Ubo

by Steve Rasnic Tem

  The boy nodded, then suddenly, vigorously poked the body with the shovel. The breast feathers depressed with a rubbery, sickening movement. “Will I die like that?” he asked in a near‑whisper. “I mean, somebody’ll find me on a beach or a sidewalk somewhere, and think I was just sleeping, ’till they poke me and I don’t wake up? I mean, just like that, like something broke?”

  Something caught in Daniel’s breath then. Like a failing bird’s wing desperate for some small wind. “Well, we don’t know if that’s what happened to this bird. Maybe he was having a good time, doing tricks in the air, racing another bird. Birds don’t last long, you know—they die pretty quickly.”

  “Yeah.” It sounded like relief. It made Daniel slightly nervous. “Maybe he won’t be so lonely now.”

  “Why do you think he was lonely?”

  The boy shrugged. “I don’t know. All birds are, I guess.”

  He was smiling now. “Least maybe he was being excited when he died. He was... mad or something.”

  “I think you may be right.”

  Again, he looked so primitive, with his ragged shorts and face set over a problem he couldn’t begin to understand. Maybe the boy would have known if the bird had been lonely. And maybe children did share a certain kind of loneliness with the first humans—it wasn’t all that long ago that they had been a part of a wholeness that included everything in their universe. But then you’re born, and your eyes open onto yourself for the first time and see that you are separate and alone. But you want to go back to that all-encompassing love, and gather up the parts of you for a return trip to paradise.

  But there was no turning back the clock. And that made you angry, made you want to tear the whole world—your house, your crib—apart. The child would always be that naive, painful part of you still aware of your first separation, when the shadow of violence slipped out. And that would make anybody furious.

  It made you mad that the child was so naive, that he could not see the danger, and could not see the danger from you, your hands, your fists. Sometimes you wanted to kill that part that refused to grow up.

  “Maybe I wouldn’t mind dying so much, you know, mister? How would you know?”

  Daniel grabbed his shoulder. “Don’t say that-you have no idea what you’re talking about.” The boy looked disdainfully at the hand on his shoulder. Daniel pulled away and sat down on the roof facing the boy. “Where are your parents?”

  “Dead, maybe. I don’t know. Maybe I’m the one—I fell asleep one night and then I was here. And now I have to pretend to be other kids I’m not.”

  “Anybody to take care of you?”

  “They’ve all gone away. What’s it like, mister, being dead? Are we in Heaven, or are we in Hell? Are we like gods, or are we like monsters?”

  Daniel bit his lip. “I don’t know. What do you think it would be like to be dead? Do you think it would be like this? Because I’m afraid you’d be wrong. You just wouldn’t be—at least that’s what I believe.”

  “I don’t know for sure, but maybe it might be kinda exciting. It ain’t that easy to die, is it?”

  “Usually not.”

  “Then you gotta be doing things that are risky, things you shouldn’t do.”

  “Well, not always.”

  “And so maybe you’re doing exciting things when you die, maybe the most exciting stuff you ever done, mister.”

  Daniel stared at the boy in exasperation. “What’s your name?”

  The boy grinned. “I don’t know. I guess I lost it coming here. You can call me anything you like.”

  From Gordon’s first days Daniel and Elena had had definite ideas about their son’s education and their obligation to instill certain values in him. To that end there were no toy guns in their house, no tanks or other combat equipment, no toy weapons of any kind. Gordon’s television viewing was carefully supervised, and programs with heavily violent content weren’t permitted him, including most Saturday-morning cartoons. Comic books and magazines were similarly scrutinized before Gordon was allowed to have them. This program started when Gordon was two years old. Daniel and Elena were determined that he have a repertoire of better solutions to his everyday problems than the aggressive ones his parents had grown up with. He’d be a better kind of person.

  It wasn’t long before it appeared that Gordon had an even greater fascination with weaponry than the average kid. His playtime fantasies were dark and violent, full of monsters and colorful deaths. Children, Daniel concluded, were a mystery.

  Children were human beings, but they weren’t “like us”—they weren’t adults. And few adults treated kids as if they were fully human. They treated them like animated dolls, robots, pets. The adults used unnatural tones and vocabulary. They referred to them as “cute,” or “noisy.” Parents were amused by the walks and dances that mimicked the human, but certainly didn’t duplicate it with much accuracy.

  Children lulled you, made you think of them as small cuddly humanoids, but something would change, and the child would suddenly speak to you in an anguished, strangely human voice, and you felt ashamed.

  Daniel vividly remembered one night becoming aware of soft moans from Gordon’s bedroom, interrupted by wet coughs and hiccups. He went into the bedroom and a wail from under the comforter made him turn on the light.

  “Gordie ...” He pulled the wet and trembling child from the tangled mass of bedclothes and embraced him fiercely, wiping awkwardly at the damp face with a corner of the sheet. “It’s okay, love. Daddy’s here... nothing to be afraid of. Nothing wrong here.”

  “... bad dream...” Gordon gasped out between sobs.

  “Oh, but it’s gone now. The dream can’t get you now, sweetie. Daddy won’t let that happen.”

  Gordon gazed at him sleepily. “They were trying to get me.”

  “Who?”

  “The man and the woman. We were in the bathroom and they held knives to my belly and all the skin started coming off me and... they didn’t have no faces, and I was bleeding too much. I started yelling but that came out blood, too, all big and bubbly.”

  Daniel held onto his son. After a while Gordon fell asleep. Daniel gently slipped him under the covers and kissed him, and as an afterthought tucked Flat Duck under his arm. Then he returned to his chair in the living room, where he brooded for hours.

  He’d never thought of children having nightmares that bad, and over the next few months discovered that Gordon had a variety of them. Suddenly his son seemed a tiny container of horrors. Small cuddly humanoids should never have such dreams, nor should robots, nor dolls. Was it his fault, Gordon picking up Daniel’s own anxieties? But the source of Gordon’s fears remained a mystery.

  After they had been told of Gordon’s heart condition Daniel thought he had at least a reason for the mysterious dreams and fears. This small thinking machine had created a compelling image or two to explain its hidden defect to its human masters.

  Each night Daniel went into his son’s room, allowing the light from the living room to illuminate the bed in the corner. Each night he would walk over to the bed and stand a moment, watching carefully to make sure that the small chest was rising and falling as it should. Then he’d lean over and hold his son awkwardly through the covers, repressing the urge to climb up onto the bed and sleep with him.

  “There’s still much we can do,” he whispered to end the ritual, and damned himself for a liar each time. It seemed the best he could do was imagine the worst.

  6

  DANIEL HAD BEEN forced to endure many trips into the minds of soldiers during combat. It had become a constant theme in his compulsory role-playing, so apparently it was a primary area of interest in the roaches’ studies, but at least in Daniel’s case the results were mixed. It was almost always a frenetic and fragmented experience, frequently brief, as he was jerked out of these scenarios for a variety of reasons including bodily trauma and death. He wondered if the roaches had been unable to get a stable read of these personalities because of
the volatile nature of most combat experiences. The stray thoughts he caught were like unstable bombs threatening to blow up in his face.

  Fighting the enemies of freedom to spread democracy throughout the world.

  “Why do they hate us?” It always shocked Daniel to discover that Americans were hated. “Is that what brought the towers down?”

  A pre-emptive strike. A fight to remain dominant.

  “Sergeant Taylor?” Voices like insect scrapes across the brain, painful and annoying at a low level, but he was trained to ignore such tiny, irritating voices. He was glad they didn’t use his first name. Perhaps “Sergeant” had become his new first name. He doubted he would ever use his given name again.

  Of course Taylor wasn’t his name,either. He’d been misidentified. His face must really be messed up. He’d become the unknown soldier. How much of the rest of him was left?

  “What do you think he thinks about?”

  “Nothing. How could he? He doesn’t move; he barely breathes. Look at his eyes. They don’t blink.”

  “Has anyone on the staff seen him close his eyes? Does he sleep?”

  “Look at his eyes, so dry. They should put more drops in them. How could a man stay sane without sleep?”

  So they weren’t doctors or nurses. Maybe they were orderlies, or maybe cleaning people. Good, he was sick of doctors and nurses. He’d rather talk to the regular guys cleaning up piss and blood. If he could talk.

  “I hear he used to talk.”

  “Yeah, but he didn’t answer any of their questions. He only talked about what he wanted to talk about. And then one day he just stopped talking.”

  Black clouds of smoke drifting with veins of blue. He dropped like a burning cinder, the jungle shooting up around him. Dark wings covered him. Sharp legs and brittle antennae massaged his brain, working their way into his thoughts. The smell of phosphorous so strong it pinched the nostrils. The smell of napalm and the smell of human flesh burning. The evil stench of insect bodies massed for an attack.

  AND SUDDENLY DANIEL was out of that soldier, and into another grunt back in Vietnam. Pinkville, up against the border. He skipped through their heads like a stone thrown by a boy across a dark and deceptively still pond. My Lai. Charlie Company. 1st Battalion, 20th Infantry Regiment, 11th Brigade, 23rd Infantry Division.

  He’d heard that Captain Medina’d said nothing would be left alive in the village. That wasn’t a direct order, but leave it to Lieutenant Calley to try to make it happen. Calley was Medina’s bitch, and nothing he could do would please him, but he kept on trying. They all should’ve just walked away, pretended they didn’t hear him that day. Some of them did, and some of them would feel okay about it either way, but for the rest of his life he would wonder if he could have, should have done something.

  The film of it was embedded in his head: all those people begging and screaming, and Calley firing into that ditch, and the emotions so high his eyes were burning, the sky in his private film burning, those dying breaths turning into dark plumes of smoke. He had to admit, he used to call them gooks, but not after that. Never after that.

  It was your duty, basically, to go to war. He’d even believed in the Domino Theory. But God knows, not that.

  SERGEANT TAYLOR WRINKLED his nose, even though he didn’t have a nose anymore. The smell of burning shit. That was his first smell of Vietnam—out where there wasn’t any plumbing they collected all the human shit in barrels, soaked it in fuel oil and set it on fire. Guys had to stir the barrels to make sure it all burned. Always a bad smell, a bad taste. Pale, bloodless faces. Dark, yellowish, insect-like heads. The salt taste of blood in the mouth. The need to bite, to chew, to rip, to tear tender skin. The need to smash like some rampaging god. To ignite mayhem. Sergeant Taylor used to talk often about the lies of Vietnam. There was little else to do.

  Taylor loved the way Alex smiled. He was a good boy. Blond hair, skinny, and eighteen years old. Basketball player, playing now for God and country. He didn’t pay much attention to what Taylor said, or at least he didn’t act like he did. Still, he was a good boy. But hell, the kid didn’t know what they were going to ask him to do. None of them did. Hell, the whole damn country had no idea what it was trying to face.

  “Now the way I parse it out,” Taylor continued, “is that you first got your big lies. Everybody knows what the big lies are, whether they think of them as lies or not. You know, son, lies about whether we can win or not, or whether we belong here in the first place. The lies that got us into this mess. Then there’s the medium sized lies, don’t you see, like The Body Count Lie, or the Stupid Math Lie, as I like to call it.”

  He stared at the boy, who now grinned in embarrassment. Taylor figured the kid was scared to death that some brown bar or the C.O. might walk by. He really shouldn’t do this to the boy, he supposed. Damn them all, though. They spend all their time teaching kids in school about being heroic, about being noble and giving your life to something bigger than yourself. They don’t teach you about the nights and what to do when you’re ass-deep in the dark. These people here in Nam, they’ve lived in the dark for a long, long time. They know it’s got teeth and a belly it needs to fill. They know you have to grow teeth, too, if you’re going to survive it. You have to embrace it and become the goddamned God of Mayhem. The number of dead don’t matter, except the bodies are just something more you can feed it. What the hell does a body count mean out here anyway?

  “You know about the body count, don’t you, soldier? Haven’t you counted no bodies yet? For shame. You know, twenty here. Sixteen back there—oops—one of them’s ours from that not-so-friendly fire so better make that fifteen. Twenty-five over there, but that count includes two cows, three civilians, and a fence post. Out here we use that new Stupid Math. Forty-two in the next county, but then them were all civilians. Now, you got to be careful not to miss the bodies left in the ditches, stacked on the trails like bags of dirty laundry, the bodies in the house, the bodies hanging from the trees, the body fertilizer, the body mayonnaise. How many arms or how many legs or—here’s a tough one for you—how many pounds of loose gut equal one body on the C.O.’s body count report?”

  Alex wasn’t smiling anymore. Sergeant Taylor could dearly appreciate that. Wasn’t a damn thing to smile about.

  “But, now, it’s the little bitty lies that’ve always interested me, the people lies. Like the lie that said you wouldn’t be afraid when you got over here, that you’d be some kind of frigging freedom fighter, or that they’ll all be treating you like a fucking hero when you get home. You listen to Sergeant Taylor, boy. Ain’t going to happen. Ain’t no way. Like the lie that says you’ll go back in one piece. Like the lie that says you’re a wholesome, all American boy and you’re going to stay that way. The lie that says you ain’t going to turn into a fucking monster over here.”

  “Now, wait a minute, Sarge. Pretty personal, aren’t you?”

  “It’s a damn personal war, son.”

  “I don’t intend to change.”

  “Now I am relieved.”

  “So, if you hate it so much, why are you here? You already had your tour, you went back for a while, so why’d you sign on for another one?”

  Taylor just stared at him. Insect legs scratched along the back of his brain, trying to find the right words for him to say. “My business, son,” he finally said. “Go check your gear. Moving out soon.” The boy strode off with a little swagger. Probably thinking he’d finally caught his old Sarge on something. Maybe he had.

  LIEUTENANT CALLEY WASN’T the only one trotting after the Captain like a little puppy dog. They would have followed Medina anywhere. He gave them those cards, the Ace of Spades, because they were “death dealers,” okay? They were supposed to drop those on every gook they killed.

  Still, Calley was the worst, always trying to please Medina, and it only made the Captain call the lieutenant a little shit, and that’s how he treated him.

  If Bill Webber hadn’t been killed, maybe things w
ould have been different. He was the first, and that started the dying, and then they went through that mine field. They had one soldier split right up the middle. The villagers could have said something, warned them. That changed the rules—destroying villages became the standard.

  It wouldn’t have been wise for the villagers to point out the mines, though. Folks like that, they stayed alive by keeping their mouths shut. It was a bad situation for everybody concerned.

  The company set up a perimeter around the village. Those villagers never saw it coming. The older ones had told the younger ones that the Americans were different—they brought candy bars. Not that the Vietnamese didn’t resent being occupied, but the Americans could be trusted.

  The real problem, though, was there was bad intel. Medina had been told the Cong’s 48th Infantry was holed up there around the village. There weren’t supposed to be any civilians. And when the companyfound civilians, Medina wouldn’t adjust his thinking. It was going to be all out war.

  FOR A LONG time Taylor believed he signed up again because of the way people had treated him back home in the bars, at parties, whenever they found out what he was and where he’d been. But there was more to it than that, and those motherfuckers back home probably saw that part of it written all over his sweating face.

  “You’re in the service?” His old friends had told him it was a bad idea to wear the uniform, but he hadn’t listened. It pissed him off when people said crap like that.

  “Yeah. Be out for good soon, I reckon.”

  “Nam?” The man’s tone made Taylor uneasy. The girlfriend just sat there, staring past the man’s shoulder, pale lips pouted and eyes blazing.

  “Yeah.”

  “How many did you kill?” And there it was. They always asked that first thing, or after they’d beaten around the bush awhile. Nobody had told Taylor it’d be like that when he got home.

  Taylor tried a smile, but it felt too much like the kind of smile you made sometimes back in Nam. You’d have been up for days, strung out on the fighting and running just on fatigue and adrenalin, and there’d be some little hurt kid you’re trying to make feel better, so you try to smile, and it’s only after you’ve been making that smile awhile that you realize the muscles in half your face aren’t working anymore; they’re frozen solid. “Hey, why don’t you let me buy you and your girl a drink?” he finally said.