“Towards thee I roll, thou all-destroying but unconquering whale; to the last I grapple with thee; from hell’s heart I stab at thee; for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee”
—-Herman Melville, Moby Dick

Combs in Blue Water

Lieutenant Sampson looked across the heavy table at the armored screens, blinking lights, heavy duty keyboards, growling speakers, all connected with a tangle of cables. Right in the middle was a paper map of the area, worn on the edges, stained by spilled coffee, and obscured by layers of pencil and Sharpie scribblings. No matter how high-tech the electronics can be, people like him still had an affinity for paper maps – they conveyed the situation in a way no digital scan could.

At times of extreme stress, Sampson’s mind would always go back to strange, seemingly random memories, usually of his childhood.

Today he felt himself siting in a rural barber shop, nervous. This was from a time that people cared what your hair looked like – it was a statement of where you stood in the world. Sampson was too young to understand this exactly, but he knew that this was something important and that he didn’t really have any control over how it came out.

His father sat in the barber’s chair, covered in a checkered drape and his face lathered with white foam. The barber scraped away with a huge, deadly razor, the beard beneath giving up with a rasping sound. Sampson worried that the barber would use that razor on him… the buzzing electric scissors were scary enough.

He looked into the huge mirror that covered the entire wall behind the barber chairs. This was the twin of another on the wall behind the folding chair he waited in. The two parallel mirrors bounced off each other, creating a series of copies of the room, each smaller and slightly darker that the one before, falling off into a cave of infinity. This confused and fascinated the child – How does this work? -When does it end? Why does it do that?

But of all the things in the room, what intrigued and confused Sampson the most were the glass cylinders of blue liquid along the ledge in front of the mirror. Black rubber combs bobbed in the mysterious fluid, like the were waiting for something…. But What?

When he and his dad entered the barber shop he saw one of the vessels up close. It had the mysterious label, “Sanitized For Your Protection.” This confused, confounded, and frightened the boy. What danger was he in that the blue liquid and black combs were protecting him from?

The Lieutenant shook his head and the half-century old memory dissolved like grains of sugar in hot tea. “It’s time,” he said to the other shadowy figures moving around the room.

He lifted a plastic shield that covered a round red button inside a yellow protective ring. Without hesitation he pushed the button sending tons and tons of screaming metal death through the air, raining fire and pain down on thousands of (mostly) unsuspecting human beings he didn’t know and would never meet.

After he received conformation of the successful launches, Lieutenant Sampson sat down to await the reports of how much destruction had been successfully dealt out. He tried to stir up the memory again, to retreat back into the past, into the quiet isolated barber shop.

But the memories would not come. They were gone, forgotten, probably forever.