Whiteness
By benignmilitancy
- 222 reads
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Naught's had, all's spent
Where our desire is got without content.
'Tis safer to be that which we destroy
Than by destruction dwell in doubtful joy.
--Macbeth
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When Steve came home he found many of his things scattered across the floor. Most of them were broken, worn, or else unusable; as he walked into his closet he noted the mass absence of clothes—his mother had given them all to charity. He did not bother to ask for his father; he knew by her staying in her bedroom all the time and by the smell of emptiness radiating from all corners of the house that he'd most likely bit the big one.
Yet he did not flinch. In fact, he might have even celebrated this, the graveyard of his childhood; he'd spent most of his days mulling over the common traumas: the Oedipal dramas, the nights spent tossing and turning at the Curtis house, the power struggles, the bubblings of shame, the eternal "Dad, why wasn't I...?" But no longer. He was an adult now, in every and all sense of the word. He'd buried it. He'd survived the turning point in his childhood that had ultimately driven him off-course and led his life awry. In his mind's eye, he'd walked through fire, conquered the world, rode the dragon, slew the beast. The only thing that was broken, in essence, was himself. So he spent much of his time inside himself, fixing things, readjusting things, fine-tuning aspects of himself that had gone haywire or no longer served their purpose.
If someone mentioned the war, or the newfound shade of yellow in his eyes, he would simply stare down the inquirer until the question shrivelled back into its mental embryo.
His bitterness over the drafting had came and went as quickly as the wound had ripped open and sutured itself. He couldn't afford college; his life since then was split down the middle. Beautiful people, it seemed, had beautiful places to go. The cosmic laws were as plain as day; while the rich, the talented, the intelligent, the beautiful bought heaven, the bottom-feeders toiled with no notion of reward or virtue. Saints littered Providence with words of divine wisdom which passed as momentary chills to mortal ears. Men must have appeared maddening—scattered like insects among themselves—to God.
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Steve had split the deck of cards with dry, dirty hands. It was a miracle he and the kid even got to stick together. He figured if he kept to himself, and called his best friend the kid, then maybe when the inevitability approached it wouldn't sting with so much soul-paralyzing venom.
Well, fuck, he wouldn't have worded it that way, dramatic bullshit, but if he had the chance to talk honestly, he would have been the first to admit he was scareder than shit. The guys told him stories—at first he thought it was to blow some smoke up their asses, because the fresh meats always needed a little toughening up—but he later learned they were advisories. Aesop's tales. Don't go there. Don't look up when you hear the shell shock. There's a crazy VC woman out there who gouges men's eyes out with a spoon and swallows them whole, hoping to get pregnant. No spitting. No saluting. You get no insignias, kid. Who the hell you think you are, Robert E. Lee? Dumbass. They can pick you off real easy if you strut around like a fuckin' pincushion. Straighten up. You don't go to bed unless that goddamn quarter bounces right off the mattress. Oh, and that C-ration is supposed to taste like somebody pissed in a cardboard box.
The kid had said the last line in a feeble attempt at humor. Steve tried to smile, but he often got too tired to keep a grin for too long. He was known as the brooding one, which was strange, considering he was as far from the brooding spectrum as he could have gotten. But people found it easier to classify the kids by demeanor; if you said greaser, they would have stared at you. And smoked.
He handed the kid his five, and dealt the others their five, regarding each face with equal hardness, scanning, processing.
Failing. He picked up two more cards. The kid looked up at this motion. Steve stifled a sigh in his throat. He was fuckin' handsome; people admired him, and he admired people. He remembered names, faces, eyes. But Steve was different. He couldn't tell a John Doe from a Frank Sinatra. He couldn't pretend to try now.
He chewed on a queen's scepter. He had three aces but no pairs.
The kid won by a royal flush, and, like a flock of geese, everybody disbanded and took turns yelling and cursing and flicking their lighter fluids on the ground and thumping him on the back.
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"Lights out." That was the first thing he'd ever told a dying man. The kid told him not to be so fuckin' cinematic, but here, it seemed that everything required some degree of hammin'-it-up.
Steve and the kid had argued over what to do with the body, and like all conflict, two sides quickly arranged and polarized themselves.
After two broken noses, seven bruised ribs, three knocked teeth, and twenty wearied prides, they'd decided to follow the body to its origin.
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Following the body, they'd seen thin trails of gunpowder and piss lining the sand. Beyond the sand was the forest, great and smoky and vicious. No one asked, no one laughed, no one told, no one stepped in it and yelled what the hell, nothing.
A valley of dead, surrounded by stars lit so carelessly they could have set the sky aflame, packed a massive stench in the air. A charred village blocked the end of a mine trail.
"They're trying to bottleneck us," someone said.
Bombs flared, sending Steve into a brilliant whiteness.
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Eons later Steve found the kid's hand, covered in scratches and scrapes and dust, and held it. With what was left of his pathetically failing strength, he concentrated on being the rock between them, the anchor, the epicenter of warmth, a bond of which the chill of the night could not penetrate. He laced his fingers into the kid's, and held on so tight his knuckles turned snow-white. He squeezed his eyes shut a minute, then blinked them open, having speared an eyelash into his left iris. Water welled up, and he brushed it off, but he still hung onto the kid's hand.
He couldn't breathe—the jungle mist solidified as cream in his lungs, falling like sediment to the bottom of each breath he took. All he had seen was a flash illuminating the trees, and then a red mist filling his sight. The next thing he had heard was a low moan, and a strange, smothered, gurgling sound beside him.
He lingered in the whiteness and the redness for a while, wondering why in the hell he was taking so long to find him. Get up. Get up.
The best friends lay together in the sand as men swirled about them, barking orders, moving on, out for heads, counting bodies. But the usual system of chaos could not touch them, for now there was something beautifully Aristotelian about them. People by instinct tend to avert their eyes from scenes of lovers joining, or mothers kissing newborn children, or dying men holding one another, unless unnatural impetus spurs them to do otherwise. Nature sets a merciful shield about the most human parts of us; this divine shield is what protected Steve and the kid from the world's filth and ruination.
His nails dug into the Steve's knuckles, breaking the skin. Blood for blood.
"Oh, shit," he said softly, his breath coming in and out in huffs. His eyes were wide plates of blue, and his face radiated serene white horror, thinking maybe the scene was more reminiscent of a tragedy or a painting than a man dying out of his own humanity. Clutching Steve's hand, he tried to smile at the irony, soot clinging to the crevices of his face. "Oh, shit, shit, shit."
Then, smiling, he died.
His golden head had swung lightly to the left, as if he were looking to the horizon for artistic inspiration. When Steve let go of the hand, it stiffened, destroying the shield. Rain pattered lightly, creating mud. The unit, in thanksgiving, muttered a collective "Fuck you" to Mother Nature. Reality finally slammed its sword into Steve's back and the stricken soldier screamed.
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He awoke to someone prodding him in the ribs. He was used to being prodded; at first, by hard eyes and grim faces, such as his father's; then by rough questions and orders, as became custom; then by doctors and needles and lights—sharp lights—piercing lights—
He didn't know how long he would go under for. All he remembered was the whiteness. A field of snow...and the kid's hand. Sometimes he would slip into the whiteness, sliding deep into the snow, devoured by pain. Inside its jowls the memory of holding the kid's hand would flare, and shift according to the way the light hit it. If he was angry, he would dig his fingernails through the flesh of the palm. But most of the time he spent kissing the kid's knuckles, tasting the blood that had spilled over them.
You're not gay.
"I know I'm not," Steve said. "Now shut the hell up."
[He would spend hours talking animatedly to empty spaces.]
But he thought that if the kid's blood was inside him, the red would take root in his stomach, and a tiny rose would bloom inside of him, worlds apart from the whiteness—and the chill of the whiteness.
He would wake up from his hallucinations inside a hospital room. Looking at a cross bolted to the wall, and spurred by detox veins jerking his memories this way and that, he would watch himself as he laughed like a damn puppet. Would a perfect God allow this?
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"Lights out," Karen, his girl, had said. He blinked.
Lights out.
He thought briefly about the VC woman they said got pregnant from eating men's eyeballs. And as he did, a vision of the kid flickered like a candle in the darkness; he whipped a lamp at the wall, shattering the illusion. The kid looked down, shook his head at the million shards sprinkled at his feet, and smiled sadly.
"Leave me alone!" Steve shrieked.
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The next day, Karen left, and Steve smoked through seven packs of cigarettes. Anything to get past the whiteness—the whiteness blinding him inside his own mind.
Today was the first day he realized his mother had moved out, and that his things were scattered across his bedroom floor because three weeks ago a bunch of drunken kids busted in and had a party there.
"Fuck," he said, staring into his filter.
The word rang out like a gospel.
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Sometimes the kid would cut the shit and speak directly to him. Today he said: I have a name too, you know.
"I know," Steve said.
He sat down.
You want to know something?
"What?"
I got two of 'em as I went down, Steve.
Steve shared a smile with the empty space before him.
"That's why I said nice shot."
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End.
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