While I Slept

A nightmare wakes me abruptly; that dream was so dreadful that my mind took the trouble of erasing the memory. I do not usually sleep so deeply, and nightmares rarely appear at my pillow. I am lost; I struggle to determine the dimension and the time in which I am. What time is it, what do I have pending? I feel a pressure on my chest, as if it were some urgent matter that had gone unattended, but the atmosphere strikes me as nauseating and any desire to get out of bed slips away from me. I move the curtain a little; the light gives me no clues about the time of day—it could be night or early morning. The annoying noise of the traffic on the avenue is not making the windows vibrate, a peace typical of Sundays, but this begins to worry me, since the last memory I have is of preparing a report to present at work. My alarms go off and I get up; nevertheless it is hard for me to stand, the sound of my footsteps echoing throughout the apartment as if it were the only thing in motion in the universe. My eyes can barely adjust to the light; the switch confesses to me that there is no electricity. Everything begins to make sense now: the silence, the peace, the darkness... I head toward the balcony to see what has happened to the world while I slept, but as I approach the window an increasingly heavy odor penetrates my nose, fetid and hard to bear. I move through the main living room but feel as though I am going to faint; I tell myself: this is not normal. Before reaching the window I hear footsteps, coming up the building's staircase; before long they seem to be at my door, and they snap: -OPEN THE DOOR!- My heart stopped. I lay in the middle of the living room, cold and motionless, waiting for signals that would indicate my next step. The natural thing was to answer, to open the door, but my instinct guided me to stay exactly as I was. Hundreds of questions besieged me about the possible reasons why someone would knock at my door in that way. It was fear, not blood, that ran through my veins, until an unexpected event occurred... -AAAAAAAAAH! - The thunderous scream of a woman shatters the silence; shortly afterward one hears: "COME UP, WE FOUND SEVERAL". Then the footsteps of those who had been at my door began to move away, and I took advantage of the noise to disguise the sound of my own steps with theirs. I ran to the guest room, a small space that had ended up as a storage room, closed the door and hid; whatever was happening, it did not seem a good time to find out. I placed several boxes against the door to block it, deliberately messed up the room, and hid in a convenient corner behind some shelves. My mistake: not having brought something I could use to check the time. The noise returned, the footsteps of boots coming down the building's stairs; I manage to hear: -"DO NOT DO IT PLEASE, DO NOT DO IT"-, while the footsteps of those who were moving away receded. Once again I took advantage of the noise of the guards' footsteps to disguise the sound of my own; this time I manage to reach the window, beginning to grow resistant to the unpleasant odor. From a corner, I subtly draw the curtain aside. I can make out an unusual filth all over the street; the whole stench is beginning to make sense—although I live on a high-traffic avenue, I had never before noticed so much grime stuck everywhere. I see the official guards come out of the building; they carry long guns, escorting several people—some of them I can recognize, but most I cannot—all of them walking in a line: children, adults, the elderly. I notice that they place them all in front of the building and make them kneel. Before long some hooded men appear, take the weapons, and from that point on I could not keep watching; something was wrong, very wrong, I had to think about protecting myself and keeping them from finding me. It was then that the sound of my footsteps was drowned out by a burst of gunfire; my heart stopped, I could not hold back the tears, I ran to take shelter—this time I did manage to grab a watch. They killed them all, I thought. There is no escape, I thought. I am going to die, I thought. I remembered that I had the watch and at last I could know the time: it was 10:35 p.m. Stress was suffocating me; I was awake all night, waiting for something to happen or, rather, hoping that nothing would happen to me. Two days passed and then I decided that it was time to leave, my provisions were running out. Coming out of my hiding place, I prepared a backpack with everything necessary: documents, clothing, boots, all the available cash, valuables, food, water, a flashlight, a knife, a cell phone, and everything needed to flee far away if it came to that. I would have liked to alert the authorities, but the electricity did not come back during those days, all the batteries were dead, and the security forces did not seem very trustworthy after I had witnessed that massacre. For two days I heard no sound; I came out cautiously. Luckily I am only two floors above the ground level. As I go down, I see that all the apartment doors were open or broken into. I continue down the stairs. The main door was ajar. Upon stepping out, the sunlight reveals to me a Dantesque scene: the grime I had seen that night was no such thing, but dried blood, stuck to all the walls of the buildings on the street; it was also on the asphalt, on the sidewalks, on the lampposts, as if a kind of blood bomb had suddenly exploded and painted the whole place. On the verge of collapse, my consciousness barely holding on, the shock threatened to make me faint. The only place where the blood was fresher coincided with the spot where I had seen the hooded men two days earlier from my window. Perhaps dozens—no, hundreds of people—had been executed on that street, and I could have been one of them. I walk fearfully toward the main avenue, avoiding exposing myself to windows that might be stealthily watching my path. Upon reaching the corner, I see a kind of barricade, unusually tall, which I estimate to be at least about four meters high. When I finally reach the spot I set out to climb it; as I scale the barricade, I feel something strange in the sacks—they do not seem to be filled with sand, I tell myself. Upon reaching the top, my eyes could barely process the horror of what I was seeing: thousands of bodies piled up all along the avenue, so many that the end could not be seen, a sea of lifeless bodies. Coming down from the barricade, to my misfortune, I discovered the strange thing the sacks contained: dismembered bodies. In the midst of that infernal solitude, I found myself enveloped in the most absolute darkness, in the most absolute pessimism toward humanity; but, surprisingly, it was not the hope of a better future that made me go on, but rather the absence of it. As I wandered I asked myself: could this be the nightmare I was trying to forget? Never before had I so wished to be in a dream and for all of it to be only a horrible nightmare. Short story © Alejandro Guipe | All Rights Reserved.