I don’t like these cold, precise, perfect people, who, in order not to speak wrong, never speak at all, and in order not to do wrong, never do anything.
- Henry Ward Beecher
PROLOGUE
As I look at the photos placed around me, I don’t know what to say. The images of people’s mangled bodies and blood, so vivid I feel like I could touch the shrivelling skin and feel the warm liquid, make me swipe across the screen to hide them. I bury my face in my hands, and breathe out slowly. I want to delete the data, get rid of it – but that does not make it disappear from my mind.
“Take this away,” I say, getting the glass tablet from in front of me and holding up behind, feeling it being taken from my hands by someone. “I don’t need to see anymore.”
“Of course, ma’am.”
I sigh, resting my elbows on the glass table. My eyes flick up to where my husband stands, strong as he always is, but there is almost a stoop to his shoulders; he seems to have given up, too. Or perhaps this stoop wasn’t anything new and I just hadn’t taken the time to notice it.
“Leave us,” his voice, while not shouting, booms across the room, and there’s a scurrying of feet behind me as people leave the two of us. But instead of kissing or hugging like we always did when we were alone – like we have for all the years we have been married – we are silent. We don’t know what to say to each other.
My eyes sweep over to the digital photo frame, where images of our life together reside; photos of us as teenagers, our wedding, babies, our leadership, everything. I glance at the huge family crest, a lion on the shield with a flag that reads ‘By skill, not force’. The photos tell me otherwise.
“Did you know this was happening?" I ask finally. He turns to look at me, his blue eyes piercing mine. “Did you know they were…?” Murdering couldn’t quite come out of my mouth.
He glances up to the wooden roof as if expecting an answer, but of course none come. He seems to hesitate before saying anything. “It was a possibility, yes, but I was hoping for the best. Every government takes collateral when it comes to defending what they know.”
But they are people, I want to scream, but I know perfectly well that won’t get me anywhere. We could scream, we could shout, but it wouldn’t do anything. Nothing would change unless we actually did do something for them.
“I never wanted to do this,” I say suddenly, sitting back in my chair.
He must have been shocked by my admission. “Marrying me?” he asked, a mixture of incredulousness and anxiety in his voice.
“No,” I said, making him relax, “I mean – all of this. I never wanted all this responsibility. You know the minute we make a decision, that can be the best thing that ever happened or the worst?” This is a way we never talk. We haven’t since we were youngsters, happy in each other’s company and not fearing the end of our relationship by an admission from one of us. Today, we speak lithely, asking each other how our prospective meetings went, how we could improve our speeches, our funding. We never, ever speak of our secret anxieties because there is too much at stake. If one of us turned and realised the enormity of what was on our shoulders now, the other would surely crumble, as would our whole state of living. So we kept our silence, our fears, away from each other at the best of times, just to stay sane. We just kept pushing, one foot in front of the other, climbing all the way to the top of the ladder, only to realise with a sinking heart that the only way back down was to jump off the ledge.
“Do you honestly think I do not realise what it means for us to be leaders of the world every day?” he asks, looking at me as if he was seeing someone new.
“We gave them a free world – now look what they are doing.” I stand up, wanting to look into his line of sight. “We gave them everything and they aren’t satisfied. Doesn’t it bother you that there are rebels as old as our eldest child out there?”
I think I struck a chord. The shock has left his face, to be replaced with worry. When he knits his forehead together in such a way, it makes me realise that we really aren’t young anymore. His wrinkles become more pronounced, his stoop more obvious. My Beautiful status is irrelevant now, and has been for years. My body is aging, as does everyone’s eventually. But I think, somewhere along the line, we threw that to the wind, and blindly kept moving because we thought we could do it. Maybe we couldn’t anymore.
“We’re doing it wrong and you know it,” I whisper softly.
There is a long hesitation. “I think you’re being too harsh on yourself,” is all he offers as he pulls away from me. He heads to the large glass doors, putting his hand on the keypad to open it up. I follow behind to the large lounge room we put near the office, one that we had decorated with soft rugs and photos and wooden frames; feelings of our old home.
“I have no right to criticise what we’ve done, mainly because I play a huge part in it,” I say as he sits down on a chair. “But… ever since I was in my twenties, I feel like my life has been a huge pardon. Every time something great has happened, I think, ‘So they’ve forgiven me. They’ve forgiven me for killing everyone’. But how can I think that any longer with so many still dying after it? Surely that is my fault. I’ve done bad things in my life – despite what the old ways said, I was never a true Beautiful – “
“This is crazy talk, Dylan!” He stands up just as quickly as he sat down, and comes forward to grip my shoulders. “This was why we changed things. So people didn’t have to look in the mirror and think, ‘Wow, I really shouldn’t have thought that bad thing about Mr. So-and-so, if I hadn’t I wouldn’t have gotten my nose bent out of shape.’ It was a crazy system and you know it. Does a government have the right to command people on what they say, how they act in everyday life and, most importantly, how they think?”
I look away from him. I know what he is saying is true, but I still can’t erase those images from my mind. Couldn’t it be, in a way, my own fault for it? Even if I wasn’t the one who stabbed their hearts or slit their throats, I might as well have been. I changed things and for it, they aren’t happy. That is my own fault. And despite what our supporters say – who make up the bulk of the electorate, otherwise it wouldn’t have worked – I still can’t erase the creeping thought that it is still my own fault. Few people can have such knowledge in their heads and not collapse under the weight of it.
There were so many different lives I could have led, but I lead this one: life where I was a leader, one in which people were willing to die for their freedom and willing to protect me if it kept them free. But how could someone be free if they still had to die for something? And there is not one doubt in my mind that if I had stayed where I was when I was young, and done everything the Old Government had asked, I would have succeeded in a manner that was comfortable to me as I would have had no knowledge of this one. I would have still been ‘leader’ but for a different cause. There is no doubt in my mind that I would have married someone different, had different children, followed a different ideology. But my life led me into the arms of the husband in this reality, with our children, and this idea of life, one that we had introduced back into the world. And I cannot help but wonder – how many different choices did I have to make, how many different situations had to happen for me to end up a mere puppet in a world who would have only loved me due to my looks?
