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It is with some measured melancholy that I look out through this window. There is a quiet out there that hangs preternaturally still, watching, waiting, dying. I, myself, have been dying for many years now. An irony for a man who has ostensibly dedicated most of his waking life to the medical profession. Fa would tell me that she was always surprised that I pursued this route. That someone as insular as me would dedicate myself to others. It was partially her role as my nurse that engendered me to it in the first place, little did she know. And that I could express my love for all those around me in a manner that finally worked for me.
And yet, here, in my swelling twilight years, I continue to slowly die. Who attends the doctor after all? I pick up a small piece of metal, some errant scrap I have been unable to discard since I was young and violent. It stands on the dresser that I and Fa had shared for these long years since, under the window that overlooks a small Colony town, far away from the noise and life that spins forever and ever underneath us. I feel its cool touch in my hands. Its jagged edges speak of a terrible end. The last flecks of red paint cling to dulling, rotting metal. I set it down again, and move slowly but deliberately towards the living room, making my way down the steep stairs that I struggle to contend with on my own.
I can see from outside the window, here on the ground floor, the sweeping vista outside my forlorn house, and there, right outside, my garden. It is well-tended, as gardens maintained by doddery old men often are. It is difficult, somewhat, to raise one in these conditions, up here in the vacuous expanse of space. Flowers always struggle to find purchase here. I was told once that they had always struggled to grow in the Colonies. From the very first one, all those years ago, to me now, standing here. Some things do not change it seems. No matter how finely tuned they made these hulking machines, flowers would never flourish. They would grow and grow, and just before they would bloom into their myriad colours, they would then suddenly wither and die. People would remark that it was as if nothing beautiful could grow up here in space. As if the cold and bitter expanse of space just outside of our eccentric contraptions would seep in regardless of our many plans. But I managed. It took me some time to get it right, however, many long years of trial and error to finally be able to carry these things through their fragile lives.
Fa had suggested I start with the garden when I was first able to really move around and be on my feet. That it would distract me, that I always seemed like the sort of person who would be good with flowers. That the garden would be a wonderful place for the both of us. I remember laughing at the thought. That the man who brought war to a sudden and stuttering end could be good with flowers. In a particularly depressive mood, I had asked her what I should use to fertilise the ground, the blood I’d spilled? She never met my eye. She only insisted that I’d be good at it. But she was right. She always was.
I am quite the well-travelled man. After a rather debilitating incident in my youth, Fa had insisted on visiting the other Colonies, and indeed Earth, which she had always enjoyed. There are mementoes strewn across the room. The odd magnet with nothing magnetic to hold it. Picture after picture. Little statuettes, commemorating some foreign field. Fa had set them all up in a manner to her pleasing. I have never had a sense of interior design. Patients would often complain about the drabness of my office, and even Mr Quattro had remarked that I kept my quarters quite sparse. I was never sure if that was a compliment or an insult. I just never saw the point of all the clutter, where an eye could catch an errant memory and the mind would be forced to relive it. Why mark the clean, sickly green walls of a ship with something as frivolous as a memento?
The first place that we had ever visited together was the original Colony that made up Side 7, Green Noa 1. Mr Ray had come along with us. I had not seen him since after the whole ordeal, but he had gotten in touch with Fa once I had recovered. His hair had grown longer, his eyes sadder. His uniform, crumpled and sinful. He was an itinerant soldier at this point, never anywhere for anytime long. It was hardly a life. It was not much of a Colony either. Broadly similar to my own Colony that I spent my youth in, it was certainly more residential. Dusty red and pale-yellow houses blotted the thin veneer of grass that blanketed the Colony. Despite the heavily residential nature of the place, it was still rather sparsely populated. As if people were in some way afraid of what had happened here. The small house we stayed in was exceptionally well furnished considering the area's turbulent past. Mr Ray cried for quite some time on that trip when he thought we weren't looking. Mr Quattro never joined us on any trips, much to my dismay. We never saw him again until he was blaring on screens across the world a few years later. He had always told me he wanted to travel somewhere on Earth, but where exactly eludes me now. We would recline by one of the decks of the Argama, and he would start talking to nothing at all. Sometimes I wonder if he even knew I was there. But he would keep talking. Somewhere where the heat beats down relentlessly, where the dust chokes the air, and rain comes once a year, and furiously at that. I remember him removing his sunglasses and smiling. Somewhere where he met someone he would never meet again, someone who could have been his-
Me and Fa settled out in Riah, in Baldur Bay. Barring any postings elsewhere, be that in space or on another Colony, it was largely where we called our home. It was not our first choice. I think Fa had always wanted to live on Earth. Somewhere where the wild still stretched out towards that infinite horizon. I regret never appreciating my time there as a young man. To my own credit, there were a variety of auxiliary issues that precluded me from actually enjoying the sights, especially in those heady days. It seems almost alien to me that I was a fighter back then. More than just a fighter. A murderer. My hands tremble at the thought of it. Yet, in my advancing age, I can hardly even remember the faces of those I’ve killed. My own mother and father are among them. Their faceless faces stare back at me through the encroaching grey mist that takes me every time I go to my restless sleep.
When I had just recovered, back with Judau and his lot, I often rallied Fa to get me involved in the melee, she would tell me. I must admit, those were likely rather pyrrhic cries. I do not think I could have commandeered the Gundam again. It is a frightening thing to behold, that strange, endless machine. To think I had a hand in making one- I baulk at the thought. I try not to think of that time too much these days. There were moments, after having recovered, I would feel so physically sick, Fa would rush to my side and have to hold me as I cried and heaved for hours. Thankfully, it never happened at the office. Always at home, out in my garden. The corpse of a flower accidentally underneath my foot. And yet the Gundam persists. Forever and ever. I see them again and again from our small television screen, huddled in the corner, suffusing its small blue light into our empty room. Only ever flashes of someone or something gone rogue, the briefest glimpse of those deep, green eyes, blaring their endless secrets out into the world. Fa would always sigh and leave the room every time one came on, the anchor waxing poetic about what on earth this machine was, how much destruction it had caused so quickly. It's not good for you, Fa would tell me. I mean, look, we put all this behind us. I would nod, of course, but I would keep watching. I couldn't help it, you see.
After Axis, that Gundam was everywhere. On our screens, photographs in the newspaper, graffiti adorning every walkway. We didn't know the name of it, at first. But that piercing stare, that demonic visage, it was something out of a nightmare. Captain Bright wrote to us about it after the fact. The letter is still in one of the drawers, where it yellows and weeps. He was telling us about his family, hoping we were all right, that Mr Ray had died in the Nu, and that his son, Hathaway, was heading off to secondary school.
Mr Ray was telling me, when he was alive, that I had rescued Hathaway once. Saved the boy from the deep, drowning depths of the ocean. I hardly remember the deed. Those few months are a total blur to me. They were then as they are now. Fa told me that it was fairly normal for people coming out of what was effectively a coma, Newtype or not. That memories are locked away, a sort of trauma response. It was never my speciality in the field. I mean, what does Newtype even mean? I was one, they said. And what good has that done me? Nothing but torture me every day of my waking life. I despise those faces that talk at length about them as if the moniker will ever mean more than a mass murderer and an especially good one at that. In any case, about thirty years ago we saw Hathaway die, executed by the Federation. Certain things you struggle to forget. Even with the way my head is these days. I remember Mrs Noa crying. That was the last time I saw her before she died. She was so upset at the whole ordeal. That her child could be ripped from her so cruelly, killed by their own father. There was another child, wasn’t there? Did they cry? I know I did not. I hardly knew the boy. Just another soul claimed by the Gundam.
I am not a religious man, not by trade. It scarcely befits a doctor to entrust his patient to God when it should instead be his own two hands. But I do believe in souls. I have seen so many be extinguished- at the hospital, in their machines. I’ve seen the manifestations of rage rise far above the paltry world we live in. But there is no God. That I know. On a more everyday level, it was interesting to observe the uptick in religious thought in the world, however. That Gundam- Mr Ray’s final one- became the object of so many prayers. I would hear people mutter statements to it, that its green flash would once again save a loved one in the operating theatre. Mr Ray once told me his callsign on the Zeon side of affairs, back in the distant past, was the White Devil. I am sure the irony of it all is not lost on him, wherever he is.
I finally sit down on the singular sofa we have in our living room. It is worn, as most of the things in our house are, by years of use. Me and Fa had shared this thing for decades at this point. It is almost no longer fit for use. I should throw it out, get some of the young lads who swing by here to help me move it. But I do not. I do not know why. Directly in front of me, there is a picture that stands in the centre of the mantelpiece. It is a picture of me, Fa, and the crew of the Argama. Mr Quattro has his hand on my shoulder and is looking down at me. He so desperately wanted to be a father to me. There are other faces too. Very few of us are still alive.
Next to it is a photo of me on my thirtieth birthday, next to the ocean. It is a real ocean, you know. Not the sort of artificial one that was all the rage a few years back. This was off the coast of New Zealand, a small collection of islands by Australia. To think that's where it all started. At least for ordinary folk. But I've not been ordinary folk for some time. And that photo was a long time ago in any case. I hope that the ocean is still that brilliant blue it was when I and Fa visited. That there is still that wretched abyss that I stared into, marred only by the swelling life that surrounded me. Fa despised it, where this (relatively small) oceanic trench began. Terrifying! She would cry, paddling away towards the beach. I looked into it. I remember a great beast, rising up towards me, two beady eyes staring at me from a mass of darkening grey. I touch it, and it disappears in my mind. Only the vague shape of some long-forgotten thing remains. Later that same holiday, Fa took me to my first art gallery. She would always tell me how much she adored art. That she had never gotten to paint enough. Sometimes, I would find her in the garden on those quiet days in the height of a heady summer, paintbrush in mouth, easel in hand. I would always take care not to disturb her.
That first gallery, however- it was beyond my ken. There we were, in a cadmium yellow room. The vaulting ceiling above us made everything we whispered echo. In front of me was a painting that I simply could not understand. Impressionism, Fa whispers to me, in its finest form. The sublime use of colour, the manipulation of space on the canvas, a striking deconstruction of what happens in our minds. To me, it was nothing by a dusty street, melting away into the night. I’m sure I said something to that effect. I try and remember what Fa looked like when I say it. Somehow, I am sure that the faceless face I see in my mind is disappointed in me.
Very little else of that trip do I still recall. Just Fa talking, and that one dusty street melting into the night. I think about that painting every now and then. It still clings to the recesses of my mind, like a parasite trying to worm its way into my deepest memories. My time with the Argama, my time with that Gundam, it all fades away. I can remember the touch of cold steel, the firm grip of the controls, the whirr of every electrical life blinking in and out of existence around me, but there, outside the cockpit is not the black expanse of space, but that street. I can feel myself operating that fell machine, walking step after step, further down this street where my dreams began spilling over into life, where blood and tears rain down mercilessly and then in a flash, there is nothing but the silent wind. There, at the end of this forlorn road, is a singular window, its light illuminating everything and nothing all at once. Me and the machine, we move in sync, walking, running, towards it, only to fall in supplication at the final hurdle, where my flashing green eyes stare into the window, and I see a woman whom I do not recognise, her unnatural blue hair obscuring her eyes, dealing cards out on a table filled with stars to the shapeless forms of all the ghosts I’ve made. I open my eyes. The sky outside is already growing dusky, with great orange scars snaking their way out of an artificial purple. In my hand is that decaying metal I was sure I had put away upstairs.
I sit upright, and I look over the pictures once again. Mr Ray and Mr Quattro flank me in one of them. I look so angry in it. Mr Ray is giving Mr Quattro a vicious side-eye, and Mr Quattro is smiling genially towards the camera. For all the names and faces I have forgotten over these long years, theirs I am incapable of, despite how desperately I try to forget them. Char and Amuro. I hate them both in a way I cannot explain. Would I be full of such impotent rage, so full of loss and longing, were it not for them? Would I have so much blood on my hands that years of working to give life back will never fully wash them clean, so stained crimson by the deep incarnadine? Would I never be haunted by those flashing green lights that are a part of my very soul, and that I have no way of wrenching out and being rid of? Would they not infest every memory that I desperately cling to, choking all the others to darkness like weeds and vines that will never stop growing? Perhaps, even, I could have been the man that Fa needed, and not some shell of a man desperately trying to fill the abyssal trench within me, from which a great, grey beast rises and rises and rises-
In my hand, I realise I am holding the picture above my head, ready to throw it onto the floor. I stop and bring it to eye level again. I look at us three. I set the picture back down and begin to move towards the door of the room, to return to my bed. This day was nothing but lost time. The flowers will have to remain untended for a day. I am not angry at them. Amuro and Char. That all the memories I wish I had been of other things, and not their looping visages- I cannot be angry. Fa wouldn’t like it. She would tell me to be thankful that I have memories of them at all. That’s all they are now. Or something like that. She was always too sentimental for a nurse. I make my way up the steep stairs that I now struggle to contend with.
Some of me is dead, a book Fa read to me once goes, but more of me is stronger. I have learned a few things, forgotten many; in the total of me, I am but the same youth, disappointed and rheumatic. I lie down on my bed and stare at the ceiling. The same youth- I suppose I am. All anger and confusion, unable to read the eyes of those closest to me. I have managed as well as anybody can, but life goes on. Outside the bedroom window, the dark of our artificial sky has taken over. But I can see it, you know. Just beyond these metal confines, right there, that blue star. That star that she loved so much. And as I look towards that aqueous blue star with love, I feel Fa settle down by me. I look at her gently smiling face. She is younger than I remember her last, wearing that stupid yellow outfit I never had the heart to tell her I disliked. She rests a hand on my forehead, and I smile. She disappears into the swirling grey mist. Another day passes, and another lonely hour transpires. We are echoes of our past and all I wish, here in my soundless climes, was that I was louder, once.