes, but he turned away before I could speak.

He couldn’t have come with me to the festival. Our area had been targeted, and one person in each household had to stay behind. But I knew that he wouldn’t have gone even if he could.

He sat perfectly still. I gazed at him, realizing that he expected to die, and was pushing me away; he didn’t want to live in the kind of world he feared was coining; the one he had grown up in seemed bad enough. Maybe he would have been different if my mother had lived. I had a dim memory of a man who had laughed more often, but maybe I was only imagining that.

He looked down at me sadly and said, “I’m sorry, son, that I couldn’t give you more.”

I saw how damaged he was inside, how useless to himself, realizing that it had always been this way for him. I felt lost.

I packed and readied myself for bed, feeling uneasy-and alone, as if I wasn’t coming back.

“Good night,” I said from the landing above the living room. Something stopped inside me as he glanced up, smiled, and continued reading. I retreated to my room, with feelings of independence stirring beneath my fears of being abandoned.

My father claimed to know a lot about the past that he insisted no one else wanted to discuss. He hadn’t tried to hide his hatred of the world from me, yet he always said that he wanted me to find my own way and be happy. But if he was right, that was impossible.

The wars of the past, he had often told me, were always fought for good reasons. Our peace had only buried the truth of justifiable killing, which was a transcendent act, cutting short the slow violence of human affairs, or releasing the inner pressure of lives that had nowhere to go; violence called attention to the world’s failures, to its inability to shape itself into something better. But he denied that we would ever be wise enough to shape ourselves and remain human. The peace of the keepers was a tyranny that feared its own death, and had set itself against human nature—against him, it seemed to me as I drifted into sleep, because he took everything personally.