I picked myself to live.
I was close to the end of the line. The barracks, I thought they were barracks, creaked in the blowing sand fifty yards away. Sand scoured my face, but I didn’t even squint. I learned that the first time I was here. Don’t squint. Don’t relax. Don’t step forward. Don’t talk unless you’re talked to. Let your eyeballs dry out. Stand tall.
I don’t know how many times I’d dreamed about the line when this guy I’m telling you about got his. The sergeant was stalking the line towards me, and I was praying he would stop before he got to me, or walk by, not pause in front of me.
He did once.
“What are you thinking about?” he had asked. His face pushed up under my chin, his breath puffed on my neck.
“Lots of things sir.” My voice didn’t crack. There was no way to know what would be a good answer. He never behaved the same way twice. He was a maniac sometimes, or as reasonable as a judge others, or indifferent, or caring. He changed constantly. Sometimes his voice varied. He spoke in an accent, or hoarse, or falsetto. But his face never changed. It was creased and leathery, an odd shade of brown, not really Chicano or Negro. Something else. And his uniform was always the same, sky blue with a wide black stripe down the sleeves and legs. He might as well have been wearing a black hooded robe though, and carried a scythe, since that is who he was. He didn’t though. The uniform was blue and the boots were brown, and he took long heavy strides in them, for a small man.
He almost always carried something. Once it was a machine gun, the kind I used to see in World War II movies. A Sgt. Rock machine gun. Another time it was a spear, and another time an Eskimo skinning knife. Today it was a little stick, like a straw you’d stick in a malted milk. He pressed it against my chest above my heart.
“Name two,” he said.
“I was thinking how I wished you wouldn’t stop in front of me sir, and I was thinking it is too hot here.” I tried not to lean backwards from the pressure of the stick on my chest, and to do that I had to lean into it, which struck me as exactly like moving into a punch.
He laughed. He did laugh a lot, but it hardly ever meant anything. He laughed the way some people say “um.” It just filled time while he thought of something to say.
“Good answers.” He pulled the stick away and I had to catch myself from falling forward. He turned and walked. That’s the first time I saw the patch on his shoulder. Since then I tried to study it whenever he went by. The patch is gray with a black border, and on the field of gray is the fraction 1/1,000 in black. That’s the other reason I know this is not just a dream. The patch I mean.
That’s what happened when he stopped in front of me, but the time I was telling you about, the time he stopped in front of the guy three men down, he wasn’t carrying anything. Around his lower legs, though, he wore what looked like skinny shin guards, and coming out of the top of each of the guards was an eighteen inch long sabre, curved slightly away from him so when he walked the points wouldn’t stab him. They looked sort of weird sticking up like that, like something you might see on an insect’s leg.
The sergeant started screaming at him. He spit when he screamed, so that at the end his chin shone with the glisten of his saliva. He yelled like a television preacher preaches, putting emphasis in odd places and dragging out some syllables. It all seemed like gibberish these things he yelled, and part of the time I couldn’t tell if he was yelling at the guy, or yelling at himself, or just yelling for the hell of it. I thought for a second maybe that he was even crying.
Then, abruptly, he threw his knee into the abdomen of the man, and the sabre slid in as easily as a boat into harbor. It made a ripping noise, a small one, when it tore his shirt, and then a kind of sloppy wet sound. The guy doubled over the sergeant’s knee and spazzed out for a few seconds, like an epileptic having a seizure, and then he was still. The sergeant had been supporting him by the armpits and he let him down on his back and pulled the blade out. His pant leg was black with blood, and when he walked by me his shoe squished just like he’d accidently stepped in a puddle.
It’s kind of funny. When something happens in a movie, like a guy gets kicked in the nuts, lots of people double over, like they got kicked themselves. Not me. I feel the kick in my foot. People all around me are moaning like they got booted, and I’m thinking how it feels to do the kicking. So this guy down the line gets gored with a mutant shin guard and instead of thinking how bad that’d feel to have happen to me, I’m thinking what it would feel like to do it. Funny, huh?
I saw the guy’s face staring up into the blind sky. I looked at it out of the corner of my eye for a long time, and that’s why I know I can die here, because I saw the same face on the street outside of my apartment the next morning. He’d been hit by a car and his back was twisted around funny, like a busted toy, so that his knees were against the asphalt as if he were kneeling, but his upper torso was on its back on the sidewalk. I had walked out of the door, on my way to the plant, still distracted from the dream, just in time to hear the car hit him. He didn’t make a sound, but the car tires shrieked like a banshee and the driver was out in a second saying it wasn’t his fault; the man was a jaywalker.
I stood there. It was the same guy as from the dream laying in the street. He blinked slowly once, and his lips parted, not to speak but to let a last breath out. The driver was still yelling, and a handful of people stopped to look at him, but no one bent to touch the dead man. For a moment I panicked when I thought the driver might be the sergeant, but he wasn’t. He was a middle-aged fellow, really beefy. His shirt was untucked in the back so it flopped off his big butt as he twirled around assuring everyone in earshot he was innocent. I backed up though when I saw his tatoo, a little one, on his forearm, a black circle around a gray field with a black 1/1,000 in the middle.
I saw that tatoo and my breath kind of froze in my throat, and I ran away just like I’d killed the guy.
Couldn’t work worth a damn. Made lots of mistakes. Couple of the fellows covered for me when I did, because I had for them before. I thought about the dream all the time. I wondered if the dead man had had the same dream the night before, and he knew he died in it. I wondered if he woke up that morning and washed his face, and put on his tie, and kissed his wife goodbye, and patted his kids on the head knowing that it was over.
It’s kind of odd, you know, being afraid of a dream since you can’t do anything about it, though Lord knows I tried. I mean this is going to sound like I just did nothing, like I was a wimp letting this dream push me around, but it wasn’t like that at all. I tried all the time, every night, to not dream. I stayed away from rich food, thinking that might do the trick, but it didn’t. And then I tried dreaming other dreams, dreams I used to have, but they wouldn’t come. So I ended up just letting them do what they wanted because I had no choice.
All the first dreams I stood in the line and he inspected, and paused, walked on, and paused, and killed. Sometimes with just his bare hands. I tried to guess who would go next. Once, way down the line, he reached up to a man’s throat and stood there for ten minutes choking him to death. I could see the hair on the sergeant’s arms, and the muscles underneath straining. And I remember other faces turned to look, like I was, but no one stepped out; they took peeks, so I’d see the face, a flash of eyes, and then I wouldn’t.
It happened slowly. The wind moaned past us, notes rising and falling. Individual grains of sand bounced off my shirt. The sergeant was far away, but I could see those muscles tight under his skin as if I stood beside him. My forearm muscles clenched until they ached from it.
The guy next to me hated the sergeant; I could tell. Hated and feared him. Scared? Oh yeah, I was scared. Who wants to die? But I couldn’t work up any hate for him as much as I tried. So I started to hate myself, for not hating him, I mean. “What kind of man am I?” I thought.
In the beginning when I believed it was just a dream, a bad recurring dream, I guessed it came out of dodging Vietnam. It’s not li
ke I really dodged. I had a high number, but other guys didn’t and they had to go. I stayed home. I would have gone, but my luck was good. So I thought at first that these dreams were like a civilian version of delayed shock syndrome. I was feeling bad from not going over and it showed up in this military nightmare.
Fat chance. As I said, they are real.
Then, we broke formation. He made us march across the desert, and for days (every night) I drug my feet across the sand, and that’s all the dream was, us walking, and him trailing along killing people, maybe a half dozen a night. No reason as far as I could tell unless someone cut from the column. Completely random. Sometimes he’d yell something. Sometimes he was quiet. You’d never know.
I watched the back of the man in front of me. He had a funny rhythm in his walk. He’d take three good strides, and then a short one, always with the left leg. It got hypnotic. I breathed to his walk, three longs and a short, three longs and a short. Sweat lines slid down my back, soaking my belt. My feet burned because the sand held the foot for a second each stride. I counted steps, but only the short ones, and I was almost to 2,500, about six miles I figure if each step was three feet long.
“What you thinking about?” The Sergeant marched beside me, hands hidden behind his back, like this was a stroll in the park. This was the first time he’s spoken to me since I saw the guy in the street, but I didn’t think about that then. My face went dry. It was funny, kind of, how my body showed me I was afraid. All my pores closed up, and my skin got cold, like my body fluids had abandoned me, gone to hide inside. I didn’t blame them.
“Just counting steps.” I had nothing I could say. What did it matter, after all? My dream had a maniac in it who was going to kill me.
“What else?” He sounded like a librarian asking me what books I wanted. Very proper. Very polite.
“I was thinking I don’t want to die yet.”
“No one does, son.” Then he pulled a gun from behind his back, not an ordinary gun, but a massive black hunk of metal with a pistol grip and no barrel at all, pointed it at the man in front of me, and blew a hole in him the size of a pie plate. Almost cut him in half. I skipped sharply to avoid stepping on him. The sand was sprayed red for twenty feet from the body, and the guy I was behind now was soaked in gore, little bits dropping off him as he walked. Blood ran off the palms of his hands. I wondered what it felt like to hold a gun like that, to feel the heavy kick of it.
“He didn’t want to die either,” the sergeant said in his librarian voice as he aimed the gun at me.
Then I woke up, gasping, soaked with sweat, and I realized I’d wet the bed.
I knew I couldn’t go back to sleep, so I scored some whitecross from an old drug buddy of mine and tried to outlast the sergeant.
It was stupid.
Sitting in a back booth of the Dark Horse Bar and Grill seventy-six hours later, with a hundred gallons of coffee and God knows how many amphetamines in my system, I closed my eyes.
“Nobody wants to die,” he said. The sand scrunched loudly under his feet. I stared ahead, but the gun filled my peripheral vision.
“I hate this dream,” I said. He laughed, and it almost was a real laugh, an honest one.
“You shouldn’t.” Then he said a weird thing. I wondered about it. “It’s better than being awake. You should want to stay here all the time.” Then he dropped the gun to his side and disappeared behind me, but I could still hear his chuckle as I walked farther away from him. When his gun’s awful slam echoed flatly across the desert later, and someone else died, I didn’t even flinch.
How could this possibly be better than being awake, this nightmare where people died for no reason, this nightmare that was real? But I didn’t try the uppers trick again. I just went to bed when I was tired and let the dream happen.
We came, I don’t know how many nights later, to the edge of a swamp, all oozy mud and pale sick looking trees falling over on themselves, and he set us to building a road into it. I was in the rock and fill crew. We moved dirt and boulders in wheelbarrows from a quarry a quarter of a mile up a hill to the edge of the marsh, where a second crew dumped it into the muck. Mindless sort of work: lift and carry, lift and carry.
The road stretched into the swamp slowly, night after night. We started moving our loads down to the end of the road we’d made and leaving them there rather than at the edge of the swamp. He kept killing though. Like a jumping spider, he’d be one place, and we’d be working, and all of the sudden he’d be next to somebody and they’d die. We buried the bodies in the road.
I don’t know what I was doing during my waking times. These dreams went on for months. It seems that I did what I always did: went to work, ate meals, talked to my friends, but it was like that was the dream, and dreaming was the reality. I tried to tell a buddy about it, but he got that glassy look in his eyes, like anyone would, when I started going into the details. After all, it was only a dream to him. Everyone has them, he said.
I even went to a psychiatrist, and he at least listened, but when we were all done, he said I needed more sessions, and scheduled me in for twice a week. I told him that at the rate the dream was going I wouldn’t make the second appointment, and he frowned, scribbled a prescription for something and told me to try that. The pharmacist told me that it was a sleeping pill. Great help.
Meanwhile, numbers were getting pretty thin in the dream.
The road reached a couple of hundred yards into the swamp, but there were only eight of us left when I woke up in the dream, exactly where I had been when the dream left off last. He carried a six foot long double bladed ax now, with a little whistle device in the head so that when he swung it, it sang. Gruesome thing, and heavy too. It hardly slowed down passing through a body. I thought of that old horror story with a pendulum in it. This ax could have doubled for the pendulum.
He walked behind me, and my back felt naked. I shoveled more dirt into the wheelbarrow, waiting for the whistle, but it didn’t come for me. All night I loaded dirt and rocks, rolled it to the edge of the road, and dumped it. I imagined what it would be like to be him, to heft that heavy axe, to look at sweaty backs and choose and choose.
When I woke up in the real world (I don’t know. I can’t tell them apart any more. Not that it makes a difference), there were only two of us left and I knew that I would die the next night.
But it was unavoidable. Sleep, I mean. It was like a gigantic cold front moving across the horizon, first showing up as just a hint of darkness, and then towering higher and higher. I remember a picture of a farmer in a field watching a storm come. He is very small in the picture; the wall of blackness bearing down on his field, huge.
I pulled my blankets back, stepped out of my shoes, lay down and closed my eyes. You can’t stop the rain. I started to sleep.
That’s when I yelled “This is a dream! This is a dream!” But it didn’t do any good.
He threw a body into my wheelbarrow, a short woman with black hair. Not a mark on her. Perhaps he just looked at her and wished her dead. I don’t know.
She thumped hard, her head snapping sharply against the edge of the wheelbarrow.
“Put her in the road,” he said. Her hands had draped on the rim like she was going to come to life and pull herself out, like she was resting there and wasn’t really dead. I wondered how she would die in her other life. Maybe a car accident, or on an operating table, or she might just go to sleep and not wake up.
“You killed us all off. The road won’t get finished,” I said.
“The work doesn’t matter,” he said, but his tone was odd, like he was smiling when he said it.
“Was this better than being awake for her?” I was angry. You can’t stay scared forever. For a while I was petrified. He killed up and down the line. I saw death administered hundreds of ways, then, after the uppers incident, I got numb, like death was anything else that happened. It was no different than going to the bowling alley. But now I was mad.
“Of course.”
“She’s dead.”
“That’s true,” he said.
“So how’s that better?” I dropped the handles of the wheelbarrow. Her arms flopped across her chest. He pushed his burnt leather face up to mine, but I didn’t back up. We locked eyes, his watery blue ones with my muddy browns.
“Before, she was always going to die. Here, she had a chance.” His breath washed on my chest. I thought about jumping him—he didn’t carry a weapon today—but I had seen him attacked before, two times. They both died horribly, slowly, in a great deal of pain.
“What chance!” I yelled. It was so stupid. He would kill me, and that would be that.
“The same chance you had, which was better than what you use to have over there in your waking life.”
“What?”
He sat down on a boulder the size of an office desk and crossed his legs under him.
“What do you think life’s about?” he said to me, suddenly angry. “Have you thought for a second what you do anything for?”
I tried to think, but I was too mad. I couldn’t figure what he was getting at, and I wanted to kill him. I’d never have another chance. What did I have to lose? I bunched my fist and slammed it into his throat.
It was like hitting polished marble, like punching a statue. He waited until I quit grimacing. My knuckles should have all been broken, but they weren’t. The skin wasn’t even bruised.
“Don’t you get it?” he said. “I can’t die, and that’s why she’s lucky and so are you.”
I must have looked stupid. “Huh?” I said.
“Nobody used to live,” he said. “You know, it was inevitable. Everybody died. One-hundred percent. But it’s different now. Things have changed here.”
I looked around. Behind him the gray desert hills mounded one on another. Behind me, the incomplete road reached into the swamp like a dock. “Where’s here?” I said.
Flying in the Heart of the Lafayette Escadrille Page 18