YEAR OF THE DOLLAR
an Earthbound fanfic by Tenda

There was a time, I think, when we had the strength to protest.

Let me begin with a quote, some words of the beloved novelist laureate Dr. Sebastian Fletch: "Immense military force is not sudden but a long-time coming, and even before the standard-issue rifles are bought an army pays a cost that is not counting or counted or summed until after the rifles are lowered for the last time."

Dr. Fletch, in his award-winning story, and in this award-winning quote, talks about the costs of a military that cannot be measured-- this is approriate. His "The Gifts We Take," a stirring civil rights piece about the Fourside Riots, was an appropriate piece to win the Lenob Peace Prize. It is appropriate that Dr. Fletch, a legless survivor of what he called war, now resides in a mansion where he eats a lavish meal three times a day.

I will not be a laureate, having wrote this. Likely, it will never leave my journal, and will never be recited by a tongue that is not mine. There was a time, I think, when I still had the strength to speak aloud.

I was not born in Onett, though I lived there many years. I live at Onett now, which is different than living in Onett, and it's my way of saying I don't really live here. I'm not in any directories, and I'm certainly not in any house. If you would have liked to see me, you may either have been lucky and caught me on the streets at night, or have been luckier and caught me "in the can" at the police department. My name is Saul. I never talked very much.

I was born, rather, in a land far to the east called Dalaam. The name is likely familiar, because now that the war has ended, you are familiar with a hero from this place-- Poo, our prince, who I no longer recognize as our prince. You may be familiar with his doctrine, which he calls training, which is the Mu doctrine. If you have seen Poo on television, you have likely seen him shatter a brick with his bare hands as a demonstration of Mu training.

This is not the Mu we learned.

I cannot say I was a colleague of the prince; his training was separate from ours. I had many colleagues, however, but they are now counted among the dead.

Ah, they should be, at least. They are dead, but they are not counted. We are the casualties of war that will not be counted, and will never be summed even as Dr. Fletch sums up the casualties of racism and bigotry in his novels.

My name is Saul, and I come from the east. I am a student of the Mu doctrine of power through detachment and non-aggression, and I am-- as all my colleagues were!-- a pacifist.

That is why, today, I am starving and living on the streets, and it is altogether appropriate. Dr. Fletch was right when he said there are immense costs incurred before an army is marshalled, but where Dr. Fletch's desire to become a laureate held his tongue, mine is unrestrained-- there are immense costs incurred while an army is in operation.

Costs measured, not in crime or riots, but in dollars. In Onett, in little Onett, in this suburb where we were told we could study in peace far away from the price-gouging of the city, a hamburger on the evening of war's declaration cost $14.

I do not lie. I will produce the documents for you, though likely dead as I am-- they are folded into the back sleeve of this journal. The menu is there. $14 for a hamburger, $4 for a can of soda, chilled but with no ice.

And yet, at the end of the day, it is only Saul and his student cohorts-- freshly exiled from Gomer County High School for the rumored association of Mu "mysticism" with the invaders-- that are going hungry.

The government, and again the documentation is here included at the back of this journal, though you should not need see, placed a bounty on each and every 'enemy' within its borders. And the government paid these bounties, post-haste, into the accounts of the killers.

To kill, to eat. But these were not stag or bears that were being hunted-- they were tigers. Eagleland posted its memorandum on telephone poles, and the corpses of dogs and blue-faced men piled up by the dozen outside the collection agencies.

A snake, I kept in a box-- the animal of my year of birth-- he was taken from me in the night. A snake, any snake, was worth a dollar to the Eagleland War Effort Collection Agencies.

You would produce a dead snake, from a box or perhaps just hanging from the stick with which you beat it, and lay it on a glass countertop in an air-conditioned room. A man wearing a suit and tie would look at the snake, and ask to see your ID. He would turn on his chair, an amalgalm of steel and twenty-one centuries, to a computer-- and he would forward a dollar into your ATM account.

And that night, after you arrive home from pressing and shining .357 caliber shells at the renovated factory-- and after you have handed in the bodies you later shot with them-- you will sit with your family and enjoy a meal of $14 hamburgers.

My name is Saul, and my friends are named Lau, Robert, Elise, Barbara, Sean-jin, and Rohit. We were not all of Dalaam, and we were not all students of the Mu doctrine. We all, however, spent many months in the alleys of this town, waiting for the prices of food, of clothes, even of toothbrushes to fall. We all die now, in this alley, one-by-one.

Lau, I believe, was traded in. They found him-- behind a garbage can-- and he was not dead to them in the way a person may have died before the war effort. I too, will die now, but will not be dead. A nation cannot return to civilization in a period of months, and cannot rework twenty-one centuries into its angered and war-painted flesh so fast.

I die a man of peace, who still writes with graphite and paper, and I am of the things we lost. I will never be a laureate, though I am not sure that Eagleland crowns laureates any longer, and I take pride now in dying uncounted by them-- for war is murder, though the winner never murders. I take pride in dying proud.

(There are one-hundred and thirty-one blue-skinned bodies behind the brick wall that encloses Market Square in uptown Fourside. We counted them, and we took their IDs from their wallets, so that we may honor them. There are graves we dug, at Beak Point, that are empty of bodies but full of meaning. Should I be found with this journal, and you have read this particular page of this journal, bury me with the the unmarked mounds-- just past where Elise played her saxophone, on carefree days many millenia past today.)

January 19th, 2000
Saul "Hutchins"