War Stories

by Andrew Liptak

  Inevitably I looked up at the stars. You kept pulling at your beer, two fingers around the neck, and looked instead at the shadows at our feet. You kicked the snow until ashen grass showed beneath, then buried the ground all over again.

  My curiosity, but not about the stars: “I’ve never been up there.”

  Another swig of the beer. “There’s nothing up there.”

  “There’s a war out there.” Rebellious company colonies that we called terrorists. “You were up there. Are you going back?”

  “Yep.”

  It didn’t have to matter then. This was only supposed to be one time.

  I love a man in uniform used to be a punch line.

  §

  It was only supposed to be one time, seeing you, but the next day I let you ride one of my bikes, a vintage that you said you had experience with, yet you brought it down at the side of the road. Gravel flew like tiny meteorites. You laughed. I wanted to hit you for the scratches and the dents, for all the ways you thought my anger was funny. “I didn’t do it on purpose.” Sure. Anyone who liked to crash probably always did it on purpose.

  It didn’t occur to me until later that you’d lied about the experience. That you just wanted an excuse to do something I loved. That you dived in so readily and risked your limbs for an extra day together. “I’m not bad with machinery,” you said. “Just not used to roads.” We walked back to the garage, five miles pushing the bikes on snow–dusted road, with rockets from the base launching in the distance, returning your brothers and sisters to the stars. The contrails carved white across the blue sky, making wedgewood out of the Earth’s canopy.

  It was a clear day and maybe that had been your plan all along. This way we talked instead of the wind rushing between us. You might’ve even faked a limp to ease my irritation. Tough guy. Bright smile. I talked. You just listened, gathering my stories of childhood spills and sun–drenched road trips to your chest like they would keep you warm. That was exactly what you were doing, why you didn’t tell me any of your own stories. Your stories, you said later, would only leave behind the cold.

  Anna wore a smile the following weekend, like people do when they’re in on a secret. I found it infuriating. We said it was casual. We shot pool and went for drives. The snow on the fields made you quiet and I didn’t mind. You know you get along with someone when silence isn’t a barrier. You know you belong with someone when breaking it opens a door.

  Because you didn’t tell me stories, I made up my own. Confirm or deny. The only rule was you weren’t allowed to lie. It was my version of invading a foreign space, of setting up convoys and creating a supply line. We tried to outflank each other but I don’t think you tried very hard. Soldiering was all you knew. Your parents had both worked at the base. They’d shipped out early in the war and you were raised by Anna’s father, your uncle. You heard about their deaths through the report of the battle. Everyone remembers the battle out by the belt. Confirmation came later, in uniforms. Some things they still do the old–fashioned way.

  I changed the direction of my march when your eyes started to drift to open spaces. This was over days, picking up the conversation before and after sleep, between shared drinks and naked bodies and sheets. The truth wasn’t everything, I said. Let’s say we grew up together. Let’s say I pelted snowballs at you and we ruined each other’s forts. Let’s say you broke my arm pushing me from a tree and felt sorry after.

  Let’s say I followed you to space.

  “No.”

  Pretending didn’t go that far. You skirted my attempts to advance.

  It was stupid anyway.

  So I took it back even if it was too late.

  That night I knew I didn’t want you to go.

  But it was too late.

  §

  Pretty soon you realized my temper was a mask. “You put all of your aggression into these machines, but it can’t fuel you the same way.”

  “Thank you, Doctor.”

  I wanted to rewind to the moment when I could make the decision to fortify these walls. Instead I lowered the damn bridge and beckoned you across.

  It felt like a homecoming, not an invasion. That was the problem. And we had years to catch up on.

  Years of when you were somewhere else, growing up, losing your parents, going off to war. And I was just here.

  We spent every day together for two weeks. If only I’d forced the siege.

  §

  “Don’t write to me,” you said. Do you ever think about taking that back?

  “I’ll write to you. I just won’t send it.” Civilian comms didn’t go that deep into the war anyway. The soldier you were didn’t sit on base or on a ship somewhere waiting for the mail to light in. I watched your eyes glint in the morning sun and asked you if you’d miss it. The sun. Earth sky. Snow on the tips of your boots. I was asking something else and your gaze caught mine in the mirror.

  Tough guy. Bright smile. “Of course I will.”

  Your uniform was black like space. I planted a kiss to the back of your shoulder and the imprint only remained for a couple seconds. Black absorbed light. It also hid blood. But it couldn’t mask your heartbeat, I still felt that against my palm.

  §

  I want to joke at you, I wrote. The tenth letter and two months into your absence. I want to start this off like I started off the first one, ignoring the facts. We can be troublesome lawyers too crooked to take into consideration something as variable as the truth. You are not out there in deep space, I am not back on this planet waiting. I’ve never waited for anyone in my life. Nobody’s ever waited for me. Remember when I told you about riding my first bike over the neighbor’s yard and crashing into the fence? Of course it was on purpose. Of course my parents yelled. Of course a few more stunts like that and they kicked me out of the trailer. They didn’t wait for me to come back before they left. I keep it all inside because there’s nowhere to put it.

  In one night, though, you heard my crash stories. I can blame you.

  When you come back I want you to tell me everything.

  I want to understand if this is real, or are you just good at saying the right things and listening the right way? I won’t believe Anna. Your cousin isn’t allowed to vouch for you. This isn’t a swearing in of eyewitnesses or a pledge to a club. I won’t believe the hearsay. I want you to look me in the eyes. I want you to take all of my letters. You don’t have to read them, just know that I wrote them for you.

  We still call them letters because they’re made up of the minimal components that create language and meaning. They’re not handwritten anymore, I don’t have to get them stamped. Letters on a screen. Letters made of light. Letters going only as far as the transparent display over my eyes.

  It’s not enough just to have your feet back on Earth. You don’t get off that easily. Let’s just assume you’ll live and you owe me something, even if we said we didn’t owe each other anything. We were just ignoring the facts then too.

  Apparently I have it in me to make demands. Maybe it wouldn’t be this way if you just worked in another town.

  But I have to know.

  You might die and I have to know.

  Everything you do makes my life immediate.

  §

  Six months later you showed up at the garage. I was beneath a car fiddling with the repulsor panel settings. You grabbed my ankles and yanked me out and I kicked you in the shins before I saw you. We made a scene. Crashed into one of the bikes. Fell over parts. I might’ve been trying to punch you. My boss said to take it elsewhere, but there was a smile on her face.

  So you did. You took me elsewhere.

  §

  In bed you told me about all the parts of you that weren’t human anymore. Starting with your fingers, which had been blown off three years ago, and now they’re reset with mods that can arm guns and grenades with just a caress. I could’ve told you that, for the way they pass along my skin, detonating me.

  Your eyes, at least your left on
e, that can see in the night or the black of space, can read radiation levels and zoom in on targets from ten thousand meters away. But to me they’re green with flecks of gold, like something people used to mine, something rare and valuable that catches the light. I saw an old movie once where the cowboys bit down on coins to test their authenticity. If I set my teeth in you I would know that you are genuine.

  The line of your spine doesn’t show a scar, even though that was replaced, regrown, made new so you could walk. Seven years ago you’d been ripped apart, torn out like a fish, and they said you’d never walk again. Tough guy. I smiled because I didn’t want to think about it. You smiled because you didn’t want to say it.

  This was everything. These were your stories.

  The months of convalescence, physiotherapy, reprogramming, refusal. Stubbornness. Let me ask just one question, and it isn’t a game, this isn’t pretend.

  Why did you go back?

  Don’t they have robots for this now? Isn’t this a machine war?

  But it’s humans that wage war.

  War is a human problem.

  And the rebels have been taking our robots, reprogramming them, and sending them back. Trojan warfare.

  This was more than the news said. More than the military let out.

  Human beings started this war, human beings have to end it.

  I touched your fingertips. Now I knew why they were so smooth. I have another question, I’m sorry.

  Every time you go back to the war, they steal another part of you.

  How much of you returns home? Not because these scars bother me. Not because I can almost feel the triggers when we lay our palms together.

  “I don’t really come back,” you said. “They don’t fix me for that reason.”

  You weren’t talking about your body.

  These were your stories and they left me cold.

  §

  After breakfast I gave you the letters. I wanted to leave while you read them but you gripped my hand and made me stay. Two of us on the bed with the scent of chai tea and waffle syrup, in an apartment small enough to house voices long after they died.

  Thirty letters and you read every one, the light from the screen making your skin glow.

  As if you weren’t real.

  But your thumb moved over my fingers like you didn’t even know you were doing it. Moving at the same speed your eyes did as they gathered up the words. Your thumb moved over my fingers like I was a trigger.

  I had the quiet and the worry, as you read.

  I had my heartbeat in my ears.

  Who needs romance? Reality is better.

  At least in moments. At least in imprints before they fade away.

  §

  Dear Tuvi.

  It’s easier to write when I know you won’t read it. I can be honest. More honest. I can go through all the stages of things and be imprecise about it. Things. I can say I miss you and it doesn’t feel like I’m giving something away into a void. The void. Even if this is going into a void. You’re not here and it’s a void. You’re the one in space, in a void. Write a word enough times and it begins to look funny. It becomes nothing. If I write it enough times maybe it won’t exist anymore. Void.

  I only have mundane things to say, but maybe that’s what you want to know. About the orange cat that came by the garage and everyone wanted to keep it. About how it just took our milk then went away, never returned. I raced last weekend and came in second. I think my repulsor alignment was a little off. I’ll fix it for next week. I mixed a new paint and maybe I’ll add a flag to the bike. How can any of this interest you?

  The truth is I’m just thinking of you.

  The truth is I’m angry that I’ve become one of those. I never expected you, and now look.

  I wonder if writing these letters makes it worse. With all my focus on the words, maybe you’re more than you really are. Or maybe I made you up entirely.

  I spend months missing you. It’s a currency that never dries up and I get slapped with interest. Maybe at the end of this I’ll be bankrupt. Maybe when you come home and decide you don’t care, I’ll go into foreclosure.

  This is what your absence does to me. Suddenly I doubt everything. Should I wear this shirt to the bar? Do I want to talk to anyone else? I don’t feel like riding this afternoon. There’s no more solace in speed.

  I go to sleep thinking of how long it would take for word to come back that you’re dead. Sometimes I don’t sleep at all.

  Why can’t you at least try to write?

  What’s so important about this war?

  Why do you care when you can stay here on Earth (with me)?

  I can hear you already: Tell a different story, Jake.

  Tell me one about going cross country. Tell me all about getting lost in the trees. Give me your injuries one by one. The first crash and the last.

  Especially the last because that one is you.

  One night I met a soldier in the snow. He wore white boots and didn’t seem to feel the cold.

  Tell me the best thing about the seasons changing. How the trees light up like fire and warm the cool blues of the sky. Nothing is as beautiful as that. Death can be beautiful.

  No, let’s not take it there.

  It’s not death, it’s transition.

  It doesn’t matter how many parts of you aren’t homegrown from birth. Don’t you see what I do for a living?

  Whatever happens, I can fix you.

  Yeah, I believe that shit too.

  I never met anything engineered that I couldn’t understand. Taking things apart and putting them back together. That’s what I do.

  Dear Tuvi.

  Just come back.

  I miss you.

  Don’t die.

  On the last letter: Love, Jake.

  And your fingers squeezed the blood from my hand.

  §

  We had two weeks the first time we met. The second time around, after six months of absence, we had another two and you said you weren’t going back.

  I thought you were joking and it was cruel. But the nervousness told me this wasn’t a joke. You made the decision to stay. I didn’t ask if it was for me. Vanity is the other side of love.

  There, I said it. Doesn’t matter that it’s in my head. It feels loud.

  You were nervous because you didn’t know how to live in this world. I thought back to those first two weeks. Mostly we were alone. Even at the barbecue we were alone.

  The only time we were never alone was with each other.

  The secret to being in a room full of people but not noticing a thing is you.

  §

  At first we lived.

  You moved in with your meager belongings.

  Anna threw a homecoming and you didn’t leave my side.

  I saw how the laughter was a strain. I saw how you were already regretting it.

  “No, no, of course not.”

  That was the first time you ever lied to me. I didn’t call you on it because I wanted to believe. I knew it could work. It would just take time. The things beneath your skin now could be used for other things.

  Vague things. A vague future but at least it’s a future and you’re here. Just give it time.

  We all have our mantras.

  I fell into the trap. The door in the floor opened up and I dropped in. It had your name on it, that was the problem. You didn’t want to hear it but I would’ve followed you into space.

  Instead I followed you into the hole, into the dark.

  Same thing, maybe.

  In the light that came through the window, sunlight or moonlight, I traced the curve of your spine and marveled at the technology that gave you to me.

  Vanity is the other side of love. Of course it was all for me.

  The hands that used to set off grenades and fire weapons now handled drinks at the bar. We met at odd hours but they worked for us. Other people didn’t work for you though. Too many people. Every time the vid cycled the news you switc
hed it to sports.

  At first you tried. You came to my races. You read books while I worked on my bike, music threading between us on the driveway. You learned to cook stir fry, made me a birthday card from scratch like we were in fifth grade. Fixed the misaligned window so the rain didn’t leak in.

  But the other window cracked.

  Little things frustrated you.

  Then you didn’t want to get out of bed.

  Then you just kept saying, Tell me another story.

  I ran out of stories.

  We tried running away for your birthday, took a road trip to the mountains but the silences stretched. They became barriers. You didn’t want to celebrate. You gripped my hand until I no longer had feeling in my fingers.

  Please talk to me.

  Don’t tell me a story, just talk to me.

  Or write it down if you can’t say it out loud.

  Just something.

  It was winter again and I felt futile. The frightening part was how much you loved me without saying a word. You turned your body to the shrapnel in order to protect me. You lay down on top of me when the tanks rolled over. You gave me your last tube of oxygen and with my last breath I yelled at you, I said, I just want you to live.

  Dear Tuvi.

  Please don’t die.

  Just come back.

  I miss you.

  §