Virtual Fire

by Mendy Sobol

  Chapter Six: Paul

  The party began typically enough for that time and place. Meg met Toby and me at the door. I’d only seen her wavy black hair jammed inside her jacket, but now it hung full below her waist. Smiling, she led us across the living room through clouds of smoke. Janis Joplin blasted Piece of My Heart from stereo speakers the size of file cabinets. I recognized some faces, mostly SMC members like Nick, the leader of last night’s marshals training. A football player I knew from Latin class took a joint from the fingers of his cheerleader girlfriend, holding it out to us as we passed.

  “No thanks,” I said.

  “Where’s your helmet?” asked Toby, following close behind.

  Meg stopped at the foot of the stairs, introducing us to a short, broad-shouldered man who wore a Vietnam Veterans Against the War button on his faded military jacket. “Kevin’s coordinating Veterans Against the War demonstrations with the SMC,” she said. I realized Kevin couldn’t be more than twenty-five or twenty-six. He looked much, much older.

  A second fatigue-jacketed man stood silently, ghost-like at Kevin’s shoulder. On his left collar two small holes marked the place where insignia of a United States Marine had once been pinned. On his right he wore the red star of the NVA—North Vietnam’s Communist Army. He was taller, more wiry than Kevin, but there was something similar in the wrinkled squint around their eyes, the unsmiling set of their mouths.

  “This is Ian Marley,” Kevin said. “We served together at Khe Sanh. When we got out I talked him into coming to Butler with me.”

  We shook hands all the way around, but Ian said nothing. Meg took his hand in both of hers for an extra moment, looking in his eyes. “It’s good meeting you, Ian. I hope we can work together on the next march.”

  We continued up the stairs, the embroidered hems of Meg’s bellbottoms dancing step-by-step ahead of us. Meg shared a tiny attic bedroom with a phantom roommate named Ruth. Ruth paid rent, using the address so her parents wouldn’t know she’d moved in with her boyfriend. The single small window faced north, toward the grimy mill town of Springfield, the worst view in Butler. Meg had three warm cans of Pepsi and a cold pizza waiting for us.

  “So Meg,” Toby said, halfway through his fifth slice, “you want to spank Joker’s Wild with us again tomorrow?”

  “Can’t. I have to get out a big SMC mailing. Want to spend tomorrow mimeographing letters and stuffing envelopes?”

  “How much text in the letter?” I asked.

  “Just a one-paragraph fundraiser.”

  Toby, as usual, was thinking what I was thinking. “We can get a bunch of postcard stock. Run ‘em on Bruin. No fuss, no muss, no stuff. Cheaper postage, too.”

  Meg’s dark blue eyes sparkled. “You can do that?”

  “Hey, we can do anything! We’re masters of the machines!”

  Then suddenly, the crash of breaking glass downstairs. And a man screaming, “Incoming! Incoming! Victor Charlie! Victor Charlie!”

  Meg was first out the door, Toby and I right behind. In the living room Ian, hands bleeding, muscles knotted, held a chair straight out in front of him like a lion tamer, waving it at the football player’s terrified girlfriend.

  The term Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder hadn’t yet come into the language. Instead, Toby whispered, “Flashback,” followed by, “You keep him busy in front. I’ll circle.”

  As I wondered, What the hell kind of a plan is that? Meg stepped between the cheerleader and Ian. “Put the chair down, Ian. We’re friends, we’ll help....” He charged before she could finish the sentence, and without thinking, I jumped sideways between them, arms raised, waiting for the crunch of the chair.

  Toby was faster. His big bear paws swatted Ian’s arms, pushing them enough so the chair’s legs glanced off my right shoulder. Toby’s follow-through carried him forward into Ian, awkwardly shoulder-tackling him to the floor. I recovered, straddling Ian’s kicking legs before they did Toby any harm. And as we wrestled on the woven oval living room rug, there was Meg, inches from Ian’s face, quietly repeating, “It’s okay. You’ll be all right. We’ll help you.”

  That’s when Ian stopped fighting. First his body stiffened. Then, eyes rolling back in his head, his thin chest and legs began undulating like ocean waves. Meg said, “Are you all right?” He managed one word—“No.” Then, teeth clenched, his body began the jerky spasmodic dance of a grand mal seizure.

  Toby rolled off Ian’s chest looking dazed, out of breath. I continued holding his legs, more gently now. Meg, voice calm, quiet, kept talking, reassuring. “It’s okay,” she said. “You’ll be all right. We’ll take care of you,” just as we’d practiced the night before less than thirty yards away in the middle of Hope Street.

  Later, I’ll have no idea how long it took before the shaking stopped and Ian’s tongue rolled from his mouth dripping blood and saliva. And I won’t remember anyone leaving. But when I looked past Meg’s anxious face, I realized the apartment, so crowded when we arrived, was nearly empty.

  Nick, the SMC leader, spoke first. “We’ve gotta call an ambulance, get him to the hospital!”

  “You can’t do that man.” Kevin, eyes big, voice ragged, kneeled behind Meg. “They’ll ship him out to the Veterans Administration Hospital. And the VA will drug him and stick him in a straight jacket. I’m telling you man, he’ll die there!”

  Nick was about to answer when Meg, in the same voice she used to comfort Ian, said, “Don’t worry. He’s not going to the VA. We’ll take care of him.”

  The story about the beautiful hippie girl with long blonde hair and a peace sign button who first smiles at, then spits on a young soldier returning from Vietnam, has been repeated so often it’s become an American folk legend. I never saw anything like that. What I did see was the awe people in the antiwar movement felt for veterans, especially when they told stories of the jungle war they’d somehow survived.

  So out of awe, perhaps more than compassion, we carried Ian upstairs to Meg’s bed, and for the next four days, under her direction, took turns caring for him like a newborn, feeding him spoons of applesauce and broth, washing him when in fitful sleep his bladder drained or bowels moved.

  Kevin came by each night after his shift stocking shelves at Taylor Market. He talked about meeting Ian during the siege of Khe Sanh.

  Like he’d done to the French a decade earlier at Dien Bien Phu, General Giap positioned his army of North Vietnamese regulars and Viet Cong guerillas to cut off all ground approaches to Khe Sanh. By the winter of 1967, the large U.S. base was surrounded. Looking for a definitive military victory, NVA mortars began a continuous bombardment while veteran jungle warriors tested the perimeter. Resupply by air and the will of its American and South Vietnamese Marine defenders were the only things keeping Khe Sanh alive.

  Everyone heard the rumor that the American military commander, General William C. Westmoreland, asked President Johnson for permission to lift the siege using tactical nuclear weapons. No one knew what that meant for American troops on the ground, but as the siege continued week after week, most welcomed anything that would put an end to it.

  “They’d been shelling us nonstop for three days. A dozen or so of us first and second lieutenants hunkered down in this little underground bunker, dirt falling on our heads every time another round exploded. Some guys are talking, some praying, everybody’s scared. And this big guy from Michigan, he starts bawling. I mean really sobbing out loud. Mostly, we’re pretending not to hear him. That’s when Ian pipes up. ‘I’ve got a carton of Camels here says none of you sopranos can sing your college fight song loud enough to drown out those mortars.’ Then he grabs the Michigan guy by the arm, hauls him to his feet. ‘C’mon, Wolverine,’ he says, ‘let’s hear your best Hail to the Victors!’ ”

  Shakily at first, but prodded by Ian’s lopsided grin and encouraging shouts from the other officers, the Michigan fight song carried louder and louder through the bunker, everyone joining in heartily at the end, singing words they didn�
�t know, applauding wildly, pounding the smiling second lieutenant on the back. Then one-by-one each officer stood, defending the honor of his alma mater, sometimes off-color, usually off-key, improvising lyrics about beer, coeds, and rival universities.

  “Ian was great. Twice as loud and twice as funny as anybody else, belting out On Wisconsin, marching in place, saluting the whole time. He thought he won his own carton of smokes, but he wasn’t counting on me.”

  Kevin waited for Ian to finish before revealing his two secret weapons: a battered Epiphone guitar and an operatic voice that sang the lead in several Wellston musical productions including Pirates of Penzance. Accompanying himself on guitar, Kevin upstaged Ian with an unsanctioned, Gilbert and Sullivan-style rendition of Ever True to Wellston.

  We are ever true to Wellston

  ‘Cuz we love our college dear

  And wherever we may go

  We are ready with a beer

  And the people always say

  (Whaddatheysay? a dozen voices called out)

  That you can’t out-drink Wellston men (And women!)

  With a scotch and rye and a whiskey dry

  And a B-O-U-R-B-O-N!

  When Kevin finished, they realized the shelling had stopped. A cheer went up at the unmistakable sound of a C-141 transport loaded with toilet paper and spare parts, food and ammunition, making its approach and landing on the cratered runway.

  “Ian sticks his head out of the bunker then looks down at us, face covered with dirt, grinning that lopsided grin of his. ‘The enemy has withdrawn!’ he says, ‘Guess they couldn’t take that Wellston guy’s singing!’ ”

  Later, Ian and Kevin shared the Camels, and later still took to sharing everything. Together, they volunteered for another tour, though Kevin couldn’t explain why. That’s when the Marine Corps surprised them, ordering Kevin stateside to Quantico, Ian to Germany.

  “We wrote or called each other every week, making plans for cross-country trips, graduate school, or starting a band. But two months before discharge it’s like he disappears. No more letters, no more calls. When I try calling the BOQ at his base everyone acts like they never heard of him.”

  Kevin wrote their former Vietnam CO, now posted in Germany. He wrote back that one morning Ian hadn’t shown up for a staff meeting. They found him lying naked on the floor next to his bunk in the Bachelor Officer’s Quarters, his dress uniform neatly laid out on his blanket. The only thing they could get him to say was, “I can’t put it on. I just can’t put it on.”

  “I guess our old CO tried getting Ian into the base hospital for the few weeks he had left in his tour, but the sickbay docs said there was nothing wrong with him. He said Ian’s discharge was being processed, and he’d be flying stateside within a week.”

  Kevin got a three-day pass and hitchhiked north to Otis Air Force Base on Cape Cod. On a brilliantly sunny June morning, he stood alongside the runway watching a smoky speck far out over the Atlantic grow until it became the easily recognizable pregnant guppy shape of a giant C-5A Galaxy transport plane. The flight crew seemed only vaguely aware they’d delivered “some jarhead space case,” taking twenty minutes going through post-flight routines before opening a cargo hatch. Inside the massive jet, big enough to hold helicopters, tanks, and armored personnel carriers, they found Ian, curled in a ball, completely alone.

  “He was dehydrated, hypothermic, terrified. That’s how my best buddy, a decorated combat veteran, came home.”

  Chapter Seven: Paul

  On the morning of the third day after Ian’s seizure, Toby returned from Taylor Market with tea, honey, and candy bars, and quietly climbing the stairs to Meg’s room, found her asleep in the old armchair next to her bed, repeating in her dreams, “It’s all right. You’ll be okay. We’ll take care of you.”

  On the fourth day, I woke in the armchair finding Ian out of bed, standing over me, covering me with Meg’s blanket.

  That afternoon, Kevin came to take Ian back to their apartment. Ian was shaky, ten pounds lighter, but looking more peaceful than when we’d met him four days earlier. He hugged me gently, Meg shyly, reserving the biggest hug for Toby who’d patiently done the heavy lifting whenever Ian’s clothes needed changing. Then he surprised us with three sentences, more than he’d spoken all week. “I went to college,” he said. “On a ROTC scholarship. That’s how I wound up in the Marines.”

  Shaking hands, eyes glistening, we all said goodbye.

  After that, we hung out with Meg every day. She joined us for Beef ‘n’ Bun lunches and pinball, Toby and I joined her for SMC meetings. We felt like brothers—and sister—in arms. Within a month, Toby and I cleared boxes full of Popular Mechanics and Scientific Americans out of our Bowen Street apartment’s tiny sun parlor, and Meg, with her boxes full of New Republics and Rolling Stones, moved in. We were always together except when Meg went to SMC leadership meetings or on the rare occasions when we attended class—Meg in the Political Science and English Departments, Toby and I in Physics, Math, and Engineering.

  Kevin and Ian dropped by Bowen Street every Friday, Kevin strumming his guitar, his perfectly-pitched tenor leading sing-a-longs of Runaround Sue and The Lion Sleeps Tonight, Toby and I joining in flat and low, Meg high and sweet, Ian silently lip-synching. Ian’s dog, a scrappy golden retriever-border collie cross named Broadway Joe lay next to him on the lumpy sofa, scratching the occasional flea and howling soulfully whenever we strayed too far off key. The he’d jump off the couch and trot into the kitchen where Toby would secretly bribe him with a Hydrox cookie or Pecan Sandy. It was no use though, because except for Ian, I was Broadway’s favorite human.

  Nothing about the suddenness or intensity of these newfound relationships surprised us. That’s how friendships were forged in 1969—quickly, easily, and with unquestioning trust, at least among people under thirty who shared the same hairstyles, clothing, politics, and more often than not, drugs. I didn’t know Meg’s last name, and I don’t think Toby did either. It didn’t matter.

  Meg’s only flaw was her lack of interest in computers. So while Toby and I communed with Bruin, she sat with us quietly listening to WELL and reading the Wellston Daily Herald or Butler Journal. Sometimes she’d bring a dog-eared copy of Siddhartha or Slaughterhouse Five and read to us aloud. Sometimes she’d read us eye-opening articles about racism, poverty, and the war. Classmates took to calling the three of us “The Marx Brothers.” The new joke in the Physics Department was that no one could tell whether Toby or I was Groucho, Harpo, or Chico. But Meg, obviously, was Karl.

  Throughout the winter, despite rising tension and increasingly combative protests, Toby and I continued working with Bruin. Outside of computer linking, our greatest collaboration was on a program we named Thoroughbred.

  I’d arrived at Wellston convinced that a lack of computing power was the only thing standing between my genius and the creation of a program for consistently picking racetrack winners—computing power Bruin could provide. I piqued Toby’s interest by taking him to the track, then hooked him with all those marvelous numbers in the Past Performances section of the Daily Racing Form. For me, those statistics were useful tools from which we could construct a program. For Toby, they were nothing less than a window into the future, the only place where, as he said, “You can learn from history in order to repeat it.” Now, on a chilly March morning, after three and a half years of trial and error, numerous money-losing trips to Rhode Island and its two broken-down racetracks, Narragansett and Lincoln Downs, and four rejected attempts to work on Thoroughbred for independent study credit, we were ready.

  When Ray Constantino arrived to unlock his newsstand at 5:00 a.m., Toby and I were waiting for him. “Don’t you two ever go to school?” he asked as we helped him untie the bundled Daily Racing Form the instant they dropped from the delivery truck. While Toby anxiously folded back pages of fresh newsprint looking for the Past Performances section, Raymond lit his first Corona of the day, clenching the cigar on one side of his mouth, dr
inking his morning coffee on the other. I held out a crumpled dollar bill for the paper, but Raymond waved it off, peeling two crisp singles from his own gold-plated money clip instead. “Pick me a winner,” he said, palming me the folded bills.

  Before sunrise we returned to our keyboards, typing the Racing Form’s data into Bruin. Entering the numeric history of each horse’s past performances took two hours. Thoroughbred took another hour to run the entire nine-race card, weighting and sifting twenty-seven different factors for each of the eighty-six horses racing at Narragansett that day.

  At 8:15, as we were ready to print Thoroughbred’s results, the computer lab’s temperature dropped to 66 degrees, the thermostat kicked on the building’s old baseboard heaters, the fluorescent lights flickered.

  Bruin’s screens went blank.

  All of our work, every bit of data we’d spent the last three hours entering, disappeared. Thoroughbred disappeared.

  Toby bolted upright in his chair. I stood frozen at Toby’s shoulder, wide-eyed, holding my breath, too shocked to curse.

  Toby recovered first.

  “C’mon, Tesla! There’s gotta be some way to retrieve it!”

  Furiously we took turns typing commands on Bruin’s keyboards, discussing options as we worked, communicating as only close friends do, me beginning sentences that Toby completed, Toby mumbling fragmented ideas that only I could understand, trying everything we knew and some things we didn’t, all to retrieve Thoroughbred. Each of us did what he was best at—Toby tossing out far-fetched options, me reeling them back in, organizing them, making them work. Neither Toby nor I considered giving up, but after forty-five minutes searching Bruin’s memory with no sign of Thoroughbred, our attempts became desperate, our efforts frantic.