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The people of my town believe a nuclear apocalypse happened decades ago. The truth is almost as terrible.
Have you ever heard of the Japanese soldiers who didn't surrender along with the rest of their country in 1945 and spent decades hidden away in the belief that World War II raged on? The town I lived in for the early parts of my life gave me a similar experience.
As kids in our small town, we all grew up with the same story. It was late October 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to engulf our planet in a fiery apocalypse. On the evening of October 27, the townsfolk tucked themselves into bed for an inevitably restless night of sleep whilst radio and television chatter in the background provided increasingly worried-sounding commentary of the situation at hand. At some point, the signals grew garbled before eventually turning into static and the constant noise of live updates was suddenly sorely missed. Before dawn came, unfamiliar men in army fatigues went door to door and led the townspeople into the large shelter built beneath their feet in anticipation of the exact scenario they had been alerted to. Supposedly some people refused, with the explanation that there had been no official communication of an attack or a state of war and that they would comply if they were allowed to find out for themselves through their long-defunct radio and television sets. Childhood rumour had it that none of these people were seen again.
I was born a decade after that night. My first memory is playing catch with myself against a decaying concrete wall in the shelter. It was a pretty big place, bigger than you would expect for a town of our size and life down there did its best to mimic the lives we had all had stolen from us. Those efforts were admirable but ultimately fruitless. There was a dingy little school for the kids, a community kitchen with massive stockpiles of awful canned food and large rooms filled with rows upon rows of rusting metal bunk beds. Still, though, life in the shelter was awful. I would not wish being trapped underground with hundreds of people for decades on anybody, and the drab existence took its toll on the older townspeople who had once known a life far better than that one. There was a room that became notorious for the sheer amount of people who took their own lives there. They had to get creative with such limited resources and sometimes it would take days or weeks for somebody to die after slitting their wrists with a dull and rusty knife. I would know, because my father died in that godforsaken room. They found his lifeless body dangling from the ceiling and little ten-year-old me was left in a state of agony. I didn't talk for months after it happened, and sometimes I still wish it had been me instead of him. Then, at least, I wouldn't be burdened with the knowledge I am today.
I remember being taught about the aftermath of the night that started all of this in school. We were told that most of our nation and the world had been ravaged by clouds of smoke and pillars of fire. That life on the ground above us was practically impossible. That we had to stay there, forever, lest we face the horrible deaths we had been saved from. There were a lot of rules to ensure we stuck to those ideals, but we were far too terrified to be sceptical of anything we were taught and so those rules went untested.
It took me until I was 19 to question the teachings we were expected to take as absolute truths. You see, whilst I was mostly a good citizen and complied with the rules of the shelter, I did have a sneaky little habit. I don't know why, perhaps I had grown bored or just wanted to disobey the seemingly arbitrary rules for once, but I had a borderline obsession with exploring the nooks and crannies of the shelter. Finding untouched corners and hints of a life that supposedly didn't exist any more gave me a thrill I didn't know was possible in that place. Those hints were usually boring by any outside measure, but one day I found something that left me both in awe and bewildered terror.
A window.
I didn't know what it was at first, because when I came across it all I could see was a build-up of dust and cobwebs in the shape of a square, but I quickly got to work peeling away the layers that had built up over what was presumably a great many years to reveal something out of my wildest dream. An impossibly green landscape stood before my eyes. The sky was a deep blue with an occasional cloud floating by, and the houses abandoned decades before lay there in an unmaintained condition that gave them a unique character. I must have stood there for hours, taking it all in. Wondering why the world I was taught about wasn't what I was staring at. Wondering why we had been lied to. I made my way back to my bunk bed at some point and settled in for a night of restless sleep, of my few unconscious moments being pierced by the supposedly impossible landscape I had seen.
It took me weeks to bottle up the courage to go back because I was terrified that my eyes had somehow deceived me, that I was losing my mind and that I would end up in that room with the same fate my father faced. I couldn't tell anyone, and I didn't tell anyone. They would think I was losing my mind too, and understandably so. Eventually, though, I did go back. Armed with a little piece of my bed that I had managed to break off. Do you know what it's like to have a burning desire to step out into a world that you had always been taught would kill you as soon as it got the chance? Because I do. The perfect palette of colours before me was too strong to resist - I needed to go out there. To run my fingers along the green grass and to breathe in the air that had been meant for me.
So I did.
The window was large enough that after the glass was broken into minuscule pieces it was easy for me to climb out. I took my first step that wasn't in that shelter and inhaled for as long as I could whilst my lungs filled with cool, wonderful air. I turned my head back towards the window only to find it was gone. Bare concrete lay in front of me and my way out was no longer my way back in. Despite my confusion, I figured it was some long-forgotten security redundancy. I quickly forgot about that, though, as I refocused on the reality of life outside of that place. It was real, it was all real. I wasn't losing my mind. Everything I had seen through the window was exactly the same once I had rid myself of its constraints. Except one thing. It was out of view from the window, so I hadn't seen it before I climbed out. It pierced the otherwise impossibly pristine landscape around me. An army van. All four doors lay open and there was a singular person in the front seat. His head had a bullet hole cleanly through it, and any blood from the incident had long dried up. As I walked closer to the van, I noticed a piece of paper beneath the deceased soldier's dangling foot.
*"To whoever is lucky enough to read this,*
*I am sorry for what we did to your people, to your families. During the Cold War, the unit I worked for was ordered to implement a psychological experiment. It went too far. We were supposed to keep you in the shelter for a year. To test our readiness for what seemed like an inevitable future. To find out whether a shelter of that scale and nature could be our saving grace, our hope for rebuilding civilisation in the event of the bombs finally falling. It was unethical at best, but I rationalised it with the false comfort of doing a service to our nation. I told myself that perhaps our research would one day keep us all alive, even if it meant mental torment for the people of your town. Well, a year came and left quite a while ago. Slowly, governmental and military interest in this little experiment dried up. On the night that this all began, you were led to believe that the bombs were fast approaching our nation. The people who refused to believe our word - legitimised only by army fatigues and commanding voices - were the smart ones. That's why it hurt so much when we were ordered to line them up against a wall and shoot them.*
*They deserved so much better.*
*The truth is that Cold War tensions began to ease following the emotional high point of the missile crisis, and over the years the need for shelters subsided. With it, as I mentioned before, so did interest in our experiment. Our men filtered out over the course of months and years until I was the only one left. Perhaps the guilt I felt, the guilt that gnawed at me during every waking moment, kept me here. I had no purpose, no resources and no way to get to the people we had condemned to a miserable life years before. Still, though, the empty remnants of the town this once was kept a tight grip on me and I have never been able to leave. I will never leave. This is where I deserve to die, where I deserve to pay for the sins I committed upon the people who were once here. I hope and pray this letter someday finds a citizen of this condemned town, and I hope my confession can bring you some peace. I do not expect you to forgive me, nor do I deserve it, but please know that every moment I remain alive will be spent in an impossibly deep regret.*
*I have one final wish. Please bury my body and this letter as deep as you can dig in the soil of this town. I deserve to be forever condemned to an existence underneath the ground of where this all began, an existence you have wrongly been forced to partake in. I hope my pain is far worse than we made yours.*
*Goodbye."*
I must have sobbed for hours on end after reading the letter, and the days and weeks after that were a haze. Much of what I remember is made up of trying to get back into the shelter in a desperate bid to give my fellow townspeople the freedom of the life we were supposed to have. At every turn and entrance, I was met with metres of concrete and I never succeded in getting back into the shelter. I don't remember how long I tried, but eventually, I gave up and decided to grant the deceased soldier his final wish. I dug for days and buried him outside the area where the window that started this all used to be. I know he said he doesn't deserve forgiveness, but he had the dignity to understand the awful nature of what he did and he stayed with us until his end. He was a far better man than those who left us behind, forgotten about and condemned. I hope his regrets are washed away in the soil of our town.
As for me, I left the town a long time ago. I lost my way out as I was leaving, and I was never told the original name of the town in the shelter so unfortunately the memories are all the proof of my experience I have. The outside world took a lot of getting used to, but in the years since my escape, I have grown to be okay with my new life. Still, though, I will never forget what I left behind. Even if it was decades ago, my entire life was in that shelter. Everybody I knew and all that I loved. I wake up every morning having been tormented by nightmares of still being stuck in that deep, dark underground prison and yet I often find myself wishing for the comfort of those I lost upon my escape. I hope they found their peace with my sudden disappearance, but something in me knows they haven't. My pain and terror out here is almost as great as it was in there. Maybe ignorance is actually bliss, like they say.
Perhaps someday the townsfolk I once knew will be greeted with the same view of blue skies and green meadows I was.
In the meantime, I desperately hope that they found a better existence in the shelter than the one I once knew.
#entertainment
source
Have you ever heard of the Japanese soldiers who didn't surrender along with the rest of their country in 1945 and spent decades hidden away in the belief that World War II raged on? The town I lived in for the early parts of my life gave me a similar experience.
As kids in our small town, we all grew up with the same story. It was late October 1962 and the Cuban Missile Crisis threatened to engulf our planet in a fiery apocalypse. On the evening of October 27, the townsfolk tucked themselves into bed for an inevitably restless night of sleep whilst radio and television chatter in the background provided increasingly worried-sounding commentary of the situation at hand. At some point, the signals grew garbled before eventually turning into static and the constant noise of live updates was suddenly sorely missed. Before dawn came, unfamiliar men in army fatigues went door to door and led the townspeople into the large shelter built beneath their feet in anticipation of the exact scenario they had been alerted to. Supposedly some people refused, with the explanation that there had been no official communication of an attack or a state of war and that they would comply if they were allowed to find out for themselves through their long-defunct radio and television sets. Childhood rumour had it that none of these people were seen again.
I was born a decade after that night. My first memory is playing catch with myself against a decaying concrete wall in the shelter. It was a pretty big place, bigger than you would expect for a town of our size and life down there did its best to mimic the lives we had all had stolen from us. Those efforts were admirable but ultimately fruitless. There was a dingy little school for the kids, a community kitchen with massive stockpiles of awful canned food and large rooms filled with rows upon rows of rusting metal bunk beds. Still, though, life in the shelter was awful. I would not wish being trapped underground with hundreds of people for decades on anybody, and the drab existence took its toll on the older townspeople who had once known a life far better than that one. There was a room that became notorious for the sheer amount of people who took their own lives there. They had to get creative with such limited resources and sometimes it would take days or weeks for somebody to die after slitting their wrists with a dull and rusty knife. I would know, because my father died in that godforsaken room. They found his lifeless body dangling from the ceiling and little ten-year-old me was left in a state of agony. I didn't talk for months after it happened, and sometimes I still wish it had been me instead of him. Then, at least, I wouldn't be burdened with the knowledge I am today.
I remember being taught about the aftermath of the night that started all of this in school. We were told that most of our nation and the world had been ravaged by clouds of smoke and pillars of fire. That life on the ground above us was practically impossible. That we had to stay there, forever, lest we face the horrible deaths we had been saved from. There were a lot of rules to ensure we stuck to those ideals, but we were far too terrified to be sceptical of anything we were taught and so those rules went untested.
It took me until I was 19 to question the teachings we were expected to take as absolute truths. You see, whilst I was mostly a good citizen and complied with the rules of the shelter, I did have a sneaky little habit. I don't know why, perhaps I had grown bored or just wanted to disobey the seemingly arbitrary rules for once, but I had a borderline obsession with exploring the nooks and crannies of the shelter. Finding untouched corners and hints of a life that supposedly didn't exist any more gave me a thrill I didn't know was possible in that place. Those hints were usually boring by any outside measure, but one day I found something that left me both in awe and bewildered terror.
A window.
I didn't know what it was at first, because when I came across it all I could see was a build-up of dust and cobwebs in the shape of a square, but I quickly got to work peeling away the layers that had built up over what was presumably a great many years to reveal something out of my wildest dream. An impossibly green landscape stood before my eyes. The sky was a deep blue with an occasional cloud floating by, and the houses abandoned decades before lay there in an unmaintained condition that gave them a unique character. I must have stood there for hours, taking it all in. Wondering why the world I was taught about wasn't what I was staring at. Wondering why we had been lied to. I made my way back to my bunk bed at some point and settled in for a night of restless sleep, of my few unconscious moments being pierced by the supposedly impossible landscape I had seen.
It took me weeks to bottle up the courage to go back because I was terrified that my eyes had somehow deceived me, that I was losing my mind and that I would end up in that room with the same fate my father faced. I couldn't tell anyone, and I didn't tell anyone. They would think I was losing my mind too, and understandably so. Eventually, though, I did go back. Armed with a little piece of my bed that I had managed to break off. Do you know what it's like to have a burning desire to step out into a world that you had always been taught would kill you as soon as it got the chance? Because I do. The perfect palette of colours before me was too strong to resist - I needed to go out there. To run my fingers along the green grass and to breathe in the air that had been meant for me.
So I did.
The window was large enough that after the glass was broken into minuscule pieces it was easy for me to climb out. I took my first step that wasn't in that shelter and inhaled for as long as I could whilst my lungs filled with cool, wonderful air. I turned my head back towards the window only to find it was gone. Bare concrete lay in front of me and my way out was no longer my way back in. Despite my confusion, I figured it was some long-forgotten security redundancy. I quickly forgot about that, though, as I refocused on the reality of life outside of that place. It was real, it was all real. I wasn't losing my mind. Everything I had seen through the window was exactly the same once I had rid myself of its constraints. Except one thing. It was out of view from the window, so I hadn't seen it before I climbed out. It pierced the otherwise impossibly pristine landscape around me. An army van. All four doors lay open and there was a singular person in the front seat. His head had a bullet hole cleanly through it, and any blood from the incident had long dried up. As I walked closer to the van, I noticed a piece of paper beneath the deceased soldier's dangling foot.
*"To whoever is lucky enough to read this,*
*I am sorry for what we did to your people, to your families. During the Cold War, the unit I worked for was ordered to implement a psychological experiment. It went too far. We were supposed to keep you in the shelter for a year. To test our readiness for what seemed like an inevitable future. To find out whether a shelter of that scale and nature could be our saving grace, our hope for rebuilding civilisation in the event of the bombs finally falling. It was unethical at best, but I rationalised it with the false comfort of doing a service to our nation. I told myself that perhaps our research would one day keep us all alive, even if it meant mental torment for the people of your town. Well, a year came and left quite a while ago. Slowly, governmental and military interest in this little experiment dried up. On the night that this all began, you were led to believe that the bombs were fast approaching our nation. The people who refused to believe our word - legitimised only by army fatigues and commanding voices - were the smart ones. That's why it hurt so much when we were ordered to line them up against a wall and shoot them.*
*They deserved so much better.*
*The truth is that Cold War tensions began to ease following the emotional high point of the missile crisis, and over the years the need for shelters subsided. With it, as I mentioned before, so did interest in our experiment. Our men filtered out over the course of months and years until I was the only one left. Perhaps the guilt I felt, the guilt that gnawed at me during every waking moment, kept me here. I had no purpose, no resources and no way to get to the people we had condemned to a miserable life years before. Still, though, the empty remnants of the town this once was kept a tight grip on me and I have never been able to leave. I will never leave. This is where I deserve to die, where I deserve to pay for the sins I committed upon the people who were once here. I hope and pray this letter someday finds a citizen of this condemned town, and I hope my confession can bring you some peace. I do not expect you to forgive me, nor do I deserve it, but please know that every moment I remain alive will be spent in an impossibly deep regret.*
*I have one final wish. Please bury my body and this letter as deep as you can dig in the soil of this town. I deserve to be forever condemned to an existence underneath the ground of where this all began, an existence you have wrongly been forced to partake in. I hope my pain is far worse than we made yours.*
*Goodbye."*
I must have sobbed for hours on end after reading the letter, and the days and weeks after that were a haze. Much of what I remember is made up of trying to get back into the shelter in a desperate bid to give my fellow townspeople the freedom of the life we were supposed to have. At every turn and entrance, I was met with metres of concrete and I never succeded in getting back into the shelter. I don't remember how long I tried, but eventually, I gave up and decided to grant the deceased soldier his final wish. I dug for days and buried him outside the area where the window that started this all used to be. I know he said he doesn't deserve forgiveness, but he had the dignity to understand the awful nature of what he did and he stayed with us until his end. He was a far better man than those who left us behind, forgotten about and condemned. I hope his regrets are washed away in the soil of our town.
As for me, I left the town a long time ago. I lost my way out as I was leaving, and I was never told the original name of the town in the shelter so unfortunately the memories are all the proof of my experience I have. The outside world took a lot of getting used to, but in the years since my escape, I have grown to be okay with my new life. Still, though, I will never forget what I left behind. Even if it was decades ago, my entire life was in that shelter. Everybody I knew and all that I loved. I wake up every morning having been tormented by nightmares of still being stuck in that deep, dark underground prison and yet I often find myself wishing for the comfort of those I lost upon my escape. I hope they found their peace with my sudden disappearance, but something in me knows they haven't. My pain and terror out here is almost as great as it was in there. Maybe ignorance is actually bliss, like they say.
Perhaps someday the townsfolk I once knew will be greeted with the same view of blue skies and green meadows I was.
In the meantime, I desperately hope that they found a better existence in the shelter than the one I once knew.
#entertainment
source
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