“What did I just do?”
This was a question that hadn’t crossed his mind before. Not while he was doing it, not after. He had gone home and slept soundly afterwards, every night without fail. Nothing troubled his dreams – not the screams, not the tears, not the gas, or the guns or the mountains of corpses. Nothing.
“I’m just doing my job” – now that was a thought he often had. It made it almost laughably easy to block it out, to forget, not to comprehend. “This isn’t happening” – that was another favourite. He would repeat it, over and over again in his head, until he believed it, until he could look around and see no horror, just normalcy. His new normal, the world’s new normal.
But this was something new. This terrible, sick feeling that left his stomach in knots so tight, he found it hard to breathe. Of course, he wasn’t a stranger to the feeling of guilt – he was a human being after all. But he had never felt anything of the sort before, not with such intensity. It was so strong, it almost felt like physical pain, forcing him to fall to his knees and grip his head in his hands. This was definitely happening.
There were three loud knocks on the heavy door of his cell and then two security guards entered, wordlessly shackling his hands and marching him out of the small space he had occupied for the past several months.
They were taking him down a long corridor with whitewashed walls with long grey stripes over them. It was depressing. But the man registered none of this. All he could think about was the heavy feeling in his gut, weighing him down, choking the life out of him. Kind of ironic, given where he was headed.
Still feeling sick with the intensity of his own guilt, he thought suddenly about something that hadn’t crossed his mind before, not once. He thought about their eyes – dark and huge, staring at him in terror from sunken faces that looked like they might have belonged to skeletons. Silently begging, each and every one hoping until the very end. Why was he suddenly thinking about them now? The awful feeling in his stomach intensified, clawing at his insides. It’s as though he was suddenly feeling the pain each owner of those eyes must have experienced, the pain he helped to inflict. But he was just doing his job, right? Nothing beyond that. He wasn’t a sadist; he had no choice. It was kill or be killed, as far as he was concerned, no way out, no way to win. But the rationalizations his brain was offering right now suddenly started feeling fake, almost like excuses. The leaden guilt in his stomach intensified tenfold.
He barely noticed the people around him, nothing seemed to be real or make sense. He felt the knot tightening around his neck, the handcuffs digging painfully into his wrists.
And then he realized – he was to blame. It was real. It was his fault. The cold realization washed over him like a tidal wave, shocking his whole body, closing his airways, stopping him from breathing. He felt the crushing sense of responsibility hit him like a ton of bricks. He was not just the guard – he was the executioner, the murder, the coward, the torturer, the one to blame.
A tear rolled down his cheek.
The last thought he had before the ground was knocked out from under his feet and his neck broke was “I deserve this”.
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