The first time Roj Blake ever met Kerr Avon on London, he thought the man reminded him of something: the slightly waved dark brunet hair, the sombre aristocratical features, the blank expression that revealed nothing, and the eyes that full of suspicions. He thought he had seen that composite somewhere, it wasn’t like that the impression was a very common feeling.
After being condemned and sent on the prisoner ship, his memory started to come back, intermittently, piece by piece, thread by thread, like an unravelled tapestry, being patched up again. The patterns and the canvas were slowly surfacing up, recombined. The thing that pained him most was sometimes, there was only one thread required to rebuild these images, but it almost looked like that string just slipped from his fingers, disappeared forever.
He just fixed his gaze on his dark-haired cellmate for a while. He felt, at the moment, it was like exactly one important clue was missing.
Realised he was being watched, Avon’s calm looks became alert. “What’s the matter?”
“Sorry… I was lost in my thoughts” He dared not to tell him what he was thinking, Avon’s expression was full of doubts, he couldn’t just believe him that he reminded Blake of someone. He would think it is a bad pickup line. “I didn’t mean to stare at you.”
Obviously, the man didn’t buy his explanation, but he didn’t question him further, because Blake quickly switched his attention back on his own task.
But that familiar vibration still vaguely lingered at the back of his mind, like all other fragments he would never be able to retrieve. He felt frustrated, disturbed, and violated. Like being stripped off of one’s identity. Even there were new memories coming back constantly, but some names, faces, and events were lost forever. If a man died but is remembered, then there are some parts of him alive. But if all his friends forgot his name, has he gone, in perpetuity?
Maybe the vague feeling was also from a permanently dead friend?
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When they had sex, he didn’t tell him the transient déjà vu he had before. It is not important now. Because the moment had passed, no matter what feeling he might have back then was gone and completely replaced by these new frustrations.
New frustrations, why can’t his lover understand his pain, why when he asked him about his side of pain, he just replied ‘you wouldn’t understand’. Kerr Avon is a new enigma, it is more frustrating than the emotion that some piece of memory had stirred up for a split second.
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“I didn’t know a man like you would make someone hate you so much.”
“You mean Travis?”
“Who else would be?”
“By the look on your face when you argued with me, I thought you were talking about yourself.”
“This joke isn’t funny, Blake.”
“It isn’t a joke. I don’t know why he is so obsessed, maybe that is federation soldier’s zeal, maybe that is an officer’s pride. That man would kill an innocent civilian without a blink, losing an eye and an arm might mean a constant disgrace.”
“That is what you think.”
The tone Kerr had then sounded like he was satirizing him of being subjective. But, how could Kerr understand seeing the image of your comrades falling, one by one? So terrible, the thing he remembered most vividly is a massacre.
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The visual records about that pathetic rebel were scarce, the pictures they could find were all very disturbing. They constantly reminded him of the fiasco he had more than ten years ago.
That university student had a pair of over-enthusiastic hazel eyes, he could even tell there was affection behind it.
His own father wouldn’t give him, his colleagues wouldn’t give him. He didn’t need it. All his wish was to serve, to protect the Federation’s integration and peace. But when that curly-haired young man was wrapping up his injured left arm, there was an uncomfortable dizzy feeling kept clouding his eyes.
His superiors kept repeating the unchanging propagandas.
Those euphoric nights, he was not afraid of being reported, he was not afraid of being court-martialed. Only the melancholic look the student beamed made him confused.
…
He should really stop this kind of thought, the paralytic dizziness wasn’t fading, it entangled with the strong urge of killing.
He knew how intense the Federation’s conditioning could be. But when he found out the man had no trace of that memory, he still felt a little piece of that desperate asphyxia. How could he blame all this on the Federation? It was that man ruined everything, that man had made him lost an eye, an arm, soldier’s pride. He made him nearly betrayed his own cause.
Sometimes the look Servalan had when she was watching full of pity and contempt, he understood it, just like he understood the sorry twist on Maryatt’s eyebrows.
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When he was shot by Kerr Avon, falling into the well, he knew, in the end, Roj Blake didn’t recall at all.
‘I hate humanity’, that is his last thought when his existence fell into oblivion.