(I think)
have made insomnia
my nightly companion instead of
you
once listened to me play
that song for a while and placed
your head on my shoulder
so how can you expect me to
forget these things when that
song drowns my senses with
you
look sometimes from across the
room I know I stare I
think I hope I
forget your eyes soon because
until I do I think my right
index finger will remain poised
over Middle C and my todays will
remain poised over yesterdays of
the perpetual autumn of
plastic dinosaurs and a well-stocked refrigerator.
Hayes found the fire intensely interesting; his gaze was riveted to the flames. He had recited line after line in what appeared to Maggie a trance state, some terrible mental denial of the present that transported him back to the shattered moment when he had placed those very words on wrinkled paper with cheap pens Bic metal points and he couldn’t couldn’t COULDN’T write fast enough or make it say enough to mean the thoughts that surged through him and the process ended too too too many times in a tragicomical adolescent rage that sent the pen through the air and the poems into the incinerator. Then he blinked his eyes and returned to normal. The fire was fascinating.
I will know him. I will see what is beneath the surface. I have to know him.
Let me in, Simon.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For sharing that with me. It was beautiful. They both were.”
“They were the mindless babblings of a teenage boy who needed to get out more.”
Flynn smiled sweetly. “You’re too hard on yourself. You loved her, didn’t you?”
Hayes let the unexpected inquiry hover above the flames for quite some time before he spoke the answer that he had known all along. The answer was somehow seared now, although he could not tell if it was from the passage of time or the brief flight over the campfire.
“She was killed in the Quebec War. I found out later that she had been in the Seventh Assault Group. She never had a chance.”
“Seventh Assault? Jesus, they cleaned Montreal out for Assault Eight, my group. That was a bloody—”
Hayes visibly flinched. He had been there as well, Assault Fourteen, cleaning up after Eight had retaken the city. He had seen the blood and choked on the fires of the burning city. He had seen the remnants of Assault Seven, but never knew until later that his beloved Brigid was among the twisted wreckage and remains, the burned skulls and shattered bones that littered the blasted remnants of Montreal.
“I’m so sorry, Simon… Please, tell me more.”
“The poems can wait. I can’t remember any more right now.”
She knew he was lying, but it intrigued her nonetheless.
Who is this man? This complicated, dark man?
And what is he hiding?
“Go on, please, Simon.”
Simon graduated at the top of his class, but he did not know what to do after school. The government was collecting volunteers for the colonization of Mars, but that did not interest Simon. Anyway, he knew it would not work. Humans were not meant to leave this planet. And, as he had predicted, the colonists died in transit when a meteor the size of a soup can punctured and depressurized their vehicle. Mars would remain uninhabited, and the space program would be largely abandoned for the time being.
He was accepted at a quite prestigious local university, where he studied literature and art. He met people, he made friends, he fell in love, he made love. He lived what he thought was a good semblance of a normal college life. He tried to keep in touch with old friends. He saw things fall apart. He realized he never wanted to go home.
After he graduated from the university, he spent a summer walking across the country with nothing but two of his best friends, a guitar, quite a few cigars, and a small wad of money kept laced tightly into his left boot. He ended up in Seattle and lived the starving artist life, replete with long hair, goatee, gesso-spattered knee-holed jeans. He found some satisfaction in the “Purple” series of paintings he produced for his landlady in lieu of rent; she had had an abstract-expressionist lover in the glory days of her youth, and although he had long gone the way of the Fletcherists and she had grown more wrinkled and worn than she had been when she was an impossibly smooth-skinned nude model he portrayed descending a staircase perfect even with the small brown beauty mark that graced her supra-sternal notch and its companion that guarded her left breast, she had retained her love of the finer things in life, most notably paintings. For Simon, there were months where going out to dinner meant buying a box of macaroni-and-cheese and as a treat perhaps some ketchup to accompany it at the local supermarket and seeing a show meant watching the scarlet sun burn its way into the western horizon. The news of his mother’s nanotech overload and subsequent death did not disturb him. He knew that she would be happier that way, hopefully forever within one of her heavens.
The Quebec War came with fire and fury and the destruction of Washington, and Simon knew what he had to do. He enlisted, hoping to get placed on the front lines, retaking the cities of New England from the French, but instead, Milicom saw his untapped potential and placed him in military intelligence, medical division. His research team helped to devise a new vaccine for cobalt radiation sickness, a vaccine that saved thousands of American troops in the Adirondack campaign. When the war took a turn for the worse he had finally been sent to the front lines as a medic with the Fourteenth Assault group in Ontario, retaking Brockville, Kingston, and Ottawa from the French. The only time he had actually set foot into Quebec was during the Montreal cleanup operation after the war. There had been so very few wounded, so many dead. His medical training was quite useless when day by day he was simply required to help dig the mass graves outside of the city that the countless war dead were dumped into.
The war was over, and Simon found the restlessness crawling back into his mind. He tried to write, but everything sounded somehow empty. His earlier penchant for poetry was replaced with a disdain for the medium, and he wrote several reactionary poems of a distinctly DaDa nature that amused his friends but only fueled his angst.
Oh my goodness! Golly gee!
There is a rhinoceros in bed with me!
He was not here last night at ten.
(I can’t believe he’s back again.)
He visited me a year ago
And jumped out my bathroom window
And now he’s here again I see
To make a nervous wreck of me—
Maggie laughed out loud, her face illuminating their encampment with a brilliant smile. Simon paused, intending to let her laughter run its course, but instead he found himself joining her. It felt good to laugh like that, something he had not done in so long. She covered her mouth with her hand, and Simon noticed for the first time that she had dimples. When they were done laughing, Simon found himself looking into Maggie’s eyes for a too-long and silent moment. He stuttered a few syllables and eventually succeeded in telling her that—
he had tried music; it had the same result: he was restless, apathetic. He would write a song, play it for hours on the guitar, but never be satisfied with it. Simon had a bad habit of obsessing over the minute details. For months at a time he would play the same chord over and over again, sitting in almost a trance state, hoping for inspiration for the next chord. He resigned himself to serving in military medical for a few more years, and then perhaps traveling the world. Milicom Systems paid well enough, and the prospect of entering the workplace in the shattered and rebuilding real world did not appeal to Simon. Somewhere out there he hoped to find the source of his unrest, the cause of his sleepless mind. And perhaps another Brigid was out there as well. He cherished the cross that she had given him, even thou
gh he always said it meant nothing to him. He wore it with his Milicom tags and never took it off. As for religious significance, it held little for Simon, whose overly-analytical mind simply could not fathom either a divine being or an afterlife. But still he wore it, the last link to a time and place and woman now long dead.
He was stationed in Seattle when the black shapes fell from the sky and took away what was left of the planet’s soul. He fought, he tended to the wounded, he was forced to retreat into the tunnels beneath the city. He treated the chemical burn in the throat of a beautiful woman with a biotic field that he himself had invented four years prior to the invasion of the planet in a lab buried beneath the city with technology that most certainly could not have been human. And he found himself sitting before a meager campfire watching the sunrise with the same woman listening to the story of his life unfold like the blackening pages of his adolescent novel…
The night had grown colder as Simon told Flynn of his past, and the already-struggling fire had choked and died while he was speaking. Neither of them noticed it until Simon stopped talking. There was an uncomfortable silence for a moment. Flynn broke the silence by sitting up and grabbing a handful of the ashes. Her hands flickered and the embers began to glow once more. She put them down and a roaring fire grew from them.
Simon watched in silence.
“Your turn.”
“Hmm? For what?”
“For explanation.”
“What do you want to know?”
“Everything. Nothing. Just talk. I’ve talked all night long, and bored you with the details of my life. Now it’s your turn.”
Simon caught a glimpse of an inward smile that broke through the placid surface of Flynn’s face and then disappeared as quickly as it had emerged. It had been a smile of contemplation. A smile of quiet reticence.
“Simon, you haven’t bored me at all. Telling me—”
“Ember, I—”
“Maggie. Please don’t call me Ember.” Simon was not sure, but for an instant he swore her eyes had flashed with a silver fire, but then it disappeared. “She’s gone now. Ember was my Styx designation. Maggie is my name. Please don’t make me wake her up again.”
There was another moment of silence. Flynn’s hand flickered. Hayes saw with some concern that two lines of teardrops slid silently down her face, the right tear winning the race because of the very noticeable cleft of skin on Maggie’s left cheek that blocked the course of the left tear, diverting it towards her chill-reddened ear, where drained of kinetic energy, it simply came to rest. The display was somehow heartbreaking, and Simon began to stand up, to go to Maggie’s side, but he sat back down when she began to speak, looking into and through the fire.
“There was a time when I was just Maggie Flynn, a time between the wars, before the annexation, when I was just a stupid young girl in New Belfast. A girl who took great pride in her green eyes and her curly red hair. A girl who got caught up in the wrong crowd and did some foolish things for what she thought she believed in. At least that’s what I tell myself; it’s been so long that I don’t remember what I really lived and what was just a dream anymore… There was a time before I became Ember…”
The tears continued their slow voyage down Flynn’s face, and Hayes went to her, held her. The fire had been the intermediary, bisecting their night of revelation of dead histories into a precise one hundred-eighty degrees each. Simon now violated the unspoken boundary established by the fire and held Maggie close. She shivered in his awkward embrace.
“Go ahead, Maggie. You can tell me. Please, tell me.”
Her shaking eventually calmed, and she sat up from Simon’s embrace. He sat back, looked into those gray eyes, but remained on her side of the fire. She reached up to wipe the tracts of wetness from her face, winced as fingertips brushed the unfamiliar sensitive wound of her left cheek. She held out her hand and placed it on top of his, which rested on his knee.
Maggie cleared her throat, and began to speak in that voice that melted Simon’s composure and broke his heart. She spoke to him, but somehow spoke through him in a way that Simon could not explain. Soft, lilting, hypnotic.
“I was a member of the—
—Blood Army, are you?”
Confusion. A dark room, a bright light. Sudden, cold, alone.
“Wha… What?”
A nightstick crashed into the table in front of her, and the legs of the chair upon which she sat flew out from under her. She fell to the floor, her head connecting squarely to the cold stone beneath her in a way that made her bite down on her lip. Warm coppery blood flooded her mouth.
“You didn’t have to do that. She—”
“Bloody hell I didn’t have to do that. Get up, you!”
She wiped the blood from her mouth, or attempted to wipe the blood away, but it was everywhere, stippling the floor at which she looked, coursing down over her chin and soaking the front of her white shirt. She was dizzy, her head a confusing swirl of pain and stars.
“I said get up!” She found herself being lifted forcefully from the floor by her hair and thrown at the table while the chair she had been sitting on was righted behind her. She was then thrown back into the chair, and at last she could look at her attacker.
“Fucking Bloodies. Fucking bombing all over Old Belfast again. The war ended twenty fucking years ago, but still you have to bomb the innocents, don’t you?” An older man, dressed in a dark gray suit with black pockets and black gloves and a nameplate that said “Connelly” and a nightstick that he was presently swinging down at the table again—
“Let’s try this again” he intoned after the crashing sound from the impact of the nightstick had echoed for a short time. She noticed two very painful-looking fresh dents in the metal surface of the table at which she sat. She reached out, fingers tracing the outline of bent metal.
“You’re gonna wreck your furniture before long if you keep hittin’ it like that, Soldierboy.” She attempted a smile, revealing blood-reddened teeth and a freshly split lip. His face turned a noticeably deeper shade of red as he rushed across the room, open-hand slapping her face with black leather-gloved palm. A fresh agony arose as her nose gave way to the blow. More blood soaked her shirt. She glared at Connelly, but said nothing for the time being.
“The next time it’ll be the club hittin’ your face, not my hand, you fuckin’—.”
“Connelly, just get on with it.” Head spinning, broken nose pulsating with agony, she looked around for the source of the voice, finally located a shadow standing in the darkened back of the room. The speaker walked forward, joined Connelly in the light. He was dressed in a similar suit, the same gloves, but his arms were crossed and he was holding a black leather folder in one hand.
“Fine.” Connelly’s eyes glared. “Fine.” He tore the folder from his companion’s hand. He opened the folder, spilled its contents onto the tabletop. Several blurred photographs, some nondescript sheets of paper, and a microdisc, which he gingerly picked up and slid into a video projector on the wall of the dark room. A series of images began to flicker across the wall.
“Magdalene Flynn. Is that your name?”
She looked at the images of blackened, burned car wreckage. Another shot of a collapsed storefront. She took her time wiping the now-congealing blood from her upper lip with the back of her hand.
“You are Maggie Flynn. Correct?”
“Aye. I’m Maggie Flynn, Soldierboy.”
Connelly uttered a sound that eerily resembled a growl, but the other man stepped forward, placing his hand on Connelly’s shoulder. Connelly moved to the back of the room, submitting grudgingly to the other man’s authority.
The images continued upon the wall, but now they had switched from depictions of bombed wreckage to photographs of Maggie with various groups of people. Images that must have been taken in public places, when she did not know she was being watched.
“Maggie, how old are you?” His nameplate, now visible, said simply “Smith.” His v
oice was not like her own, or Connelly’s. His was the voice of an American.
“What the fuck does it matter to you, Yankee?”
He smiled, shook his head. “It doesn’t matter anything to me, Miss Flynn. It matters to you. It matters because some people think you’re just a kid caught up with the wrong crowd. It matters because other people think you should be shot in the morning, like the rest of your group will be.”
She became visibly upset for the briefest of moments, and then her face returned to the stoic, defiant demeanor that so infuriated Connelly, eyebrows drawn to a frown, chin held high with youthful pride. “What group?”
“Oh, I think you know who I’m talking about, Maggie.”
“Well, I was a Girl Scout a few years back—”
“Are you a member of the Northern Irish Blood Army, Maggie?”
She did not reply, but her sudden and intent interest in her hands on the tabletop was all the answer Smith needed. Her face had taken on a pale, drained sheen.
“Jesus. How old are you, sixteen? Seventeen?”
She studied her hands in silence. Smith turned to Connelly, who looked through his papers. “Sequencing says she’s seventeen.”
“Seventeen. Hell, when I was seventeen I was working at McDonald’s and saving up for a new car and trying to find a girlfriend to keep me company in the back of that car. You’re seventeen and you’re blowing up buses and churches.”
She began wiping her blood from her fingernails. “They’re going to execute you for that last bombing, you know, Maggie. The war ended twenty years—”
“The war never fucking ended as long as his troops are in my country!” She pointed out at Connelly. “Collaborating bastards! If they hadn’t… If they…” She started coughing forcefully, her hand reaching to grasp her right side. Smith frowned and looked back at Connelly, who shrugged his shoulders. Smith leafed through the papers on the table as Maggie continued coughing, her face turning a violent red.
“Did you see this report?” Smith held out a paper and Connelly took it, looked it over, glanced up at Maggie, and then looked back at the physical report. “What could have caused that? I’ve never seen anything like—”
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