by Lydia Millet
“Air Force.”
“I was just with some Marines,” said Hal. “Or something like that. Coast Guard. Green Berets. Shit, military-type guys, what the hell do I know. In the jungle.”
“Yeah?”
“Down south, on the Monkey River,” said Hal, nodding.
“No shit,” said the Air Force guy. “Me too!”
“Get out,” said Hal. Was the guy playing him?
“Serious,” said the Air Force guy. “We did a raid on a guerrilla camp.”
“A raid? You mean like—”
“I’m a pilot.”
“So you mean like a bombing raid? A—dropping bombs on them?”
“Limited airstrike. Yeah. Cluster bombs.”
“Cluster bombs?”
“CBUs.”
“Don’t we—I mean don’t we have to declare war or something?”
“Hey. Just following orders. My understanding through the grapevine, this was a War on Drugs operation.”
Hal felt dazzled. Water splashed up from the pool onto his back, and people were still shrieking. He thought for a second he was back by the river, exhausted. Was it his fault? Bombing Mayans … but maybe they weren’t Mayans at all, maybe they were drug kingpins. He gazed down at the drink in his hand; he had mixed tequila, whiskey and now vodka. It was dizzying.
“There you go,” said the pilot, putting a hand on his back and moving him. “Guy was about to stick a tail on you.”
“You mean on this side of the border, right?” asked Hal.
“Wanna get some food? I’m starving.”
“Sure,” said Hal, but he felt unsteady. “They have shrimp puffs.”
“There’s a whole table. Follow me.”
At the table there was a surfeit of food. The pilot picked up what looked like a kebab.
“Is that meat? Does that look like meat to you?”
“I think so,” said Hal, bending to look at it.
“I think so too.”
He put it back.
“What,” said Hal, “you don’t eat meat?”
“Vegan,” said the pilot.
“A vegan bomb-dropper,” said Hal. He drank from his glass. It was almost empty. He put it down on the table.
“Best thing for you,” said the pilot. “Too much dairy clogs the arteries.”
“You don’t get anemic or anything?” asked Hal.
The pilot was piling fruit onto a plate, fruit and corn-on-the-cob and bread.
“You should eat too,” he said to Hal. “You look like you need it.”
“I’m not used to drinking,” admitted Hal.
“Here, take that,” said the pilot, and handed Hal his plate. “Sit down. Dig in.”
The vegan pilot was looking out for him. Why? It was a mystery. Kindly people were crawling out of the woodwork, lately—vegan pilots and German women. Nice people and nude people. In fact there was definite overlap. Did being nude make people nicer? Quite possibly. The inverse was certainly true: putting on Kevlar vests, body armor, etc., made you more willing to go around shooting people. It might also be the case that nice people were more willing to be nude. Chicken or egg question, really.
But then technically the vegan pilot had just been on a cluster-bombing sortie, so maybe he was not so nice. A wolf in vegan’s clothing.
Hal carried the plate to a table and sat. The bread was good, though there was no butter on it. He would prefer it with a pat of butter. He took a bite of the corn, also. Then the vegan cluster-bomber was back with him.
“So this bombing, did it, you know, kill people?”
“The bombs were anti-personnel, so yeah, that would have been an objective. I didn’t do any follow-up though, I was in and out, that was it.”
“You don’t feel bad about that? Killing?”
“It’s not ideal. But we all kill,” said the vegan, and forked up a piece of roasted red pepper.
“Not people,” said Hal.
“Of course we do,” said the vegan.
“Me personally?”
“You eat other people’s food.”
“Not following you.”
“People who need it more than you do and die for lack of a pound of corn. It’s what we all are, isn’t it? Killers. I mean, all that life is is energy. The conversion of fuel. And we take it all. A quarter of the world’s resources for what, five percent of its population,” said the vegan. “That’s us.”
He patted his mouth carefully with a paper napkin and raised a glass to his lips. It looked like bubbly water.
“That’s ridiculous,” said Hal. “Talk about oversimplified.” He should drink water too, to clear his head. He looked around for a dispenser.
“Yeah well,” said the vegan. “Arithmetic is simple. That doesn’t make it wrong.”
This kind of discussion was pleasing only in a work environment, and only when it dealt directly with taxation. In a party setting it was unwelcome. Hal had the feeling of being caught in a trap by the vegan. Maybe you had to be careful of vegans. The vegan menace.
Although the vegan still seemed friendly. He spoke in a soft, moderate tone.
“Come on,” said Hal weakly. “You’re talking about what, middle-class lifestyle? At worst it’s manslaughter. It’s not murder. It’s not like flying over a jungle and cluster-bombing Mayans.”
But the buttery corn was slipping out of his grasp. It was devious and slippery.
“Manslaughter or murder, the guy still ends up dead,” said the vegan. “Does it matter to him how the killer rationalized?”
“Where’d you get that water?” asked Hal. He also needed a napkin.
“Right over there,” said the vegan, pointing.
Hal made his way to the table with the water. He was leaning over an array of light-blue bottles when an elbow struck his ribcage.
“You’re married, right?”
It was Cleve, with a woman hanging onto his arm.
“Oh hey, I got you that cognac,” said Hal, nodding confusedly, and looked around for where he’d set it down.
“Because the guy you’re talking to?”
“He claims to be a pilot,” said Hal. “With the Air Force. He talks like an earnest grad student though. Do you know him?”
“He’s a pilot. Yeah. But he’s also a flaming faggot,” said Cleve. “What, you didn’t notice? He’s probably hitting on you.”
“I’m old enough to be his father,” protested Hal weakly, but Cleve was already clapping him on the back with a smirk.
“Just a babe in the woods,” he said, and moved off.
There was still butter on Hal’s fingers, or maybe vegetable oil. He reached for the top of a stack of paper napkins and wiped his fingers, then picked up a bottle.
When he sat down again beside the vegan he looked at him differently, applying a This Man Is Gay filter. He remained unsure, though. The vegan was buff, clean, and ate politely, but there were straight men like that.
“You know Cleve?” asked the vegan.
“Not really,” said Hal. “I know someone who knows him, a guy at the embassy. I don’t really like either of them. Just between you and me. But he told me you’re gay.”
The vegan laughed easily.
“Guilty,” he said. “Though I doubt he put it that way. Cleve’s got issues.”
“They let gay guys fly fighter planes?”
“Don’t ask, don’t tell. Hey, it’s not like we’re color-blind. Or women.”
“Ha,” said Hal. He had finished the whole bottle of water. He felt almost sober. “My daughter always wanted to fly,” he said.
“She should take lessons,” said the vegan, and set his plate down on the table.
“Paralyzed,” said Hal.
“I’m sorry.”
“Me too.”
He was far soberer, yes, but the food was making him drowsy, the food on top of the alcohol.
“I need to lie down, I think,” he said to the vegan.
“There’s a hammock,” said the vegan. �
��I’ll show you.”
They walked down the stairs, past the pool, past the crowds and onto the beach, where there was a small stand of palm trees. A string hammock swung there. Someone had just vacated it. There was a breeze off the ocean.
“Perfect,” said Hal, grateful.
Cluster-bomber or not, the vegan had been good to him.
After he settled down in the hammock the vegan patted him on the shoulder.
“Good talking to you,” said the vegan, and moved off.
“You too,” said Hal.
When he woke up he would tell Brady: You were wrong. The kindergarten teacher was right.
They cluster-bombed and cluster-bombed and told the diplomats nothing.
• • • • •
What woke him up was not the flying dinosaurs but their calls. The calls of the pterodactyls were the same as the hoarse, throaty cries of young men.
He heard them and shifted in the hammock, registering the way the strings were cutting into his back. He was sore along the lines the strings had etched. White light made him cover his eyes.
Struggling awake he saw it was morning—no, midday; the sun was high in the sky—and the monsters were in the sky too but shockingly close to him, red and green dinosaurs with spread wings. He was back with them. Prehistoric. He could smell the salt of the sea and the freshness of morning air. Dinosaurs had been birds, many of them, and birds were their descendants … they skimmed along the ocean, over the waves. It must be high tide, because the water was not far away. It lapped at the sand just a few feet downhill. He was between palm trees, so the dinosaurs were only partly visible.
One landed. It had feet rather than claws. It was running.
It was actually a young man holding onto a glider thing. Was it parasailing? No … kitesurfers, that was it. He’d seen them before, on Venice Beach. The man hit the sand running, calling out again hoarsely, a cry of triumph. The others were behind him, still over the water. The young man let his red wings go, his red apparatus on its metal struts, or maybe they were fiberglass. It tumbled behind him. How had he taken off? How did they do it?
Another one alit on the water.
Hal struggled out of the hammock as the fliers landed, rubbing his eyes, bleary: the party would have ended long ago. The party had continued without him, leaving him behind. When he was a young man, in high school and college, he had been almost frightened to miss a party, at least any party his friends were attending. He had thought that everything would happen there, at that precise moment, that on that one occasion all friendships, all bonds would be cemented without him. In his absence, he had feared, the best times would be had and he would have missed them.
He did not have that feeling now. Sleep was a good way to leave a party.
His neck was stiff, though.
He patted his pockets. Wallet, check. Something in his breast pocket; he extracted it. It was a mass of tangled pipe-cleaner. Formerly a toucan. He pulled at it, trying to get it back into shape, but no dice. He must have lain on it.
He left the shouting men behind him, the ones landing with hoarse cries of victory. There were more of them coming, more red and green shapes over the horizon. Best to leave before the full-scale invasion. Recover in the hotel room; possibly sleep more there. But first he needed to rinse his mouth.
He walked over the sand to the water, where waves were curling. The wind was up. Behind him the first man landed was grappling with his sail apparatus; ahead, beyond the break, another man was surfing. Hal bent and scooped water into his mouth, jumped back from the edge, gargled and spat. He did it again until his mouth felt salty but clean.
Around him the red gliders were landing. They made him nervous, as though they might land on him. Were they members of a club? They all bore the same pattern, like a squadron of fighter planes. Panels of red, green, orange. The men who held them were euphoric. Their muscles and the wind alone had carried them. Hal felt envious. Yes: when he got home he would enroll in a class, learn to do this. Or windsurfing. To be one of the blown ones, carried.
Today was the day; this very afternoon he would liberate T. He would hustle him onto a plane and take him back to Susan like a trophy.
Slightly dinged, admittedly. Luster dimmed, in her eyes. But still a trophy.
On his return, he would see Susan in a softer light. He owed it to her. And he would be with Casey again.
Climbing the steps to the pool, he looked across its breeze-rippled surface to the aftermath of the party—glasses still on tables, white tablecloths with edges flying up in the wind, flapping across leftover, greasy dishes. No one was around, not even cleaning staff. It was deserted.
Maybe, he thought, he could salvage a replacement toucan from the ruins. He wove through the tables, scouting. Toucan, toucan! He would score one for Casey. He swore to get one for her. It was his duty. Yet there were no toucans.
Still, as he rounded the last dirty table, where a bowl of floating flowers had been used as an ashtray, he saw what seemed to be a green pipe-cleaner turtle sticking out of a margarita glass. They swam thousands of miles to build nests in the sand a few miles south of here, the divemaster had told him, but after they laid their eggs had to return to the water, and poachers tore up their nests and stole the eggs. They had lived 200 million years, maybe more. Maybe even 400. They had outlived the dinosaurs. But now a few beachfront resorts, a few hungry poachers and they were on their way out.
He would accept the turtle, though it lacked the kitsch value of the toucan.
He snatched it out of its empty glass.
10
It was time. At the holding facility T. would be waiting for him. Turned out the place was an easy ten-minute walk from the hotel: the receptionist drew a crude street map on the back of a piece of stationery.
The humid air of the streets was heavy with a gray smog; cars here still ran on leaded gasoline. Simply because no one had yet passed a law to prevent it. As a result children breathed in the toxic fumes every day and gradually lost brain function.
It came to Hal—a curious thought, because he was not given to theories of the supernatural—that their ghosts must linger here, the ghosts of those children before they were impaired. Even as the living children went on, growing into adults of limited intelligence, so must the ghosts linger beside them, pale images of what they might have become.
How wrong Tom Paine had been. Not overall, but in the sound bites. “That government is best which governs least.” If only.
Ahead of him a thin boy stepped out of the darkened doorway of a building. Hal felt an impulse to apologize to this boy in case he was one of the retarded ones. Not that Hal himself was personally responsible for the lead in the gasoline of this foreign country, but in the sense that they all were, that individuals were culpable, especially individuals like him, secure and comfortable and well-educated, for all of the rest of them … but now the boy must be confused, because he was not moving out of the way. Hal would have to step around him, down over the curb, onto the street and up again.
He moved to step into the street, smiling apologetically in case—since after all he was the interloper here, not the boy—it had been rude on his part not to do so in the first place. He noticed, in the boy’s rising hand, something thin and gray. Then the boy stepped up to him, and the boy’s hand was on his pocket; at the same time he felt a pain in his side, and was already on his way down to the dirty sidewalk before he could say anything. Falling into sharpness, or the sharpness was crumpling him. It happened so smoothly that as the boy ran away, a small bundle in his hand—a wallet?—Hal was still feeling beholden, as though he owed him an apology.
He was a child, after all. You wanted to protect them despite the bad behavior, knowing that all hurt animals had to flail … it was bad, it was surprisingly bad, but the sharpness faded, actually washed itself out a bit. It softened and covered him as he lay, doubtful, stricken by confusion. Was he supposed to be doing something? Was there something he could do abou
t his situation? He was part of the world’s momentum, part of its on-and-on functioning, its inertia that was neverending. The pilot had said it, and it was true, finally. He himself was responsible for the boy, and by extension for this, for the sharpness and the spreading bewilderment. He had played by the rules—he had always played by the rules, even when, for a second, he considered breaking them and then decided not to. His life had been bracketed by rules, enclosed by their tidy parentheses; he had gone along in the forward motion, he had done nothing to stop it.
Warmth flowed over the sidewalk—his own, he felt in a wave of dismay. Had he disgraced himself? But it was thick—blood, not urine.
The sidewalk heated under his side and his arm but he himself grew colder despite the weather, his legs and stomach icy. He had thought it was so cloying in this place, so humid. Just a minute ago … how quickly it all flickered. Time was not in step with humans, in the end. It went too fast and too slow: and yet people expected it to guide them and shelter them.
And the boy was gone. Hal was alone and he almost missed him: come back, he thought. Boy? Anyone?
He tried calling out, but lacked the force or the breath. His voice dwindled.
His face against the sidewalk, then turning to lie on his back while the snake twisted in him—he saw the pain that way, an image vaguely inherited somewhere: a black and white snake with a diamond pattern—or no, the diamonds were not white but a sickly yellow. The image flicked past him, a snake slithering through his own blood. He felt a lick of panic, but then he was calm. It wasn’t real, after all.
He would have to wait till someone came to help him. That was what happened, with these incidents. People came to help you. All life was based on this, the social compact. It would not let him down, would it? He himself had held up his end. Not that he was a saint. But he was not a bad guy. It was fair to say that, more or less, he had held up his end.
Sometimes you had to wait first. That was all. T. would be fine without him; there was no bail, so all he had to do was walk out. Possibly, even, he would walk out and find Hal. Rescue him, in a role reversal. At this point he was only a few blocks away.
But the flow—he was soaking. Could he stop the flow while he was waiting?