Somehow I remember it all. The scorched fields, the black mask, the yellow concrete cascading to the ground, the blood. The day it all happened, it ended, it began, memories coming in waves forcing me to face horrors I tried so hard to put away. I was 6, yes that's where the memories begin, I was 6. To young, far too young to understand or comprehend what I saw that day. Mi hermano, hermana, all of us playing on the uneven concrete of the school the Americanos built for us. The ball, a ragged soccer ball with the white and black spots gone revealing the ugly brown underneath, slipped through my fingers and rolled out onto the dirt road. The black mask, the black car, go hand in hand as the arrival of one came with the arrival of the other. It drove up destroying my soccer ball and my life in the process, or did it help start my life? I mean if they had never come would I still be in the village? Some rice farmer working for the man? It is impossible to know if I would have shared that fate like my father, living just to please someone else. Knowing you’re worth nothing more that than the few dollars you get a day from breaking your back in the mud. I guess for that I am thankful that I was able to get away, but I am never grateful for the black mask because in order to start my new life they tore my other one away, the good and the bad.
The fire could be seen burning in the distance. The palace of yellow that all our hard earned money went to. You see my father worked everyday in the mud getting rice to feed our family and got paid no more than 3 or 4 dollars a day to pick thousands of grains, and then give that money back to get barely two hundred grains to feed us. That day when the palace fell it should have been a glorious day of my village finally earning its freedom from the man but it wasn’t. Why wasn’t it? What am I missing? Who burnt it down? It doesn’t matter now I guess, all that does is the black car, the black mask. It came rumbling down the road about about 30 minutes after the fire started to burn and crushed my soccer ball before stopping in front of me and my siblings. Three, four, no three men with their black mask came out of the car. Two of them with large firearms, one a 20 gauge sleek automatic shotgun, Johnson’s favorite, the other a standard issue Scar-H hollow point. I didn’t know any of this at the time but remembering it now I realize what they were and even who was wielding them as they cut down my family tree. The last man standing in the back with his hands behind his back standing in a possession of power with a simple pistol sheathed at his side. We stood there looking up at them with wide eyes wondering what these gringos wanted with a small village like Cotui. The one in front of me, a burly man with big arms with giant veins and calves the size of telephone poles and an even bigger belly looked back at the man standing in power, a man slender and tall definitely older than the others with a ponytail coming down his neck, and said “these too sir?”
The man considered this for a second then looked at me through the giant dark pieces of glass that wouldn’t let me see his eyes, but I could tell he was looking into my eyes. At that moment he assessed my soul as I stood their un-nerved while my siblings shook in their boots. He said in english which I didn’t understand at the time “yes, but leave the one in front of you alive, I think he could be useful.” Sounds of explosions rang out from their firearms with a flash of light blinding me, mi hermano, hermana, no...they fell. Fast, hard, hitting the ground with a deafening thud. Red sprayed across my face and my Aladdin T-shirt, Aladdin? Alibaba? Morgiana? No none of those, definitely Aladdin. There were no screams or cries just the silent drip of the blood streaming down my siblings bodies through the holes in their chest. But there was a scream, yes, a single scream, from behind the men, a woman's scream. Mi Madre came running pushing against the men and trying to grab me and carry me to safety but, no, no she didn’t get me to safety she fell like the rest. Her face went blank and eyes pale as the man in power simply put a hand against her and drained her essence, her life was being drained right in front of me as I watched her turned to dust, and blow away in the wind off to I hoped heaven. The man put black gloves on and came over kneeling before me. He took of his mask revealing his deep hazel eyes that glowed in a deadly way. He looked at me and said “your family was weak, and unimportant. You however, you are strong. I feel a fire within you, and I saw it as my men cut your family to the ground and you didn’t even flinch.” He put his hand on my shoulder “ you are better than them, and more powerful then your father. You are no longer his child, you are mine.” He reached behind him and pulled out a machete, my father's machete. It’s shiny silver face covered in blood, fresh, from what I can remember. If I had known at the time the horrors he would bring to my life in the future I would have taken that machete and spilled his blood upon my homeland, avenging the lives of Chammel, Chamilcha, Chicho, Fema, Chappa...but I couldn’t, I didn’t. I just stood there, unmoving and unsure of the things that I had seen, planted like a tree in this moment where I was on the cusp of greatness and the ultimate downfall of my spirit. He lead me to the SUV and helped me inside. We rode down the dirt road passing by makeshift houses and more black cars. Bullets flying, my countrymen dying in front of me. The river that ran through my village was dyed red with blood as bodies that I recognized flowed down it. Men with machetes running into men with black mask and being gunned down mercilessly and relentlessly as they tried to save our village from the men. As we rode we came to the clearing of the rice fields that spread for miles and I got my first clear view of the flames as they starting coming down the field. It was almost sanctifying as it burned away the old me making me someone new, someone I don’t recognize even to this day. A man, not a man, the man. Stood with no mask with his back turned to me, his maroon blazer, black slacks, and maroon Nikes. He had his hands on his hips just enough that I could see the assortment of knives below on his leather belt, glistening their brass glow against against the flames. We drove onward for a couple of hours, I didn’t speak, or make a sound, I couldn’t think or move I was just stuck in this state of perpetual paralysis, I didn’t even ponder what had happened, I was just...blank. We arrived at an airfield where a white jet awaited us. An emblem of a tiger with it’s eyes ablaze was plastered on the side of the plane piercing my younger self with it’s fiery eyes. I was lead into the jet taking each step like I was stepping on hot coals purifying me and making me new, but the thing that made me new, the real fire, was inside.
The interior was luxurious and beautiful, more beautiful than any house or place I had ever seen in my impoverished life. The seats were genuine fine brown leather, with mahogany tables and wood paneling. Fancy glass bottles filled with strange brown liquids, alcohol I suppose, were placed in compartments across the cabin. In the very back of the plane a curtain hung down impeding my view of what was beyond, all I could see was a faint blue glow creeping from the seams trying to get through and shed its ravenous light throughout the cabin. My “father” led me to the curtain and opened it with a swift motion to reveal a extravagant metal chair with wires and cords going every which way leading into a headset glowing blue at the top the chair. I should have been reluctant, I should have run away, but no, no I was a fool, a kid, what could I have done to stop this chair, these men from taking everything away in as little as 30 seconds. They strapped me into the chair with leather straps around my legs and wrist. They tightened them a little tighter than I felt necessary but I had no idea what was going on. A man with turtle rim glasses and a lab coat stood near a computer hooked up to the machine. He was a squirrely looking man who had slicked back brown hair and and scruff on his chin. He couldn’t have been more 30 years old and yet sleep deprivation made him look 20 years older with his saggy bags and grumpy demeanor. Joseph, yes his name was Joseph, he was my friend, my creator, but now he’s...where is he? He pressed some buttons on the computer and looked to my “father”.
“The machine is ready when you are commander, the output has hit the adequate 64% and we have enough joules to remove the 6 years requested.”
“Excellent” the commander said, “give me a second to talk with the boy and then turn it on, I don’t want anything left behind.”
Joseph’s face seemed disturbed for a second but said confidently “Yes Commander King.”
The commander looked me in the eyes once more as he had before and said to me the only thing I remembered of that day until now as things start coming back. “You are my son, you are mine, you will show no mercy, and you will never give in, you are a weapon, a warrior, whose only purpose is to bring death to those who oppose our order. Welcome to the Wuxing order, Chanel son of King.” The machine whirred to life shedding blue light across the cabin and for the first time that day I screamed. They say there are two types of pain someone will feel in your life, physical and mental, well this machine made me feel both. I could feel, actually feel the memories, mi Hermano, mi hermana, madre, padre, all of it being sucked away to where I couldn't find it. It wasn’t buried somewhere in my mind it was gone. The took everything and everyone from me making me a blank canvas for whatever they wanted me to be. They wanted me, a six year old boy to be a killing machine that would do their bidding without question of cause, that day was the day I died, that was the day ordinance was born.