January 3, 2020: Know Your Enemy

Song: “Know Your Enemy” by Green Day off the album 21st Century Breakdown

It is difficult to say if I should thank or fail against my father for raising us like he did. A family of paranoiacs, constantly on guard for the invaders. The drills. The memorization of facts. The weapons training.

It made sense, I suppose. It seemed like they were everywhere back then. Like any day they’d be on our doorstep.

History made a fool of him and he never really recovered. No one was as bad about the peace treaty as him. Never had someone watched his side achieve victory with so much heartbreak. He’d never admit it, but he was not just preparing us for the worst-case scenario. He was preparing us for the scenario he desperately wanted to live through.

Is it any wonder I resented him growing up? Felt perpetually annoyed about how we never had enough money for the clothes everyone had, but we had enough to purchase cords and cords of wood for supplies?

Of course, now they really are everywhere. They don’t just seem like they are at the gates, they’re literally inside them.

Dad moved to the United States and my brother and sister and their families followed suit. The war he had prepared for even after the ink dried on the treaty finally arrived but he was too old and too broken by the first disappointment to meet the challenge.

I should have followed. But my kids were older and my business employed so many. If I cut and run, I wouldn’t just be leaving, I’d be kicking out a support pole in the community when my friends and neighbors needed it most.

So although I hated them, I stayed. I pasted on a happy face when they patrolled in the “uniforms,” I matched their phony courteous overfamiliarity in kind, a contest of who could be as fake as possible.

One thing my father was wrong about. They’re not animals, monsters. Up close, they’re pathetic. Pale and hollow. Ensnared by old rules and rituals they’ve convinced themselves are evidence of their superiority. I could have respected monsters, in some way. These…creatures…I can only feel disgust for.

Of course, not everyone who stayed felt like we did. The Gunthers, they’ve become snitches. Rather than resist or just keep their heads down, they report us, family by family, to curry favor. A curfew violation here, a religious artifact there. They sweep down and the family disappears in the middle of the night. The Gunthers have fooled themselves into thinking our enemy will show them favor, with leave them alone, because of these actions. The Gunthers are too cowardly to seek true freedom and would rather settle for the false temporary hope that information protects them. Our enemies are bloodthirsty. By reporting others, the Gunthers only tarry their trip to the top of the menu.

It came as no surprise then, as the sun dipped into the darkness of night, that the sentries alerted us to the enemy’s presence. It was even less of a surprise when they showed up on our doorstep. Ever since I refused to let Helga enter our house I knew it was coming. It was only a matter of when. It’s not as though, if I had let her enter, she wouldn’t have turned us in anyway though. So at least the enemy has no clue of what we’ve done inside.

That’s the thing. My father wasted my childhood, but I remembered it all. It was like mental muscle memory. The moment the enemy took the capital, I went to work. By the time they finally got their act together enough to choke our supply routes, to ban materials, it was too late. Moreover, we had never had to even request some of the not banned but still suspicious materials. We looked clean as a whistle even as our house became a deathtrap for the enemy.

They knocked at quarter after 8. A dozen of them fanned out across our lawn. Always at night. As though we were all too dumb to miss that detail. I took my time answering. My daughter hid in the crawlspace. Last year she contracted the illness and was rounded up. We freed her and gave her the cure but she’s still listed amongst the victims so she must stay hidden for her sake and ours. If they see her cured, they’ll know we’ve seen through their propaganda. The disease works fast, true, but the lies about the cure only working for 48 hours? We’ve found it destroys the disease without any lingering effects even 3 weeks later.

They’ve depended on citizens tossing out their afflicted immediately. When we figure out how to tell our side that it isn’t true, the enemy will lose both a means of dividing us and increasing their ranks.

For now though, we have to survive the random search.

They stay on the front steps, pacing impatiently. They smile but their frustration is clear. I make them sweat it longer. A master race and I have twelve of them trapped on my front steps using nothing but acting like I forgot the protocols of courtesy. When I finally step to the right and apologize for forgetting myself, I can hear them sigh in relief. I invite them and they grin again, convinced they’ve already won.

Idiots.

The thing about folklore is that it is only ever half useful. It can give the what of the rules but not the why. For the longest time, we just assumed it was a matter of the smell that put them off. The smell warned them, let them take steps to avoid and escape. It was the chemical components, though, they were what was fatal to them.

It took me 3 summers between the ages od 12 and 15 to figure it out but I did. A garlic aerosol with no scent. The moment they enter and I shut the door, it starts. It’ll make us feel gross and queasy. But them? Thirty seconds exposure and their vision blurs, their sense of equilibrium slips. At five minutes they go blind. If they can’t get out by 10, they drop dead.

Half make it outside and tumble head over heels into the trough. Thank goodness we’re believers. Really increases the weapons available to us. That’s one we still haven’t figured out, but no need to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Only two make it out of the holy water.

I delight in pushing the cross into one of their heads and he goes screaming. Benjamin from down the road helps with the other, stoically shoving a Star of David into the other’s mouth. Benjy makes a grim joke about how hard it’ll be to get the tarnish off and smiles. We gotta take our joys where we can get them.

We wait the rest of the night but another patrol never comes through. They’re cowards and until they figure out what happened, they won’t come back through the township. That gives us plenty of time to hoist the radio receiver. Spread the word about the cure, about the lies.

When Herb goes out to his car the next day, I’m standing by my fence, beaming. I shout a hello at Mr. Gunther and he pales. If I’m alive that means the enemy either ignored his “tip” and he and Helga have fallen out of favor or the enemy didn’t and Herb and Helga will be scapegoated for send a dozen bloodsuckers to their death. Either way, their days of favored status are over.

I whistle as I walk back to the house. Time to reset the traps, rearrange them. Sure, none of them got out alive but one can’t be too careful. My father taught me that.

Oh, dad. When this is over I’ll thank him for all the training when I was a kid. Then I’ll rub his nose in the fact that he missed out on it all. We must take our joys where we can find them.