Lyrics: Ryan Starr, Brand New Day
The soldiers marched in a mass, stomping their boots onto the ground, none of them batting an eyelid but instead staring at the backs of the head of their frontmen. And the people on the sidelines of the streets, the people around Jiji and me, screamed frantically. Men and women, old and young, every one of them hailed the soldiers in their tight fitting uniforms who were marching towards the battlefield, towards their enemy. A sunbeam broke through the ceiling; the weapons they held glinted, promising blood and pain and murder.
Inwardly I took notes for later written documentation. Notes about the people's general mood but also about some sideline comments, about those who were left behind and those who would join the soldiers in a war the majority seemed to anticipate feverishly, about those whose faces hinted something different than support for the following carnage. And a carnage it would be, without doubt, without fail. Because I knew there was no way it would be any different than the last wars I had witnessed. It would be the same all over again, maybe for different reasons, for different alibies, against different enemies. But the soldiers, the weapons and the carnage would be the same. Time and again.
And in the back of my mind a tiny little thought occured: This was not only tiring, it was boring.
I looked down at Jiji, the present Bookman and my master. 'Jiji' was just my nickname for him which he had fought tooth and nail for the first weeks, but I'd always been persistent when something piqued my curiosity. And since he'd cast away his true name in order to become the Bookman, I'd decided that 'Jiji' was a cheeky yet fitting enough way to call him and at the same time avoiding some annoying title as 'master'.
Jiji returned my look and nodded slightly before he retreated from the cheering crowds into the darker alleys of town. I knew where he would be and after round fifteen minutes, using some detours not to be tailed by anyone, we met in front of a shabby bar, far from the main streets.
'Anything out of ordinary, junior?', he asked me then in his calm and seemingly uninterested voice. He even sounded old but I guess that couldn't be prevented when you had lived as long and the way as he had up to now. And as he would till his death. My response was short and down to the point.
'Nope, just another civil war. Same reactions as ever, no too big anomalies, neither in development, mood nor execution. Neither special characters nor importantant information concerning neighbouring conflicts.'
'Indeed. Well done, Andrej. Then without further delay, it's time for us to leave.'
At his words an invisible burden fell from my shoulders; finally we would leave this place and move on. Over the last weeks I had felt an incomprehensible but growing pressure somewhere in the back of my head, and a restlessness which had made me irritable and used up most of my self-restraint to keep up my current alias as naive Andrej, the runner of this country's most well-informed newspaper agency. Not to mention that I was sick of this town and its inhabitants. They were ignorant fools, like sheep running in a herd towards the shambles, blindly hailing their own limited horizon, their own celebrated ignorance.
This pressure lifted from me and finally we'd be on the move again. We had seen what we had come here for, collected the information needed and evaluated the situation and prognosis. Now it was time for us to move, leave this place behind and head for another. For another war, another change, another valuable information and correspondingly to another alias.
I've stayed in one place for too long
Gotta get on the run again
I saw the one thing that I want
Hell bent, get outta bed
I'm throwing rocks at your window
You're tying the bed sheets together
They say that we're dreaming too big
I say this town's too small
Dream
Send me a sign
Turn back the clock
Give me some time
I need to break out
And make a new name
Let's open our eyes
To the brand new day
It's a brand new day
I've taken hits like a brother
But I'm getting back up again
And from the moment I saw her
I was hell bent with heaven sent
I'm throwing rocks at your window
We're leaving this place together
They say that we're flying too high
Well get used to looking up
Dream
Send me a sign
Turn back the clock
Give me some time
I need to break out
And make a new name
Let's open our eyes
To the brand new day
It's a brand new day
It's a brand new day
...
I think I lost all feeling for time when I realised that the world would never change. That the humans would always stay the same. It was then that I lost the ability to tell the difference between weeks and years, decades and centuries. Everything I documented, everything I read and wrote down and learned about the past and saw with my own eyes in the present – it all melted into the same colours.
Red – the blood. There was never a time without carnage, without bloodshed. No matter whose – soldiers, civilians, adults, children, wretches and kings... their blood didn't differ.
White – the priests' robes. There was always an institution claiming to know the reason behind the killings, the problems, the happenings. Claiming to know the difference between good deed and sin. Claiming to act in the name of some god. God – one of the things so utterly abstract and useless to me.
And finally ashgrey – the dead bodies' colour. If their skin wasn't coverd in blood or dirt, it was an unhealthy ashgrey. It was also the colour of the sky I noticed most often. Whenever I looked up, most of the time the sky seemd to be as grey as ashes. Just like the weapons, shining weapons made of steel; guns, daggers, swords and blades, the tips of arrows, halberds. There was no end to the grey shining weapons invented to kill, to end the lives of others.
Red, white and ashgrey, together they melted into black, a pitchblack that swallowed everything. And the world was the same all over again. A dark and dirty place, in the end no war ever made it better.
People often say they see how time flies by because of faces growing older, because of children growing up and people changing. Since Jiji and I never stayed in one place for too long, I never got to see such outer developments. And to tell the truth, I didn't care. To me, people just weren't interesting enough. After analysing them for so long, their reactions were predictable, their thinking mundane and shallow. And I was tired of it. Living my new alias time and again, it wasn't difficult to deceive them, make them think whatever lie Jiji had thought of in order to sneak into their community, their homes, their knowledge and plans, their dreams.
Come to think of it, it was a strange game indeed.
Us, acting as humans among humans, playing our roles as humans among monsters who shed tears over their own loss but didn't bat an eye when slaying their own kind. So who's the true monster here? Who's truly human? And if Jiji and I were just letting them think of us as humans – then what were we in reality? Maybe just monsters as well?
The Bookman's first priority, first duty is to be objective in the recording of history. Emotions prevent objectiveness. Therefore, emotions are to be banned. As his disciple, that was and is the first thing he's been teaching me. And telling the truth, it's much easier to wander this earth without distracting, restracting feelings. There's no sense in getting attached to that kind of living being that's so eager in destroying itself. No sense in letting them get close because the only thing they can do is hurt you. I don't know this only from the battlefields and wars and actions I've witnessed until this day, but also from my own experience. They are very old, personal memories that I'd rather forget. So I open a door in my mind, put those painful memories behind it and close it well. Seal it behind imaginary bars and locks and iron chains. For those who know not sadness cannot be hurt by it. And those early memories don't belong to my current alias anyway. No need to concern myself with them.
The self that is – who exactly?
I'm not quite sure.
Maybe I don't want to know.
Maybe because I'd find that there's no true 'me' of myself left anymore after locking away the last original experiences.
There are only objective memories, fake memories, experiences that are not mine but those of an alias. An alias whose existence will eventually end and be replaced by another. Easy as that.
So where am I left in this equation? See, I'm not even there anymore.
So right now, I'm only 'Lavi'.
There is no other possibilty for me to 'exist'.
Easy as that.
Logical as that.
And in the end, it's logic that I have to follow.
In order to survive.
In order to have a reason to stay alive.
In order to at least pretend to be 'someone'.