Analysis of the Christ Myth

I: Introduction

Before I go into this analysis, I need to clarify a few things for my readers. If you wish to read a characterization of Christ that reaffirms all the orthodox notions of him, I recommend going back to your Bible, or to your local church and listen to your preacher. There’s no point in my simply restating what’s already been said so many times before.

I’m attempting here to argue something different: a combination of ideas from modern Biblical scholarship with some literary interpretations of my own. So if you, Dear Reader, happen to be a Bible-believing Christian who doesn’t like to have his or her cherished beliefs challenged, I’m afraid that this analysis isn’t for you; stop reading, and do as I suggested in the above paragraph. I respect your right to have your faith, but I don’t share it.

Also, if your beliefs are as I’ve said above, don’t assume that you’ll read this through, then ‘prove me wrong’ in the comments section with a reading list of links and books. Don’t assume you’re going ‘to win my soul for Christ’: almost twenty years ago, I went through a Christian phase, for about six or seven years, then I lost my faith by the end of the 2000s. I’d say bringing me back into the flock, through a little online arguing, is most unlikely.

Finally, if my analysis offends your sense of orthodoxy, I’d advise against making abusive comments, as such an attitude is decidedly un-Christian, and therefore will have the opposite effect of changing my mind. Recall Jesus’ words in this connection: “You have heard that it was said, ‘Love your neighbor’ and ‘Hate your enemy.’ But I tell you, love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be sons of your Father in heaven. He causes His sun to rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and the unrighteous. If you love those who love you, what reward will you get? Do not even tax collectors do the same? And if you greet only your brothers, what are you doing more than others? Do not even Gentiles do the same?” (Matthew 5: 43-47)

Then, there’s what Bill Hicks said in response to offended Christians (<<<at about 1:20).

Furthermore, if my interpretations seem to be ‘manipulative’ of Scripture, keep in mind how manipulative the Church and others in power have always been in their interpretation of the same Scriptures, typically for political ends. For those manipulations, the accepted ones, are ones that have been made by the owners of the most real estate!

Now, as for those of you who are open-minded enough to consider a different point of view, I welcome you.

II: Jesus, the Anti-imperialist Revolutionary

Jesus was not a “Christian.” He had no intention of starting a new religion, nor did his immediate followers, including James and Peter. It was Paul, apostle to the Gentiles, who introduced the idea of Jesus dying for our sins to save us from eternal damnation (see The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, by Hyam Maccoby, for a full argument), faith in this salvific death replacing the Torah, something neither Jesus nor his immediate followers ever intended to abrogate, an idea they would have been horrified even to contemplate.

Jesus saw himself as the Messiah in the traditional Jewish sense of the concept: descended from David (even Paul acknowledged this in Romans 1:3), a king “who would restore the Jewish monarchy, drive out the Roman invaders, set up an independent Jewish state, and inaugurate an era of peace, justice and prosperity (known as ‘the kingdom of God’) for the whole world.” (Maccoby, page 15) He did not consider himself divine; such an idea was added decades later by the Pauline Church. For him, ‘Son of God‘ was not meant to be taken literally, but was rather expressive of how he was a righteous follower of God, as used in the Hebrew Bible.

Now, I don’t subscribe to Caleb Maupin’s notion that Jesus was a socialist, but this notion of Christ as a revolutionary, who didn’t come to bring peace, but a sword (Matthew 10:34), is an inspiring concept for us anti-imperialists today. For as Mao taught us, “Revolution is not a dinner party,” and “Political power grows out of the barrel of a gun.” As I will argue below, there are revolutionary things Jesus and his followers said and did that can inspire us socialists today, if in a symbolic, allegorical form.

Of course one wouldn’t know that Christ was a revolutionary to read the New Testament, since the followers of the Pauline Church, including the four evangelists, edited out and minimized all discussion of militant action. Only a few such remarks, such as the quote given in the link from Matthew in the previous paragraph, remain in the Gospels as, so to speak, Freudian slips that go against the tendenz of the general message, and therefore hint at the hidden truth.

Other examples of the truth slipping out include how Jesus’ disciples included one called “Simon the Zealot,” as well as the “Sons of Thunder” (or does Boanerges mean “Sons of Tumult,” or “Sons of Anger”?). Why would a mild-mannered preacher of peace and love, so willing to “render to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s,” include a Zealot, as well as such aggressive types, among his disciples?

A more important question is why this militant, revolutionary message was edited out (with the exception of such oversights as those mentioned above). Though some scholars have claimed that Roman rule over Palestine in the first century CE wasn’t all that oppressive, others say it was. Romans crucified men for the crime of sedition, as I discussed in my analysis of Spartacus. Thousands of Jews claiming to be the Messiah were put to death in this cruel, excruciating way. Why kill them this way if the revolutionary threat wasn’t so great, and why risk such a painful death if one’s oppression wasn’t all that severe?

The earliest of the Gospels to be written was that of Mark, written around 66-74 CE, either just before or just after the destruction of the Second Temple in Jerusalem in 70 CE. The other three Gospels were written years, if not a decade or two, after this event, when the brutally defeated Jews were too demoralized to take up the revolutionary struggle so soon again.

For the early Christian Church, having just been persecuted under Nero, any antagonism of Rome would have been inadvisable, to say the least; whereas gaining as many Roman converts as possible would have been in the Church’s best interests. Hence, as appeasing an attitude to Rome as could be achieved, while also contradicting the known history as minimally as possible, was desirable to these early Christian missionaries.

Added to this issue was the growing antipathy between the original Jewish Jesus movement and the Gentile Pauline Church (In this connection, consider how defensive Paul gets in 2 Corinthians 11 against those “super-apostles” who doubt his authority as an apostle; consider also the controversy between Paul and the Jewish Christians as expressed in Acts 15.). It would work to the Church’s advantage to reinforce the bad Roman feeling against the Jews while as the same time ingratiating Rome. Hence, the Gospels’ shifting of the blame of Christ’s crucifixion onto the Jews and away from Rome.

Small wonder Jesus is understood to have said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” (John 18:36) This statement is a clever de-politicizing of the notion of the Kingdom of God as wiping out Roman rule and reinstating the Jewish monarchy. Small wonder, when the Jews insisted that Pontius Pilate release insurrectionist Barabbas and crucify Jesus (“His blood be on us, and on our children!” [Matthew 27:25]), the Judaean governor washes his hands of the decision, carrying out the Jews’ apparent wishes while absolving himself, and all of Rome, of responsibility.

It is also easy to see how all of this whitewashing of Roman responsibility, and placing it instead on the Jews, brought about almost two millennia of Christian, particularly European, antisemitism, culminating in the Holocaust.

III: The Son of God, Figuratively to Literally

As I said above, the traditionally Jewish use of ‘son of God’ only meant someone with a special, close relationship with God, not one literally begotten of God, the way Zeus impregnated maidens to give birth to Greek heroes. Such a use originally applied to Jesus, too, though that would change over the decades and later New Testament writings.

Let’s start with Paul’s letters, the earliest New Testament writings, generally dated around 48-57 CE (i.e., Galatians, 1 Thessalonians, 1 and 2 Corinthians, Philemon, Philippians, and Romans; all others attributed to Paul are either of doubtful authenticity or not considered authentically his writing).

One striking thing to note about this early Christology is that Paul doesn’t seem to know anything about the Virgin Birth. As I pointed out above with the quote from Romans 1:3, he said that Jesus was descended from King David, but that he was “declared to be the Son of God with power, according to the spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead” (Romans 1:4).

In other words, according to Paul, Christ wasn’t the pre-existing Word from the beginning (John 1:1); he was “born of a woman, born under the law” (Galatians 4:4), that is, born fully human. He became the Son of God when God rose him from the dead–no earlier.

Let’s move ahead a decade or two to the Gospel of Mark, which establishes Jesus’ Sonship, well, earlier, specifically, at his baptism, after which the Holy Spirit was said to have descended on him like a dove, and God declared that Jesus was “[His] beloved Son, in whom [He is] well pleased” (Mark 1:11). Still no mention of a Virgin Birth.

We get the Virgin Birth in the Gospels of Matthew and Luke/Acts, respectively believed to have been written around about 70-85 and 80-90 CE. There’s one little problem with this notion of a Virgin Birth, though: it’s based on a mistranslation.

Matthew 1:23 quotes Isaiah 7:14 as follows: “Behold, a virgin shall be with child, and shall bring forth a son, and they shall call his name Emmanuel, which being interpreted is, God with us.” The problem with this is that the author of Matthew was quoting the Septuagint Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible, which used parthenos, “virgin,” for the Isaiah verse; the original Hebrew Bible, however, uses almah, “young woman.” If the prophesy had intended to refer to a miraculous birth, why not use betulah, “virgin,” instead?

Another curious thing should be noted, one that will doubtless infuriate the fundamentalists, who insist that the Bible is ‘the inerrant Word of God.’ If one were to compare the genealogies of Jesus as given in Matthew and Luke, not only do the names differ so much as to be surely the genealogies of completely different men, but if one were to reckon only those names from King David to Joseph, one would find that in Luke, there are about fifteen more generations (Luke 3:23-31) than there are in Matthew 1:6-16.

In any case, we can see that Jesus was getting more and more divine by the decades. With Paul’s notion of Christ dying for our sins and being resurrected, we sense the, at least unconscious, influence on Paul of the dying and resurrecting gods of pagan mystery traditions (i.e., Attis, Osiris, Tammuz, etc.–see Maccoby, pages 195-198). As the notion of Christ’s divinity grows through the Virgin Birth, Mary, the Mother of God and Queen of Heaven and Earth, also slowly begins to acquire quasi-pagan/divine attributes.

We can see this Marian development already in Luke 1:28-55, from the angel Gabriel calling her kecharitomene up to the Magnificat. Mary has been full of grace right from the beginning of her life, as kecharitomene implies, according to the Catholic interpretation, which is used as proof of the Immaculate Conception. One doesn’t have to go far from this to the Cult of Mary (in spite of the Church’s condemnation of it), and thence to her role as Co-Redemptrix. Since Paul was, as I mentioned above, Apostle to the Gentiles, and Luke was written for a Gentile audience, notions of a dying-and-resurrecting son of God, born of an immaculate mother, must have inflamed their pagan imaginations.

Finally, it’s in the Johannine writings (the Gospel of John, in its final form, having been written probably some time between 90-110 CE) that we find Christ as the pre-existing Logos who was made flesh. He’s truly coming closer to God, though the Trinitarian doctrine isn’t yet quite fully established. An argument can be made that the Gospel of John is presenting the Arian position that Christ is homoiousios, not homoousios–similar to, but not the same, as God. After all, Christ seems to be denying his identity with God (John 10:30) to his accusers of blasphemy when he says, “Is it not written in your law, I said, ‘ye are gods?” (John 10:34-38).

The hypostatic union, that is, Jesus understood in the Trinitarian sense of being God and man, all in one indivisible whole, suggests that goddess-like status of Mary, the Theotokos, who couldn’t be merely the mother of a physical, but not spiritual, nature, as in the Nestorian heresy. The pagan influence on Christianity goes back pretty early, doesn’t it? Small wonder the Church was able to accommodate so many pagan traditions (i.e., transforming pagan gods into Christian saints, turning pagan holidays into Christian ones, etc.) so easily.

IV: The Ouroboros of Christ

So as we go towards the later New Testament writings, we go further away from the Jesus of history and more and more towards the Jesus of faith, or of myth, however you prefer to see it. As much as I see these later developments as ahistorical, though, I don’t see them as completely without merit or worth. I will, nonetheless, interpret their meaning in an unorthodox, metaphorical way.

In the last section, we saw Jesus rising from a man favoured of God to being man and God at the same time, since the Church insisted he must be both, for soteriological reasons. Now, however, we’re going to see Christ descend, though in a very different way. Here, I give you a new, metaphorical interpretation of the Christ myth, one that paradoxically uses the orthodox concepts to symbolize how we can think about the original, revolutionary message.

In the beginning was the already existing Word, the idealized, spiritual version of Christ, who dwelt with God. I like the New English Bible translation the best: “…and what God was, the Word was.” (John 1:1) It suggests the Arian notion of homoiousios, similarity between God and Christ, an emphasis of Jesus’ virtues and closeness to God, good qualities to have in a revolutionary figure.

When the Word was made flesh (John 1:14), though, a transformation of Christ occurred that requires us to take note of the influence of Gnosticism on Pauline Christianity. In particular, I’m referring to the dualism of the spirit vs. the flesh. Naturally, the spirit is idealized, Godlike, and the flesh is corrupt, evil, of the Devil.

Now, since Pauline Christianity is, as Maccoby conceived of it, a combination of Judaism, Gnosticism, and pagan mystery tradition, Paul was only a moderate Gnostic (Maccoby, pages 185-189). For Paul, the physical world and the Torah weren’t created by the evil Demiurge, but by God; instead, Satan took over this world from the time of the Fall, perceived as a radical plunge from God’s grace to the depths of sin (a notion whose logic I questioned here–scroll way down to find the relevant passage), and the Torah for Paul was only a temporary guide to be superseded by belief in Christ’s sacrificial death (Romans 8:3), the pagan element of Paul’s conception of Christianity.

So the physical world and the Torah aren’t evil in an absolute sense for Paul; they’re just inferior…bad enough. Indulgence in physical pleasure, and insistence on adhering to the Law, though, are evil for Paul; hence, his celibacy and recommendation of it to those who can resist sex (1 Corinthians 7:1-2), and “the power of sin is the Law” (1 Corinthians 15:56); also, there’s Romans 3:20.

My point in discussing this Gnostic influence on Paul, that the spirit is good and the physical is evil, is that it has a bearing on the Incarnation. As perfect as Christ is understood to be as both God and man, his very physicality is a descent from the absoluteness of that perfection. Small wonder the heretical Gnostic Christians couldn’t accept a Christ that came in the flesh (2 John 1:7); for them, he, not having a body, couldn’t be crucified, but someone else had to have been crucified instead (Simon of Cyrene), an idea that managed to appear in the Koran (surah An Nisa, 157).

Christ’s Incarnation is thus the beginning of his mythical descent, one that will end with his crucifixion, death, and harrowing of hell. His resurrection, in a spiritual body that’s incorruptible, is thus his return to that absolute state of perfection from the beginning, a coming full circle for him, which leads to a point I’ve made many times before.

I use the ouroboros as a symbol of the dialectical, unified relationship between opposites. I feel that that relationship is best expressed in the form of a circular continuum, with the extreme opposites meeting and paradoxically phasing into each other. For me, the ouroboros shows us that meeting of opposites with the serpent’s head biting its tail. Of course, every intermediate point on the circular continuum is corresponded to on the serpent’s coiled body.

Now, as I see it, the biting head of the ouroboros of Christ represents the pre-existing Word from the beginning of Creation up until just before he is made flesh. With the Incarnation, we shift from the serpent’s biting head to just after it, at the neck. The newborn baby is surrounded by the love of Joseph, Mary, the gift-bearing Magi, the shepherds, and the angels, but he is in the humblest of mangers.

Later, as a young man, Jesus is tempted by the Devil in the wilderness (Matthew 4:1-11). As we all know, he of course resists this temptation completely, but none of this is to say he doesn’t at all feel the itch of temptation: after all, without at least the urge to give in, it’s hardly temptation, is it? Thus, this is a further move down towards the tail.

After that, he begins his ministry, with the assembling of his twelve disciples. As we know, he performs many miracles–turning water into wine, feeding five thousand, walking on water, healing the disabled, etc.–so even though he’s gone further down the body of the ouroboros, he’s still in the upper half of it. At one point, however, he’s hungry and goes to a fig tree, one that is out of season; angry that it has no figs for him to eat, he curses it, causing it to wither away (Mark 11:12-14). This is hardly saintly behaviour, no matter how Christians try to rationalize or allegorize it. His enjoining us to forgive others so God will forgive our sins doesn’t seem to dovetail well with his cursing of the fig tree (Mark 11:20-25). Why couldn’t he forgive it? He has thus slipped another inch or two down the serpent’s body.

In his exorcising of evil spirits in a madman, Jesus sends them into a herd of about two thousand pigs, which immediately run into a sea and drown themselves (Mark 5:1-13). Why kill them? Couldn’t Christ have simply sent the demons back to hell? That large herd of pigs was surely part of a farmer’s livelihood. Couldn’t Christ have taken that into consideration? Again, he seems to have slipped a bit further down the serpent’s body in the direction of the tail.

One striking thing about his teachings, often in the form of parables, is that they’re part of the Pharisee style of teaching. Indeed, in spite of the hostility Jesus is portrayed in the Gospels as having showed the Pharisees (whose way of doing things would evolve into rabbinic Judaism), he seems to have been a Pharisee himself (see also Maccoby, chapter 4). Though the Pauline New Testament tries to vilify all Jews not converting to Christ, his real condemnation is towards only those particular Pharisees and Sadducees who were collaborators with Rome, outwardly appearing to be righteous, but inwardly full of hypocrisy and iniquity (Matthew 23:28).

Indeed, as the controversies between him and the Jewish religious establishment grow, we find that, because of his popularity with the regular Jewish people, those authorities are afraid of showing antagonism to him. Recall that Jesus was thoroughly a Jew, not at all intending to destroy the Law or the Prophets (Matthew 5:17). Those Jews who opposed him weren’t ordinary Jews, as John would have you believe (John 8:44-49)–those Jews in particular were collaborators with Rome.

Now, with these controversies come the nearing danger of Jesus’ arrest and crucifixion, which therefore brings him further down the serpent’s body and closer to the tail. Since he is opposed to these collaborators with Rome, they at one point try to test him on his position on taxation, to which he gives a cleverly ambiguous answer (Mark 12:13-17).

I referred to the “render to Caesar” quote above, giving the interpretation that favours acquiescence to taxation, and therefore to Roman rule. The opposing interpretation, though, I’d say is the far likelier one, given Jesus’ revolutionary bent, and that is that what is Caesar’s is nothing, while what is to be rendered to God is everything.

As for the nature of Christ’s revolutionary leanings, as I said above, he was no ‘socialist,’ or even whatever the ancient equivalent of that would have been. Nor was he, much to the chagrin of your typical Christian fundamentalist today, the ancient equivalent of a right-winger, in spite of his Jewish traditionalism, and in spite of the later Pauline Church’s acceptance of the master-slave relation (1 Peter 2:18).

Jesus spoke of a kind of egalitarianism that many right-wingers today would balk at as being ‘socialist,’ even though it was nothing of the sort; and as I said in my analysis of It’s a Wonderful Life, such talk of Christian charity as socialism tells us more about the mean-spiritedness of those right-wingers, who often consider themselves Christian, than it does of whether or not such charity is at all socialist.

Jesus told a wealthy man to sell what he owns and give the money to the poor, in order to inherit eternal life (Mark 10:17-22). A little later, he says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God (Mark 10:25); this goes hard against the Protestants’ notion of the “Prosperity Gospel,” in which the material success of certain Christians is supposed proof of God’s favouring of them, rewarding their faith with wealth. On the contrary: as Jesus himself said, “many who are first will be last, and the last will be first.” (Mark 10:31)

In this connection, we must also allow for some nuance regarding this idea that one is saved only by faith in Christ’s death for our sins. The Gospel of Matthew, understood to have been written for a Jewish audience, seems to be an attempt to reconcile Pauline Christianity with the original Nazarene message, which insists on sticking with the Torah and even expanding on its morality (Matthew 5). After all, Jesus’ original teachings seem to have survived through an oral passing-on of them, as well as through the collection of Q sayings, so the Pauline Church would have had to address and reinterpret these words of his that wouldn’t go away.

The insistence on doing good works (Matthew 25:31-46) isn’t limited to Matthew: it’s seen also in the Epistle of James (e.g., James 2:17), which, as I see it, is another attempt to reconcile Pauline and Nazarene Christianity.

As I’ve been saying, Jesus has been slipping further towards the tail of the ouroboros, and he knows it. He predicts his betrayal, arrest, and crucifixion (Matthew 20:18). Along with his lowering of fortunes comes more temptation not to have to endure the Passion, hence his grievous praying in Gethsemane, hoping that God will “let this cup pass from [him]” (Matthew 26:36-39). In his temptation, his fear of the terrible pain he is about to endure, Jesus is showing us more and more of his human, rather than divine, side.

Of course, he is then betrayed by Judas Iscariot, fortuitously named from the point of view of the increasingly anti-Jewish Pauline Church, and arrested. Jesus is now definitely down in the rear half of the ouroboros’ body, and getting closer and closer to the bitten tail. His suffering is vividly and graphically shown in Mel Gibson’s movie on the topic, the film that unfortunately affirms the antisemitic passages of the Gospels.

Jesus is beaten, mocked, and crowned with a wreath of thorns…he’s inching closer to that tail. This is quite a descent from the high position of the pre-existing Logos, from the loftiest honour to an abyss of degradation, culminating in what’s been represented in the pitiful images of those Ecce Homo paintings.

Nailed to the Cross, Jesus retains some of his nobility by saying of his persecutors, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34), indicating that he’s still some way from the serpent’s bitten tail. Shortly before he dies, though, he quotes Psalm 22:1, saying, “Eli, Eli, lema sabachthani?” (Matthew 27:46). One would expect someone of moral perfection to suffer without complaint, knowing that God’s abandoning him is for the salvation of all of us.

With his death, understood to be confirmed by the spear in his side (John 19:34), and his descent into hell, we see Jesus reaching the bitten tail of the ouroboros. This is the lowest point of the low: his revolution has failed, it seems. His followers are all despondent.

A similar feeling has been felt in all the failed revolutions of history, including the short-lived Paris Commune, the 1905 Russian Revolution, the Spartacist Uprising, the Spanish Revolution of 1936, etc. After all the deaths and repressions, one can imagine the despair the insurgents felt.

Still, the early Nazarenes believed, apparently, that God rose Jesus from the dead (note that Paul also wrote of the passivity of his resurrection, as opposed to him raising himself from the dead). Now, we’ve gone past the bitten tail to the biting head of Christ’s return to glory. We also can see here the dialectical unity of his suffering, degradation, and death, on the one hand, and his resurrection in an incorruptible, spiritual body, in all his glory, on the other. The disciples’ hope has also been revived. To save one’s life, one must be willing to lose it (Luke 9:24).

V: The Resurrection and the Second Coming

We all know the traditional, literal meaning of Christ’s resurrection and Second Coming at the end of the world, so I have nothing new to say about that. Instead, given what we know of the original, revolutionary intent of the Nazarenes, I think it would be illuminating, and inspiring, to reinterpret the meaning of these two crucial Christian ideas in symbolic terms.

A revolution may fail; it may die…but it can be revived–it can come back to life, as it were…it can come a second time, or many times, until it finally succeeds. The Paris Commune failed, as did the 1905 Russian Revolution, but the revolution of 1917 succeeded (furthermore, the Soviet Union may have been dissolved, but that doesn’t extinguish the hopes of its return). The Cultural Revolution suffered many difficulties and setbacks…but look at China today.

The Messiah is supposed to come at the end of the world (or, for our purposes, the end of the world as we know it), establishing Zion and the Kingdom of God (hence Orthodox Jews are especially opposed to the man-made creation of Israel, along with a generally Jewish opposition to the oppression of the Palestinians, a situation that’s in ironic contradistinction to the plight of the Jews in first-century, Roman-occupied Palestine), a new era of peace and justice. For those of us who aren’t Bible-believing Christians, the resurrection and Second Coming can be seen to symbolize revived hopes of anti-imperialist revolution.

Of course, we have to believe, to have faith, hope, and love, those three things that last forever (1 Corinthians 13:13); recall Che’s words on revolution and love (the greatest of these), in this connection. Our love of the world drives us to try to make it better, to feed, clothe, house, educate, and give medical aid to the poor, as Christ would have wanted us to do (Matthew 25:40).

Now, the early Christians were no socialists, of course, but they did have some interesting practices worth discussing: they “sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need” (Acts 2:45). Also, “the multitude of them that believed were of one heart and of one soul: neither said any of them that ought of the things which he possessed was his own; but they had all things common.” (Acts 4:32) These practices influenced Thomas More in his writing of Utopia, a book about a fictional Christian island with a form of welfare and without private property, ideas which in turn influenced socialism.

The Nazarenes may have failed to kick their Roman oppressors out of Palestine, but Paul’s Gentile Church, over time, accommodated itself with Rome, a kind of changing of the system from within. The problem with this takeover is that one authoritarian, oppressive system got replaced with another.

Indeed, the Church authorities, in replacing the pagan Roman ones, were rather like Orwell’s pigs in a manner that the Bolsheviks never were, in spite of the intended narrative of Orwell’s polemical allegory. Such examples as the Church’s stamping out of heresies (including the many thousands of lives lost over the iota that marked the difference between the orthodox homousios and the Arian homoiousios, as noted above–Hegel, page 339), including, for example, the horrors of the Inquisition, should be enough to illustrate my meaning.

This difference between the Nazarene and the Pauline Church’s way of dealing with the Roman Empire can be seen to symbolize the difference between the virtues of revolutionary change and the vices of accommodation with the imperialist system. There is no room for opportunism or compromise.

We wipe out imperialism and replace it with a “kingdom of heaven,” so to speak–‘heavenly’ in the sense that, ideally, it will provide for all human needs, and a ‘kingdom’ in the sense that all authority will be used to ensure that providing for those needs. We must believe in such a possible future world; have faith in, and hope for, it. In such a world, we’ll love our neighbour as ourselves (Matthew 22:39).

It was believed that the ancient Hebrews fell under the Babylonian captivity as punishment for their sins, which sounds suspiciously to me like blaming the victim (similarly, many who suffer under capitalism today blame themselves unjustly for their suffering [i.e., they ‘lack ambition and talent’], instead of blaming the system that is causing their suffering). Nonetheless, those ancient Hebrews saw their prophesied Messiah as saving them from their sins, as Christians see Jesus as having done.

We secular-minded people, on the other hand, can see Jesus’ death and resurrection as symbolic of how revolutions at first fail, then hope in them is revived, then a ‘second coming’ ultimately leads to the success of the revolutions. Belief in his salvific death can thus symbolize our faith in persevering in a painful struggle that, after so many failures (and an unjustified blaming of oneself for those failures, our ‘sins’), ultimately leads to success, a kind of ‘eternal life’ in a much-improved world.

VI: Conclusion

So, this is my secular, allegorical interpretation of the Christ myth, which I hope will inspire my comrades. Of course, many won’t be happy with what I’ve written.

Indeed, many will want to point out to me how my sources are at best controversial, and at worst, the validity of those sources has been eviscerated with criticism. The fact is, objectively, we don’t really know for sure what happened in first-century Palestine. One camp of scholars says this, another camp says that, using whatever arguments they have to back up their agendas; we all pick which story we prefer. As far as I’m concerned, criticism of the interpretation that my sources have given has less to do with their technical, historical inaccuracies than with hurting Christians’ feelings. It’s more about politics than logic.

So as I said above in the Introduction, if my reinterpretation of ‘sacred history’ is offensive to certain Christian readers who chose not to heed my warning not to read something they surely wouldn’t like, being abusive to me in the comments will neither change my mind nor do you much credit. So please, don’t waste your time with that.

Still, if what I’ve said here bothers you that much, perhaps there’s one thing you can do that will make you feel better.

Pray for me (Matthew 5:44).

Hyam Maccoby, The Mythmaker: Paul and the Invention of Christianity, San Francisco, HarperCollins, 1987

Michael D. Coogan, ed., The New Oxford Annotated Bible, Third Edition, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2001

Samuel Sandmel, general ed., The New English Bible with the Apocrypha, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1961

Georg W.F. Hegel (translated by J. Sibree), The Philosophy of History, Buffalo, New York, Prometheus Books, 1991

Horns

The
loud,
brass bluster of horns that accompanies pomp is foul,
obnoxious noise one should not have to endure in our
world
now.

No
one’s
better than all others, by birth, colour, or sex. Why,
why must we hear fanfares that damage our fragile
ears
so?

To
blow
one’s own horns is a blow to our eardrums, a
rupture, a goring, a piercing of a bull’s horns.
Stop
it!

Towers

Some
people
tower
above
others
because
of innate
greatness
and effort.
They have
earned their
godlike glory.

Many
others
lord
them-
selves
above
all of us
because
they are
egotistical
seekers of an
unearned glory.

Their
Babel-
esque
boasts
sound
to us as
if they were
unintelligible
gibberish from
distant, foreign
lands. To listen to
them is to be deaf.

These
Simon
Stylites
would
attain
heaven,
but they’d
best beware
of falling from
so far a height as
to crash on the land,
bore a hole into it, and
end up in the lowest hell.

Atropos

When will the third of the Fates
snip the cord of my life?
How will she do it,
and where?
Will I go gently, or
will I scream in a panic?
Will it be quick, or drawn out?

Will the
snipping cut me up,
leaving my blood in a splash,
staining my clothes and surroundings,
or will it be painless, me not
knowing it happened
at all?

And what of the fate of the world?
will it end with a bang,
or a whimper?
Will the
scissors snip
with a piercing clack,
or with an unnoticed smoothness?

All I know
is that her scissors
are right by the thin string.
The blades surround it, and they
are ready to close and cut.
The string trembles
in terror.

Plugs

Plugged in means
being connected to all of
the information &
everyone out there in the
whole wide world.

Plugged in means
everyone out there is also
connected to you,
& all your information is
all of the world’s.

So
to be
plugged
is a pleasure
and an irritation
at the
same time.

Roads

The
road
to hell
might be
paved with
noble intents,

but
such a
way may
have tar as
black as evil,
leading to worse.

To
go on
the ‘left’
lane or to
go along the
right won’t make

too
big a
change
of where
we’ll go, on
the same road.

I
am
going
toward
a dead end,
off a high cliff.

The
ones
at the
top are
taking us
to our doom.

We
must
course
down an
alternative,
while we can.

Analysis of ‘Wozzeck’

I: Introduction

Wozzeck (pronounced ‘votsek’) is Alban Berg‘s first opera. Composed between 1914 and 1922, and first performed in 1925, it is based on an unfinished drama by Karl Georg Büchner (which in turn was based on the real-life case-history of Johann Christian Woyzeck, a soldier executed in 1824 for the murder of his mistress while suffering from paranoia and hallucinations). When Berg saw the first production of the play in 1914, he immediately knew he wanted to set it to music.

Büchner’s play is actually called Woyzeck (after the historical man mentioned above), but due to an incorrect transcription made from a barely legible manuscript, the correct title wouldn’t be known until 1921. Selecting fifteen scenes from Büchner’s unordered fragments, Berg adapted the libretto himself, with three acts of five scenes each, and retaining the essential character of the play.

With its themes of militarism, callousness, social exploitation, casual sadism, alienation, class antagonisms, and madness, Wozzeck is especially relevant for our troubled times today. The opera’s free atonality, dissonance, and use of Sprechstimme (also used in Pierrot lunaire, the song cycle by Berg’s musical mentor, Arnold Schoenberg) vividly evoke the dark atmosphere of the story. When Franz Wozzeck says, “Still, all is still, as if the world died,” and his friend Andres shows little interest in his words (Act I, scene ii), Glenn Watkins said that this was “as vivid a projection of impending world doom as any to come out of the Great War.”

When first performed, Wozzeck was a succès de scandale and received mixed reviews. Since then, it did, however, get a string of productions in Germany and Austria until the Nazis condemned it as “degenerate art” after 1933. Now, it is considered one of the most important operas of the 20th century.

Here is a link to Berg’s libretto (including both the original German and an English translation), a link to Büchner’s play, a link to a 1970 film version of the opera, and here are links to a performance of it, conducted by Claudio Abbado, in Acts I, II, and III. Here is a link to a recording with the score. Notes and text from the booklet of this CD recording were also used in the research for this analysis.

II: General Points About the Music

Of the three famous members of the Second Viennese School–which, in its early twentieth century’s avant-garde abandoning of tonality and eventually making use of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone technique, was comprised of Schoenberg, Berg, and Anton Webern–Berg was actually the most conservative. Schoenberg, the second most conservative of the three, nonetheless also wrote of the experimental technique he called Klangfarbenmelodie (“sound-colour melody”), which both he and Webern used extensively in their music. Webern’s music also tended to be more concise and melodically pointillistic, with wide leaps of, often, over an octave to create a sense of melodic fragmentation.

Berg, on the other hand, achieved a paradoxical fusion of the experimental Expressionistic techniques of Schoenberg with the flowing, lyrical orchestration of 19th century Romanticism. The emotional intensity of this old style, combined with the discordant brutality of musical modernism, is effective in bringing out the bleak world of Wozzeck, fittingly based on a play left unfinished with Büchner’s death in 1837.

Because Berg composed the opera in a free atonal style, he had to use other methods of controlling pitch to direct the harmony, as well as use a variety of other musical techniques to achieve unity and coherence. The most important of these is the use of the leitmotif, of which there are prominent ones for such characters in the opera as the Captain, the Doctor, and the Drum Major. Wozzeck has a motif for when he rushes on and off the stage, and another to express his misery and helplessness. Marie, his beautiful but unfaithful wife, has motifs to express her sensuality.

Elsewhere, we hear the tritone B-F, representing Wozzeck and Marie, the conflict in their bedeviled relationship fittingly expressed through the diabolus in musica. The relationship of Marie and their son is represented with the minor third, B-flat and D-flat; this is an interval commonly expressing sadness, which is fitting given her difficulties as a poor woman raising a child scandalously born out of wedlock. One notable motif is a pair of chords heard at the end of each act, oscillating and almost blurring into each other.

III: Act One

The opera begins with Franz Wozzeck shaving the Captain, who nags and taunts him with talk of going slower (langsam!) and of being “a good man” (ein guter Mensch). The Captain is clearly indicating his bourgeois disposition. It’s far easier to take things one at a time and to be a good man when one has money to give charitably and leisure time with which to take things slowly, and when one doesn’t have to sell one’s labour to survive, as Wozzeck must.

But all he can do is say, “Yes, Captain” (Jawohl, Herr Hauptmann!), because as a mere soldier, Wozzeck the proletarian has no power. [Berg was no revolutionary, of course (in fact, the financial success of this opera allowed him to live comfortably off the royalties); but his writing of an opera, whose subject matter clearly manifests the problems of class conflict, during revolutionary years (1914-1922, when the Russian Revolution and its ensuing Civil War happened; also, when the failed Spartacist uprising happened, and when the Italian fascists came to power in 1922 after having crushed socialist movements in the country) makes it impossible not to take note of the political implications of the story.] All Wozzeck can do is suffer in silence at the taunts of his superiors.

The Captain heightens his provocations by mentioning Wozzeck’s illegitimate son, “a child without the blessing of the Church.” Thus, Wozzeck has no morals!

He reminds the Captain of what Jesus said in Mark 10:14, “Suffer the little children to come unto Me.” Wozzeck’s bastard son is also a child of God, and God is always willing to forgive sinners. The Captain, with his bourgeois mentality, finds this Bible quote to be a strange answer; his attitude thus shows us the hypocrisy of the bourgeoisie, who see morals only in terms of social status and outward appearance, and who ignore the stresses and pressures that drive the poor to behave in ways that society disapproves of.

Wozzeck tries to get the Captain to understand what these stresses and pressures do to the poor when he begins with “We poor people!” (Wir arme Leut!) This introduces a particularly important leitmotif, D-sharp, B, E, G, the notes of an E minor/major 7th chord, expressive of the deepest despair.

Of course, his words go in one ear of the Captain and out the other, so having finished shaving him, Wozzeck is dismissed and told to go slowly. This first scene has been in the form of a suite.

In the next scene, Wozzeck is in a field with his friend, Andres, cutting sticks. The musical form is a rhapsody: the freer form of such music, with its highly contrasted moods and colour, is fitting as an expression of Wozzeck’s unstable, troubled state of mind at the moment.

He speaks of the cursed earth; one might be reminded of God cursing the earth as punishment on Adam and Cain (Genesis 3:17; 4:11). Andres seems oblivious to what Wozzeck is saying (as was the Captain), and, eyeing rabbits, he speaks cheerfully of wanting to be a hunter. He sings a hunting song.

Wozzeck’s premonitions and catastrophizing get worse: he makes a vague reference to the Freemasons, which sounds like a common form of paranoid conspiracy-oriented thinking similar to anti-semitic ranting. Apparently, it’s always the Jews or the Freemasons who are ruling the world and ruining it for the rest of us, rather than it simply being the capitalist class who is doing this evil. It’s clear that Wozzeck is suffering from mental illness, a growing problem today in relation to the plight of the poor, wir arme Leut!

He speaks of how hollow everything is, a maw, a chasm. One is reminded of the first few verses of Ecclesiastes, that in a world of vanity, futility, meaninglessness, uselessness, and emptiness (or, if you prefer, hollowness), one gains nothing from one’s labour, toiling under the sun, as Wozzeck and Andres do in that field.

As the sun is going down, Wozzeck sees a fire that roars like trumpets, reminding us of the seven trumpets of the Apocalypse, when the first angel “sounded his trumpet, and hail and fire mixed with blood were hurled down upon the earth. A third of the earth was burned up, along with a third of the trees and all the green grass” (Revelation 8:7). Wozzeck is having visions of the end of the world…”as if the world was dead.”

Many of us proletarians today, as we see the Western imperialists continue to antagonize nuclear-armed Russia and China, and as we see our financial prospects worsening, similarly are having premonitions of the end of the world, and can see the world burning down from wildfires and other problems related to climate change.

In Wozzeck’s case, though, the end of the world is coming about in Scene Three, with Marie, the mother of his child, being tempted into flirting with the handsome and socially higher Drum Major. Naturally, the scene begins with a march, so we’ll hear, specific to this scene, a marching band including woodwinds, brass, and percussion.

Marie, with her son at the window of their home, watches the Drum Major marching with his men on the street. Both she and Margret express their admiration for the man, though the latter taunts the former for her loose ways with the soldiers. Annoyed with Margret’s slut-shaming, Marie calls her a “bitch” (Luder) and shuts the window.

No longer do we hear marching music. She sings a lullaby to her son after putting him in bed (at crucial points in the melodic contour of the lullaby, we can hear the B-flat and D-flat that I mentioned above as representing her relationship with him). She feels the shame of having a reputation in town for being a whore, but again, as with Wozzeck, the stresses and pressures of being poor can drive people to act in ways that society disapproves of. Her eyeing of the Drum Major may be lewd on a superficial level, but on a deeper level, she has hopes that uniting with him will raise the financial status of herself and the boy, the only way a woman during that more patriarchal time could achieve such a social ascent.

The boy falls asleep, and after a brief moment of her being lost in thought (with a flurry of descending and ascending notes played on the celesta), she hears a knock on the window–it’s Wozzeck. He briefly tells her of his troubling visions, but he has no time to stay; he doesn’t even look at their son, which dismays her. She says the line, “Wir arme Leut,” though not in the notes of the minor-major 7th chord mentioned above. We can see here the connection between poverty and alienation within a family, the one causing the other.

The next scene, a passacaglia, has Wozzeck visiting the Doctor, who has him on a bizarre, experimental diet of beans (and later, mutton). As does the Captain, the Doctor bullies Wozzeck, berating him for pissing on the street, thus wasting what could be useful urine samples for the Doctor’s study. He pays Wozzeck a meagre three groschen a day for these urine samples and other forms of cooperating with the experiments.

As does the Captain (with his exhortations to take things slowly and to be “a good man”), the Doctor pressures Wozzeck to have better self-control in regulating his bladder. The Doctor is thus another example of a bourgeois imposing his sense of virtue on a proletarian who, in his poverty, finds such virtue difficult to live up to.

The Doctor brags of his self-control, including the control of his temper. Nonetheless, in his experimentation on Wozzeck, we see a sadism in the Doctor that, if we were to look ahead a few decades after the completion of this opera, would remind us of Doctor Mengele. Wozzeck’s doctor has a fascistic, disciplinarian authority about him, and he speaks gleefully about a revolution in the science of diet.

When Wozzeck tells the Doctor of his visions, the Doctor is delighted to see Wozzeck’s descent into madness. For his declining mental health, he’ll get a raise…of one extra groschen. The Doctor believes he’ll become famous for his theories, thanks to the deleterious effects of his research on Wozzeck!

Scene Five is a rondo. Marie is out on the streets, and her temptation to have an affair with the Drum Major is growing. She sees him approach and shows her admiration for him. He returns the flirting.

He aggressively comes on to her, causing her at first to resist, externally playing hard to get, and internally feeling conflicted over her loyalty to Wozzeck as against her desire for this far more manly Drum Major. The music gets particularly discordant during their struggle, but she gives in to him in the end.

Act One ends with those oscillating chords I mentioned above, played faster and faster until they seem to blur into each other. The notes of the first of the two chords are, from top to bottom, C-flat/G-flat/E-flat/A-natural; and those of the second chord are, again from top to bottom, D-flat/A-natural/F-natural/B-natural. Three quarters of these groups of notes are thus rising and falling parallel major seconds, and the remaining quarter of them are rising and falling parallel minor thirds, undulating like ripples in water.

The speeding up in time starts with eighth and quarter notes, then eighth notes, then eighth notes in triplets, then sixteenth notes, then sixteenth notes in sextuplets, then thirty-second notes, and finally it ends with tremolos. All of this occurs with a crescendo beginning at piano.

It’s significant that this music should have a rippling, wave-like effect, for it can be understood to foreshadow Wozzeck’s fate in the pond towards the end of Act Five.

IV: Act Two

Act Two, Scene One (in sonata-allegro form) begins with a solo cello playing an ascending stack of perfect fifths: C-natural, G-natural, D-natural, and A-natural; then B-natural, F-natural, and C-sharp. After the cello, we hear flute and celesta play that rippling theme of rising and falling (mostly, as last time) major seconds, only now the notes alternate between, from top to bottom, B-natural/F-sharp/D-sharp/A-natural and C-sharp/A-natural/E-sharp/B-natural. These oscillations are in sextuplets and triplets, then in tremolo half notes, with eighth rests between these groupings. This watery, wave-like tune reinforces the foreshadowing mentioned above, since Marie has succumbed to temptation.

She’s back at home with her “Bub,” admiring earrings that the Drum Major has given her. She puts the boy to bed, then Wozzeck suddenly walks in and sees the earrings before she can hide them. These earrings are like the handkerchief that jealous Othello learned was in Cassio‘s possession; the difference here, though, is that where Desdemona was innocent of having an affair with Cassio, Marie really did receive the earrings from the Drum Major, with whom she has had an affair. In any case, Wozzeck will go as mad from his actually unfaithful woman as Othello went mad with jealousy over his only seemingly unfaithful wife.

This time, unlike before, he looks at his sleeping son. He sings, “Wir arme Leut!” again, to the notes F-natural, D-flat, F-sharp, and A-natural…the intervals of that minor-major 7th chord motif. As I said above, this chord has a despairing quality to it, and now Wozzeck has even more to despair about. His whole world is coming to an end, because Marie’s infidelity, which will be most public, will cause him such a humiliation that he’ll fall to pieces.

Still, like a dutiful husband, he gives her the four groschen he made from the Doctor. He leaves, and Marie, though guilty of the sin that Desdemona was only slandered with, has at least a bit of her goodness, in that Marie is consumed with guilt over her infidelity. She ends the scene singing of how “Everything goes to the Devil: man and woman and child [Kind]!” On this last word, she sings a high B-natural descending to an F-natural, that tritone, the diabolus in musica representing her relationship with Wozzeck, which resulted in their Bub.

In Scene Two, a fantasia and fugue on three themes, we see the Doctor rushing by the Captain on the street, the latter, true to his character, urging the former to slow down, like “a good man.” Nonetheless, the Doctor is in a hurry and cannot slow down.

They taunt each other with names: the Captain addresses “Doctor Coffin-Nail” (Herr Sargnagel), and the Doctor addresses “Captain Drill-angel” (Herr Exercizengel). The Doctor begins finding fault with the Captain’s health, as a way to scare him. The Captain is “Bloated, fat, thick neck, apoplectic…” As we can see here, the bourgeois can trouble each other as much as they do the proletariat. Recall Marx’s words: “One capitalist always strikes down many others.” (Marx, page 929)

Then Wozzeck appears before them, and so these two bourgeois steer their taunts away from each other and on to him. They insinuate that they know of Marie’s infidelity to him. Now, he’s not only a cuckold, but a public cuckold. His already fragile mental stability is about to crack even more!

He says that he’s a poor devil, and that she is all he has in the world. So, to lose her to the Drum Major would be to lose everything.

The Drum Major, being like the Doctor and the Captain, that is, of a higher social position than that of Wozzeck, in taking Marie away, is symbolic in his actions of the capitalist who takes from the worker the full fruits of his labour. The capitalist’s surplus value is that stolen value, in the form of unpaid labour, money not given to the worker, here personified by Marie.

A worker’s labour is the only commodity he can give in exchange for money, and his unpaid labour, in the form of surplus value, is stolen from him, just as Marie, all Wozzeck has in the world, is stolen from him.

Feminists might be offended at my referring to Marie as Wozzeck’s stolen commodity, his stolen property; but think of my reference here as a comment on his patriarchal use of her, not as a defence of that use. For one of the many ways the ruling class keeps the proletariat divided and mutually alienated from each other is the perpetuation of sex roles.

So the Captain’s and Doctor’s taunting of Wozzeck, their knowing of Marie’s dalliance with the Drum Major, is like Iago fueling Othello’s jealousy, except that unlike Iago, Wozzeck’s two superiors are being truly honest with him.

Wozzeck thus rushes away in a jealous rage.

Scene Three, largo, brings us back to Wozzeck’s and Marie’s house, on the street in front of it. He confronts her with her infidelity. To his direct accusation, “You–with him!”, that is, with the Drum Major, she brazenly replies, “What if I was?”

He is about to slap her, but she defiantly says he wouldn’t dare touch her. Her own father wouldn’t have dared hit her when she was ten years old. (Othello dared to slap Desdemona in public, though, and she was innocent.) During this argument, though, she says something truly dangerous to herself, something to inspire Wozzeck’s eventual revenge on her: “Rather a knife in me that a hand on me.”

Scene Four is a scherzo, in which Wozzeck sees Marie dancing a waltz with the Drum Major in a crowd, in an inn where people are drinking and partying late in the evening. In other words, her infidelity with the Drum Major is shamelessly public. Wozzeck sees his humiliation right before his eyes!

A special set of musicians is reserved for this scene, a tavern band made up of a clarinet in C, a bombardon in F (or tuba, if it can be muted), an accordion, a guitar, and two fiddles (with steel strings).

Artisans and soldiers are singing about dancing and the joys of hunting, just as Andres, who is here at the inn, too, was singing of hunting while he and Wozzeck were cutting sticks in the field in Act One, Scene Two. All of this festivity is going on while Wozzeck is losing his mind, while his world is coming to an end. Hunting and drinking, for the artisans, soldiers, and Andres, are manic defences against facing one’s suffering. As we will see, Wozzeck will do some hunting and drinking of his own…but these won’t help him escape his suffering.

As Wozzeck sits there fuming all alone, the “village idiot” (Der Narr), as it were, approaches him. He vaguely senses the joy about him, something he’s too simple to understand; yet he paradoxically can sense something about Wozzeck that the others cannot–he smells blood on Wozzeck. This is more foreshadowing, of course: we all know what Wozzeck is going to do…with a knife.

Scene Five is a rondo. Wozzeck is in his bed, a bunker in the soldiers’ barracks at night. Andres is sleeping nearby, but Wozzeck cannot sleep, for obvious reasons. A chorus singing softly and wordlessly represents the sleeping soldiers.

When Wozzeck complains to Andres about not being able to sleep, the latter, annoyed to have been woken, tells the former to go back to sleep.

To make matters worse, though, the drunken Drum Major enters the barracks and brags of his sexual conquest of so fine a woman as Marie, thus compounding Wozzeck’s public humiliation. The usurper of her bed rubs it in further by picking a fight with Wozzeck, who has no hope of beating such a strong man, and one of such high social and military rank.

It would be easy to judge Wozzeck as a weak and cowardly man, but the point is that there is a power imbalance here–him as a poor soldier, and the Drum Major of so much higher rank–that the former can do nothing about it. Wozzeck’s low military rank is symbolic of the proletarian’s low social rank, just as the Drum Major’s high military rank, as that of the Captain and the higher social status of the Doctor, is symbolic of the ruling class.

Wozzeck cannot hurt the Drum Major, but there is someone of his low social caste whom he can hurt…Marie! Indeed, part of the reason he can’t sleep is that he’s thinking of the knife that she’s put in his mind, the temptation to murder her that he’s been struggling to resist.

Receiving no sympathy from his fellow soldiers for his beating and humiliation, Wozzeck can only repeat the Captain’s words: “One after the other.” Wozzeck, however, doesn’t use the Captain’s meaning, to take things slowly, one at a time, but rather that he suffers one injury after another; for such is the difference between the bourgeoisie’s experience of life, and that of the proletariat.

This is the end of Act Two, which musically has been structured like the movements of a symphony: sonata form, slow movement, scherzo, and rondo. Act Three, however, will be in the form of a series of inventions.

V: Act Three

Scene One, with Marie and the boy at home at night, is an invention on a theme. Plagued with guilt, she is reading her Bible, wishing Jesus would forgive her as He did Mary Magdalene and the woman taken in adultery (John 8:3).

With the boy near her, she tells a story of a poor boy whose parents are dead, and he’s now hungry and weeping day and night. Obviously, this story foreshadows the heartbreaking ending of the opera, where we have full knowledge of the fate of Wozzeck’s and Marie’s child.

She is worried that Franz hasn’t come home in the past couple of days. Next, she reads Luke 7:38, about Mary Magdalene’s repentance before Christ. Marie would be like Magdalene, to anoint Jesus’s feet and be forgiven.

Sadly, she will get no such forgiveness…not from Wozzeck, anyway. For in Scene Two, an invention on a single note (B), he has taken her into a forest by a pond, where he plans to murder her.

She senses the danger she’s in, and she tries to leave, but he won’t let her. As Othello did to Desdemona, Wozzeck kisses Marie before he kills her…she who, redeemed through faith in Christ’s crucifixion, could be seen to have been made as innocent as Desdemona always had been.

They notice how red the moon is, and I assume that it’s a quarter or half moon, because Wozzeck compares it to the “blood-stained steel” of the blade of a knife, right when he draws his, in preparation to stab Marie. The notion of a blood-red moon is associated with the end of the world (Joel 2:31, Acts 2:20, Revelation 6:12). As I said above, his loss of Marie is the end of the world for him, for she is all that he has. He stabs her, she screams and dies, and he runs away fearfully.

The scene ends with two crescendi, from ppp to fff, in octaves of B, in keeping with it being an invention on B. I wonder: why B, of all notes? Given that this moment can be felt to be the emotional reaction to the actual committing of the murder, that point of no going back, B–as the leading tone of the most basic scale, C major, the white keys on the piano–is thus symbolic of the greatest tension, without resolving up to C.

In Scene Three, an invention on a rhythm, Wozzeck is back in the tavern. We hear an out-of-tune piano playing a fast and jaunty polka while he drinks wine and pretends he’s enjoying himself and forgetting his guilty act, a manic defence against his deep sadness. It’s significant that the piano is out of tune, for it represents the pain he feels that he’s hiding behind his fake festivities.

He imagines he’s completing his revenge on Marie by groping Margret. She notices blood on his hand, though, right up to the elbow. He tries to hide his guilt by claiming he must have cut himself, but no one in the tavern believes him. Terrified of being found out, he runs away.

Scene Four is an invention on a hexachord. Wozzeck is back in the forest by the pond, where Marie’s body is still lying. The blood-red moon is still out.

He wishes to erase all evidence of his guilt, first by tossing the knife into the pond; then, thinking he hasn’t thrown it far enough and fearing it will be easily found, he wades into the water to find it and throw it farther in. What’s more, he must wash the blood off of himself in the water, so he wades in deeper.

He imagines the blood-red moon is reflecting his guilt from on high, incriminating him to the town. In his growing madness, he thinks the whole pond he’s bathing in is blood. He submerges himself in this “blood” and drowns himself.

What’s fascinating about this moment is the combination of Shakespearian associations that can be made. First, as mentioned above, Wozzeck is like Othello, killing his love out of jealousy, then killing himself. Second, he’s like Lady Macbeth, mad with guilt and unable to wash the blood from his hands, and committing suicide. Finally, he’s like Ophelia, mad with heartbreak over his love, mad and drowning himself out in nature.

For no apparent reason, the Captain and the Doctor happen to be strolling in the area just after Wozzeck’s suicide. They’ve heard the ghastly sound of Wozzeck’s cry before his death, and the Captain curses: “Jesus, what a noise!” Knowing they’ve heard human moans from the pond, the two bourgeois shudder at the implications (as well as at the blood-red moon), and rush away.

The juxtaposition of two proletarian deaths with two bourgeois witnesses of one of them, the latter two then rushing off to safety, represents the disturbing contrast between the suffering of the former and the privilege of the latter. This scene ends with an invention on…yes…a key (D minor)! It’s ironic how we have here an atonal opera in which–as with those crescendi of B notes–of all moments for there to be a surprising return to tonality (however dissonant it remains), it’s at the realization of the deaths of the two most sympathetic characters in the story, leaving the remaining sympathetic character, the boy, parentless.

We hear a mournful adagio in 3/4 that builds up to a despairing fortissimo climax starting on a D minor chord with an added ninth: two sets of eighth notes playing, top to bottom, E-natural/D-natural/A-natural/F-natural; then all these notes go down by parallel major seconds to give us two sets of eighth notes playing a C minor chord with an added ninth, then a B-flat minor chord with an added ninth. This climax softens to pianissimo, then an upward arpeggio played on the celesta leads us to the final scene.

Scene Five is an invention on an eighth note. The next morning, children are playing “ring-a-ring-a-roses” outside in the sun. Marie’s son is there, too, riding a hobby-horse. One child comes to tell them the news that Marie is dead.

One of the children makes sure to tell Marie’s boy that his mother is dead. He isn’t processing the horrifying news yet, so the other kids run off to the pond to see the body, while he continues riding for the moment, calling out “Hopp! Hoop!” Finally, he snaps out of it and goes after the other children, and the opera ends without our seeing his reaction to the sight of his mother’s corpse.

VI: Conclusion

Whether or not Berg unconsciously intended it, his opera dramatizes the social consequences of class conflict: poverty, alienation, mental illness, the breakdown of family, violence against one’s fellow proletarians (instead of the revolutionary kind against the ruling class), and suicidal despair. The red-blooded end of the world as depicted in this WWI setting is all the more relevant to our late capitalist world, which is looking with dread at a possible WWIII.

Shelves

To
be
on
a
shelf is to be left
alone, put aside
and forgotten.
No one
has
any
use
for
you.

Bit
by
bit,
the
dust settles on you.
Maybe someone
dusts you from
time to time,
but
you
are
just
art

for
the
eye
to
see,
and then forget
about. Neglect
could break
you, make
you of
no
use
for
the
day

one
has
new
use
for you. Forgetting and
neglecting can lead
to regretting.
One should
not
let
you
sit
and
sit.

Analysis of ‘Watchmen’

I: Introduction

Watchmen is a 1986-1987 comic book limited series, collected into a single-volume edition graphic novel in 1987. Original characters were used, since most of them would be unusable for future stories. The series was created by writer Alan Moore, artist Dave Gibbons, and colourist John Higgins.

Moore meant the story as a reflection on contemporary fears, and as a deconstruction and satire on the concept of superheroes, as well as a commentary on contemporary politics. Watchmen depicts an alternate history in which Nixon not only doesn’t resign or is threatened with impeachment over the Watergate scandal (which is never exposed), but enjoys an overturning of the two-term limit and is thus still president by the mid-80s, when the story begins. He is able to do this because such superheroes as Doctor Manhattan and The Comedian help the US win the Vietnam War, ensuring Nixon’s continuing popularity.

Watchmen has received commercial and critical success, recognized in Time‘s List of the 100 Best Novels. According to the BBC’s Nicholas Barber, it is “the moment comic books grew up.” A film adaptation by Zack Snyder came out in 2009, featuring Malin Åkerman, Billy Crudup, Matthew Goode, Carla Gugino, Jackie Earle Haley, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Patrick Wilson; a video game series, Watchmen: The End Is Nigh, also came out the same year. A TV series continuing the story came out in 2019 on HBO. I’m basing my analysis on the comics and the 2009 movie.

Here is a link to quotes from the film.

II: Alternate History vs Real History

What should we make of the alternate history, with a Vietnam War victory and Nixon continuing on as president well into the 1980s, that is, as a form of political commentary? Here’s my take: what difference does it make, really? Though communism hadn’t yet been defeated as of when Watchmen was written and published, it certainly had been as of the creation of the movie; besides, Vietnam would go over to a market economy, as would China, around the time of the comics’ publication. As for Nixon, when one considers how the foreign and domestic policies of the United States have moved unswervingly in the same neoliberal/neocon direction since the 1973 oil crisis, one can easily see how it has made no difference who’s been sitting in the Oval Office.

…and here’s where the superheroes come in.

Apart from the sheer goofiness of their names (Nite Owl?, Dollar Bill?, Captain Metropolis?, Hooded Justice?, Mothman?), the superheroes are a satire on their whole existence based on the idea that…no…they do not really embody the idea of defending truth, justice, and…wait, actually they do defend the American way. “Who watches the watchmen?” Juvenal once asked of the corrupt men who would guard women against infidelity; though we today find far better application of his words to the defenders of tyrannical governments.

It must be emphasized that, though the liberal creators of Watchmen would have been unlikely to have defended Marxist-Leninist governments (note how the comics’ portrayal of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, moved later in this alternate history to the mid-80s, is still deemed an invasion, rather than an attempt to defend the growth of socialism there against the fundamentalist, reactionary mujahideen), the tyrannical government being critiqued here is the US dictatorship of the bourgeoisie, the capitalist, imperialist state led by Nixon, who stands in for Moore’s real Republican satirical target…Reagan!

So, as with John Carpenter‘s film They Live, Watchmen is meant as liberals’ indictment of the GOP specifically, as opposed to being a critique of the entire American two-party system, the military-industrial complex, and capitalism in general, though it should have been meant as such, and it has enough elements in it to be critical of so much bigger a realm of political corruption, as I’ll try to show. For to put what I said above in different words, re-elected Nixon can be a stand-in for not only Reagan, but also Ford, Carter, Bushes Sr. and Jr., the Clintons, Obama, Trump, and Biden.

One criticism of the film’s general faithfulness to the comics is that it was too faithful. Retaining, for instance, the Cold War fears of nuclear armageddon between the US and socialist Russia was deemed by film critics over a decade ago to be too dated for contemporary moviegoers to be able to relate to the tensions depicted. In the 2020s, however, with new Cold War fears of nuclear armageddon between the US and capitalist Russia, moviegoers today can relate all too well to the tensions depicted in the film.

Such fears are what have motivated me to do this analysis.

III: The Comedian Is Dead

The story begins with the violent murder of Edward Blake, the Comedian (Morgan in the film), a man in his sixties who was in remarkably good shape for his age, but no match for his much younger killer, who throws him out of the window of his New York apartment, him falling to his death. The iconic image of his pin of a smiley face stained with a drop of his blood’s a harrowing one, for it symbolizes all that the Comedian in turn came to represent: the idea of superheroes defending the innocent is a sick, cruel joke.

Superheroes in this story are, essentially, glorified police and soldiers, whom they thus represent. Many people, especially in recent years, have come to feel nothing but contempt for cops, and justifiably so, for the cops’ job is really “to serve and protect” the ruling class. Similarly, the American/NATO military serves nothing more than imperial interests.

This is where the Comedian comes in. With Doctor Manhattan (Crudup), he is the only superhero allowed by the US government to remain so under the Keene Act of 1977, which otherwise banned all “masks.” Though the Comedian was inspired by the Peacemaker, with “a little bit of Nick Fury,” there’s also some Captain America in him, too, as can be seen on his Stars and Stripes shoulder sleeves.

Watchmen the comic and film seem to have anticipated the huge outpouring of superhero films in the 2010s, especially the MCU, with its pitting of the Avengers against armies of alien supervillains, a glorification of war between the “good guys,” or “Earth’s mightiest heroes” as representing the armies of US/NATO imperialism, and the “bad guys,” the Chitauri, etc., as representing any country opposing the Western empire.

Accordingly, we shouldn’t be surprised to see flashbacks of the Comedian killing the Vietcong with Doctor Manhattan, though we feel an unsettling sympathy for Charlie as he gets mutilated and destroyed, unlike those Chitauri. What’s worse, we see what a pig of a GI Joe the Comedian is to the pregnant Vietnamese woman he kills…after refusing to take responsibility for having impregnating her. Added to that is his beating and attempted rape of Sally “Jupiter” Juspeczyk, or Silk Spectre I (Gugino) back in the early 1940s. The Comedian thus represents not only police brutality and imperialism, but also toxic masculinity (elements I linked together here), showing what a cruel joke it is to be a “superhero.”

So, the Comedian is despicable in the extreme; but he is not 100% despicable. There are, after all, his penitent tears while sitting at the bed of Moloch (played by Matt Frewer in the film), who was his supervillain enemy for forty years (Chapter II, comic pages 21-23). The Comedian feels this remorse as a result of learning of the apocalyptic plans of Ozymandias (Goode). Indeed, his maskless confession to Moloch, revealing his secret identity as Blake, puts the retired supervillain in the ironic role of priestly confessor, thus once again blurring the line between good and evil in Watchmen.

The Comedian’s grinning wickedness can be explained, if never justified, in one remarkable way. His oft-repeated line, “It’s a joke,” can be interpreted as a kind of Camus-like absurdism. He knows it’s no good playing the hero in a world where villainy keeps resurfacing after brief defeats; it’s especially no good in a world whose existence is threatened by nuclear war.

For him, fighting crime is like Sisyphus rolling that huge boulder up the hill, only to see it roll back to the bottom as soon as it’s reached the top, to have to be rolled up again and again, for all eternity. One can never make the world a better place, but one is forced to keep trying. Camus concluded, however, that one must imagine that Sisyphus is happy, as a proposed resolution of the contradiction of man’s search for meaning in a meaningless universe; similarly, the Comedian continues to play the fake role of hero with a smile, knowing full well that it’s “all a joke.” Hence he commits atrocities without batting an eye.

IV: Rorschach

Rorschach (Haley), or Walter Kovacs–who has been, like a noir detective, investigating the murder of the Comedian and has formulated a conspiracy theory about someone out to kill all “masks”–is a similarly amoral sociopath, another example of how Watchmen deconstructs and satirizes the idea of “good guy” superheroes, though his sociopathy expresses itself in markedly different ways. His mother having been an abusive prostitute makes him a literal sonofabitch. This rupture in the normal child’s Oedipal and post-Oedipal development at least in part explains his pathology (it goes without saying that little Walter had no father in the home).

One peculiarity about Rorschach is his omission of definite and indefinite articles when speaking; these omissions are more extensive in the comic than in the film. Given his psychopathological nature, such omissions symbolize how incomplete his communicating is. In other words, he’s not as engaged as most people are in the Symbolic Order, the realm of language, social mores, custom, laws, culture, etc. His refusal to abide by the Keene Act, that is, illegally continuing his work as a “mask,” is a reflection of all this. He doesn’t fit in with society, and it shows when he talks.

He sees the world as irredeemably cruel, so he believes that he has the right to be as violent and cruel as he likes to other people (e.g., breaking people’s fingers when interrogating them). His superhero name and mask…or “face,” as he calls it, comes from the Rorschach test, a projective test using symmetrical inkblots (like the shifting black images seen on his white “face”) to bring out features of a patient’s unconscious thoughts that are projected onto the ink blots when he’s asked what he sees.

So his black-and-white “face” represents the kind of projection we all do, not just his own projecting of his viciousness onto the world, but also our projecting onto him when we see his “face,” or onto anyone else. (Consider the scene in the film when, broken out of prison with the help of Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II, he finds his “face,” puts it on, and facing the prison psychiatrist, Dr. Malcolm Long–played by William S. Taylor– who has used the Rorschach test on him, he asks, “What do you see?”) He is a mirror to us as much as we are a mirror to him. Rorschach, in his permanent hostility to all those around him, personifies the alienation that is almost universal in our world.

The fact that his mask is black and white also represents his own psychological splitting, his black-and-white view of the world: if something isn’t totally pure and innocent, honest and just, it’s so fetidly evil that destroying all manifestations of that evil is perfectly defensible (the fact that he stinks becomes yet another projection onto that fetidly evil world he sees). Hence, “not even in the face of Armageddon. Never compromise.” The splitting into black and white means projecting the black outward and keeping the white inside…or so Rorschach thinks he’s doing; yet one cannot deny one’s Shadow, so he behaves as hideously as all those he condemns and maims.

V: Nite Owl II

Upon learning of the murder of the Comedian, Rorschach first goes to the home of Nite Owl II (Wilson), or Dan Dreiberg, to warn him about his theory of a “mask-killer.” Though based on the Ted Kord version of Blue Beetle, Nite Owl is in many ways a parody of Batman, with his use of gadgets and his “Owlship” (reminding us of the Batplane), nicknamed “Archie,” short for Archimedes. Dreiberg’s father left him a lot of money when he died, allowing him to afford such things, rather like orphan billionaire Bruce Wayne. His class status as a bourgeois ensures that Dan, like the other Watchmen, will always have, if not right-wing politics, at least liberal ones, as a reflection of his wish to protect his class interests.

Still, of all the Watchmen, Nite Owl II (as well as Silk Spectre II, or Laurie Juspeczyk–Åkerman) is the most moral. He and she do the one act of saving the lives of innocent people in danger in the whole comic, rescuing people from a tenement building on fire and taking them aboard Archie (Chapter VII, comic pages 23-26). When he and the Comedian are trying to handle the rioters back in the 1970s, he’s in the role of the “good cop,” trying to reason with the rioters, while the Comedian is the “bad cop,” beating the crap out of them (Chapter II, comic pages 16-18), if not killing them.

VI: Ozymandias

After warning Dan, Rorschach goes to tell Adrian Veidt, formerly Ozymandias, now the wealthy owner of, among other businesses, a toy company that, in selling Watchmen action figures, is capitalizing on the whole superhero phenomenon. Here we see more of the comics’ satire on superheroes. Like Dan, Adrian shows skepticism over Rorschach’s “mask killer” conspiracy theory (Chapter I, comic pages 17 and 18).

Well, naturally Adrian shows skepticism: as we learn in the end, he is the mask killer.

He’s the one who breaks into Blake’s apartment, beats him up, and throws him out the window. Adrian’s the one who deceives Doctor Manhattan into thinking that contact with him caused his colleagues, his former lover, Janey Slater (played by Laura Mennell in the film), and Moloch to develop cancer, giving the godlike superhero such guilt feelings that he leaves for Mars for some peaceful solitude, thus ensuring he won’t interfere with Adrian’s plans. Since Rorschach is also piecing the plot together, Adrian must get rid of him, too–by framing him for the murder of Moloch and putting him in prison. Finally, Adrian stages an attempt on his own life to make himself seem above suspicion.

And what’s Ozymandias’ plot? To kill millions of New Yorkers with a monster he’s had biologically engineered so that the leaders of the US and the USSR, joining forces to defend the world from alien invaders, will relent from nuclear war. Thus is world peace achieved!

Now, purist fans of the comics will be infuriated with me for saying this, but I believe the film’s changing of the alien monster to energy blasts, seemingly from Doctor Manhattan, on not only New York but also a number of other major cities around the world, was an improvement. Wiping out so many more people makes it all the more horrific, and energy blasts coming from a harnessing of Doctor Manhattan’s power, by virtue of the godlike hero’s name’s association with the Manhattan Project (and therefore associating his power with nuclear weapons), creates an ironic genocide by power thus associated in order to prevent a genocide by nuclear weapons.

Ozymandias imagines that his plot, as horrific as it is, will be a necessary sacrifice to prevent a horror killing billions, because apparently, the American and Soviet governments will be deterred by this horror from ever going to war with each other. Why, however, should we believe that world peace, let alone a lasting one, will be guaranteed by this “sacrifice”? Ozymandias himself acknowledges that man’s savage, violent nature will inevitably lead to his destruction. One doesn’t have to be “the smartest man in the world” to know that that savage, destructive nature won’t be tamed forever just because of the massive deaths caused by the monster, or the energy blasts. Let enough time pass by, and all those deaths will slowly fade from memory, and our bloodthirsty, competitive habits will reemerge.

Kiling millions to save billions, therefore, must be Adrian’s rationalization, rather than his real reason, for killing all those people (I wonder if any of his businesses’ competition were wiped out in New York, with his full knowledge?). Like the Comedian and Rorschach, Ozymandias is yet another superhero psychopath (recall how easily he disintegrates his pet Bubastis in his attempt to do the same to Doctor Manhattan), but with some narcissism mixed in. He identifies with great leaders of ancient history: Alexander the Great, and later Ramses II, called Ozymandias by the ancient Greeks. We’re reminded of Shelley‘s poem, in which we read the famous lines, “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:/Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair.”

In his narcissistic imagination, Adrian thinks he’s achieved the ultimate act of greatness in creating world peace, paradoxically, through a huge massacre. We are to look on his works (supposedly not knowing they’re his works) and despair, on the one hand, at the huge number of deaths he’s caused, and on the other hand, at the great accomplishment–supposedly thus–of what has been deemed impossible to accomplish…a lasting world peace. The “mighty” would envy him for his great feat.

Yet, just as the giant statue of Ozymandias in Shelley’s poem has been reduced to mere fragments of rubble by the passage of time, so will Adrian’s peace by mass murder–by the passage of time–fade away into oblivion with the innate human urge to resume competing and waging war. His peace will come crumbling down; in fact, it may crumble quite soon if Seymour (played by Chris Gauthier in the film), at New Frontiersman, takes Rorschach’s journal from the crank file and, reproducing in a newspaper article the contents that have resulted from Rorschach’s investigation, expose Adrian’s whole plan as a hoax (Chapter XII, comic pages 31 and 32).

Now, New Frontiersman is a right-wing newspaper (as made blatantly clear on pages 275-278 in the graphic novel), and Rorschach’s giving of his journal to them indicates his sympathies for their politics. Indeed, he often speaks disparagingly of “liberal sensibilities,” which, contrary to popular belief, are not left-wing, but centrist, swaying only temporarily to the left or to the right depending on the political climate of the time (consider, for example, how liberals were left-leaning peaceniks in the 1960s and 70s; but when Trump was elected, they started banging the war drums against Russians, leading to our predicament in the 2020s). Other masks, like the Comedian, are similarly right-wing, “practically a Nazi,” according to Adrian.

Now, Adrian is deemed one of the “most consistently left-leaning superheroes,” according to a 1975 article by the liberal Nova Express (pages 377-380), so virulently hated a publication by the editor of New Frontiersman. Still, as the wealthy owner of several companies, Adrian is merely a bourgeois liberal and a member of the capitalist class, so he hardly merits the moniker of “leftist.” He’s no more “left-leaning” than billionaire George Soros, who may critique the excesses of unregulated capitalism from time to time, but who also used the “Open Society” to help dissolve the Soviet states. Only a far right-wing moron would call Soros a ‘communist’; it’s equally absurd to imagine that Adrian, an admirer of rulers during the ancient slave/master class contradiction, is anything approaching a socialist.

If one wishes to call Adrian a liberal, fine. We’ve seen plenty of liberals in today’s world joining the choruses of condemnation of Putin and all things Russian in response to his provoked invasion of Ukraine. These same liberals are, knowingly or unknowingly (the latter being no excuse, as evidence of the provocations has been made public for years), cheering for a government that has Nazis in it, as well as in their military. (I go into more detail about this issue in these posts, Dear Reader, if you’re interested: rehashing these arguments is beyond the scope of this article.)

That Western liberals are rooting for Ukraine and manufacturing consent for continued war with Russia is a dangerous game, risking a very possibly nuclear WWIII. Such an understanding of Ozymandias’ politics helps clear our minds as to why this liberal, fantasizing about an ideal world, has massacred millions in a manner comparable with nuclear war in order, paradoxically, to prevent it. Recall how atomic bombs killed hundreds of thousands in two Japanese cities (rationalized as having prevented far more deaths), far fewer than Adrian’s mass murder in New York City.

So, one lesson to be learned from this narrative is not to be naïve in hoping that liberals will steer humanity away from extinction. The trouble with liberal normal is that it always gets worse.

VII: Doctor Manhattan

The next heroes Rorschach goes to warn are Doctor Manhattan and Silk Spectre II, the couple being in a sexual relationship and living together in the Rockefeller Military Research Center, where Doctor Manhattan works for the government. When Rorschach tells them the Comedian is dead, Dr. Manhattan says he already knows, and that “the CIA suspects the Libyans were responsible.” Though the CIA presumably wouldn’t have known of Adrian’s plot (of course, knowing the nature of the CIA, and of at least some billionaires’ CIA connections, it’s quite possible that they might be in on it), their scapegoating of Libya sounds most convenient for their purposes.

Laurie feels no love lost for the murder of the man who tried to rape her mother, breaking her ribs and almost choking her; but Rorschach just trivializes the “moral lapse” of a man who died serving his country, a typically jingoistic and insensitive opinion from a right-winger (Chapter I comic page 21).

As for Dr. Manhattan, he is similarly unmoved by Blake’s death, since “life and death are unquantifiable abstracts.” As the only superhero of the Watchmen with superhuman powers, this nude blue demigod is emotionally numb from his deeper understanding of ‘the broader scheme of things,’ as it were, a numbness that will alienate Laurie from him and make her run into Dan’s arms later.

Dr. Jon Osterman became Doctor Manhattan as a result of a freak accident in the test chamber–in which he was locked–in the intrinsic field chamber where he and his fellow researchers worked. (He went there to retrieve a watch he’d fixed, that of his lover, Janey Slater.) In that chamber, his body was torn to pieces…pieces too infinitesimally small to see (Chapter IV, comic pages 7 and 8).

He reassembled himself (just like the repairing of her watch) in stages: first, a brain, eyes, and nervous system emerged; then, his circulatory system; next, a partially-muscled skeleton. Finally, he appeared before Janey and the other research staff in the cafeteria in his full, new form–blue, hairless, muscular, and naked, glowing with a “sudden flare of ultraviolet” (Chapter IV, comic page 10).

Osterman’s ordeal is obviously Christ-like in his agonizing death and resurrection, giving him a kind of “spiritual body” (1 Corinthians 15:44), if you will, and as a kind of “second Adam,” it’s fitting that he goes about “naked…and…not ashamed” (Genesis 2:25), just like the two lovers in the garden before their fall from grace. So his disintegration into the void was a kind of harrowing of hell…but also, paradoxically, a brief experience of the no-thing-ness of nirvana.

The sublation of the dialectical opposites of heaven (or, if you prefer, nirvana) and hell can be a way of interpreting what Wilfred Bion called O, and what Lacan called the Real. It’s a place of bliss as well as of trauma. Osterman has experienced both, almost simultaneously, and he’ll never be the same again.

Having experienced such extremes, he is distanced from the normal feelings of human attachment that are a part of samsara. He scarcely feels the fire of desire that causes dukkha, suffering; so his resurrected, god-like incarnation grows cooler and cooler emotionally. Death and suffering no longer trouble him all that much. He can still feel some emotion (hence his guilt over Janey’s cancer, a particularly powerful exception for him), but feelings are scanted for him, at best.

Small wonder he can walk as a giant through the jungles and rice paddy fields of Vietnam and destroy Charlie without flinching. Such is his nirvanic indifference to the differences between life and death. This indifference, of course, is most useful to the American government. As an American god, Doctor Manhattan should be terrifying to the world. As a metaphoric nuclear weapon personified, he’ll keep the Soviets at bay.

As the personification of a nuclear weapon, capable of destroying all life, he’s the opposite of what a superhero is supposed to be. As someone so indifferent to human life that it doesn’t matter to him if nuclear war wipes it out, Doctor Manhattan is that much less of a superhero.

It is only when he realizes so good a person as Laurie, Silk Spectre II, can come–by a one in a billion chance–from the mating of Sally, Silk Spectre I, with her near-rapist, the super-despicable Comedian, such good from such bad, that Doctor Manhattan sees the birth as a miracle, and therefore he can see value in human life once again. So by this paradox, he finds the willingness to go back, from his isolation on Mars, to Earth to prevent nuclear war between the US and the USSR.

But he arrives too late to stop the monster…or, according to the film, the energy blasts to be blamed on him.

Heroes meant to prevent calamity either fail to prevent it in Watchmen, or they outright cause it…the superhero concept is further satirized and deconstructed.

VIII: The Black Freighter

A subplot running throughout the comics, but not included in the film (apart from deleted scenes), is a comic book story–read by a young man sitting by a newspaper vendor who’s always prating about the end of the world (and providing copies of New Frontiersman to Walter Kovacs when he isn’t in his Rorschach outfit but is carrying around a sign saying “The End Is Nigh”)–from Tales of the Black Freighter. (This begins at the start of Chapter III.)

The protagonist of the story–curiously not a comic book superhero, since a decline in the popularity of “masks” over the years has replaced them with, in this case, for example, seamen–has found himself the sole survivor of his crew from a shipwreck resulting from an attack at sea by the Black Freighter, or as he calls it, the “hell-bound ship.” (Chapter III, comic pages 1 and 2) Overwhelmed by the sight of his wrecked ship and the bodies of his dead crew strewn on the shore, and also fearing the hell-bound ship sailing to his hometown of Davidstown, where his wife and daughters will be killed before he can get there, he vows revenge and is obsessively driven to get home to achieve it.

When he realizes that making a raft from wood won’t be buoyant enough, he decides to make one with the body parts of the dead crewmen he’s just buried. This ghoulish act is the first example of foreshadowing in the story, for the Black Freighter has heads nailed to its prow. In his overzealous quest to avenge evil (if he can’t stop the ship from killing his family, that is), the protagonist will become the very evil he’s trying to prevent. He’s projecting his own potential for evil onto the Black Freighter (Chapter V, comic pages 8 and 9), just as Rorschach projects his evil onto the world.

Further foreshadowing of him becoming that evil is when he, on his raft of rotting corpses, grabs a seagull among many trying to nip at the dead flesh and savagely eats it alive. We see a picture of him (Chapter V, bottom right of comic page 9) with a wild facial expression and gull’s blood dripping from his mouth.

It’s interesting to note, in connection with the moral degeneration of the protagonist, how the newspaper vendor standing by the kid reading the comic has said, from the beginning, that the US should nuke the USSR. Is his attitude not a perfect parallel of that of the comic’s protagonist? So eager to kill the bad guys that he talks like a bad guy himself. The same is true of the Comedian, Rorschach, and Ozymandias, all self-righteous psychopaths who think they have the right to end human life.

Eventually, the protagonist reaches land and gets to Davidstown. Since he’s narrating the story, and he’s been through a harrowing, traumatizing, and disorienting experience, his judgement will be shaky at best. Therefore, he is clearly an unreliable narrator. What he perceives to be happening next should be observed with due skepticism.

He sees a man and a woman walking along near the beach. It’s at night, so it’s dark and not easy to see. Still, the protagonist is sure this man is a moneylender from Davidstown whom he recognizes, and the woman is his paramour. Moneylenders were despised people back around the 18th/19th century, when this story takes place, so it’s easy to see the protagonist vilifying this man as an abettor to the evil crew of the Black Freighter. (Chapter X, comic book pages 12 and 13)

He kills the lovers, then disguising himself as the man and putting the woman’s body on her horse, he rides into Davidstown with her. (Chapter X, comic page 23) Again, this use of a corpse with transportation is a foreshadowing of his eventual identification with the murderous crew of the Black Freighter, with heads on its prow.

Finally in Davidstown, he gets to his home and, thinking the murderous pirates are there, he attacks one to avenge his family…only to realize he’s actually killed his own wife. (Chapter XI, comic page 6) The Black Freighter never reached Davidstown (has it been only a figment of his imagination the whole time, a projection of his own, inner evil?), though the ship is later seen approaching the shore by the despairing protagonist, who has returned to the beach. He gets in the water, swims to the boat, and joins the crew, being as evil as they are. (Chapter XI, comic page 23)

To return to the main story, after Ozymandias has released the monster (which, by the way, can also be representative of a nuclear holocaust, through associations with such kaiju as Godzilla) on New York, a mass murder that one TV news reporter compares to “Hiroshima but with buildings”(Chapter XII, comic page 25), he tells Doctor Manhattan about a dream he’s had, “about swimming towards a hideous…” (Chapter XII, comic page 27)

He doesn’t finish his thought, though, because, as should be obvious to us, he’s referring to the Black Freighter. Like the protagonist of that story, Ozymandias has become the very evil he claims he’s wanted to prevent…though he won’t let his guilt surface to his conscious mind (it can appear only in his unconscious, in dream).

IX: Conclusion

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union at the end of 1991, Francis Fukuyama declared “the end of history,” meaning the triumph of “free market” capitalism as the highest and final stage of human civilization. But as Doctor Manhattan tells liberal capitalist Ozymandias, “Nothing ever ends.” (Chapter XII, comic page 27)

We all imagined (myself included, at the time), in our naïveté, that the end of the Soviet states would not only usher in freedom and democracy around the world, but also, in ending the Cold War, put to rest our fears of nuclear annihilation. Yet since the early 1990s, we’ve instead seen life get shittier and shittier, with increasing income inequality, the capitalist class controlling most of our access to information, a homelessness epidemic, worsening financial crises, government surveillance (and surveillance capitalism), rampant imperialist wars, and militarized police. The end of socialist “totalitarianism” has only led to a very real capitalist totalitarianism. In the past, the West feared the rule of Stalin and Mao, but we don’t need to fear them: now we’re ruled by the likes of Gates, Musk, and Bezos.

Our “heroes” of the past–Soros et al–have become the very evil they fancied themselves to be fighting.

Furthermore, just as we see on the pages of the Watchmen comics, the doomsday clock is set just a few minutes before midnight. All one needs to do to see the grim reality I’m describing is to watch the reckless nuclear brinksmanship going on with the US and NATO’s proxy war with Russia, using Ukrainians as cannon fodder. And as if that weren’t madness enough, the Western imperialists are planning to play the same game of nuclear chicken with China, using the Taiwanese as cannon fodder.

The end of the world is nigh…where are Walter Kovacs and his sign when we need them?

Just as Ozymandias imagines dropping a giant squid-like monster on New York City–or, as in the film, using energy blasts seeming to come from Doctor Manhattan, killing not only millions in the Big Apple, but also in London, Paris, Beijing, Moscow, Tokyo, etc.–will save billions by killing millions, so do some of the warmongering imperialist psychopaths in our world imagine using smaller nukes will defeat Russia and China without wiping out the entire world. MAD indeed.

Not only are we headed unswervingly towards WWIII and nuclear annihilation, we are also blinded to this reality by the Russophobic and Sinophobic propaganda of the Western bourgeois media, who keep the truth from us just as Doctor Manhattan kills Walter Kovacs to keep the truth from the world about Ozymandias’ plot. That Western propaganda is like the tachyons used to blind us Dr. Manhattans to the dire future we face, causing us to do nothing to prevent it.

The anti-Russian partisans of the DNC, as well as the anti-Chinese partisans of the GOP, see the politicians of their respective parties as superheroes defending the US…yet, who is watching the watchmen? In their hate of their version of the Black Freighter, be it China, or Russia, or both of them, these Western politicians have built their raft of corpses–from all their previous warmongering–and they’re on their way to Davidstown.

Not enough of us yet know that these Western politicians will soon swim to that hell-bound ship and join their bloodthirsty crew…will there be enough of us to stop them before it’s too late?

As we can see, Watchmen, in its comic and movie forms, is extremely relevant to our troubled times today.

Alan Moore, Dave Gibbons, and John Higgins, Watchmen, Burbank, CA, DC Comics, 1986-1987

‘The Splitting,’ A Sci-Fi Horror Novel, Expanded Version, Book IV

Book IV

Chapter One

2033, Fort Leavenworth, ExxonMobil Correctional Facility

Peter sat on his bed in his cell with a permanent frown, his smartphone in his hands, searching for another video to watch.

Apart from trying to keep abreast of what had been going on in the world since his, Michelle’s, and the other sympathizers’ arrests, he was using the videos as distractions from everything he had to be miserable about. As distractions, though, the videos weren’t of much use, of course.

He tried to forget his and Michelle’s treason trials and convictions. Their protestations, as well as those of their defence attorneys, that the Bolshivarians were trying to help the world, fell on deaf ears. Their counter-accusation–that it was the armies of the world that were the real war criminals, having killed hundreds of thousands of people with the nuclear bombs dropped on Santiago, Lagos, and Jakarta, all to draw out the Bolshivarians so they could be sprayed with bug toxins, killing not only the aliens but millions of human carriers as well–also fell on deaf ears. Having judges who were paid for by, and therefore sympathetic to the interests of, the governments, corporations, and military, is what caused that deafness, of course.

The only good thing about that morning was that he, for some reason not explained to him, didn’t have to do hard labour all day that day; nor did the other sympathizers, who were just as unaware of any reason for this relief from work as he was.

Leavenworth, like so many other places over the 2020s, had been given such a thorough makeover that the current fort would have been almost completely unrecognizable to anyone who knew it back in the 2010s. The fact that Exxon-Mobile had taken it over and privatized it was most of the reason for the sweeping changes, including not only the radical changes to its physical form, but also the new incarceration of civilians, females, and non-Americans. After all, countries only continued to exist in name, essentially, so one didn’t have to be an American, or even a native of Kansas, to be incarcerated in the new Leavenworth.

All one had to do was offend the privatized armies of the 2030s.

Peter heard the clanking of metal on the bars of his cell. He looked up from his phone to see Corporal Culig, one of the prison guards, giving him a tray of food.

“Here’s your breakfast, traitor,” Culig said as he put the tray through a horizontal rectangular hole in the bars. “I hope you choke to death on your bacon and eggs,” he added, a typical comment from him.

Neither Peter, nor Michelle, Wendy, Pat, Valerie, nor Sid were allowed even to eat in the prison cafeteria, for fear they’d sit together at a table and reminisce about old times in Venezuela or Angola. Part of their punishment was to be deprived of friendly company for the rest of their lives.

He took his tray from Culig, thanking him with a scowl. He took it back to the bed and sat back down.

I miss Michelle, he thought. I miss her touch. I miss looking at her pretty face.

He found a video of a crowd of people on the streets of Paris protesting the nuclear bombings of the previous year. His grasp of French was good enough to know that they were also sympathizing with the slain aliens, for he saw placards that had such messages as, “Killing Bolshivarians is also a war crime!” and “No to nuclear war!”

He was struck by the huge range of emotions he saw in the protestors…he was struck by the fact that there even were protestors!

Didn’t all those vaccines numb away all the spirit of resistance from everybody? he wondered. I thought all the sympathizers were arrested. This protest is commemorating the first anniversary of the bombings. This video was taken only last week! Surely it’s going to be deleted any time now; I’m surprised it’s still up. How is all of this possible? We lost!

Then he Googled more information, that of independent bloggers. He found one, published just a few days before, titled, “How the Vax Got Vanquished.” The writer said, “I went about every day like a zombie, just doing my job without any feeling or interest. Then one day, someone touched my arm, a carrier of the aliens. I saw the little lights go out of his fingers and into my body. I was so numb from the effects of the vaccines I’d been made to take that I didn’t feel scared; if my body was to be torn to pieces, I just thought, ‘Oh, well…’ But instead, I felt that emotional numbness fading out of me. I started to feel something I hadn’t felt in years…emotions. Energy. Drive. Passion. And most importantly, joy! A touch of the aliens cured me! I’ve heard stories from many other people who’ve had the same experience.”

They’re still alive, Peter thought. They’re not all dead, after all. And the article is still online.

He searched for more information to explain all these odd developments. He found a YouTube video, again recently published, of a woman standing before the camera and saying the following:

“We all know of how governments around the world have been testing people to see if they’re carriers of the Bolshivarians. It has been assumed that, by now, they have all been found and, on exposure, been killed–that is, the human carriers are shot, and the Bolshivarians are exterminated with the bug spray toxins.

“This, however, is far from the truth, as I’ve been tested and allowed to pass, alongside many other carriers.” To prove her assertion, she let the tiny dots of light flow out of her fingers and towards the camera screen.

They’re alive, he thought with a smile. They’ve been hiding, but they’re coming back.

“You sympathizers out there in the world,” she went on, “I say this hoping you’ll hear my words before this video is removed from the internet: don’t lose hope. We have non-carrier sympathizers conducting the tests and allowing carriers to pass them undetected. We’ll all be free sooner than you think.”

He was so excited, he’d forgot about his breakfast, which was getting cold. He started shovelling it down.

After eating, his newfound happiness caused him to let go of the tension he’d been feeling up until this morning. His initial excitement thus gave way to a sense of peaceful contentment, making him want to lie on his bed and meditate on his new hopes. Within an hour, he fell asleep.

He’d been napping until lunchtime when that clanking metallic noise woke him up. “Here’s your lunch, traitor!” Culig snapped at him. Peter didn’t scowl at him this time when he took his tray, surprising and annoying Culig.

About two hours later, Culig returned.

“Peter, get up,” he said. “We’re transferring you.”

“What?” Peter said, rising to his feet. He never calls me by my name. ‘Traitor’ is my name, as far as he’s concerned. No look of hate in his eyes, either. Not much emotion of any kind.

“Please hurry,” Culig said. “We don’t have much time.”

Peter put his smartphone in his pocket and approached the bars. Culig never says ‘please,’ either, he thought. This is truly weird.

Culig opened the cell door. “C’mon, we gotta go.”

“Nobody said anything about a transfer,” Peter said as he came out of his cell. “What’s going on?”

“Everything will be explained later,” Culig said as they walked through the hall and out of the cellblock area. “For now, let’s just focus on getting you out of here, and fast.”

Culig is never this…nice, Peter thought. He also seems a little robot-like. Just two hours ago, he was his usual mean self. And now…?

Peter was even further amazed at how smoothly he got through the whole prison complex, all the documentation and requisition forms reviewed and accepted without a hitch. And this was all for a transfer he’d never been told about until just now, just like his sudden, unexplained relief from having to do his daily hard labour. He thought to look carefully at the faces of all the people cooperating to make this transfer so effortless.

They all had Culig’s newly-acquired automaton-like body language. Had they all acquired these same traits, just this afternoon? And who gave them these traits, all of a sudden?

Could it be? Peter wondered, remembering all he’d looked at on his smartphone that morning. Nah, don’t get your hopes up too high.

He was taken outside, to where a dark green truck was parked by the outer entrance gate.

“Get in,” Culig told him. “Good luck, where you’re going.”

“What?” Peter said, looking back at the guard and seeing no trace of sarcasm (or any other emotion, for that matter) on his face. He got in the truck.

Now he felt an even greater shock…but a pleasant one.

“Peter?” a familiar, female voice called out to him. The driver closed the back door of the truck, leaving everyone in there in almost total darkness.

“What?…Michelle?” he shouted, straining his eyes to find her face in the dark of the truck. When he spotted her, he ran over to where she was sitting. They hugged and kissed. “Damn this darkness. I wanna see your face in the light.”

“What’s going on, Peter?” she asked. “What do they want to do with us? You don’t think they’re taking us out to be…” (she whispered) “…killed or anything, do you?”

“I don’t know,” he said, sitting down beside her. “My guard, who’s never nice to me, seemed nicer just now.”

The truck started moving.

“I know,” she said. “My guard seemed nicer today, too.”

“Did their mannerisms seem a little…mechanical to you, and I mean ‘mechanical’ in a familiar way?” he asked.

She recalled her mother’s initial mannerisms when she’d just been made a carrier, then made a mental comparison to those of her guards. “Yeah, now that you mention it, they were,” she said.

“I noticed the same thing, Peter,” another familiar female voice said in the darkness, to which his eyes were only now adjusting. “But I don’t wanna get my hopes up.”

“Wendy Callaghan?” he asked. “Is that you?”

“Yes, it’s me,” she said in a cheerful voice.

“Wow!” he said, then went over to hug her. “So good to see you…well, sort of, in the dark…again! Any other familiar faces in here? My eyes are still just adjusting to the dark.” He squinted and looked around.

“Over here, Peter,” Pat called out. Peter could barely make out his and Valerie’s faces, then their waving hands.

“Oh, hi!” Peter said, waving back. “Is Sid here?”

“Oh?” Sid grunted, waking up from a nap. “Did someone call me?”

“Yeah, there’s Sid,” Peter said. “Hi!”

Sid strained his eyes to recognize Peter. “Oh, hi, Peter.”

“So, where are we being transferred to?” Michelle asked. “Anybody know?”

Every voice in the back of the truck said, “No.”

“You’d think they’d have told us,” Valerie said. “Why didn’t any of them say where we’re going?”

“That’s what’s kind of scary about all of this,” Pat said. “Were they all nice to us because today is our last…Oh, I don’t wanna say it.”

Suddenly, the truck stopped.

There was an uncomfortable silence of several seconds.

They heard footsteps on what sounded like gravel going from the front to the back of the truck.

“We’re about to find out, I guess,” Wendy said.

The driver opened up the back of the truck, with grating metal clangs. Blinding sunlight shone outside. “Everybody out,” he said.

They all came out slowly, with shaking legs. When their feet touched the gravelly ground, they looked around, with a hand over each pair of eyes to block the sun. Now they had to adjust their eyes to the light…but they were afraid of what they would see.

No wall to line up against.

No firing squad.

Just the local bus station.

“What the…?” Peter asked, then he looked over at Michelle and smiled. “Oh, there’s that face.” He caressed her cheek, getting a smile from her. “If we die, at least I got to see you once more.”

“I love you,” she said.

“I love you, too,” he said, then looked over at the driver. “But what’s going on?”

“There are people in the bus station, our contacts, who will take you where you want to go,” the driver said, in as monotone a voice as that of Culig and the other guards. “Go in there, and you’ll find them.”

“Where we want to go?” Sid asked.

“Yes,” the driver said. “You’re all free now.”

“We’re free?” Valerie asked with a sneer of incredulity that all the others imitated.

“Yes,” the driver said. “We’ve arranged everything. But beware of the manhunt that’s coming soon; we might not be able to stop that soon enough, though we plan to. The people in there will help you, and we’ll do what we can to slow the manhunt down, as I said. Anyway, goodbye, and good luck.” A few little dots of light flew out of his waving hand. He went back to the truck, got in, and drove away.

Peter and the others just stood there, stunned.

After a few seconds, Michelle said, “I guess we’ll go into the bus station, then.”

Chapter Two

“Come in,” General Harris said after hearing the knock on the door.

Culig stepped in the general’s office. “The sympathizers have all been sent off, sir,” he said.

“Good work, Corporal,” Harris said. “Has anybody objected to their being…transferred?”

“None to my knowledge, sir,” Culig said. “Everyone in this military correctional facility has been…converted to our cause.”

“Good. I’ve been sending our people out to as many branches of the military and police, in all the city-states between here and the Canadian border, to convert them, too. With a little luck, that manhunt we’re worried about won’t happen at all.”

“I’m sure of it, sir. By now, at least half of the population of the United City-States of America is likely converted to the Bolshivarian way.”

*************

Peter and Michelle were dropped off by the front doors of MedicinaTech in the Toronto District.

“OK, you two,” the driver said with what was by now an all-too-familiar lack of emotion. “Here’s where you wanted me to drop you off.”

“Yeah, OK, thanks,” Peter told him. He and Michelle got out of the car and walked over to the front doors of his parents’ business and government. It was the early afternoon, so all the staff, informed of his imminent arrival, were in the lobby waiting to welcome him back.

He and Michelle went in. The acting CEO walked up to greet him. She also had that look on her face that seemed to indicate a lack of human personality. She had the same grin as every other employee.

“Good afternoon and welcome back, Mr. Cobb-Hopkin,” she said as if having memorized a speech, putting out her hand to shake his. “I’m Marsha Tenenbaum, acting CEO–“

“Oh, uh, hi,” he said, not shaking her hand. “Look, I’m sorry, but we’ve had a long, crazy trip here, and we need to go rest for a bit, OK? We’ll talk later.” He and Michelle went off into a small meeting room to be alone. They closed the door behind them.

All the staff outside, instead of being shocked at how uncouth Peter was, just stood there like robots, still with those seemingly meaningless smiles on their faces.

“OK, Michelle,” he said after heaving a big sigh. “What the fuck is going on around here?”

“Around here?” she said. “Around everywhere.”

“Exactly,” he said. “All of that–getting out of Leavenworth, going on the bus ride all the way to the Canadian border, getting from there in another bus to Toronto, then that guy…that automaton!…driving us here. That was all much…too…easy!“

“We’re escaped convicts,” she said. “We’re wanted…aren’t we?”

“Was there any kind of a manhunt…at all?“

“I know. It doesn’t make any sense.”

“All Bolshivarian carriers getting us through everything, everywhere, with no difficulties?”

“I thought they were all killed with the bug spray drones,” she said. “I can understand if a few of them survived, and are in hiding, but…”

“And the testing was supposed to have wiped out all the remaining carriers, or at least almost all of them,” he said. “But they’re everywhere now.”

“Far too many, it seems. I never thought I’d be feeling uncomfortable about that.”

“With no recognizable human personalities, either. I thought the emotional numbing of the vaccines was bad. This emotional numbing we see now is much more extreme.”

“Yes, it is,” Michelle said with a sigh.

“In my cell, I watched a few videos of people who were liberated—by the Bolshivarians—of the mind-numbing of the vaccines. They were so full of emotion; it was wonderful to see. I have a bad feeling that that emotional liberation was short-lived, though. I’ll tell you something else: I learned from my year in Leavenworth that the army grunts never got the vaccine…because they’re already brainwashed into obeying the dictates of the ruling class; that’s why they show more emotion than the general population, though only hate and anger.”

“Yeah, I learned that, too,” she said. “But this robot-like behaviour of the new carriers–it’s disturbing. They don’t seem to have a will of their own. I’ll bet Valerie and Pat, Wendy and Sid have been taken to their homes with the same ease. We should contact them on social media.”

“Yeah, I’ll do that right now,” Peter said, getting out his smartphone. “I’ll tell you another thing: not only are there all these new carriers, including guards who were nasty to us and hated the Bolshivarians right up ’til the switcheroo, but you never see these anti-Bolshivarian types splitting up into pieces.” He began typing up a message on Facebook, then tagged Valerie, Pat, Wendy, and Sid.

“This is really weird,” Michelle said.

“OK, I just tagged all four of them with this question: ‘Did you all get back home with disturbingly unbelievable ease, your drivers all acting like robots with seemingly no will of their own?’”

Within a few minutes, Valerie, Pat, Wendy, and Sid all ‘liked’ Peter’s post, and commented ‘Yes.’

Pat added to his comment by saying, “I’ve experienced exactly what you’re talking about here in Milwaukee. All human automatons, these new carriers. No difficulty at all getting home. Just as you said, Peter: ‘disturbingly unbelievable ease.’ This is too good to be true, let alone to be good.”

Valerie, Wendy, and Sid all ‘liked’ Pat’s comment.

Both Peter and Michelle looked at his phone with fearful faces.

“Do you remember what Bob said to us, back in Luanda, just before the attack that killed him and almost killed us? He said that if the Bolshivarians had wanted to take over the world, they could have done it like that.” Peter snapped his fingers, as Bob had done. “They didn’t quite do it then, but they seem to be doing it now. Michelle, are the Bolshivarians controlling people’s minds? What do you think?”

Wide-eyed, she couldn’t answer.

Chapter Three

The morning of the next day, in the headquarters of the US State Department, three soldiers were walking the halls in the direction of the office of the Secretary of State. Again, as with almost everywhere else in the world, the whole interior look and structure of the Harry S. Truman Building had been so thoroughly made over that it would have been difficult for someone from as recent as a decade earlier to recognize it. Such was the influence of the Amazon Corporation’s takeover of it; indeed, as one walked through the halls and visited the offices, one saw, for example, not just portraits of the president, but also those of Amazon executives, past and present; and the Amazon logo was almost ubiquitous.

When the soldiers reached the office of the Secretary of State, one of them knocked on his door.

“Yes?” SECSTATE Hammond said.

“Mister Secretary?” the man who knocked said. “This is Lieutenant Davis, with Sergeant Wilson and Corporal Neil. We have a matter of urgent business to discuss with you. May we come in?”

“What the—“ he said, getting up from his desk. “You couldn’t first check this with my—? Oh, all right, come on in.”

All three entered. As soon as they shut the door, the little lights flew from their fingers.

“Oh, my G—!” Hammond began, but before he could reach for the can of bug spray in his desk, the lights had already entered him.

He didn’t grunt in pain, twitch, or fall to the floor. No red cracks appeared on his face. No bruises. No tearing of clothes, then of flesh to reveal inner organs.

He just stood still. He didn’t even fidget in the slightest.

“Mister Secretary?” Sergeant Wilson asked.

“Shall we take a walk over to the White House?” Hammond said in a calm but rigid voice. “We should see President Price. I have a matter of urgent business to discuss with her.”

****************

In the afternoon of that day, Peter called Marsha Tenenbaum. “Yes,” he said. “I want you to continue running MedicinaTech for the time being. I’ve got personal business I need to take care of, and it’s going to occupy my time for…well, quite a while. I’ll let you know when I can come back and take over…Sorry, I can’t go into that right now. I have to go now. Talk to you later…Bye.” He hung up and left for Mississauga.

When he arrived at the Mississauga Exposé building, he just barged past everybody in the lobby, past the receptionist who tried in vain to stop him and ask if he had an appointment, and rushed into an elevator.

Michelle said she was chairing a meeting today, Peter thought as the elevator went up to where he knew, from past trips there, all the heads of the newspaper worked. He got out of the elevator and went through the halls, looking through the glass walls to see which room she was in.

At the end of the hall, he found her. It was easier for him to find her by the look of confusion on her face than by her face itself. Utterly lacking experience, she could only look awkward there. He barged in.

“Michelle!” he shouted, interrupting a presentation that she looked bored watching.

“Peter!” she said with a smile, relieved to have an excuse to get out of the meeting. “Excuse me, everyone. Something’s come up. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“That’s OK, Michelle,” the unruffled presenter said as she walked out of the room with Peter.

“They’re not mad at me for my little intrusion?” he asked.

“Of course not,” she said as they walked down the hall, him looking for an empty room with a computer. “They’re all emotionless carriers, like your staff. They can totally do that meeting without me.”

“I thought so,” he said as they walked into an unoccupied room. “I figured they could run everything without you, as my staff can without me. I mean, why would they want us running things when they know we don’t know how to do it?”

“Good question,” she said when he sat in front of a desktop computer and turned it on.

“And in a minute, I’ll give you my answer,” he said. “Occupying us with our parents’ businesses will distract us from watching what the Bolshivarians are planning. Check this out.” He found a recent video on YouTube: George Villiers-Joseph and Karol Sargent in China.

Michelle’s eyes almost popped out of her head. “Oh, my God,” she gasped. “They survived?“

“Yes,” Peter said. “Someone got them out of South America just in time before the bombings and bug spraying. As you can see, this video is dated from last week, and it hasn’t been censored, like so many other videos and web pages that normally would have been taken off the net by now.”

“You mean, President Price and her people aren’t censoring the net anymore? Why?”

“Because they’re losing their power over the world.”

“Well, that’s good news,” she said, grinning. “Now the Bolshivarians can heal the Earth, and we can help the poor of the world.”

“True, and as we know from the news, these changes for the better are really being made. But at what cost?” he said. “Who are the Bolshivarians improving things for?”

“What do you mean?”

“Oh, come on, Michelle. You’ve seen those automatons working for you, as I’ve seen them working for me. Watch this.” He clicked PLAY.

George was chairing a meeting with Karl in a hiding place somewhere in China. The video panned across all the people in the audience, mostly Chinese with that all-too-familiar emotionless stare in their faces. George began to speak.

“As you all know,” he said, “the heightened danger to Bolshivarian life here, brought about by the nuclear holocausts and the genocidal extermination of so many of us, has necessitated a radical change in our strategy. No longer will Bolshivarian entry into human bodies give our carriers a choice to join us or die. We will simply take control of our hosts’ mental apparatus completely.”

“There you have it, Michelle,” Peter said. “Our worst fears realized.”

“Oh, no!” she said.

“All of you in our audience are carriers, your wills all under 100% Bolshivarian control, which also ensures that you understand my meaning without needing Chinese translation,” George said. “This use of mind control was a hard decision for us to make, but we’ve been given no choice. Too many Bolshivarian lives have been lost–deaths in the billions!–to allow us to take any more risks in the name of ‘liberty’.”

“Tory tried to warn us,” Peter said, pausing the video. “He told us not to trust George…and I put an axe in Tory’s head.”

“I can understand the Bolshivarians needing to protect themselves,” she said. “But…this can’t be.”

“In spite of all the good we’ve seen them do, including saving our own lives…twice…still, I’ve always had a nagging doubt in the back of my mind about them. Are they doing all this healing of the Earth for us, or for themselves?“

“That sounds like Price’s propaganda.”

“I know, and you know I’ll never trust her or any of the ruling classes of the Earth, but this video spells it out, all in black and white, so to speak. You won’t like hearing this, Michelle, but those psychic communions we have with our ‘parents’–I don’t think they’re real.”

“They’re real, Peter!” she said in a voice of sobbing anger.

“I know how you feel, and I know how painful it is to–“

“They’re real!” she shouted, tears forming in her eyes.

“I’m sorry, but the Bolshivarians fabricated them with their technology.”

“No!” she bawled. He held her as she wept.

“Let’s hear the rest of the video,” he said, then clicked PLAY.

“As for the non-carrying sympathizers of the world,” George said. “As long as you remain loyal to us, you need not fear having your free will taken from you. No more threats to Bolshivarian life, and you will be left alone. But if a non-carrier is to take any more Bolshivarian life, as Karen Finley did, and Tory Lee tried to, then we’ll have no choice but to take control of all sympathizers. Our safety, as the saviours of the Earth, has become paramount!”

Applause could be heard from all over the room, including Karol’s clapping hands.

Neither Peter nor Michelle clapped.

Chapter Four

One hour later that day, Peter shared the video of the China conference with Pat and Valerie. They replied immediately by saying it would be best to share their feelings on Zoom, so they could express themselves more intuitively.

They arranged a meeting that evening, all four of them, including Michelle.

“So, how are things over there in Milwaukee with you?” Peter asked. “Where in Milwaukee is ‘over there’? Are you in an airport?”

“Yeah,” Pat said. “We’ve been through customs, and we’re waiting at our gate. So we have a little time now, though we’ll have to keep this short.”

“Where are you going?” Michelle asked. “I mean, this is so sudden. I thought you’d be so tired after the ride from the Kansas Districts to the Wisconsin ones, that you wouldn’t want to go anywhere after that. You both certainly look tired, without much energy. And how did you manage to arrange a flight so fast?”

“Oh, we know people who can set us up fast,” Valerie said. “Lots of money helps, too. Besides, we’d been planning this trip for a while, even before you’d sent us the video. And actually, we already knew about George and Karol hiding out in China.”

“Wow,” Peter said. “Really?”

“Yeah. Also, the people helping us are under Bolshivarian influence,” Pat said. “So their trust of us as sympathizers will help us get to where we’re going faster.”

“And where are you going?” Peter asked.

“Guess,” Valerie said.

“I have no idea,” Michelle said.

“China,” Pat said with a grin.

“You know exactly where George and Karol are hiding?” Peter asked.

“Not yet, but we’ll find them soon enough,” Pat said. “Valerie and I want to try to dissuade them from going on with this terrible idea of controlling everyone’s minds.”

“OK, but I can’t imagine you changing their minds,” Peter said. “All those Bolshivarian deaths have made them pretty firm in their decision, to put it mildly.”

“We know,” Valerie said. “But we have to try. We don’t want a world with no free will.”

“As important as saving the world from people like Price is, it mustn’t come at the expense of making us all slaves,” Pat said.

“I couldn’t agree more, Pat,” Michelle said. “But what if you can’t change George’s or Karol’s minds?”

“Well…let’s just say we may have to resort to more…radical, sweeping measures,” Valerie said, shaping the fingers of her hand into a gun and pretending to shoot Pat in the head.

“Wait a minute,” Peter said. “I’m as unhappy about all of this as you are, but don’t do anything stu–“

“Sorry, guys,” Pat said hurriedly. “Time to board our plane. Bye.”

Pat and Valerie ended the session on their laptop, leaving Peter’s with a blank screen.

He and Michelle looked at each other with frowns.

“If they do what I think they’re going to do,” he said, “they’ll provoke even worse repressions on everybody.”

“Worse than that,” she said. “Pat and Valerie could fuck up our entire effort to save the world.”

“We should warn George and Karol,” he said. “If only we knew how to contact them directly.”

“We could tell any of the carriers in our companies,” she said. “They’d know somebody, who’d know somebody, who’d—“

“And that just might be the thing that makes the Bolshivarians want to make everyone around the world, including you and me, into mind-controlled carriers. Just warning them alone could make them make that awful decision. No, we’d better not. Let’s just hope Pat and Valerie deal with this intelligently.”

Chapter Five

Peter emailed a video to Michelle a week after their videoconference with Pat and Valerie. The video was dated three days before, and titled Assassination of Underground Bolshivarian Leader in China.

“Oh, please God, no,” she whispered before ever-so-reluctantly clicking PLAY on her phone.

Karol Sargent was seen in a small room chatting with several people, mostly Chinese. George was not there, but Michelle saw, in a far corner, a familiar face.

Pat’s.

She had no interest in what Karol had to say (it was mostly idle chatter, anyway); she was focused on whatever Pat was going to do. Though George was the one who did most of the public speaking, it was known by all the carriers and non-carrying sympathizers–including Peter and her–that it was Karol who wielded great influence behind the scenes in terms of policy decisions; so Pat’s presence in that room had great interest for her.

Pat’s face showed no hate or anger as he looked at Karol; he’d obviously learned how to bury his feelings deep down, so when he got up and walked towards Karol, he had a pleasant smile on his face, laughing at one of Karol’s jokes.

Then he pulled a pistol out of his jacket pocket.

He buried a bullet in Karol’s chest with a loud bang and a splash of blood.

The Bolshivarian dots of light flew out from the dying man as they did out of all of his carrier listeners, swarming around Pat as he fumbled a can of bug spray with his other hand. They entered him before he could aim it at them. The familiar cracks of red showed on his face.

“Oh, my God!” she said, then thought, Why would he do that, knowing it wouldn’t help our cause at all? Surely he knew they’d just kill him and use more repression on the rest of us. Then again…why would Karen and Tory have made their assassination attempts? Surely they knew it would have done them no good, either. Of course, they went mad with grief over the loss of their son, so they couldn’t think rationally. I guess Pat and Valerie were going crazy, too; maybe they lost loved ones to Bolshivarian splitting. We’ve all been losing it over the past few years, anyway.

The video abruptly ended amid the confusion and Pat’s body beginning to tear up. She saw a split second of exposed brain before it ended.

Her phone began to ring. It was Peter.

“Hello?” she said.

“Did you watch the video?”

“Yes,” she said. “Horrible.”

“You know what George is going to do, now, right?” he asked.

“I don’t even wanna think about it.”

“Well, we’ll have to. We’re going to have to lie low for at least a while, and keep away from the carriers as best we can. Imitate them if we meet any of them. Practice doing those stupid smiles before the mirror.”

“What about Valerie?”

“Probably controlled by the Bolshivarians by now.”

“I wanna contact her to be sure,” Michelle said. “Who knows? Maybe she got away from them in time.”

“Possible, but not probable. Contacting her will be risky.”

“I know, but I still wanna be sure. We need all the friends we can get.”

“I agree, but we’ll have to be super careful. These are dangerous times we’re living in.”

Chapter Six

That evening, Peter was in Michelle’s home, in the living room. They were watching CNN.

President Price was giving another press conference. Her secretary of state, that tall, black man, Hammond, who’d taken a walk over to the White House to talk with her so urgently, could be seen standing in the background.

“Over the past year, I’ve been giving some thought to the policies of our governments and corporations, both domestic and international,” she began. “This reevaluation has been provoked by what…happened…last year. We made great strides in overcoming so many of the ill effects of climate change–ending the wildfires, lowering sea levels, removing pollution in the air and oceans…”

“You liar,” Peter said. “The Bolshivarians did all that with technology we’re not even close to having. You’re still taking credit for their…”

“C’mon, Peter,” Michelle said. “Let’s listen.”

“Still, we’ve done our share of destructive things, too,” Price said, with what sounded like effort and strain. “The bombs we dropped on those three cities, a necessary sacrifice to draw out the aliens from their hiding places so we could exterminate them, nonetheless caused terrible destruction and loss of life.” That effort and strain in her voice was growing, yet it was only a physical problem, for she still spoke without feeling.

“Wow,” he said. “A frank admission of guilt from her.”

“And eerily lacking emotion,” Michelle said. “Or sincerity, I’m sure.”

“To atone for what our governments and corporations are responsible for, we’ve decided to make some radical. sweeping changes in our domestic and foreign policies,” Price said.

“‘Radical and sweeping’,” Peter whispered. “Her favourite words again.”

“The wealth…of the heads of corporate governments…will be taken and shared…with the poor of the world,” Price said. She coughed and seemed to be gagging.

“Whoa!” Michelle said.

“That’s a Bolshivarian policy,” Peter said. “Not hers.”

He noticed that Hammond was squirming, too.

“This money will fund social programs and education, will provide and guarantee employment for all, as well as universal housing and healthcare for everyone, including the poorest,” the president said amid more coughs and gagging. “All military operations in Latin America, Africa, and Southeast Asia will end…immediately.” She twitched a few times, as did Hammond. “All troops…are to come home…with no delay.”

Peter and Michelle watched and listened with their jaws practically touching the living room carpet.

“This is too good to be true,” she said.

“Exactly,” he said. “They aren’t making these decisions of their own accord. We know who’s really doing it.”

“The mechanical way Price is talking and looking at everyone proves it,” Michelle said. “Her expression is even more forced, more robot-like, than my mom’s was when she’d first become a carrier.”

“What we’re doing …is,” Price went on, wincing as if in extreme pain, “for…the greater…good…unh!“

“Madame President, are you alright?” a reporter asked.

Hammond was squirming even more, and he began fidgeting in pain, too. A confused noise of voices among the reporters was the only comment on his and Price’s behaviour.

After several more seconds of squirming and wincing, both of them let out screams of pain. The familiar red crack lines could be seen on their faces and hands.

“I knew it,” Peter said.

“So, when Bolshivarians take control of your mind, this is what happens when you try to regain control of yourself?” Michelle asked.

“Looks that way,” Peter said. “Masochistic agony.”

Hammond confirmed Michelle’s suspicions when he grunted, “Give me…liberty…or give me…DEATH!!!”

His and Price’s bodies both split into pieces, tearing their clothes and revealing their internal organs.

“I never thought I’d see the day when the president’s guts would be shown on TV,” Peter said.

“Or the brains…since JFK’s assassination, at least,” Michelle said.

The bodies exploded seconds later.

“The TV isn’t cutting to a commercial,” she said.

“There no longer seems to be any concern over censoring anything,” he said. “No secrets need to be kept from the public, it seems.”

Peter and Michelle looked at the faces of the reporters. No shock was seen on any of them.

“The reporters don’t seem to prefer liberty over life, do they?” he said.

“No,” she said. “We know whose side they’re on.”

“Look, I’m glad Price and Hammond are gone,” he said, “But I’m not so glad about what’s replacing them.”

“If the Bolshivarians can get at the president,” she said. “They can get at anyone.”

“We’re gonna have to be extra careful if we want to keep control of our brains,” he said.

Chapter Seven

The next day, Michelle contacted Valerie on Facebook, asking about what had happened to her since Pat’s assassination of Karol Sargent. This was Valerie’s reply in a personal message:

Don’t worry, I’m OK. I managed to get out of China immediately after the killings. I got back home by burying my feelings and pretending to be one of those automatons. It was really hard to hide my grief over the Bolshivarians’ murder of my husband, but once I got back to the privacy of my Milwaukee home, I lay on my bed and cried for what seemed hours.
We should meet. I can fly over to Toronto or Mississauga. I hate having to pretend to be one of those soulless carriers all the time. If I’m with you, I can relax, be myself, and cry on your shoulders over what happened in China.

Michelle let Peter read Valerie’s message.

“Well, what do you think?” she asked him. “Judging by what she said, does she seem to be still all human? She doesn’t seem compromised to me. Do you think this message could be pretence?”

“Well, I guess she’s being sincere,” he said. “I certainly want to believe she’s sincere. We need some real human company around here, and the only way we can get it is by taking a risk or two. We can have some cans of bug spray handy, just in case.”

“OK, I’ll tell her we can meet, say, in your home,” she said. “As soon as she’s in Toronto District, we’ll have a driver at the airport take her home.”

“The driver could be a carrier. He could turn her into one of them.”

“Anyone out there during her trip could be a carrier, turning her into one of them. She could be a carrier right now, for all we know. If we really want to meet with her, it’s the chance we’ll have to take.”

“Yeah, OK,” he said. “Let’s hope for the best. Let’s hope that if she isn’t a carrier, that she can fake being one all the way here, and not get changed.”

Michelle replied to Valerie’s message with the plan, to which she agreed.

***********

Three days later, in the afternoon, Peter and Michelle heard his front doorbell ring.

“That must be her,” Michelle said.

They both rushed to get the door.

Valerie stood there with that eerie, soulless grin.

Peter and Michelle grinned back uneasily.

They all stood there stupidly for several seconds.

“May I come in?” Valerie asked, her grin unchanged, with no awkwardness in her expression at her hosts’ odd hesitating.

“Oh, yeah…uh, of course,” Peter said as he and Michelle stepped aside to let Valerie in. “Sorry.”

“What a nice place you have,” Valerie said as she went in and looked around. “So, this is how the rich live.”

Concealing his annoyance at her remark, he said, “I may be bourgeois by birth, Valerie, as is Michelle, but I assure you, that’s not where our sympathies lie. My mom and dad actually used to call me the Friedrich Engels of our family.” He closed the front door.

“I’m sure they did,” Valerie said with that same grin as she approached a chair to sit on in the living room. “I’ve just never seen such a posh place before.” She sat down. “My home with Pat in Milwaukee is nice, but not this nice.”

“Thanks,” Peter said as he and Michelle returned to the living room and sat on the sofa. “After seeing what life is like for so many in Venezuela, Angola, and here, too—in Regent Park, that is—I feel guilty about having this ‘nice’ home.”

“I feel the same way about mine in Mississauga,” Michelle said. “With all the changes the Bolshivarians are making, especially now with President Price and Secretary of State Hammond gone, and with the Washington District government under Bolshivarian control instead of Amazon, we can more quickly provide for all the poor of the world.”

“Yes, those changes will be coming fast now,” Valerie said, still grinning without a trace of personality.

Peter remembered the switchblade he had in one of his jeans’ back pockets, and the small can of bug spray in the other. I don’t want to stab you, Valerie, he thought, but I will if I have to.

“Valerie,” Michelle said. “Would you like to relax? I mean…we can get you something to drink if you like. Some tea?”

“No, thanks. I’m fine,” grinning Valerie said. Are they faking? she wondered.

“You said in your message that you want to relax and be yourself,” Peter said. “Feel free to do so here.”

“I am,” grinning Valerie said, then thought, You’re the ones who aren’t being yourselves.

“You–you’re with friends,” Michelle said. “N-no need to pretend. Let yourself go.”

“Pretend?” Valerie asked, all those teeth still showing.

Desperate to end the tension, and gripping those weapons in his back pockets, Peter stood up and said, “You don’t need to pretend to be one of those Bolshivarian automatons!”

“Peter, easy,” Michelle said with a frown.

“I’m not pretending,” Valerie said as she rose from her chair. “But you have been, haven’t you?” Out of her fingers flew a swarm of those little dots of light.

Peter was quick on the draw with his can of bug spray. It hit the first six or seven of those tiny balls of light, making all of them drop on the carpet. Since Valerie hadn’t been a carrier for long, the lights hadn’t yet integrated with her body, so the bug spray wouldn’t kill her. Peter ran at her with the switchblade ready to stab. Valerie screamed.

“Peter, no!” Michelle yelled.

She looked away and covered her eyes. She didn’t want to see her boyfriend shed blood a second time.

A few seconds after Valerie’s body hit the floor, her blood staining the carpet, Peter and Michelle heard the doorbell ring again. Michelle ran over to answer the door.

“Yes?” she said to a male neighbour after opening the door.

He, too, had that all-too-familiar grin.

“I heard a scream,” he said, looking into the living room, though Michelle’s left shoulder was hiding Valerie’s body and blood from his sight. “Is everything OK?”

“Oh, yeah,” she said, trying her best to imitate that stupid-looking grin without showing any nervousness. Shake on the inside, she thought.

“We’re watching a horror movie on TV,” Peter said as he approached the door, hoping his body would help obscure not only the bloody body, but also the living room TV that hadn’t been turned on at any time that day.

Chapter Eight

The next day, Peter and Michelle were flipping through the channels on the TV in her living room, finding all the grinning they saw on everyone’s face increasingly disturbing. They stopped changing channels at the CBC, on which a reporter was interviewing the Prime Minister.

“Everything is going smoothly,” Prime Minister Lévesque said with that grin that, now, was never not seen on any face. “There are hardly any cases of rising sea levels or wildfires anymore. We’re well on our way to wiping out poverty in every inch of the City-States of Canada. Places like Regent Park, in Toronto, for example, are on virtually the same economic level as the rest of the Toronto District, or any other district in Canada, the UCSA, or anywhere else in the world.”

“That’s wonderful news, Prime Minister,” the reporter talking to him said…with that same grin.

“This is getting to be too much!” Peter said to Michelle, then turned off her TV in frustration, and tossed the remote on a chair beside the sofa. “Every politician and public figure we see on the news making statements on current affairs has that ‘pod people’ Bolshivarian face.”

“They really have taken over, globally,” Michelle said. “The heads of every city-state we’ve seen–London, Paris, Berlin, Shanghai, Tokyo, Riyadh, Ottawa, San Francisco,…”

“You name the city-state, the politicians and CEOs representing them all have that mindless grin, that far-away look in their eyes,” he said. “This is really getting scary!”

“I’m amazed we were able to pacify that neighbour of yours yesterday,” she said. “We barely escaped Toronto without being spotted as non-carriers. And there’s no way we’re risking going back. And again, I have to ask: why’d you have to kill Valerie? We could have run outside without you using your switchblade on her. I’m also amazed they don’t have Bolshivarian cops tracking us. I guess they’re more interested in turning us into carriers than arresting us for murder, they’re more upset about the loss of their own than of human life, and they know we’ll spray them if they try to apprehend us. Instead, they’ll be more cunning about catching us.”

“Again, I’m sorry about stabbing her. I acted rashly. We’re all going a little crazy here. But as you said, at least we got out of there without being chased. I guess our acting skills have improved. But we can’t stay holed up in your house forever. Is anybody out there still normal?”

“I got that message from Wendy Callaghan, which was just like Valerie’s. She claims she isn’t a carrier, and that she’s all tense and afraid of being absorbed by the Bolshivarians. She said she’d like to come here, all the way from Los Angeles, because life there is so hopelessly taken over, she wants to get as far away from the Bolshivarian carriers there as she can. Do you think we should meet her, or will it be too risky?”

“Everything we do every day is a risk now,” he said. “But I’m desperate for us to find someone else who’s normal. If she is, it will be well worth the risk. The more normal people we can find, the happier I’ll be. I’m going crazy.”

“Same here.”

***************

Three days later, Peter and Michelle were in the hallway of a hotel in Toronto, approaching the room Wendy was staying in. They were wearing baseball caps and sunglasses, in the hope that no one would recognize them as the two who killed the woman in his house, where the carriers must have, by now, gone into, looked around, and found her body.

“She must be even more paranoid than we are to prefer a small hotel room to accommodations in your house,” Peter said.

“Yeah,” Michelle said. “For all she knows, we could be carriers, and she’ll have her can of bug spray ready for us.”

“As we have ready for her, in case she’s been made a carrier since our last communication with her. So we’ll have to guard our feelings and only let our real selves out bit by bit.”

“She’ll probably be doing the same thing.” Michelle, with a feeling of dread, rang the doorbell to Wendy’s room. “Have your dumb smile ready.” They took off their hats and sunglasses.

Wendy opened the door.

She was grinning from ear to ear.

Peter and Michelle mirrored her grin back, hoping she was putting on as much of an act as they were.

“Come on in,” she said, stepping aside for them. “It’s good to see you both again.”

Peter and Michelle entered.

“What a small room,” she said as she and Peter approached Wendy’s bed. “In my home, I could have offered you a much bigger one, and for free.” She and Peter sat on the bed.

“Oh, that’s OK,” Wendy said, sitting on a chair across from the bed. “I don’t want to impose on you.”

“Oh, it’s no imposition at all,” Michelle said.

“Really, I’m fine here,” Wendy said.

“Well, as you wish,” Michelle said.

There followed a few seconds of uncomfortable silence.

“So,” Peter said, allowing his grin to relax a little. “You said in your message, Wendy, that you were really scared of…all the changes going on around us.”

“Yes,” she said, still fully grinning. “But everything’s OK now.”

“So…we can all relax, then?” Michelle asked, also letting go of her grin ever so slightly.

“Of course,” she said, all of her teeth still showing. “I’m relaxed now.”

“Good,” Peter said slowly, relaxing his grin some more.

There were a few more uncomfortable seconds of silence.

Has she been assimilated, Peter and Michelle wondered, or is she just so paranoid that she can’t let go of the act?

“So, what are your plans?” Michelle asked.

“Oh, I’m just doing what I can to help us all heal the Earth,” she said with that ever-present grin.

“Yes, it’s wonderful, all the progress that has been made,” Michelle said, her cheeks getting sore from all that grinning.

“Yes,” Wendy nodded in agreement. “Bolshivarian influence has stopped the wars, cleaned the pollution away, housed and fed the poor. It’s terrific.”

Peter ventured to lessen his grin a little more. “Is there anything you wish could be done…a little differently?”

“Oh, only that it could all be finished quicker,” Wendy said. “But things are being done fast enough, I guess.”

“And then the Bolshivarians can leave, and we can enjoy our new, healed Earth, right?” Peter asked.

“I suppose,” ever-grinning Wendy said. “Or they can stay with us, if they wish.”

“W-why would they need to stay, if all their work here is done?” he asked.

“Oh, if humans are let go, they might return to their destructive ways,” teeth-baring Wendy said. “And then our efforts will have been all for nothing.”

To Peter and Michelle, her choice of words (“humans,” “they,” “our” referring to the Bolshivarians) seemed to indicate she wasn’t acting.

Still, they didn’t dare take out their bug spray cans unless they saw the dots of light come out from her. Escaping a hotel presumably full of carriers would have been a lot harder than escaping his or Michelle’s house.

Maybe that’s why she wanted to stay in a hotel? To trap Peter and Michelle?

Hence, another moment of uncomfortable silence.

“Oh, Peter, I just remembered,” Michelle said. “There’s something I have to do at the Mississauga Exposé. Damn, I forgot all about it, and it has to be done today. Sorry, Wendy, we have to go now. This is so abrupt.”

“Oh, that’s OK,” she said, always grinning. She got up.

Do I detect a tinge of relief in her eyes? Michelle wondered. Or is that wishful thinking on my part, that she isn’t a carrier, and is acting, as we are?

“Yeah, we’d better go,” Peter said, getting up with Michelle. “Sorry to cut this off so quickly.”

“It was good seeing you again, Wendy,” Michelle said, hugging her by instinct, then regretting the hug as soon as they touched. She could have sent the lights into my body right then, she thought; hugging her was a stupid idea. She felt Wendy’s heart beating as fast as her own. Wendy was also trembling as much as she was. Does this mean she’s faking? I don’t dare ask!

Indeed, no lights came out, though, to their relief.

The women let go, and Peter and Michelle went back to the door. “Bye,” they said to Wendy as they went out into the hall.

“Bye,” Wendy said, keeping her grin on her face until the door closed.

Chapter Nine

A week later, Peter and Michelle made arrangements to meet with Sid, this time in her house.

“He’s on his way, right from his home in Brantford,” she said. “So, we’re gonna go through with this farce again?”

“Yes, crazy as it sounds,” he said.

“Crazy as it is,” she said. “At the worst, he’ll be a carrier who we’re risking turning us into one of them, or one of us will kill him (I’m not encouraging you, Peter!) and we’ll risk–this time, my neighbours finding out, since we’re meeting him here this time. At best, Sid will be the way Wendy was probably acting: he’ll be one of us, but too scared to show his real self.”

“Or he will let his real self show. As tense as this is going to be, we have to try. I’ll go crazy if I have to live knowing only you and I are normal.”

“And what if he’s one of them, and he makes one of us into a carrier? What if I lose you, Peter?”

“I could lose you to them, too, Michelle. And that terrifies me. But that’s why we’ve gotta try to find allies. What’s going on around the world is like the zombie apocalypse, only it’s the Bolshivarian apocalypse. The more of them there are out there, the more desperate we’ll be to find any of us, ’cause we can’t do this alone.”

She let out a big sigh. “OK, let’s do this.”

They kissed.

**************

Five hours later, the doorbell rang.

They took a deep breath, clutched the bug spray hidden in their jacket pockets, and went to the door.

They opened it to see, predictably, a grinning Sid.

“Hi,” he said. “Long time, no see.”

“Yeah,” they grinned back, much better practiced now.

“Come on in,” Peter said.

They went into the living room and sat down.

“So, Sid,” Peter said through his bared teeth, “how are you coping with all of the changes going on?”

“Coping?” Sid said with a tinge of disbelief in his eyes. “What’s there to cope with? The improvements being made around the world are nothing short of miraculous. Schools and hospitals are being built all over Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia. Decent-quality housing is replacing all the slums, including those in Regent Park, as you both must know. The unemployed are being given work. The climate crisis is practically over. What’s there to complain about?”

“Oh, of course we know about all the improvements being made around the world,” Michelle said. “We’re more than happy about all that. It’s just…well…”

“Well, what?” Sid asked, his smile beginning to fade.

“We don’t…feel as free…as we used to,” Peter said.

“Don’t feel free?” Sid said. “What could be more liberating than the changes we’ve recently seen? No more war. No more poverty. No more wildfires, flooding, or pollution. The people want these changes. Don’t you?”

“Of course we do,” Michelle said.

“But at what cost?” Peter asked.

“What cost?” Sid asked. There was an uneasy pause. “Has your loyalty shifted?”

Peter and Michelle couldn’t answer.

“You in your nice palace of a home?” Sid added.

There was another uncomfortable pause.

Then the dots of light flew out of Sid’s fingers.

Peter and Michelle pulled out their bug spray, but they then heard some familiar voices in their minds.

Michelle? Siobhan’s voice called to her.

“Mom?” she said.

Peter, what are you doing? his mother’s voice said.

What George is doing is for the best, Peter could hear his father saying in his thoughts.

“You’re not real,” Peter said, aiming his little spray can right at the dots of light. “You’re a Bolshivarian hallucination.”

Sweetie, you don’t wanna spray me, do you? Siobhan’s voice almost sobbed in Michelle’s mind’s ear. The Bolshivarians are what are allowing my consciousness to continue existing. They are what is still giving me life. If you spray and kill them, I’ll die a second time, and I’ll never come back. Don’t do it, sweetie!

“Mama,” Michelle answered in a sobbing voice.

“The voices aren’t real, Michelle,” Peter said.

“Oh, yes they are,” Sid said.

“Mom?” she wept.

“Don’t listen, Michelle,” Peter said. “It’s a trick.”

“If you spray them, you’ll regret it, Peter,” Sid said.

We don’t want to take you by force, Don’s voice said to Michelle, but we will if we have to, honey.

“Daddy, you won’t hurt us, will you?” she sobbed.

“Of course they will,” Peter said. “They’re not our parents.”

“Shut up, Peter!” she bawled.

“Fine,” he said. “Speak, can, for me!” He sprayed at the lights.

Michelle! the voices of Siobhan and Don said, fading out into oblivion as the little dots lost their light and dropped on the carpet.

“Nooooooo!” Michelle screamed.

Peter grabbed her by the hand, sprayed Sid in the eyes, getting a grunt from him, and the two ran out of the house.

Peter and Michelle ran down the sidewalk, almost reaching a corner when he saw a few people farther off, with their backs to them. He stopped running and tried to calm down.

“Bastard!” she hissed, hitting him on the shoulder.

“Stop!” he whispered. “They’ll see us fighting.”

She wiped the tears off her cheeks, gave him a brief scowl, then calmed down and imitated his grin.

As they continued slowly walking down the street, she whispered, “The carriers are all around your home, Sid is controlling my home. We’re homeless now, you know.”

“Don’t remind me,” he said through his grin.

Chapter Ten

As Peter and Michelle continued walking out of the neighbourhood and towards a park filled with people, including kids in a playground, they kept those stupid, mindless grins on their faces. It didn’t matter how sore their faces were…they had no choice.

Remember, they both thought as they walked along, as far as everyone else is concerned, we’re more than happy about all the progress being made to heal the Earth.

All they could do was cling to the microscopic hope that they’d sooner or later meet with non-carriers.

Their hopes kept getting frustrated with every person they passed by on the sidewalk. All the people they saw, with that uniform grin, might as well have been identical clones. Everyone appeared to be the same.

A man or a woman would be walking in their direction, and while they were far enough away from the approaching person, Peter and Michelle would think, Please, please let this person be normal!

Then, once they got close enough, the man or woman would bare his or her teeth and say, “Hi!” like a conformist, compliant robot.

Granted, Peter and Michelle were doing the exact same thing.

Could any of those approaching them have been doing the same, fake grinning act, too?

The sun was going down. They’d passed the park, and were now in an area of the neighbourhood with far fewer people.

Still, they were getting desperate to find somebody who was normal, perhaps someone who had a house nearby where they could stay and be safe.

They were getting tired from all that walking. They were hungry, too. The moon and stars were out.

They walked by a small restaurant with no customers at any of the tables. The owner, wearing an apron and presumably the cook, seemed to be the only one inside. They went in.

“What can I get you?” he asked with that all-too-familiar grin. “I was about to close, so you’re lucky to be my last customers.” He turned the sign on the door from OPEN to CLOSED, then he locked the door.

“This could work to our advantage,” Peter whispered in her ear. “We could spray and kill him, then take control of this place, and eat all we like.”

“Not for too long,” she whispered back. “And I don’t like you killing any more people.”

“It’s better than nothing. And I’ll kill only if I have to.”

The owner approached their table. “So, what will it be?” he asked, grinning and with his pad and pencil ready to write down their orders.

They looked at the menus laid out on the table.

“I’ll have a burger and fries, an orange juice, and a coffee, double-double,” Peter said, handing him the menu.

“I’ll have the same, but with a ginger ale instead of juice,” she said, then gave him the menu.

“Are you the only one here?” Peter asked him.

“Yes,” the owner said as he wrote down their orders. “Why do you ask?”

“Oh, just curious,” Peter said. “You seem lonely in here.”

“Oh, I’m fine. I’ll go cook your burgers.” He walked off to the kitchen area.

As he was cooking, he could look out from the kitchen and onto the dining area, where he could clearly see them talking at their table. Peter and Michelle were letting their guard down, and he could see them expressing themselves in a most non-Bolshivarian way.

He finished cooking their orders and served them, but as they ate, he kept his eyes on them. Still, they were behaving in a conspicuously non-carrier way, showing emotions other than, in their opinion, that fake contentment that was supposed to be the norm. Peter was tactlessly expressing his usual annoyance with the world, and Michelle had a look of worry on her face.

When they finished their meal and went up to pay, the owner looked in their eyes.

“Did you enjoy your meal?” he asked.

“Oh, yeah,” Peter said. “It was great.”

“So, you’re content?” he asked, meaning something more than just the service.

“Sure,” Michelle said. “Of course.”

“You seem a little less sure than that,” he said, always grinning.

“What are you getting at?” Peter asked, frowning.

“This,” he said, sending out the little lights from his fingers.

“You fucker!” Peter shouted, then found a steak knife on a nearby table.

Michelle had her can of bug spray already out. She sprayed the lights, dropping them to the wooden floor with the sound of bouncing marbles. The owner stepped back.

“No, Peter!” she said as he approached the owner with the knife. “You don’t need to–“

Peter slashed at him with the knife, slitting his throat. His blood sprayed out everywhere.

“Oh, Jesus, Peter,” she said, wincing at the sight of the owner staggering and coughing blood.

A few passers-by looked in the window and saw the blood, then saw the owner fall to the floor.

Michelle looked out at them. “Oh, shit!” she yelled. “Peter!”

He looked out. “Oh, fuck me! C’mon, let’s get out of here.”

They ran into the back and hid in the darkness of a storage room. They could hear a shaking of the locked front door, then a banging on it. Peter looked over to the back door.

“We can’t stay here long,” he said.

Chapter Eleven

Peter and Michelle, having heard the breaking of the glass on the front door to the restaurant, shuffled over to the back door leading out to an alley. They heard the shuffling of feet entering the restaurant; the footsteps grew louder as they, presumably carriers, were approaching the back.

“They’re gonna find us in here soon enough,” Peter whispered, then listened at the door. “I hear nothing out there. Let’s sneak out before they turn on the light in here.” They went out the door.

In the alley, they hid between stacks of crates and garbage bags to the right of that door. They heard it open, a pause of silence, then closing the door.

“What do we do now?” Michelle asked.

“We don’t wanna go in the direction of that door,” he whispered in her ear. “Any of them could be out there waiting for us. We should go in the opposite direction.”

“One of us should go first,” she whispered in his ear. “Then, if the coast is clear, we’ll go out together.”

“OK, I’ll go.”

“Stop being so gallant. I’m smaller than you, so I should go. I can hide more easily than you.”

“OK, but don’t take long. I don’t like you going out there alone.”

“I’ll be super-fast. Don’t worry.” She kissed him on the lips, then went.

Shaking with worry, he peeked past the crates and garbage bags to see what was out there, but it was mostly darkness.

Thirty seconds of agonizing waiting passed.

I thought you were going to be super-fast, Michelle, he thought.

More waiting.

It was so silent, he could hear his nervous breath and pounding heart.

Finally, she came back.

He got up from his crouching position to see her better. “So?” he whispered. “Can we go? Is it OK?”

“Yes, it’s OK,” she said with a wide grin on her face. “Everything is just fine.”

For the first time in their relationship of so many years, he did not like the look of her face.

“C’mon, Michelle. Don’t joke around. We don’t have to–“

“Join us, Peter.” She was still grinning. “It’s for the best.”

“Oh, no!” His heart sank with his lower jaw. “Please, God, no! Not you, too, Michelle.” He was choking up. In his approaching despair, he slouched to the ground, losing almost all his energy.

“Peter, just accept the new way. The Bolshivarians’ work is almost done. Just a few more months, and all the vestiges of our old, sick world will be annihilated.”

“With our souls,” He began weeping.

“No, Peter! As soon as the Bolshivarians are finished, they’ll free us and leave the Earth. I promise you.”

He just kept crying. “I love you.” He held the can of bug spray in his hands, but couldn’t bear to use it on her, for fear of even hurting her with it.

“I love you, too. And everything will be OK. Trust us. The souls of our parents are telling me, right now in my head, that all will be well.”

He looked at her and frowned. “Didn’t you tell me during our meal in there, that when I sprayed the lights coming from Sid’s hands, that our parents’ souls were destroyed, never to come back? That only the Bolshivarians could keep their souls alive?”

“That was a white lie they told me, I must confess.”

Peter took a deep breath and scowled at her.

“I’m saying this to you Bolshivarians, not to Michelle, who I know is still in there somewhere. You are all liars, like the ruling class here on Earth. You’re no better than they are.”

“The ruling class here is almost all obliterated. We had to lie about your parents. It was a desperate attempt to stop you from killing more Bolshivarians.” The lights were coming out of her fingers and were hovering before him.

“I remember when we lost our fear of these things.”

“I don’t fear them now, Peter.”

“They’ve taken your will, Michelle; but I know, deep down, you’re still in there, and I don’t wanna lose you.”

“You won’t lose me, Peter. They’ve reaffirmed my faith in them. Don’t be afraid.”

Peter, let them in, the voice of his father said in his head.

We’ll all be together again, his mother’s voice said.

As Don and I are with Michelle, Siobhan’s voice said.

“I can’t bear to lose you,” Peter said in sobs.

“You haven’t, and you won’t,” Michelle said, still with that grin that told him those words weren’t her own.

“Well, being a Bolshivarian slave with you is better than not having you at all.” He stretched out his arms to receive the lights in his body. “I guess this is my suicide.”

“Oh, nonsense,” she said with a laugh as the lights went inside him.

Split me up, he thought as he felt their vibrations throughout his body. Tear my body into pieces, as you did my parents. I don’t wanna live anymore. But they didn’t split him up.

Instead, he had the awkward feeling of feeling his body move—he stood up—but not by his own command. The Bolshivarians already had total control over him. His mind felt totally cut off.

His consciousness felt as though confined in a small, dark jail cell, with only a small window to look out of. He could see what his body was doing, but was helpless to do anything about it.

My God, he thought. This is worse than death. Why couldn’t they just split me up?

He tried to resist, as he’d seen Price and Hammond do on the TV. He felt an excruciating headache that forced him to stop long before any red cracks could be seen on him, or the bruising pains of stretched skin could be felt.

“Peter,” Michelle said. “Stop fighting it. Just let go. Accept it, and be content with the rest of us.”

He let go of the mental tension he felt.

He allowed a smile to appear on his face.

Chapter Twelve

A month had gone by. That look of stupid contentment on Peter’s face was still in stark opposition to how he felt inside. Yet still, if he even thought in opposition to the new way–critical thoughts, rebellious thoughts, conspiratorial thoughts–he would feel a sharp migraine that seemed to split his head open. He didn’t understand how Price and Hammond were able to endure such a painful death for the sake of ‘liberty.’

To feel comfortable, he had to repress his honest feelings and go about with that mindless grin…not something he was wont to do. He had to let the Bolshivarians control his body, to let them move it wherever and whenever they wanted to. He could only move his body on his own power if these movements didn’t contradict the Bolshivarian will. He could only speak without the migraines if his words didn’t contradict their will.

And his only consolation was that he had Michelle at his side…in body, if not in spirit.

He could feel the Bolshivarians trying to merge with his human consciousness, something he tried to resist with all his might. Being too aggressive about it, of course, brought about that migraine; but he’d be damned if he’d just allow those lights to merge with his brain without the slightest opposition. Instead, he found a middle way, erecting a kind of gentle, but firm, psychic wall that didn’t push the lights away, but at least kept them from coming inside.

They would eventually come inside and merge with him, he knew he couldn’t stop that…but at least he could slow it down.

Michelle, in contrast, felt fully reconciled with the will of the Bolshivarians. Her consciousness was completely merged with theirs, and she now understood why her mother had had that—what seemed at the time to her—inane grin: Siobhan wasn’t an unthinking, compliant automaton; she was genuinely happy. The Bolshivarian victory was just about complete, and the Earth was set to be a happy place to live.

Peter, of course, was still too proud to accept the new way.

“Years back, I complained about viruses, vaccines, and mask mandates,” he said one evening when they were back in his living room. Both of them were standing by his TV. “Those were days of carefree happiness compared to now. Unh!” His splitting headache came back.

“Be content,” she said. “We have our homes back, and we’re sharing the extra rooms with some of the poor, as we should be. The Bolshivarians’ work will be all finished any day now, and they will leave. Then we’ll have our heads back.”

“I’m not…holding my breath…for that. Oh!“

“Let’s turn on the news,” she said, walking over to his TV and getting the remote that lay beside it. “Maybe George will have a new speech.”

“Oh, yes,” Peter said, rubbing his head. “Our beloved dictator. Oww!“ He felt the Bolshivarians making him go with Michelle to the sofa and sit down.

She turned the channel to CNN. “If you’d just stop thinking ill of them, the pain would go away. Stop being so proud.”

“I can’t help it. It’s in my nature…to rebel. Oh!“

“George asked no less than four times to step down as leader,” she said. “They won’t let him resign because they love him so much. He’s a great leader.”

“You believe that bullshit, eh? Ooh!“

“Here we go. He’s about to give us a speech.”

“Friends, comrades,” George began. “The time has finally come. Our work has finished. Your Earth is healed, democratic systems of government have been established around the world, and the gulf between the rich and the poor is no more.”

“Wonderful,” she said with a wider than usual grin.

“Hooray,” Peter grunted. “I can feel the…democracy…swimming in my head. Unh!“

“You are free!” George shouted to cheers from his listeners.

Free? Peter wondered, with another stinging pain in his head. I keep asking myself: could there have been some justification in Price’s opposition to the Bolshivarians?

“The time has come for us Bolshivarians to say goodbye to you Earthlings,” George went on. “So this is the end.”

They’re going to kill us, Peter thought, his head throbbing in pain. I knew it. They’ve fixed up the Earth. They don’t need us anymore. They’ll split us all up into pieces, scatter our body parts everywhere, and they’ll enjoy our Earth without the need of human flesh for clothing. We’re all dead. Actually, I welcome it. I no longer want to live in this hell.

“We Bolshivarians wish to apologize to all the better Earthlings for having occupied your bodies for so long,” George said. “We know many of you have been bitterly opposed to our use of mind control, but with all the deaths we Bolshivarians have suffered, we were given no choice. The saving of the Earth was growing far too urgent for us to allow a protracted struggle with the likes of President Price. A shortened and aggravated struggle was necessary. But now, we will release you. We will let you go.”

Good, Peter thought. Kill us all and get it over with.Tear our bodies to pieces.

Oddly, though, he didn’t feel a headache after those thoughts.

His body slouched suddenly after realizing that it was no longer being held up, all rigid, by the Bolshivarians. At first, he was spastic in his effort to regain a control over his body that had become, over the past month, rusty.

“Wait…what?” he said, his first unmonitored words, freely and confidently expressed without pain, in a long time.

His consciousness felt released from that dark jail cell of the mind. The light beamed at him not from a tiny mental cell window, but from all around him in the room.

He and Michelle saw the little dots of light emerging from their bodies. They floated out and hovered before astonished Peter and Michelle.

“I knew it,” she said with a tear rolling down her cheek. “The mind control would only be temporary.” A grin lit up her face that, to Peter, looked genuine. She didn’t have his spastic reaction to having regained full control over her body, because she’d fully accepted Bolshivarian control over it.

“I don’t believe it,” he said. “I’ve got my brains back.” Now he was grinning…sincerely.

On the TV, they saw the lights come out of all the people listening to George, and out of his body, too. The lights all floated up to the sky as everyone looked up.

“I’m free,” George said. “I can resign my position. I no longer have the burdens of leadership.” He let out a loud, triumphant laugh.

Peter and Michelle felt a gentle ‘farewell’ energy emanating from the Bolshivarian lights as they floated towards the living room windows. They were about to pass through the glass like ghosts and fly outside before Michelle stepped forward.

“Wait!” she said. “What about my mom and dad? I don’t wanna lose them!”

You will never lose us, Siobhan said in her mind. We will always be with you.

As will we, Peter, the energy of Ray and Donna vibrated throughout his body.

“But isn’t your energy linked with the Bolshivarians?” Michelle asked. “If they leave Earth, won’t you go with them?”

No, sweetie, Siobhan’s soothing energy buzzed in Michelle’s brain and heart. The Bolshivarians shared their energy and our energy with yours. So we’ll always be together, even after they leave the Earth. There is a common oneness that transcends all space and time, so we’ll always be together, no matter how far away the Bolshivarians are, even to the other side of the universe.

Indeed, Peter and Michelle could feel a kind of ghost-trace of Bolshivarian consciousness blended with theirs. It no longer felt controlling, just…influencing…coexisting.

“Wait a minute,” Peter said. “That could mean that the Bolshivarians are still, secretly, controlling us.”

“Oh, will you stop with your paranoia?” Michelle said. “You have your mind back, don’t you?”

“It seems that way,” he said, looking left and right, and pausing to think about what was going on. “Still, this is all too easy. I mean, they had total control over us, and now they’re just letting us go free? This is too good to be true. I still have my doubts.”

“Umm, Peter, are you having any headaches?” she asked, sneering at him. “Surely your doubts would be giving you a splitting headache right now, wouldn’t they?”

“No,” he said, then took a deep breath. “In fact, I’ve never felt better.”

“Then stop worrying about it.”

“But what if, in some subtle way, the Bolshivarians are still–“

“Oh, please, Peter! They aren’t manipulating us. It’s a kind of…mystical oneness, that’s all.”

“Yeah, I guess. OK.”

The little lights were all outside now.

She rushed to the front door and went outside. Peter followed her. All of his neighbours were out on their lawns, watching the Bolshivarians floating up into the night sky. Soon, it became impossible to distinguish their alien visitors from the stars.

The people of Earth felt one last message sent into their minds: Remember, if you humans return to doing harm to each other and your world, we Bolshivarians will be forced to return and save you from yourselves again. Remember the lengths to which we are willing to go to ensure that salvation, so be good to each other and to your planet.

“How could they tell us that if they’re really so far away from us?” Peter asked.

“Through their advanced technology, of course,” Michelle said.

How does it feel to have a healed world, Michelle? her mother asked her in her mind.

“Like paradise,” she said with teary eyes and a wide grin.

“Yeah,” Peter said with a grin of his own. “It’s great to be free. I guess it was all worth it in the end.”

All of his neighbours were thinking the same way.

Every single person was grinning.

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