originally written for Gearsday 9, on the SCP Foundation Wiki
content warning: suicide

This is, as it always is, someone else’s story. We were assigned to the same group for a presentation in college on microhistories at some point, which turned into sharing our own separate histories of how we had gotten to where we are, and the trajectories of our respective lives. That was how I learned he served in the same unit I did half a year after I’d been posted out. For those of you who know, you know; for the remaining readers it suffices to note that we had both been deployed as military security for the same key installation, namely a complex of several petrochemical plants located by the coast. It’s a hellish place, more so at night than at day; the factory workers and most of the other guards do go home, but the lights never really turn off, so you’re constantly surrounded by dead silence and the burning glow of gas flares and service lights and the churn of unmanned machinery and kilometres of raw concrete. We both worked the guard towers, immense concrete structures five stories tall with a tiny ring of space at the top to fit whichever poor saps were on duty at the time. There are a few of them every kilometre or so lining the coast, massive monolithic things that look like a cross between an air traffic control tower and a tombstone. On the night shift up there that’s twelve hours in silence staring at the sea through a narrow slit. They're real quiet too, because the walls are so thick. You could sleep there if you knew how. This story is from that place and time.

My new friend gets to telling me all of this, and his story takes a dark turn, as army stories tend to do. People think strange things when they’re alone, especially when they’re eighteen and friendless and trapped in a system of conscription they never consented to in the first place. There was university or the working world waiting for us outside, but from within, it seems like an awful long time. Two years is enough time to develop all kinds of awful thoughts. So my friend, around the fourth month of his deployment, still friendless, jobless, and shit out of luck for higher education (his first attempts at applying had all been rejected), he starts to think of death. Hard not to, with all the drills we’d been put through to shoot on sight, aim centre mass, etc. He starts to think to himself what it might feel like on the other end of the barrel. He even starts to consider the logistics of it: when and where, and how to get away with it. His thoughts, then, bring him to the tower.

There were stories of people killing themselves on duty. Kids with live rounds, left to themselves for twelve hours straight, who knows what can happen, right? Guard duties now ran on a buddy system and had regular vehicular patrols woven in to spice up the monotony; really, just makework to keep idle hands from the inevitable. My friend, here, he’d figured out the stupidly obvious way to bypass that. He’d do it in the tower in the dead of night, when everyone else was asleep, with his helmet on to make sure his brain pan caught the most of the frangible rounds. My palms get real sweaty hearing about this. I think he notices, because he assures me that despite everything he’s about to say that he’s completely fine now. But what I’m telling you now — the scary part listening to him was, when he tells me this, tells me in full detail how he’d do the deed, I find myself understanding completely, like I’d known this all along.

My friend smiles. “Everyone listening to this story tenses up at this part. I think it goes really well with what comes next.”

The tower, you see, is made of solid concrete. So are the steps leading from the top to the bottom of the tower. The first night after he’d booked in from a particularly fucked-up family incident — he declines to tell me what — he’s all alone, and awake, and everyone else is snoring around him, he decides to do it. He’s already envisioned the place he’d do it: at the bottom of the stairs, under the first flight where they stored the fire extinguisher and some jerry cans and extra metal stools, someplace where no one would hear his footsteps, and where they’d only hear the sound of him cocking his rifle only when it’d be too late. He recites this to me with total clarity yet absolute distance — which is exactly how I would have imagined it — as if an external force had taken over his body and reasoning, and came to a clear and lucid conclusion about how it would all end. He got as far as the third flight of stairs, loaded magazine and all, when he sensed something that made him freeze, at which he’s still at a loss for words to describe.

To the best of my paraphrasing ability, this is what he perceived. That there was an immense presence in the air all around him, stilling his every muscle such that he could not and would not take another step. A year later his imam, to whom he first related this story to, described this as the miraculous hand of Allah. But there was nothing miraculous about it. The terror he felt came from somewhere deeper in his nervous system, beneath even the lucid, machinistic thoughts of death that had driven him there; beneath even, indeed, his conscious thought itself. There was a lurid sensation coursing through his system which conveyed to his every fibre that he was not to die here. His therapist in college had called it a moment of clarity beyond clarity in which he rediscovered his will to live. But he insisted to me that it was different from that, and that only someone who had served in the tower would understand.

I nodded along, not wanting to contradict him. A memory resurfaced of me pausing mid-flight down the concrete stairs, and the image of the bottom of the stairs magnified itself until it overtook every single thought in my mind. The dark space between the bottommost flight and the concrete floor was at once so familiar I swear I could feel the sandy coolness of the concrete surface beneath my touch, taste the rotten coastal air between my teeth. The rifle felt as familiar in my grip as the weight of a loved one’s arm. I felt the stippled plastic in my clammy grip. I dimly wondered if any of this had ever happened to me, or if I was instead alone telling this story to myself, hoping to uncover through imagined dialogue a truth I could barely begin to understand. I visualised, with excruciating clarity, the 5.56mm round entering the roof of my mouth at a forty-five degree angle to splinter through my brain stem, the tip fragmenting at the roof of my helmet, before ricocheting cleanly around to perforate whatever was left of my conscious self into biological mush. All this while my friend was looking at me, while I was gripping the seat of my armchair in that student lounge so tight I swear I could hear the pleather split.

This is the part that’s most difficult to relate to others, as it involves a series of thought processes so clear and alien that I doubt if they were truly my own. For the story my friend was relating had paused then and there in the middle of the steps, surrounded by five stories of concrete and indeterminable quiet in an island of burning fuel and crypt-like air, and it had become our story in the pausing. Sometimes I think I’m still there telling it. When the notion entered my friend’s head that he was not to die here it did not come through cleanly as an affirmation of his autonomous worth. Instead, it took on the tenor of a warning. He had not been paralysed with clarity. He had been paralysed with fear.

“You know it too,” he says. “It’s not happened to you, but you know it. This exact same feeling has happened to everyone from the unit I’ve told this to.”

He lived. Whatever feeling had possessed him faded quickly enough for him to make his way back up to his post without anybody noticing. Nobody noticed him slip the loaded magazine from his rifle into his magazine pocket. He remained in that position until it was time for shift change, the adrenaline racing through his veins making him more alert than he’d ever been in his life. Conversely, then, did my feeling of terror fade as I was listening to him, but I couldn’t shake the memory that I had been there in the tower before, standing where he stood, contemplating in his shoes the manner of his own death. I couldn’t shake the notion that something terrible had happened in that moment of suspended time, or that some psychic connection had made it known that others had come to the same decision that we had, and made the same choice, or that something else entirely had prevented each of us from meeting our deaths in that tower — a silence, perhaps, lying halfway in the space of the stairwell between stone and sea, symbolising the greatest solitude of all, and whose dreamless sleep we had taken the greatest of care to leave undisturbed.