You took yourself apart betting against a dead-river jump in the glass-river sands and now all you know is this sunset-fretted treatment room with its acid blades of funeral dusk light dissecting the walls and their lusty framed close-ups of pirate-bugs and vipers and the faraway grammar in your field-radio whispering a code so void and fathomless it might as well be a psalm. A psalm about misjudging shadows and glare as the retired camp-dentist hooks your legs into foul rubber sockets and sideways rain explodes in bursts of steam against all those ropes of unhinged six o’clock light.
Bleeding, like you’re pushing sap to ruin her day off, and the retired camp-dentist has buried too many dusks like this before and is in no mood to blink at a voice like mine spitting real weather distortion from a handset on a question-mark coat-hook, the room evolving around her temper as she peels X-ray film and pinches up the barrel end of your assault rifle from her jigsaw-puzzled desk and flicks notes underneath as if the simple shared weapon is one simple shared paperweight, tapping three beats on her blood-smudged forehead with a blood-smudged forefinger, eyes half-down and spectacles overcast, the weight of her eyes turning you sick and the room on its own orbit making its own way under its own serious law and you want to throw up and not think about what is engraved on city screens hours away.
Lolling her eyes to the shatterproof canopy of the one-way glass dome, doing the soft-pencil trick in front of your face, imagining what a doctor would do, tilling tacky lilac fingers through her rust weekend hairdo. At least you’re not dead yet: a clarinet voice, dandling a bool of cottonwool and iodine. But her tone and the materials at hand are neither melodies nor targets and they merge into one eerie, unknowable substance.
A tuning fork in each ear and the dead blue in the dark of the sarcastic bombproof window. Asking where pain is. Where? Dabbing a meteor field, her thousand-year-old shadow leaning in from a historical tomorrow, her bagged eyes melting rubber. Where? Light years across, she is made of the rubble of un-looted pyramids and earthquake tombs. Where? Between a zero and ten. Where?
Here in our shared and funeral dusk glow where the clock always says eight but it never feels like eight because eight is a major chord and this feels like midnight and midnight is a minor chord.
Going to the past on midnight border roads we practised hating, a hundred conscripts patrolling south from the old port, tanks light with microchips, our garrison sowing poison-mines and drones all the way to the deniable office where the deniable officers bubble bread on hot-plates in deniable locked graves and fill inhalers with sedative relief, laughing about laughing with comrades along the black-joke highways we memorised, sugared by seductive contractions of music as music made sense of time, the midnight border road gulling us to a fog-glow midnight in that dawn square market and the midnight rituals and you taking yourself apart as the retired camp-dentist takes too long and we get the wrong idea about light, about songs, about the width of a dead river. About the unique personality of blood.
A discus of undulated bread with crimson spiralling to its pivot. Oblate onion slivered on the grain. Soured cream and grapes and olives and lamb. Counting stars into their places in the market under deadlight pyrotechnics and the traces of roasting fish. Making predictions between forkfuls of salad, spoonfuls of lentils, beyond the delighted tourists and spooks, where you pretend behind closed eyes it is not possible to hear that faraway noise. I mean that you are unable to hear that faraway noise, that promise, that conditional offering which is a child really, or a story you follow like a loyal dog. I mean it is a faraway noise which exists because it is close-at-hand and affectionate and unteachable.
You are a child as she pulls fingers and slaps as if slapping is prayer. Start counting, corporal. This isn’t your first time. So you get broken numbers as she leans in. Numbers fretted and blinded by sunsets. Numbers printed on a discus of uneaten bread. Numbers faraway shouting in a play-park. Numbers you can chase down. Three and four and a needle and a thread, a horrible childishness, her eyelids shattery egg-shells and the crystals in the gutters of her lips switching with blue and green sparks as she re-laces stirrups, a mother at a shoelace. Not saying anything about one summer desert screw-down after we stopped the truck and combed the margin sand to not find our enemy. Come on, corporal. You are not a child.
Before we had to run we talked again in clichés about nostalgia.
What is nostalgia? Is it not wanting what you have and wanting what you do not have? Is it desire for its own sake? A type of self-reinforcing circle of wanting to want? Is it love possessed by memory reinterpreted by necessary failure? Is it failing to come to terms with the limits of human chronological time? Banging your forehead on the verb tenses we use to frame the reality of our lives? Is it a stomach complaint? An unbalanced microbiome? A dream surfacing in the waking moments like a submarine in a cold sea? Is it a heavy-hearted admission you are failing on and on to sufficiently appreciate the beauty of the present? A mis-naming of entropy, of decay? Is it decay? Is it a hunger for physical connection? A need for the shelter of what we know for sure is real because the only thing we know for sure is real is the past, no matter how awful and delicious, no matter how hilarious, no matter how much it takes us apart? Well, the soldier looks in the mirror of a crater-pond and knows exactly what nostalgia is. Nostalgia is the fear of not being where you want to be. Nostalgia is the fear of death.
And you do not pay attention to the dazzle in what used to be a spine, inhaling iodine and plasma, the sear of a generator and the muck the drains swallowed for breakfast, and you do not tell her we are in the past running satellite-lit, me behind you, and you do not tell her you are in the market a year ago holding a deflective glass of tea up to the sodium-lamp burn, looking forward to the sweetness on the porcelain which in a few strokes will be just another impossible equation on the medieval flagstones, and you do not tell her about deflected singing or how people shoulder and crouch, and you do not tell her you are looking across the midnight market at the figurative painting in the kiosk whose knocked-off sunglasses mirror some form of diminished heaven, and you do not tell her about the boy with the cartoon backpack laughing like that in a vision, laughing like that in a vision and then just another impossible equation on the medieval flagstones.
And you do not tell her you know where the re-spooled offal of trapped street-dogs gets seeded with remote-control grenades, the way a pepper gets spooned fast with rice, the way nasturtium seeds are rolled into tape and lain in trenches for crops.
She knows you are shattered in three places in three gestures of time plaited. Or not. Answer him now, you say, as the field-radio hisses my emergency code and she limps in flip-flops, a grass stain on the flank of her canary-yellow beach shorts, the smells of pear juice and cumin on her fingertips at your throat, and the tree outside making a human shape on the treatment room walls.
Wipes a spike, tuts her eyes, the screen blazing the same headline since you were stretchered in. You can imagine the headline. My god, she sighs, another platitude irresistible, who would do something like that? Which is not a real question and the answer is not: some gargoyle in a Grimm documentary; some charisma demon from an ancient narration, prancing around this infantile daydream; some caveat, some footnote; some capital city monster, rhetorical and then incarnate; you with an exclamation mark.
Horrified tourists close to the desert camp flower-field were forced to watch this tragedy unfold, the functionary newsreader recites. Meaning we are reminded of what remains of ordinary life when the arguing is stopped and our birth certificates and photos are legalled onto bonfires and metaphysics takes hold and the retired camp-dentist whispers a lullaby about help coming but you see her killing in flick-books and the slowed-down light missing beats of light and your own self a war in a forest of nerves. Get your story straight, corporal, before they get here. We need a story which makes sense. So you tell her with empty hands you are taking the safety off and you know better than to bet on dead-river jumps and you know you can travel in positions of time and stay with me red-handed for someone to call-back the code. Nine and ten and broken light and the field-radio hissing a code so diffuse and endless it might as well be a hymn but the retired camp-dentist does not go to the code. Like a butcher coping with a procession of festive carcasses or a house-martin coping with sundown and a common world of obstacles she can treat with cruelty and ignore me out there running in the old-light sand and your gun irrational and vacant, an animal captive, and your bones apart and mystified. The field-radio now turning off. Can’t concentrate. All this noise in you, she means. But she does not say yet you went to the field to lie with me in the frowns of corrugated soil, which is true. And she does not say yet how you did not rake the sand margin to catch our enemy, as you should have, which is not true. And she does not say yet woman this is your fault and now you have taken yourself apart. And here we are, star-stunned dust, nine and ten.
I held your hands above your head when we met where nobody saw when we came together the day after the camp goat butted loose and got bored of grazing on the ichorous sprinklered lawns and wanted to be where it should not have been and we had to find the animal before it ate more than its fatted weight in gold and we never found it and there are no first wounds.
And remember daybreak when we stopped the truck and got the rake on the sand and talked about absurd poems and songs with lyrics about rain-wells betrayed by rooting tree muscle and nerve-gas shells veined feeble to crinkle open like cuckoo eggs and about your neck ache and my unwashed sweat, remembering the poem about heart valves and spleens and liver-spots organised on a star-shaped slaughter block knocked from the cast of an ancient tree, taking off our boots together and time going across corrugations of soil as if soil is turned into waves by time and the wind’s waves were still in harrowed frowns like that.
Sore petals exploding like fire-wheels. The music still playing in your earphones where they fell out. Spikes your vein. Something wrong with the drip and the tubes they send and something wrong with laws as night comes on, as children get trapped on swings and the cooks rack the kitchen with oblongs of metal blessed with oils and chickens and courgettes and the desert dog-days reek of opened hearts and base metal and rock, and dusted bats race in sharp leaves here and there like an old carnival diorama and bats sink in tides of insects when night gets levelled under mist and it’s always a fine hour to bomb the swimming pool. Sponging off your thigh, your hair, you listen to a child in the corridor who does not want to do what it has to do, who wants it both ways, the breast and the release, the warmth and the falling, an angry kid lost in the waiting room of night, wanting to be in two contradictory positions, confused by demands for coherent time and self and chronology, when the cause of pain is not original. But you do not tell her you are waiting for tea to cool and counting on stars to appear as proof of the blackness on which they depend, her now telling you come on girl we all know what it’s like to be young and you want to cool off and unstrap in this murderer’s heat and you forget about trillions of years and training. Fewer than ten miles from what used to be an ancient civilisation which lasted thousands of years until it didn’t, we have all been on the glass-river sands and we have all waited at the stations on the incense route from the peninsula to the navigable water with our camel caravans and hard bargain faces and our enslaved friends, the grown-ups teaching the children how to throw dice or lie, the lovers at night under fabric, and opportunists keen for empires or a high point to watch hourglasses or scramble maps or cheat storms, turning a faraway noise into a tale, into a meme designed to build gold-shat palaces for bare psychopathic tyrants imagining without any ripple in their heart-rates all our generations of placentas on skulls for century on century. Our people suffering in love, she says, and lost and forgotten like splinters off trees. I mean she said all that and did not say all that. I mean it makes no difference from whose body words are claimed to come from. Same body. Same light.
Something off about the drug, the tube, the code, the birds thrilled and shitting up there on the roof as she scissors off more uniform and paints your skin with iodine and nerves and morphine and words are the same thing and she staples a paper to medical notes with liver-spotted hands and her hands are flames and rain bursting in steam. The medics were carrying you to the jeep hours ago with hours to go and red inking into khaki, making a new lost continent. Pain is twisting your focus to the blotting-paper quality of air and the galactic debris of used skin all around made obvious by some hiding absorbent liquid and the retired camp-dentist is frowning and showing all her teeth and perhaps she has realised the air was already visible when they found you, the August veil soaked in chicken shed ammonia, patrolled by youths like us with machine-guns and Ray-Bans and rakes hitched to trucks, patrolling a well-farmed wasteland, patrolling an idea.
As she splints and magnifies and diagrams and stitches and the blind light serrates her arms and her neck and impossible fragments of rain go fizzing off her spit onto the dull apron cloth in the close butcher smell. You should be honoured. Not many nineteen-year-olds have done what you have, corporal. Honoured. You assume she means some sticky recuperation cot in the psych ward, railed in a wheelchair across that stained courtyard they never tidy up, down corridors, past the maternity-unit hatches, the children’s ward, the renal vinegar fug, the geriatric farewells and the sardonic revolving doors, oncology, a thickened concentration, lowered in that grease-stinking elevator past the secretaries typing up all our ancient maladies, none excepted, a nurse almost pausing in the corridor to worry at the reducing slipknot in her heart, the sun a war-hammer and shops across the street framed in stained-glass hexagons and billions of human ambulances smiling completely in prisms as you are wheeled past the bluest room with the bodies in the preserving pool, each body insufficiently flagged, and past the closed prayer-room, and beyond holed books, and behind the memory of fire, and everything reeking of boiled human piss and detergent and gore and elimination and panic.
Loosening the stirrups, towels in a bucket, you want to tell her you are not undone and you know about chronology and common sense and we are going to walk together under the dangerous shade of civilised trees but the retired camp-dentist has buried too many dusks like this before and is looking up at the see-through roof one last time, at the songbirds and their one last sunrise, thinking of a daughter she used to be and have, or not.
A vehicle outside. Never mind about him, she tells you, sliding your arms into a lost-property sweatshirt, nudging your toes into plastic sliders, un-braking the stretcher, and when you wake up the ambulance is ready. You’re lucky, she says, as if our planned deaths tomorrow are not the mass and charge and spin of what is breaking down today, as if when the stone beats the water the waves are separate waves, and when she says never mind about him you see there are now only midnight roads and midnight markets and it takes such a long time to twist yourself around, it takes all the future you ever have, like something weak out there got stuck fast in here after we brushed the wilderness clean and waited.
We lay together in the field and imagined time moving on corruptions of soil as soil is turned into waves by time and the wind’s waves are still in harrowed frowns like that.
You are going to our city with its changeable laws and its neutral administration, with its bulletproof classrooms and its libraries and its supermarket shelves, with its shaded parks and its hairdressing salons, and then the numbness, and now the ambulance doors opening, and here is a toy shop window on a cloudless winter evening.
Wow