The Children's War

by C. P. Boyko

  She soon regretted this. The trees closed over her like a bog, screening the lightning and muffling the thunder of combat. But the wood was neither dark nor silent. She could hear it growing, breathing, creaking, reaching, gnawing; and moonlight dribbled through the foliage, and the very shadows swirled and shimmered like grease on water. Every plant was awful, trembling with life as with suppressed laughter. Every tree was a slow-bursting firework of branching bristles. Predatory animals and enemy soldiers crept continually out of sight. Snaking vines twined round her; venomous thorns abraded her skin; unblinking owls’ eyes peered through her. She turned in circles, whimpering and clutching her rifle to her chest. She shut her eyes and shook her head, but the scene did not disappear; indeed, she could see it more clearly, and from all 360 degrees. Panic-stricken, she peeled wide her eyes, to no effect. The forest grew larger and denser, crushing her beneath its churning mass to an infinitesimal insignificance. All the weight of the universe was rolling over her; she tried to lunge free, and only threw herself the more fully beneath its wheels. Every good and vibrant thing was moving irretrievably away from her at an ever-increasing rate. At last the thread of her fear snapped, and she collapsed groaning in defeat—but there was nowhere to go; no drop could fall out of the ocean. Her bottom opened to an abyss, and she emerged from a nightmare into a vaster nightmare. Now dissonance subsumed harmony. War was fundamental: even light was at war with itself. The quintessence of the universe was raw terror, from which God hid in creation. Even this was not the worst or final truth: countless times that night she awoke to a worse one. Susceptible and exposed, she rode a recursively cresting wave of hideous revelation.

  Thus hours passed like eras, and it was not until the first glow of dawn that exhaustion finally dulled her misery. Weeping with relief, she hobbled out of the grove (she had not penetrated it deeply) and surveyed the scorched landscape, which was softened to beauty by morning and mist. Not ten meters away, one of the strange local deer stood on its hind legs, placidly grazing. In the distance, a procession of refugees trudged across the valley, leaving in their wake scattered detritus: mattresses, broken-down carts, trunks and cabinets and cases that had proved too heavy. At this sight of her fellow creatures, Parade-Ground’s heart reopened, and she started towards them, smiling tenderly.

  She was back inside her skin, and the earth was again firm beneath her foot. Already little more remained of her night’s ordeal than a loose and wrung-out feeling—she supposed that she had been enlarged, even improved by her suffering—and an unpleasant but unshakable conviction of a something lurking beyond everyday sense. However, the ideas that had plagued or delighted her now seemed mere paradoxes, or trivial, or false. Nor was she aware of any irresolvable internal conflict. She would find First/Fourth Platoon; she would write a letter to her mother; she would help to rid the medi­podeans of the invaders. Her nerves and cells were again quietly working; she too would do her work quietly.

  “Who are you running from?” she asked one of the refugees. —The man shrugged, and said in his language, “Soldiers.” —“Which army? Like me, or not like me?” She indicated her uniform. “Same, or different?” —“Same like you,” said the man in her language. —She thanked him, and began walking against the stream.

  The relief for Forty-Third C Platoon arrived at dawn.

  Though surprised to meet resistance from The Nubbin, Fifty-Ninth D Platoon were well rested, better equipped, and more numerous than the suprapodean troops. They expulsed the aggressors quickly, suffering few casualties.

  Staff Sergeant Ciborsck and MAC command never attempted to retake Strongpoint E15, but they remained convinced that First/Fourth’s possession of it for one night had permanently improved their position in the area. Corporal Cobweb was posthumously promoted two ranks. The Colonel was posthumously awarded the very medal of valour that she wore when she died. Their mothers had little choice but to be proud.

  Grave Reservations. —Private Shyve had again been assigned to a graves-registration fatigue—which, due to a mental snag, and with no witticism intended, she called Grave Reservations. This was, in Thirty-Second Company, an unpopular duty, and was usually handed out as an unofficial punishment. Shyve, however, though careful not to show it, relished the work. It was unsupervised, and no officer seemed to know how long it should take; no doubt they made allowances for its grisliness. Shyve found that she could drag her feet, smoke, and take rests without ever being told to hurry or reprimanded for loafing—an unheard-of luxury. And the handling of corpses did not bother her. Indeed, she took pride in her intrepid callousness—just as she had done as a schoolgirl, loitering solitary in lush cemeteries. With two plugs of garlic up her nose, she didn’t even notice the stench.

  But the great unspoken perk was that she could keep any valuables she found on the bodies. To date she had acquired necklaces, bracelets, rings, wristwatches, pocket watches, lockets, knives, pens, eyeglass frames, a cigarette holder, a cigar cutter, a magazine loader, and other tools and devices of fine craftsmanship whose purpose eluded her. She was hoarding all these treasures in her bunk, for she was contemptuous of the local currency and distrustful of the mail service. Most of the photos and letters that she found she honored as “personal effects” and wrapped up with the soldier’s dog tags to be shipped home. But occasionally one caught her eye.

  “Dear Premli, This is the third time I have written this letter. The first two I was ordered to self-censor by Captain Dowz, and simply tore up. To censor one’s own letters somehow seems pointlessly destructive—just like this war, in fact. Anyway, God knows what precisely in them crawled up his ass. Nothing but my usual screeds against incompetence and wastefulness, nothing that should surprise anyone. There: I suppose this letter too is already unsendable. So I might as well get a few things off my chest . . .”

  Shyve stuffed this into a pocket for later reading, and continued rummaging. A few minutes later, she sprang upright, holding at arm’s length a notebook written in code. She had to show this to Iargus. On her way to the quartermaster’s dugout, she told two privates and a sergeant that she was just taking a latrine break.

  Her friend quickly disillusioned her. “That’s not code, you farthole. That’s suprapodean.” —“Oh. Well, it could still be important, couldn’t it? Maybe it’s intelligence.”

  —Iargus riffled the pages skeptically. “It doesn’t look like intelligence to me.” —“What do you know about intelligence?” —“A lot more than you.” —“You don’t even know what it says.” —“I know what it doesn’t say,” said Iargus oracularly. —“Oh yeah? What’s that?” —“Everything.”

  —Shyve made a gesture of suffering.

  But Iargus had a friend with a suprapodean dictionary. This friend, in the midst of an artillery barrage that twice blew out her candle, laboriously translated a few lines. Shyve was disappointed.

  Helmet: mine.

  Bongo drum: mine.

  Fast bumps: machine gun.

  Cut the top: hundred-pounder.

  Doctor ache: strafed.

  Who I killed: mud.

  Winker: rifle shot.

  Smith: infection.

  Juice of war: hand grenade.

  “What the hell? Is it poetry?” —“It’s intelligence,” teased Iargus. “Hey, take your intelligence!” —“Keep it.”

  On her way back to Grave Reservations, she told the sergeant and two privates that she had been delayed by diarrhea. They stared at her in blank wonder.

  The heap of corpses had received a direct hit. Bloody hunks of flesh lay scattered everywhere. Shyve drooped—not at the gore, but at the disorder, and at the responsibility of cleaning it all up.

  “We thought you were in that mess!” said one of the privates. “We thought you were dead for certain.”

  Shyve laughed at the idea. She rolled up her sleeves, spat in her palms, and got to work. Dead flesh was just dirt, and once you were comp
letely dirty you had nothing more to fear. Indeed, she soon discovered that the explosion had greatly simplified her labor. There was no longer any way of identifying or even counting the corpses; she shoveled into the pit any five limbs, or any two torsos, or any three heads, or any hundred pounds of meat, and called it a person. She was whistling at her good luck, and plucking three gold teeth from a disembodied jawbone, when a section of pukes passed by her, gawping and aghast. She grinned at their image of her, and waved, as if to reassure them that war was not so bad, provided you had a sense of humor, and a little brains.

  AT 12:51 P.M. ON TUESDAY, March 16, President Trifenia Radil capped her pen, turned off her dictation machine, and asked her caller to hold. She stared at her door in baleful disbelief as the noise in the hallway swelled to a cacophony of stomping, chanting, shouting, and song. Then the door burst open and seventy or eighty students, some brandishing placards, flooded into an office that, though large, had never before accommodated more than ten people at one time.

  “What on God’s green earth is the meaning of this?”

  No one heard her. She tried to stand, but the crowd penned her in. Impotence made her furious. She had returned to work only the previous Thursday from a week of convalescence following a quadruple coronary bypass, and she was in no mood to sit idle. She had been busy ratifying or countermanding all that had been done in her absence by Vice-President Martin, whose mistakes were all the more galling for being elusive. She resented the students’ interruption, but resented even more their boorishness: they had not so much as knocked. Also, her sense of smell had been unnaturally keen since the operation, and the odor of seventy post-adolescent bodies in a confined space struck her with the force of an assault. Someone bumped a photograph of her children off the desk.

  “What in fuck’s sake do you want?” she screamed.

  “I lost my head a little at first,” she admits.

  Several voices told her what they wanted, when they wanted it, and how they intended to get it.

  “One at a time. I can’t make out a word you’re all saying.”

  “Hey, shut up!” someone yelled in real rage. The room quietened briefly, but the hubbub in the hallway and the atrium beyond only grew louder by comparison. At last President Radil realized the significance of what was happening. Not just seventy or eighty but several hundred protesters had occupied Founders’ Hall.

  She told her caller that she would have to phone them back—not realizing that they had already hung up.

  The organizers of the Parks Not Parking Lots protest rally, scheduled for noon, had been disappointed at first by the turnout. Of 14,565 full- or part-time students enrolled at the university, only about a hundred showed up to protest the expansion of Lot M, which would involve the razing of four hectares of campus parkland. And those who were in attendance seemed disengaged; most chatted with friends or munched the free cookies baked by the Undergraduate Birders Group.

  “I counted about fifteen placards,” says Sylvie Reinhardt, treasurer of the Outdoor Activities Club. “And half of those were held backwards, or upside down, or were being used to shield people’s eyes from the sun.”

  Says Edward Xin, photographer for the student newspaper, The Weekly Beacon, “At the beginning it was more like a lawn party than a demonstration.”

  But at ten after twelve, Nolan Forntner, chairman and one-fifth of the membership of the local chapter of Students for the Protection of Urban Natural Spaces, climbed onto Speaker’s Rock and began to speak. A change came over the crowd instantly. Forntner’s indignation was contagious. “This is bullshit,” he cried periodically; and those hearing him agreed that it was bullshit, and those overhearing him came nearer to learn what was bullshit.

  Forntner had been fighting the expansion of Lot M for six months, since its discreet announcement by the Campus Development Office in September. His campaign had begun modestly, with letters, petitions, and informal meetings with administration in which he appealed to their humanity and good sense. Far from being ignored or obstructed, Forntner’s entreaties were received each time with sympathy and encouragement.

  Says Barbara Eisniz, public relations officer for the CDO, “It was impossible not to respect Nolan’s passion and commitment. And from the beginning, I believe we were all in fundamental agreement as to principles. We too prefer parks to parking lots. In my experience, it is generally not the big questions on which people differ, but the minute details. We all share much the same ideals, but we may have very different notions about how best to achieve them, or approximate them, in the actual everyday helter-skelter of conflicting interests and compromise which is any large institution.”

  Forntner and his associates began to feel that they were being humored. They adopted a more adversarial stance, seeking the aid of lawyers, conservation agencies, and the Ombuds Office.

  “Everyone told us that it could be done,” says Forntner, “and showed us just what to do. We followed their advice—and nothing was done.”

  The growing membership of Parks Not Parking Lots spent hundreds of hours submitting grievances, filing injunctions, and canvassing community support. By January, Forntner had dedicated himself full-time to the cause, and was facing suspension from the university for incomplete coursework.

  Thalia Undine, a founding member of PNPL, says, “Nolan was one of the few people I had met who not only believed that the world could be improved, but actually did something about it. It didn’t matter what you did, as long as you did something. For him, the choice was not between saving the world on the one hand, or turning your back on the world and cultivating your own garden on the other; cultivating your own garden—fixing the little problems in your own backyard, neighborhood, or community—was improving the world, one acre at a time. But everything about our experience fighting Lot M only undermined his faith. If we could not prevent this one little evil, maybe no evil could actually be prevented; maybe the world was getting irreparably worse. Some people called him an extremist, a fanatical tree-hugger. But I think he was defending less this one copse of trees than his own idealism. This was his stand. He threw his whole self into the fight—and met only setback, hindrance, frustration, and failure.”

  By March, the sole concessions made to Forntner’s half-year campaign were the relocation of some of the parkland’s more conspicuous wildlife, and the proposed planting of twenty-nine ash trees on the median strips of the new lot. Construction was scheduled to begin on Friday, March 19, with the bulldozing of the trees. Forntner slept little that week, planning and advertising the Tuesday protest rally, at which, desperate and irate, he spoke so effectively.

  “People would rather save twenty minutes’ commuting time than save a tree that has been alive for a hundred and fifty years! People would rather pour poisonous carbon monoxide into the atmosphere than let that tree do its work, putting fresh, clean oxygen out into the air we breathe! People are such idiots that they would rather have a place to put their car for a few hours a week than a place to walk their dogs, a place to smell flowers, a place for their children to play for the rest of their lives! It’s fucking bullshit!”

  This was met by a roar of endorsement from the now doubled crowd.

  “It was exhilarating,” says Forntner, “and terrifying. I felt that all these bodies were extensions of my body, that all these people were thinking my thoughts. It was like finding yourself in a strongman’s body: you feel an incredible urge to flex your muscles. It crossed my mind—our mind—to just march across campus en masse and start tearing the construction site to pieces. All I had to do was say the word; I almost didn’t have to say the word. It was scary.”

  Among those affected by Forntner’s speech was Langdon Bellhouse. “I hate politics and politicians and all that shit. I didn’t know who this guy was or what he was about, but it just went through me, this anger at all this stuff he was getting at: cars and pollution and all that garbage. And
skyscrapers and traffic jams, and jackhammers and gas-powered leaf-blowers, and no place for kids to play. I really got that. All this stuff I wanted to destroy—here was somebody finally saying, you know: Go out and destroy it.”

  Meanwhile supporters of another protest, conflictingly scheduled for 12:30 in the same spot, had begun to gather. Suresh Arjmand, one of the organizers for Reinstate Professor Reid, decided to move his rally across the common, and asked Forntner to make this announcement. Instead, Forntner graciously stepped down from Speaker’s Rock, introducing Arjmand as “someone else who has a gripe against this university.”

  Arjmand was greeted by cheers and applause, which he tried in vain to curb. Someone improvised a chant, rhyming “four” with “Professor,” and “eight” with “reinstate.” With a shrug, Arjmand delivered his address to a much larger and more impassioned audience than he had anticipated.

  At about the same time, Suz Palombo was delivering much the same address to the Special Committee reviewing the nonrenewal of Hiram Reid’s contract for the fall. Reid himself was not present at this hearing, and had in fact dissociated himself from the advocacy group formed in his name.

  “I never asked anyone to intervene on my behalf,” he says. “And I think the whole movement had very little to do with me, actually. Most of these kids who signed the petition had never been to any of my classes. They were doing this for their own reasons—to flout authority, or what have you. And just pragmatically speaking, I had no confidence that they would accomplish anything. The so-called Special Committee was obviously just a sop. It didn’t have any power.”

  The committee did not have the authority to overturn the Department of Physics and Astronomy’s decision; at most they could pass along a “recommendation” that the decision be officially reviewed—a recommendation the Department would not be obliged to follow.