There Won't Be War

Brains on the Dump Nicholas Emmett

A small boy named John balanced the rock on the edge of an orange-coloured balcony. It was heavy, and he was tired. Searching for it on the dump had not been easy, nor had the struggle up the four flights of stairs, and he thinking, and thinking, about Willie Byrne.

If Willie had only gone away after hitting him on the nose. Why did Willie force him down, rub his face into the cow dung that lay on the street, and stand there while the others laughed. Maybe if Willie had not made him look ridiculous he would not—.

His fingers tightened on the rough edge of rock, while directly below him, sleeping peacefully in a large green pram, lay the white swathed bundle of Willie’s baby sister.

John was nineteen when the gelignite blew him to pieces. How cold and wet he had been, as he prepared the booby trap for the expected jeep. How suddenly the charge exploded in his hands, causing that vague sense of identity that had been him to break into little bits.

One bit, his brain, landed on the edge of a footpath, and there considered the course of events that had brought it to its present undignified position. There had been the man he had met at the bus stop in Dublin, and the agreement reached that something should be done for one’s country. A large bare room had been entered, and his decision to join the organization accepted. And there had been the training in the use of explosives.

Here the brain tittered to itself, as the thought occurred that either the training or the gelignite had been faulty.

A late afternoon sunshine slanted painfully through the dusty streets when the machine came along. Efficiently, a shovellike mechanism shot from the side, scooped up John’s brain, and deposited it with a lot of other brains.

Trundle, trundle, it went into the approaching gloom, until it came to a broad river. Even now it did not stop, but trundled into the darkened water, for by now night was soaking darkly into everything.

After some time there was a thud, and he knew he and the other brains had been dropped through an opening onto the ground. Not that he cared, such an eventftil day, such tiredness, and now drifting into sleep.

Strong sunlight woke him, and he looked around. What a strange place, what a big dump, all those miles of lavatory and industrial waste, all shimmering, stinking, fermenting, and bubbling in the sun.

“Still it’s life, insecty life, wormy life, germy life, but still life,” said a voice behind John.

John spun his jellied remains around, and saw thousands and thousands of brains, all basking in the sunlight. The one speaking was a large purple specimen, and now it was speaking again.

“I am foreman here. I will tell you as economically as possible our situation.”

“First our comrades. They come from many places. Some were good Jews fighting the baddy Arabs, some baddy Jews fighting the goody Arabs, some were good protestants fighting the baddy catholics, some baddy protestants fighting the goody catholics, some were goody, or baddy, Viet Cong, black or white, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc, etc.

“We did not eat what we killed, we did not need it for food, or to feed our young, or to use in any way towards the increase of life.

“Life, friend, that is the word. It is not the empty space between the stars, nor the unconscious mineral. But rather the movement from single cell, towards a jellied fish, bronzed weapon, space ship potential.

“Now, comrade, you enter a sun-bathed botanical garden, and you have life seeding, increasing, screaming its multi-coloured challenge towards the universe. We on the other hand, resting on this unperfiimed site, are the shrinking of life, on the way to the greatest horror of all, the nonconsciousness.

“And you, friend, and all our fellow members have offended. We stopped life without purpose, we stopped a cell on its journey from sea to star.”

John began to laugh, his jellied blob shaking and shaking and shaking, with merriment, and all the other brains began to laugh, until a great big gale of rusty laughter, went round and round, and round, the dump.