I’m walking down the steps of the subway.  Someone has washed them and they are glistening with water.  Someone cuts in front of me and jumps the railing.  For a moment I’m disoriented.  The world is a little fuzzy, a little twisted.  I can’t focus on the steps, or the water, or the boy throwing himself over the handrail.  

What I can see, in sharp detail, is my foot descending towards the next step and missing.  I can see me falling, turning, flipping down the stairs and falling onto the hard wet concrete.  I feel the impact of the sharp stone against the back of my neck.  I hear the crack of my skull.  I  imagine that it breaks open evenly.  Nicely.  Along the seam that fused when I was a baby.  Even in death fantasies – I like to be a perfectionist.

Finally, I see blood streaming down the stairs the same way the water drips.  I see it mixing, diluted with the grime of the city.  I see it pouring from me in purples and blues, then streaming in red, finally puddling in pink.  This image in my mind fascinates me, calls to me.  Something about the idea of releasing what’s inside me is tempting.  I wonder if I could get rid of what’s inside me would I finally stop hurting?

I wobble.  My next step is shaky, twisted, my heel barely makes the next step.  A lucky break or a missed opportunity.

It as swimming day for kids at the base.  I was treading water in the deep end, poised to strike should any military-brat suddenly go down or decide that poking one another in the eye was fun.  

We had the typical games going.  Some went diving for the penny.  Some were playing water basketball.  And of course the biggest-splash contests where they’d take turns jumping in feet first to see who could cause the most commotion.  Only on a military base filled with kids whose Fathers and Mothers go to work covered in camo and packing gas masks in their “briefcases” the game took a different spin.

“Let’s play dead soldiers” one of my girls said gleefully.  

“Okay!  You shoot me.  And I’ll die first!”  

Those were the only rules.  Each girl took turns shooting one another and dying, rather realistically, into the pool.  While my other students got bored with the penny and the ball game within five or ten minutes, the dead soldiers game lasted a good thirty minutes – and attracted more kids as it went.

Over and over I watched children die of various bullet wounds.  Some took a guerilla approach to their attack.  Some simply aimed and shot.  They all died well.  None of them cried out for help dramatically or pretended to draw out the final death moments.  They all took the bullet happily and died with silent splashes.  Over and over.  

I can remember as a child having my own morbid games.  We had cops and robbers.  My father had indians and cowboys.  There are always variations to the games.  But I recall, in my own childhood, thinking that death was an automatic “out”.  Something to avoid.  Even when we were clearly shot we’d dispute it.  I recall arguing my way into hopping around with a missing leg and two missing arms (all shot off) all because I refused to accept death in the game.

Is it because so many of these children know their parents are facing their own game of dead soldiers?  Is it the hours and hours of real-life footage kids see, followed by patriotic music and narrated by proud voices?  Is it the lack of funerals?  The lack of a sense of sadness surrounding dead soldiers that let them all accept play death as stoically and enthusiastically as real death?  

Or is this just the new mutation of childhood morbidity?  Are we at the point now where death is an automatic rather than an automatic out?

I was lying on my back blinking up at a haze of white that alternated from bright to dim  over and over.  Occasionally I could feel the corner of the haze lift, then settle against my cheek again.  I knew there were people around me, above me, but I could see them.  I could hear them, but I couldn’t understand the things they were saying.  And worse, I knew they were doing things, but I didn’t know what they were till I felt them, until they started to hurt and even then all I knew was that it hurt, not what it was or why they were doing it.

The surreal part was that I had asked for this.  I wasn’t strapped down.  There were no bonds keeping me lying down.  My hands were free to defend myself, but I kept them tightly folded together over my stomach.  I could have kicked if I wanted too.  I could have jumped up and torn the shroud from over my eyes and left.  No one would have stopped me.  But even as my knees jerked at each prod and sharp pain, I stayed put.  I willed myself into that chair.  And when it was finally all over, when they finally removed my blindfold themselves…I’d pay them money for the privilege of this torture.

The dentist is a funny place.  

One wonders, if we bind ourselves so willing for these small things, where will we find the impetus for resistance?  Here we are, ignore our most basic protection instinct: pain.  If it hurts, it’s wrong, it should stop.  Yet, I will myself to remain as still as possible, only acknowledging my hurt with small whimpers and only receiving in recognition a sigh or a “I know” while my dentist continues to jab sharp things in my nerve.  If I’m so willing to lie still for this…how still will I be, will society be, for things that don’t hurt until it’s too late?  Is our willingness to bind ourselves systemic?  How far does it go?  How much torture are we willing to endure before we get up and walk?

Also, why do they always say “I know” when you start screaming?