Killing Una

5,000 words

Killing Una 

By Eli Uszacki

Ben hunched over his computer. He sat at a cluttered desk in the closet he called a bedroom and leaned his head back, running his hands through his hair. The chair he sat in creaked where he had screwed it back together and caused him to slouch further, staring at the peeling plaster on the ceiling. A cursor flashed languidly on the screen, awaiting orders. The bedside lamp burned a hole in the night, which loomed outside the heavy door at the end of the room. The story was coming to a head, the months of planning and fantasizing, the long hours spent typing and revising and all those visions of perfection now crashing into one another in a chaotic confluence of ideas, words and continuity errors. It was all too much. With a sigh, he grabbed his coat and swung open the heavy door to the backyard and walked until he could see the stars. Crickets hummed gently and dew brushed off the cold leaves of grass as they slid past his socks, which came to a stop in the middle of the yard as he looked up to the sky. He relayed the names of the constellations and major stars, slowly falling into the intricate map of light turning overhead. A question he had avoided for weeks loomed before him and now he had no choice but to answer it. He wondered: how do I finish this story? Do I really need to kill her?

 He thought about Una, his beloved main character, in all of her faults and perfections, all of her hopes and fears and hate and love. He felt her becoming a person inside of him, a Russian doll of sorts, an infinity in an infinite room. Should she die?  It pained him to think of her death, but it had been the plan all along. While he had always felt like there had been a direction with the story, that maybe the direction had changed, the meaning had wandered and now he was left with something reflective of his own change, rather than the growth and flux of his fictional world, like an explorer following a broken compass. The cold air felt good, and the night was calming as always. He knew it had to be done, it was inevitable that she would die, but it still felt wrong. Who would bring a person to life just to slay them?

An idea popped into his head. Of course! it was obvious. Terrifying, but obvious.

Why don’t I just ask her?   

#

Una Killmaster sat alone in the council chamber. The room, once intimidating, had gained familiarity. She traced the edges of the stone table and followed the gentle lines in the sandstone that comprised the cavernous walls. This room was one of the few places she could go to be truly alone, though she still posted guards at the top of the long spiral staircase leading down from the atrium to the secluded stone chamber where she often rested. She eased her boots off and felt the cool stone as it chilled the soles of her aching feet and thought of her youth in the fields, the perfect darkness and silence of sunrise, breeze in the leaves and dirt between her toes and the gray-blue light of the sun as it peeked over the edge of the Martian plain. She wished to go back there, to relive those moments of purity. But that was foolish. Everything was out of her control now, she had created a war, a problem, that was impossible to end. The only way out was through.

Tomorrow would be the hinge, the tipping point around which the future would swing, a battle that would save her way of life or mark the doom of everything she had ever known. Una tapped her foot. She was more nervous than she had ever been.  The stakes were high, and she was gambling not just her own life, but the lives of every person in commune four, possibly the lives of everyone in the wasteland once called Mars. She was committed. All she could do was calm her nerves, maybe sleep, and see this through to the end. 

A rush of footsteps echoed down the stairwell, pattering like rain, then slowing as they approached the entrance to the chamber. This was a bad sign. She directed the guards to only let urgent messages through, and an urgent message at this time could mean anything. Una took a deep breath and set her jaw, assuming the expression of the hardened military commander she was desperately trying to be.

#

“Who are you, and what message do you bring?”

Ben was at a loss for words. There she sat, Una Killmaster, the scar on her cheek standing out in the golden light of the illumination globe on the stone table of the council chamber, just as he had imagined it. Cut marks covered the black sleeveless shirt and fighting pants he had dressed her in, where the swords of enemy soldiers had come close to her flesh. She glared at him with a look of militaristic self-importance that he knew was a front, a shell covering a soft, caring, broken young woman with the world on her shoulders.

“Answer me.”  

He realized he was staring. Shit. Ben thought. What do I say? It was a delicate meeting, one that would prove very confusing for the both of them. He stepped into the room, slowly and silently, the apprehension in his voice clear and wavering.

“Hi. You don’t know me, but I know you. I have come to ask you a question.”

         The look of confusion on her face deepened, though the infamous Una Killmaster remained unimpressed. 

         “What question?”

         Ben took a breath and smoothed his old, wrinkled hoody before stepping into the room and taking a seat at the table. He chose one close to the door, far from the seats the council had taken before they had been disbanded. It took four steps to get to the seat and he realized that the space from the door to the table was shorter than he had originally intended.

         “This is going to be very hard to explain,” Ben paused for a moment, glancing downwards, gathering his thoughts. “My name is Ben Uzaki. I write stories-” 

         “What kind of stories?”

“Stories about the future. Sometimes about other worlds and sometimes from my own life.” he trailed off again, at a loss for words. He felt the distinct pressure of the moment, how from her perspective he was just some fool wasting her time on the eve of the most important day of her life. What could I possibly say? How do I ask this question?  Una was still staring at him, her expression equal parts confused and intrigued.  Ben soldiered on. “I came here because we know each other, kind of, and I wanted to ask your permission for something. You see, I’m writing a story where you are the main character."

         There was a moment of silence as the two looked at each other. Una looked at ben like a child examining an unfinished puzzle.  

         “Excuse me?”

         “I know it’s strange, but I’m writing about you and I just wanted to ask your advice on something important.”

         To her credit, Una seemed to be handling the situation well. She glanced to the side, likely suspending her judgment for the moment, then exhaled and leaned further into her carved stone seat.

         “Very well. Be quick, it’s not long before I need to go to sleep. What story are you writing?”

“Well,” Ben started, but paused as images from the last three years of his life flashed in his mind, out of order or linear form, just emotions and impressions of this woman he created from pieces of himself, all of them bent by suffering, all of them sparkling strangely and arranged in mosaic form, a personage more idea than personality, not a character at all but something more. A real person, born of his suffering and love and conviction. He could tell her the plot lines, but that was never the story, really. The story was a feeling he had sometimes. A deep love and a deep hurt. If anything, the plot just seemed to get in the way of that. He decided to tell her the feeling, because after all that was what she was: just a feeling he had sometimes. It seemed like the only way she could begin to understand the importance, the impossibility of the situation at hand. Ben mustered his courage and spoke again.

“It is a story about suffering. A story about the life of a woman who loves deeply and cares like no one else. It is a story about the moment before the sun clears the horizon and the world glows in gray-light. It is the story of a life gone astray, the life of a woman marked by grief and disaster and the pieces of that woman falling together out of place. It is a story about the wrong thing, the bad thing, the angry thing and the hurting thing when they are kept in a box shaped only to hold love. It is the story about a drawing of a bird in a box in the ditch by the third plot in the north field and everything it holds.”

They were locking eyes now. The two of them stared at each other for a moment, some form of incomprehensible knowing passing between them; a gentle, impossible spark of recognition the likes of which can only pass between an idea and its creator. Ben saw twitches of emotion on her face, could almost see the wave of strangeness crashing over her. She sat still now, her attention now fully captured by the stranger across the table. Softly, she spoke.

“How do you know about the box?” Una asked, her face ashen. Ben knew what she was thinking: Nobody knew about the box, not even Tara, and she was dead anyway.

“I buried it with you. In chapter seven.”

“And where is it now?”

“Nowhere. You dug it up and burned it when Tara died. You had a dream that night, women emerging from the tilled earth and walking into the sky-”

“-And my mothers’ face among them.” Una completed.

They sat in silence for a moment. She tried to control her breathing, but her breath came out shaky. Ben shifted in his seat, glancing around, giving her time to think. Una closed her eyes and phrased a question, still failing to fully believe what was happening.

“If this is true, why did you come? Why now?”

“I came here tonight because I don’t know what will happen tomorrow.  I wanted to ask your permission for something.” He failed to meet her eyes as he spoke, despite her piercing stare.

“Permission for what?”

Their eyes met, just for a moment. Ben held his breath and blinked hard. This was proving to be even more difficult than he had anticipated. His palms were sweating and he wiped them on his jeans. Una wore an expression that most people only wear in the moments before a car crash. Is this too cruel? Should I just leave? He thought. No, It’s too late now. I have to ask. Ben took another deep breath, staring deep into her eyes, which seemed to glow, nut brown and hazel, against the red and tan striations of the stone chamber.

“You are going to die soon. And… I want your blessing.”  

The air went stale.  Both parties sat wordless. How in the world does a person react to something like that? What is a person supposed to do when the arbiter of their fate reveals their untimely end? The unlikely pair sat in a heavy, awkward silence as they both processed the implications of their meeting.  

“Um…” Una said, before biting her lip and swallowing. “Can you explain a little more?”, then with more force, “I mean, what the hell?  You can’t just reveal this… this… thing, this idea that I’m only a figment of your imagination and then immediately tell me I’m going to die! What the fuck!” her eyes were wide. Ben could see the gears turning as she began to realize the scale, the implications of his presence. She stood, putting her hands on her head and began to pace around the chamber. “I mean, you’re saying that my whole life exists as some... story for other people’s entertainment! Do you have any idea what I’ve been through? Where were you when my parents died? When I buried Tara? All those times I was wounded? You just watched!?”  

Things were getting out of control. Ben stood up, walking around the table so he could level with her gaze. He knew she would ask questions he couldn’t answer, fuck, she did it all the time without even knowing it. But how could he explain that he loved her? That he really did care? He didn’t know the answer to her questions, she was only a tinted mirror of himself, reflective of him in more ways than even he could understand.

“I’m going to be totally honest with you. I’m pretty new to this storytelling thing. You are really the first person I’ve ever made and well…” fuck, Ben thought, this is going to sound so insulting. “Well, I didn’t do the best job of planning you. I didn’t really have a good vision of what your life would be and I just started writing because I wanted you to exist so badly. And now I’m worried that the life I created for you doesn’t do you justice.”

“You don’t even know who I am? How do you tell my story if I’m not even… I don’t even know…” She looked off into the middle distance, briefly at a loss for words. “…finished. I’m not even finished.”

“Of course you’re not finished! The story isn’t done! I haven’t even finished a first draft.”

“Draft!? Are you gonna go back and change me?”

“Well, yeah, I mean I’ll change the story but you the character won’t change. I’ll tweak stuff to make it easier to understand. What I’m trying to say-”

“How can you know I won’t change? You just said you don’t even know who I am!”

Any lingering timidity from their initial meeting vanished as Ben pointed his finger at Una as if scolding a dog.

“Of course I know what you are! You’re me!”

The room fell silent as the two of them pondered that statement. At some point in the mele they had both begun to cry. Ben sniffled and cleared his throat to speak again, softly this time.  

“You are a part of me, and I am also incomplete. People are incomplete, in general, that’s just how things work. You’re not complete until you’re dead, really, and even then you might still have never finished growing. My problem is not that I wrote you as an incomplete or imperfect person, my problem is that I have spent all this time imagining you, creating your world and everyone in it and building a story and giving you time and history and opinions and until now I never once considered that it would be painful to kill you.” he was breathing heavily, the emotion thick in his voice. “I sat down tonight to begin the end of your story, and I realized that killing you will make me very, very sad. I want so badly to give you happiness, I want to see you pull through and learn from your mistakes and find redemption and I’m afraid to write that story, because it is a story I’ve never experienced, one of real importance that must contain elemental truths of personhood that I do not know.” ben paused, shuffling his feet in the silence, then added, “I am afraid that I am not complete enough to complete you.”

Once again silence enveloped them. Ben waited patiently while Una processed his words, waiting for some kind of wisdom that he himself did not already possess. She sat down, slumping into the chair like a sack of Martian yams.

Meanwhile, Ben thought about the core of the story, the thing he wanted Una’s whole life to prove: that people could be lost. After all, that is the first lesson a person learns when they grow up: that the world is a massive confusing machine that rolls onwards without direction and everybody is onboard but nobody is driving; adults are just as scared and clueless as children, and no amount of intellect or power can change that. Only mistakes, only softness, forgiveness and listening can help a person cope with, or partially understand, the motion of a machine that moves at random. That is the story of her life he thought, a spark of awe forming behind his eyes, the story of the person who tries to drive the machine. He thought about explaining himself but knew that Una shared this feeling, this hopelessness in the face of the uncontrollable. After all, they were his thoughts in her head. Finally, Una spoke up, dissolving the silence.

“You’re right, nobody is complete. But I don’t think you need to be complete to tell a complete story. If that was the case then stories wouldn’t exist because there wouldn’t be anyone complete enough to tell them. I think I understand why you wanted to tell my story. Your world is like mine. It is brutal and confusing and random and nobody is truly in control and it feels like nothing ever makes sense. I think you wanted to prove that a person can’t force the world to be understood or work perfectly or become something it isn’t. Permanent change is a slow, gentle, constant thing and time is long. That is the greatest power in existence: Time.” 

A look of pride swept across Bens features.

“I couldn’t have put it better myself.” 

“I think you did”

The pair of them laughed, both keenly aware of the absurdity of the moment. The conversation had calmed, but they still hadn’t come to any sort of decision and while time didn’t truly exist while they talked, the hour was still getting late.  

“So, I’m your first?” Una asked once they were finished laughing.

“Yes.”

“Are there any others?”

“Yeah, maybe four or five. None of them are as… real as you are though. Sometimes you bleed into them and I have to remind myself that you can’t play every role in every story.”

A thought occurred to Una as he spoke.

“Have you written all of my dreams?”

Ben laughed again.

“I think so. But honestly I’ve only given you two dreams in your entire life. If there’s more than that, then they must have been your own.”

Una scrunched her face trying to remember all of her dreams.

“Oh my god. You’re right. There’s just two. You really have created me.”

“Yes.”

Una took a deep breath. “Then it follows that I would be incomplete if I were never destroyed?”

“I suppose, everybody has to die.”  

“Of course. Everyone has to die.” Una spoke in a measured tone, choosing her words carefully. She sat up in her seat, taking the position of an entrepreneur proposing an idea “But, out of curiosity, what would happen if I didn’t die tomorrow?”

Ben sat back in his chair, pondering the question. He was beginning to realize that he had never wondered whether or not Una would die, He knew that it was the only way to tell the story, outside of writing some sort of sequel. The question he had really been asking all along was: will she forgive if I do? He needed to be honest with her.

“Well, the whole plan of the story was to end with your death, to show the gravity of your mistakes and the futility of your violence and anger…” Ben paused for a moment. It felt strange to say these things out loud, especially to her. He took another breath and continued. “The alternative would be for me to simply give up. I would stop writing the story and let it sit for a long time before picking up again with a fresh perspective. Otherwise I would have to write another whole novel’s worth of material to span a redemptive arc that would have to take place in some other world or some other time, and that’s a whole other thing to figure out. It would be a long time before I would be ready for a complex undertaking like that. Honestly, Una, I came to you because I was afraid of letting your story die. I want you to see the light, I guess.” He flicked his eyes down to the smooth sandstone floor, shuffling his feet awkwardly. It was cold and he could feel goosebumps on the inside of his salmon-colored hoody. They sat in the stone chamber in silence, a kind of silence that was vast and hollow, somehow colder and more desperate than the muted silences of a bedroom, an empty store or a fallow field. The silence between them had a level of intensity that was unerving. After much rumination, Una spoke.

“So, like you said, you want my blessing?”

“Yeah, I suppose so” Ben said, the shame he felt seeping into his words as he spoke. It was a cowardly request.

“And I won’t notice if you give up?”

“No. I don’t think you’ll notice that anything had happened at all, regardless of my choice”

“Will I remember this conversation?”

“Do you want to?”  

Una considered it. She looked at Ben and he looked back. Ben noticed that she was rubbing her thumb against her forefinger, a nervous tick he had developed after breaking the finger in a climbing accident. He looked down at his own hands. He had been doing the same thing. I know she is made me, but how much of me is made of her?

“No. I wouldn’t risk interfering in my own story. I think…”  The two locked eyes again while Una gathered her thoughts. She started again, “I think it is fitting that I die tomorrow.”

Ben nodded in agreement, almost hesitantly as though he were afraid of this confirmation. The conversation had not made him feel any better.

“If,”

Ben looked up, surprised at the addendum to Una’s decision. She spoke carefully.

“You can promise that I will see redemption. If the story ends at my death then it will be left half told. You owe me that much.”

It was true. He knew it.

“Of course. I promise.”

They sat one more time in silence. It was a final silence, a silence of potential.

“Will that be all?” Ben asked.

“Yes. You are dismissed.” Una said, half joking. Ben smiled and turned to go. They both hated goodbyes and neither of them felt the need to engage in formality. As he crossed the threshold, Una piped up.

“One more thing” 

Ben turned around, expectant.

“Yes?”

“Give me one more dream. Make it beautiful.”

Ben smiled.

“As you wish.” He said, before ascending the spiral stairs to the atrium, to the grass outside, to the vibrating field of stars and the heavy, open door awaiting him.

That night, Una climbed the stairs in confusion and no small amount of distress, though as she approached the top her thoughts slowly faded and were replaced by more pressing matters, the same loops she had found herself in in recent weeks. By the time she crossed the grand atrium of Martian apocalypse commune #4, the previous hour and it’s life-altering importance had faded into hazy indistinction within the recesses of her tired, aching mind. She fell into bed and slept as soon as her head touched the pillow, crossing the watery boundary between the waking world and the ebb and flow of dream-time.

#

She was in nature. Trees and undergrowth crowded around her as she ran along a narrow trail, winding in and out of woodland on the slope of a grand mountain. She felt every stone under her feet and every grain of sand. Sunlight reflected in the canopy above. Aspen leaves, they were. She had never seen them before but somehow the name had a familiar shape in her mouth. At some point, she came to an overlook and stopped. Below her stretched a vast forest, green and unending. It was her home, she knew, the mars of old when trees grew freely and water flowed forever. She was standing on the flanks of Mount Olympus, looking out to the place that would become the site of so much violence and desperation. It was covered in a gently undulating canopy of trees. There was nothing there but forest. This was the age when people lived without violence, when choice was possible. She moved on, every muscle working in concert as she ran, every footfall perfect in its placement, every step catching in the perfect place. It was light and effortless, the air was cold and perfect in her lungs, the forest floor was dappled with afternoon light that flew past like the sparkling surface of a shining river. She had never seen a river before, though the comparison was striking. Few things crossed her mind; she only felt the calm of the present. She could go on forever, striding in perfect repetition, everything in place and playing together in harmony, the way sunlight feels across the electric sea of the solar system, the way water feels in a perennial stream.