The Preserve

by Patrick Lestewka

  Then the injury. Suddenly all those dreams seemed foolish. Maria wouldn’t want him now, not with half his face blown off. He tried to imagine them together but found he could not: his face had become a black smudge she refused to look at. He knew what she would say: I still care for you, but… and he would let her off easy, for perhaps he might have done the same, had the situation been reversed.

  She continued to send letters. They were forwarded to him at the institution in Coldwater. He would read them aloud to Eugene while he traced the cracks of his room with syrup. Letters full of love and compassion and infinite hope. But they were addressed to a man who no longer existed. He wrote back, long and searching letters on yellow foolscap, much of it lacking commas or periods—a furious outpouring of emotion. He would address the envelopes, stamp them…and burn them.

  Better she thought he’d found someone else.

  Better she thought him unfaithful. Better she thought him dead.

  Help me forget. Help me remember.

  Now, as he lay dying, his thoughts turned to Maria. In that stillness, in that quiet, he wondered, Where was she? How was she? Had she found the love she so dearly deserved? Had she forgiven him? He thought of the way the wind caught her hair, the way her fingers traced his body in the darkness, his ribs, the fortune-lines of his palm…

  Pain crested and ebbed, crested and ebbed, in great waves. He rode them, a ship in the storm. The moon curved upon the maples, brightening the ground, hardening the stars. The grenades in his hands felt weightless, blown-glass globes.

  Just let go.

  No. Not yet. Such a beautiful night.

  Movement on the far side of the clearing. Something tottered to a standing position. Whatever it was, it looked horrible: naked and white, most of its face blown off or eaten away, guts hanging in a loose ball above a clean-picked groin.

  “Glaaa…” it said.

  “Glaaa yourself,” Crosshairs croaked.

  It advanced with aching slowness. Its guts bounced and slapped.

  Just let go.

  Not yet.

  It fell at Crosshairs’s feet. Its hands—one of them fingerless—caressed Crosshairs’s flanks as if an exotic meat. It made a loud clicking sound deep in its throat, like a nun’s clacker. Its eyes, the sole unscathed feature on its face, were alive with mindless hunger.

  “Are you hungry?” Crosshairs said.

  “Glaaa…”

  It reached across Crosshairs’s face and dipped a finger into the divot’s pooled blood. It crammed the finger into the wet red hole in its neck.

  “That’s a filthy habit.”

  Its gaze lowered. “Glaaa…”

  The finger dipped again, greedily. Crosshairs stared skyward. So wonderful, the stars in their orbit. “I want to forget,” he whispered.

  “Glaaa…” it said, predictably.

  JUST…LET…GO.

  Yes. Alright.

  For a moment he was gripped with panic as his hands refused to open. Then the appropriate nerve centers received the appropriate messages and his fingers slowly unclenched. Grenade clips pinwheeled before his eye on a spinning trajectory. It was one of the most oddly beautiful things he’d ever seen. Spinning metal. Over and over, and over and over. Beautiful.

  Crosshairs smiled and said, “Let me take you away from this.”

  It was slow to comprehend. “Glaaa…?”

  Then it saw the grenades. Its eyes widened in fear.

  The breeze on my face, Crosshairs was thinking, feels so fine. Feels like—

  BOOM.

  The reverberation of the detonating grenades rose above the treetops, carrying for miles and miles.

  — | — | —

  War Zone “D,” South Vietnam

  July 15th, 1967. 21:02 hours.

  “Sit. Talk.”

  The fire spread. Blazing tongues licked at the overhanging palms, setting them ablaze. Flame unfurled across the jungle canopy like lit gasoline across calm waters. A huge black bird rocketed from a burning palm, wings and tail feathers robed in fire. It rose into the night sky, phoenix-like, before arcing into a tight tailspin, crashing in a shower of flaming plumage, withering and writhing as it died.

  Answer sat less than five feet from the creature. Its burning flesh threw a pleasant warmth. Flies congregated on the stump of Slash’s neck.

  “What are you?” he asked.

  “What do you think I am?”

  “Some kind of monster.”

  The creature’s long tongue reached out and licked its remaining eye in the manner of a gecko. “A monster? Perhaps. I’ve been called such before. But I do not see myself as one.” A rueful smile. “Then again, I suppose no monster sees itself as one.”

  “If not a monster, then what?”

  An expression of vexation crossed its face. “I am not exactly certain. You see, I have no parents—or, if so, I have never met them. I was not raised as you were, taught acceptable modes of behavior, shown my role in this world. Of course, I was born before even the most rudimentary societies existed, at a time when the Americas were no more than timberland and desert.”

  Answer crossed his legs and planted his elbows on his knees, resting his head on his balled fists. His posture echoed that of a young child listening, rapt, while his father spun a tale.

  “Nevertheless,” the creature continued, “I have come to some understanding of what I am, and my place in the world.”

  “And what’s that?”

  “I am War,” it replied. “Or perhaps more properly Chaos. Anarchy. Discord. I am the living embodiment, the ultimate personification of these ideas.” A scream rose above the fire’s roar. The creature shivered delightedly at the sound. “Wherever there is anger, or strife, or suffering…I am drawn to such places, inexorably, like lead filings to a magnet.”

  Images flickered through Answer’s mind in jerky, Nickleodeon-style stop-motion: Neanderthal men fighting with teeth and nails and blunt rocks; Genghis Khan and the Mongols cutting a bloody swath across the East, leaving fatherless children and ravaged women in their wake; Nero fiddling madly on the minaret while Rome burned beneath him; dead-eyed Jews being led to the gas chambers at Dresden, and Auschwitz, and Treblinka; soldiers fighting and dying in a foreign land for a cause they would never fully understand. The images held a single commonality: in the background, or on the periphery, swathed in shadows, a form watched, bearing witness and urging humanity on to greater atrocities.

  “Why?” Answer said. “Why do you exist?”

  Chaos shifted. The smell of pork barbecue, unpleasant given the setting, wafted off its body. It said, “Every living thing has a reason for existence, be it to provide the world beauty, or to create great things, or to see beyond the borders of what is to glimpse what could be. But the most important role any of us can play is to maintain the balance.”

  “Balance?”

  Chaos nodded. “The nature of balance is of utmost importance. When an infant boy is born, an old man must die. Whenever a tree is struck by lighting, a sapling must grow in its shadow. Any act of kindness must be equalized by an act of malice. Love offset by hate. Happiness neutralized by despair. Order balanced by…me.”

  “Then you are a monster,” Answer said, “because Chaos is evil.”

  Chaos issued a choked gurgle that in some alternate universe may have passed as mirth. “This from a species responsible for such suffering and bloodshed as I could only wish to wreak. When you have lived as long as I, you come to understand very little in this world is truly good or evil. It is a matter of shades, of degrees. If I am evil—and yes, I am—it is simply because evil is my nature. But my evil is a necessary one.”

  “Why?”

  Chaos smiled, a thin and almost imperceptible motion of its glowing lips. “Something once told me, long ago and in another world, that the most truthful of all stories in this universe is one in which something horrible happens for which there is no explanation. There is only one essential truth, and it is this: things happen
because they happen. Bad things. Sometimes good things. All things. With no rhyme or reason.” A hut toppled in a shower of swirling sparks. “And what is so evil about chaos, anyway? Does it not represent ultimate free will, total empowerment, absolute self-determinism? And what is so evil about war? Yes, it brings out the worst in men—but it also brings out the best. Comradeship, heedless self-sacrifice, heroism of the highest order: war effects such actions.”

  Through the foliage to their left came voices. Answer heard Tripwire say, “Shit, Sarge, half his fuckin’ head’s missing…”

  “So tell me,” Chaos said, “if I am indeed the truest mode of social behavior, the shape that humanity naturally tends towards when freed from the shackles of ordered society…am I not Truth?”

  “Truth in Chaos,” Answer whispered. Did it not make perfect sense?

  Chaos took a step forward. Its eye was shiny and red and huge, the pitiless eye of a predatory bird. Answer felt, for the first time he could remember, a sense of kinship with another living thing. Chaos reached out and touched his face. The texture of its digits was as smooth as polished porcelain. It took Answer’s chin and pulled his gaze upwards, locking it with its own.

  “Are you going to kill me?”

  “No,” Chaos said. Its expression suggested that killing him would be sacrilegious. Like killing a son, or an heir. “You will live. You and the others. They will live because they are creatures of combat, and their lives will echo with the chaos of this night and this war for the rest of their lives.” It stroked Answer’s cheek lovingly. “For you perhaps a higher purpose exists. Not yet; you are too young. But someday…perhaps.”

  “When?” Answer was on the verge of tears. “When?”

  “That I cannot say. Nothing is for certain.” Chaos’s flaming shoulders shrugged. “Que sera, sera.”

  Chaos turned and walked away. Wounded though it was, its myriad limbs still moved in perfect sync, like gears in a precision timepiece.

  “Don’t go,” Answer said. Tears shined in his eyes. “Please…stay.”

  Chaos disappeared into the fiery jungle. Flames leapt to greet it and Chaos spread its arms wide to receive them. Then it was gone.

  Answer got up. He considered pursuit, dashing headlong into the flames, catching up to Chaos, or dying in the attempt. His life, whatever slim value system he had previously operated under, was obsolete. Duty, valor, sacrifice: such ideals seemed trivial now.

  Whatever will be will be…

  He turned and walked in the opposite direction, following the voices of his unit members…

  “Shitcan that talk, dogface,” Oddy said. “Where’s Answer?”

  “Here, Sarge,” Answer said, melting out of the foliage. Crosshairs lay on the ground with a blood-soaked blanket wrapped around his head. Zippo gave him a look that said: Where the fuck you been while this shit’s been going down?

  “We got a med evac rendezvouz one klick down this speed trail,” Oddy said. “Answer, scout ahead. Trip and me’ll hump Crosshairs. Zippo, you tail.”

  They raced down the speed trail as if the devil himself were in pursuit. Five pairs of eyes scanned the darkened jungle; four fearfully, one in hopeful anticipation.

  “Go go go!”

  The landing site came into view. A Huey waited. Dylan’s “Like A Rolling Stone” pumped out of the cockpit speakers at a pitch capable of vibrating teeth from gums. They lifted Crosshairs onto the chopper’s honeycombed aluminum floor before hopping in themselves.

  “Motherfuck.” Tripwire’s body shivered against Oddy’s. “What was that thing?”

  “Don’t know, son,” Oddy replied through gritted teeth. “Hope to Christ it’s dead.”

  The door gunner was the same kid who’d ridden shotgun on the drop-off. He said, “Where are the other two?”

  Oddy shook his head.

  “Oh,” the kid said.

  The Huey flew directly over the village, which was now nothing but a flaming scalp in the darkness. Oddy leaned into the cockpit. “Get on the horn,” he told the pilot. “I want a napalm drop on that village and outlying area. Give me as wide coverage as I can command.”

  The pilot said, “That village is burning merrily all on its own.”

  “Don’t lip me, son. Got no patience for it.”

  The pilot flicked the com-link toggle on his headset. “A-303 team leader requests scar line on coordinates fifteen-twenty-two-niner.”

  “Roger,” came the reply.

  “What’s the problem, Sarge?” the pilot said. “Some of ’em get away?”

  “Precautionary measures.”

  “One hell of a precaution.”

  Minutes later a phalanx of F-4 Phantoms buzzed the Huey. The incendiary whoosh of the napalm drop was audible for miles around.

  Please God, Oddy thought. Let that be the end of it.

  ««—»»

  A-303 Blackjack was disbanded after the mission. Oddy and Zippo returned to the States, followed shortly thereafter by Crosshairs. Tripwire set off for Thailand.

  Answer stayed.

  There was no reason for him to return: no family, no girlfriend like the one Crosshairs was always yakking about, no factory job waiting. But there was a reason to stay—he knew, on a bone-deep level, Chaos was still out there.

  Waiting. Watching.

  He fell in with a group of Green Berets working Night Recon. The Greenies were baaad motherfuckers, most of them jungle-mad. Answer fit right in.

  They worked night patrol. Answer applied camouflage—green stripe, black stripe, green stripe, black stripe—until his body was colored with the jungle. He slipped through the darkness like water, like oil, soundless, centerless. Answer became the jungle. He lost himself in the land, and in doing so located himself. His Truth. He stopped carrying a weapon, except for his K-Bar. He didn’t need a gun anymore. He had become part of the terrain, indistinguishable from the trees and the dirt and the water.

  At night in the jungle he felt as close to his own body as was humanly possible: his blood moving, his hair, his skin, his heart pounding with the rhythm of the land. He felt the roots beneath his bare feet and wished they might grow up into him, anchoring him in place, connecting him to the land. Sometimes, out in the darkness, he slipped into a kind of daydreaming state. He dreamed of dead bodies, acres upon acres of them, piled atop one another like split logs. He dreamed of armless, legless, headless corpses, fields of little rag dolls pulled apart, liquid, stuffed with streaming redness, flowing out and away. He dreamed of bloated rats skittering over and into the piled carcasses like ants trundling in and out of their hills. Vietnam—the bloodshed and madness and chaos of it—became him. He crossed to the other side. He was part of the land. He became shadows and nightmare. He wore a necklace of human tongues.

  He was watching and searching.

  He was waiting to be found.

  — | — | —

  Northwest Territories

  December 8th, 1987. 1:20 a.m.

  Once, during an R&R stint in St. Petersburg following a string of Midwest bank jobs, Oddy went scuba diving. It struck him that the pastime had much in common with his Tours in Vietnam.

  Men were not meant to breathe underwater.

  Men were not meant to go to war.

  Submerging for the first time, his heart hammering inside his wetsuit, taking that first lungful of compressed air…so unnatural. Dropping to the ocean floor, staring into the silty water, wondering what creatures might emerge from it…unnatural. Nitrogen entering the bloodstream, blossoming in every ventricle…unnatural. But after a while you got used to the unnaturalness of the situation. Came to enjoy it, even.

  Same rules applied in Vietnam. The first time he’d waded through a rice paddy with an M-16 raised overhead…unnatural. First time he’d set an M-14 toe-popper under a pile of wet leaves and dropped a Twinkie beside it…unnatural. The first time he’d killed a man, blowing a moon-roof in the back of his shocked yellow head…so unnatural. But by that time he’d dipped far enou
gh beneath the waves he’d entered that fathomless realm where there was no right or wrong, only grim survival.

  Dangers abound in both cases. Free divers who spend too much time at great depths suffer aseptic bone necrosis from years of residual nitrogen bubbles trapped in their marrow, bones left fragile as honeycombs. Soldiers who spend too much time in a warzone suffer shellshock and night sweats; their minds become fragile as honeycombs—or worse, hard as obsidian. But these are the prices to be paid by those who live and breathe at those alien depths where the wild things are.

  Now, as he ran through the night, Oddy was struck by how natural the situation felt: the weight of a gun in his hands, the blood and pain hammering his calves and thighs, adrenaline spiking through his heart. He was in the eye of madness. Where the wild things are. And he belonged.

  How long have I been running? he wondered. Felt like forever. His legs burned as if the veins were shot full of carbolic acid. Answer flashed up the path ahead of him, Sig Sauer sweeping the fringing bushes. Zippo and Tripwire brought up the rear. The land stretched before them, endless and dark and menacing.

  “Hold up.”

  Answer stopped and turned. His gun tapped his leg with the irritability of a man late for an important meeting. Zippo and Tripwire caught up.

  “What’s the problem?” Zippo said.

  Oddy pulled the map out. Answer snapped a flare alight.

  “We’ve been running like headless chickens,” Oddy said. “My bearings are shot.” He pointed in a westerly direction. “Lake’s over there. If we cut across this inlet, we’ll shave off half a day.”

  A distant explosion swelled across the treetops. Tripwire bowed his head in recognition of what the sound meant. And then there were four, Answer thought.

  “We hoof it down to the lake,” Oddy said after a moment, “slap on the snowshoes, and hightail it across the ice. How much ammo we got?”

  “The flamer’s toast.” Zippo spoke like a boy whose puppy had been run over. “Got five magazines for the pistols.”