Julian Comstock: A Story of 22nd-Century America

by Robert Charles Wilson

  He was speaking hyperbole; but the very flatness of his voice suggested a grievance too deep for words. And to a degree I shared it. To fire a bullet into the heart or brains of one’s fellow man—even a fellow man striving to do the same to you—creates what might be called an unassimilable memory: a memory that floats on daily life the way an oil stain floats on rainwater. Stir the rain barrel, scatter the oil into countless drops, disperse it all you like, but it will not mix; and eventually the slick comes back, as loathsomely intact as it ever was.

  “We can never again be what we once were,” Julian whispered.

  I sat up indignantly. “I’m still just Adam Hazzard. Adam Hazzard from Williams Ford hasn’t gone away, Julian. He just went to war. Someday he’ll go somewhere else. New York City, perhaps.”

  Julian evidently took some comfort from my crude philosophizing, for he grasped my hand warmly, and said in a trembling voice, “Thank you for saying so.”

  “Sleep on it,” I suggested. “Perhaps we won’t have to kill anyone tomorrow, and you can get some useful rest.”

  But I couldn’t take my own advice—couldn’t sleep, despite my exhaustion, any more than Julian could; so we lay awake while the moon shone down on the battlefield where we had driven back the Dutch, and on the hospital tents with their detritus of severed limbs, and on the river that flowed somewhat bloodstained to the mighty St. Lawrence and all the way to the shoreless sea.

  * The Cannon, Sam said, used particular and expensive ammunition, which the Dutch were probably hoarding for the more intense fighting to come.

  * Or “Deutsche,” as they are more properly called, for Germany is the heart and brain of Mitteleuropa, and “Deutsche” is another name for the German language. But many of the foreign soldiers in Labrador, and most of the foreign settlers, were former residents of the Netherlands, which had lost much of its land to the sea in recent times.

  4

  Because of General Galligasken’s humanitarian concern for the Army of the Laurentians we were not obliged to fight the following day, nor did we march in pursuit of the enemy, but stayed where we were, and buried our dead, and consolidated our defenses in case the Dutch attempted a counterattack.

  In another month or less this land would be a steaming Gehenna, hospitable only to the mosquitos and the horseflies that feed on human and animal flesh; and our marches, should we make any, would be mortal contests of endurance. Already the hospital tents, where they were not wholly preoccupied with wounded men, hosted a number of invalids down with “the summer complaint,” and there was the ever-present danger of an outbreak of cholera or some other communicable disease. We drew water from local streams to drink, for the Army barrel-water was stagnant and fusty; and we hoped for the best.

  But the weather held calm and pleasant for a few days more. On Sunday afternoon after Dominion services a general lassitude fell over the camp, and I wandered among the tents like an Aristo strolling through his garden (though aristocratic gardens are generally more pleasing to the nose than military encampments).

  It was while I was strolling, and sampling the sunshine, and humming tunes to myself, that I heard a noise which puzzled and interested me.

  There are all sorts of noises around an army camp: army engineers banging wood for inscrutable purposes, army blacksmiths bending horseshoes on an anvil, infantrymen at target practice, and any number of other clattery pursuits. But most of those sounds had abated on account of the Sabbath. What I heard was a sound that could be mistaken, at a distance, for the irregular knocking of a woodpecker on a tree, or a boy drummer unsuccessfully attempting some novel rhythm. But the sound had a brittler, more mechanical quality than that; and once my curiosity was engaged I could think of nothing else but to track the noise to its source.

  Its approximate source, I soon discerned, was a square canvas tent situated up a sloping meadow that became, farther east, a respectable hill. The tent’s flaps were open so I wandered past it, hands clasped behind my back, feigning indifference but sparing a subtle glance or two inside. But it was difficult to see inside in any meaningful way—my vision was hampered not just by the shade of the canvas but by an obscuring miasma of tobacco and hemp smoke, which wafted into the sunshine in coiling exhalations as if the tent itself were alive and breathing—and I had to make several passes before I could discern the agency responsible for so much smoke and noise: it was a man seated at a flimsy wooden table, working a machine.

  My effort to remain inconspicuous was apparently not successful, for on my seventh or eighth pass the mysterious man called out, “Stop hovering there, whoever you are!” His voice was rough, and he spoke with a nasal accent not unlike Julian’s. “Come in or go out—I don’t care which—but choose one.”

  “I’m sorry if I disturbed you,” I said hastily.

  “I was disturbed before you came along; don’t take all the credit … What are you staring at?”

  “That machine,” I admitted, taking an uninvited step into the shade, and resisting the temptation to hold my breath. As my vision adapted to the dim light I could see that the man had equipped himself with an ashtray, pipe, leather poke-bag, and a flask that added the astringent odor of alcohol to the already dizzying assortment of musks in the air. He was not dressed as an infantryman, and in fact he seemed to be a civilian. His clothes were threadbare and patched but must have been respectable at one time. He wore a narrow hat slouched over his eyes.

  But this was only a sparing assay of the man, for I was much more interested in the machine. The machine, though not much larger than a generously-proportioned bread box, was as intricate as a pocket watch turned inside-out, finished in black enamel and studded with round ridged buttons on which letters were etched, one per key. A sheet of paper was squeezed around a cylinder like a rolling pin set behind all this, and words were printed on the page.

  “It’s a typewriter,” the man said. “I suppose they don’t have typewriters in whatever hamlet you hail from.”

  I ignored this implied insult to Williams Ford and said, “You mean it’s a printing press? Are you making a book?” (For I had not yet inquired into the mechanics of book-making, and I guessed this might be the way books were manufactured: by grubby men copying them one letter at a time.)

  “Do I look like a publisher to you? You ought not to impose on my hospitality and then insult me.”

  “My name is Adam Hazzard,” I said.

  “Theodore Dornwood,” he muttered, and returned his attention to the business before him.

  “That’s an admirable machine,” I persisted, “even if it’s not a printing press. What do you do with it? Do you make signs or notices?”

  “I’m not a publisher, I’m not a sign-maker, and I’m not even a company clerk. My station in life is below all those. I’m a writer.”

  That startled me—I had never seen a writer before, nor met anyone who described himself as one. My eyes widened; and I exclaimed without much in the way of forethought, “So am I!”

  Mr. Dornwood caught the smoke from his pipe the wrong way and began to cough.

  “At least,” I added, “that’s my ambition. I mean one day to write books such as the ones by Mr. Charles Curtis Easton—I assume you’ve heard of him?”

  “Of course I’ve heard of him. His books litter all the stalls in Hudson Street.”

  “Where is Hudson Street, then?” (Thinking that if this street were in Montreal I might be willing to part with some of my Army pay in order to catch up with Mr. Easton’s recent work.)

  “Manhattan,” Mr. Theodore Dornwood said, casting a glance at the page in his typewriter with a certain rueful longing.

  “You’re a New York writer, then?”

  “I correspond for the Spark.”

  The Spark was a New York City newspaper. I had never seen a copy—of the Spark, or any other newspaper—but Julian had mentioned it once or twice as a popular if vulgar daily journal.

  “Is that what you’re doing now—corresponding?”
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br />   “No! Just at the moment I’m passing the time with every idle infantryman who happens to wander by; but I was working, curiously enough, before you began hovering at the tent-flap.”

  Since Theodore Dornwood came from Manhattan I was tempted to ask whether he had met Julian Comstock there, or passed him on the streets; but I remembered that any careless identification of Julian as a Comstock might attract the attention of Julian’s murderous uncle.* Therefore I left Julian’s name out of the discussion and said, “Well, I wish I had a machine as fine as that one. Do all New York writers own one?”

  “The privileged few.”

  “How does it work?”

  “You push the keys—like this, see?—and the letters are impressed on the paper—at least when the operator is allowed sufficient privacy in which to work.”

  “Isn’t it a slow process, compared to handwriting?”

  “Faster, if you’re trained to it, and the finished manuscript is easier to set as copy … Hazzard, you said your name was? Are you the soldier who’s been teaching these country boys their letters?”

  The lessons I gave Lymon Pugh had been so successful that a few other infantrymen had begged to be included. I was pleased that Mr. Dornwood had heard of me. “I’m the one.”

  “And you write, too?” He inhaled from his pipe and gave out a Vesuvius-load of smoke. The pungent air in the tent was beginning to make me feel light-headed, though it seemed to have no such effect on Dornwood, who must have saturated himself in his vices so long that he had acquired an immunity to them. (He wasn’t old, in the sense that Sam Godwin was old, but he was at least ten years older than myself—old enough to be hardened to his own bad habits.) “What are you working on at the moment, Adam Hazzard?”

  I blushed at the question and said, “Well, I do keep paper and pencils handy … though I don’t have a writing-machine with springs and levers … I mark down a word or two from time to time …”

  “No modesty between scribblers,” said Dornwood. “Fiction, is it?”

  “Yes—a story about a Western boy kidnapped by Chinese traders, and taken to sea against his will, and when he escapes his captors he falls in with pirates, but what they don’t know is—”

  “I see. And how many pirates have you met, Adam Hazzard?”

  The question took me by surprise. “In life? Well—none.”

  “But you must have studied them extensively, from a distance?”

  “Not exactly—”

  “Well, are you absolutely sure pirates exist—since they’re so foreign to your experience? No, don’t answer that; I’m making a point. Why write about pirates, Adam, when you’re embedded in an adventure at least as momentous as anything C. C. Easton ever imagined?”

  “What are you saying—that I should write about the war? But I’ve only seen a little of it.”

  “No matter! Write what you know: it’s one of the abiding principles of the trade.”

  “The worse for me, then,” I said ruefully, “for I don’t know much at all, when you come down to it.”

  “Surely everybody knows something. The Battle of Mascouche, for instance. Weren’t you in the thick of it?”

  “Yes, but it was my first.”

  “Wouldn’t it be a sensible exercise to set down in pencil what happened on that day? Not what happened to the Army of the Laurentians—leave that to the historians—I mean what happened to you—your personal experience.”

  “Who would be interested?”

  “It would be an exercise in writing, if nothing else. Adam,” he exclaimed, standing up from his desk, and flinging an arm around my shoulders in a surprising display of conviviality, “why are you wasting your time here? A writer must write, first and last! Don’t squander precious minutes gazing at my typewriter—or worse, touching it—now is the time to hone your literary skills, while the Dutch are quiet and the weather’s fair! Take up your humble pencil, Adam Hazzard, and set down in all the detail you can remember the events of a few days past.”

  This made immediate sense to me—in fact I was excited by his suggestion, and reproached myself for not having thought of such an exercise before. “And when it’s done, shall I show it to you?”

  He sat back down as if the wind had gone out of him. “Show it to me?”

  “My account of the battle. So that you can point out what an experienced writer might have done differently.”

  Mr. Dornwood knotted his brows and looked uncomfortable; then he said, “Well, all right … I suppose you can bring it to me next Sunday, if neither of us is killed by then.”

  “That’s very generous!”

  “I’m a well-known saint,” said Dornwood.

  I meant to go straight to my tent and practice my literary skills as Dornwood had suggested, but on the way back I was distracted by a crowd of men who had gathered around the tent of Private Langers.

  Langers, the reader will remember, was a passenger on the Caribou-Horn Train: a colporteur, as he pleased to call himself, who had been in the business of selling religious pamphlets on delicate topics to lonely men, who enjoyed the printed illustrations for reasons not necessarily allied to piety or faith. Private Langers had been put out of that trade by conscription, and he was just another infantryman now. But his entrepreneurial instincts had survived the transformation, and it seemed like he was back in business—some kind of business—judging by the eager crowd around him.

  I asked another soldier what was going on.

  “Langers was on burial duty,” the man said.

  “Surprising that that should have made him so popular.”

  “He collected all sorts of things from the bodies of dead Dutchmen. Jackets and hats, badges and wallets, eyeglasses and glass eyes, brass buckles and leather holsters …”

  Enemy armaments had to be handed over to the Quartermaster, but everything else, I gathered, was fair game for the burial detail. I knew that men were often tempted to take a souvenir or two from their fallen foes, if their stomachs were strong enough for the treasure-hunt. But he had gone far beyond that modest impulse. He had harvested the fields of the fallen with a bushel basket, and put the culled trinkets on display. Dozens of Dutch prizes were arrayed on a blanket in front of his tent, under a sign which read: EVERYTHING $1.

  It seemed to me an odd price. A few of the objects were obviously worth more than that, such as the collections of Dutch coins, which could be traded in Montreal for legal tender. But most were worth much less. The jackets almost all had bullet-holes in them, for instance; and even the glass eye, though lifelike, was cracked. But there was a trick to it, the soldier next to me explained.

  “It don’t mean you pay a dollar and take what you like. Everything has a number beside it, written on those scraps of paper. And Langers has a jar, with similar scraps inside it. When you pay your dollar he says, ‘Reach into the jar,’ and you do so, and you pull out a number and find out just what it was you bought. It might be something good, like that mermaid buckle there. But it might be a sad little leather bag, or a shoe with a hole in it.”

  “Isn’t that Gambling?”

  “Hell no,” the soldier said, “it’s not half as much fun.”

  I had been warned against gambling all my life, both by my mother and by the Dominion Reader for Young Persons, though the only gambling I had ever seen first-hand was the kind the indentured folks indulged in, betting tobacco or alcohol on dice or cards. Most of those games ended in fist fights, and I was never tempted by them. But Private Langers’s pick-a-number enterprise was more difficult to resist. I was curious about the Dutch, and felt that I ought to know a thing or two about the people I had been shooting at and, occasionally, killing. To own one of their possessions seemed almost a religious act (if I can be excused that small apostasy), like the custom primitive peoples have of eating their enemy’s hearts—a more Christian enactment of the same urge.

  So I pushed to the front of the crowd, and took a Comstock dollar from my pocket, and paid it over for the privi
lege of reaching into Private Langers’s Lucky Mug. The number I retrieved was 32, which corresponded to a small leather satchel, much-scuffed and disappointingly slender. This was not, by any standards, a valuable thing to have bought—and Langers smiled with satisfaction as he tucked away my dollar and handed over the satchel. But my disappointment didn’t last; for the satchel, when I opened it, contained a letter, apparently written by a Dutch soldier shortly before his death. Again, this had no monetary value, and Langers had every reason to crow over the bargain; but as a souvenir of a man’s life, and a glimpse into the habits of the Mitteleuropan infantry, the letter interested me terrifically.

  I unfolded the two closely-written pages I had bought, and thought about that deceased Dutchman putting his pen to paper, little suspecting that his words would become the property of a Williams Ford lease-boy (much less the booty of a corpse-looting colporteur). I took the letter to my tent and stared at it for nearly an hour, thinking about fate, and death, and other weighty and Philosophical subjects.

  Lymon Pugh came by as I was deep in these reveries, and I showed him the letter.

  He puzzled over it a moment. “My lessons in reading don’t seem to have advanced this far,” he said.

  “Of course you can’t read it. It’s written in Dutch.”

  “Dutch? They don’t just speak that noise, they also write it down?”

  “That’s their habit, yes.”

  “But you know all your letters, Adam: can’t you decipher it?”

  “Oh, I can read the letters all right—so can you, though you might not be accustomed to cursive script. This word here, for example: L-I-E-F-S-T-E—those are all familiar letters.”

  “I can’t make out what they spell, though.”

  “It looks like it might be pronounced leafst. Or leaf-stee, depending on how they use their terminal vowels.”

  Lymon Pugh looked scornful. “That’s not a word.”

  “It’s certainly not a word in English; but in Dutch—”

  “If they’re going to write out letters, why can’t they do it decently? No wonder we have to fight them. But I suppose it’s not meant to be understood. Not by the likes of us, at least. Perhaps it’s a code. Maybe what you have there is a plan of action, written from one Dutch General to another.”