Out in the street, a troop of heavily armed Sikhs was marching, five abreast, down the center of Notting Hill Gate. Gavin nudged me in the ribs, as if I didn’t see them.
“Look at the colonials,” he whispered without real circumspection. And indeed, they were an impressive fighting force. Purple turbans piled atop swarthy heads, faces set in a permanent poise between callousness and an angry scowl. In a minor concession to regional custom, it seemed the Sikhs were permitted to carry largely ceremonial daggers, really small swords, encrusted with various exotic jewels, a veritable rainbow of colors. No doubt this was the traditional Sikh martial accoutrement.
And I discovered, as Gavin I tramped down the street, that the British military establishment went to great pains to allow their colonial counterparts as much leeway as possible in terms of traditional dress. As the troops marched orderly down the center of the avenue, the Sikh swords jangled and disappeared around the bend. They were replaced, in quick order, with the dark chocolate tone of the Bengalis, wafer thin men sporting, without exception, waxed handle bar moustaches that must be some sort of national symbol of warlike virility. Across their tan kakis, a green and red sash, almost checkerboard in pattern, breasted their chests and nestled under their slim shoulder blades.
Following them, their blue-black skin gleaming in the sunlight, the South African Corps, a small patch of leopard skin displayed just below their characteristic emblem of a prancing cheetah, sprinting, it would seem, over a high dry velt. Bobbing behind the Corps, with their customary high kneed trot, which made them appear to be running on earth that trampolined slightly under the pressure of their gait, the Kashmiri Troops, attired in the streamlined felt hats of their mountainous region, slung rakishly low over drooping North Asian foreheads.
“I know some of those chaps,” Gavin nudged me for the fifth time that day, believing, erroneously, that every verbal revelation must be accompanied by a physical jostle, “these are crack troops from Kashmir, and some are from Nepal, if memory serves me correct.” He placed a finger on the side of this nose and rubbed rigorously, as if he were trying to conjure familiar faces from the crowd of exotic troops.
“There they are, for heaven’s sake,” Gavin burst forth like bird suddenly released from a confining snare, fluttering briefly about in a sea of confused faces. There was a great deal of momentary mutual cross conversation, and a peel of hearty laughter, and the pat-pat-pat of hands rhythmically patting khaki and leather. Then Gavin’s white hand, fluttering in the sunshine, beckoned me into the tumult.
“This,” he sputtered, short of breath, “is Abdul Ramalla, of the Kasmiri Mountain Division,” I took the hand of a small, almost completely round man with saucer shaped eyes and a mustache perched above his wide, expressive mouth, which was opened slightly, as if it were not possible to draw breath through his long, broad proboscis, which, oddly enough, was browner in hue than the caramel color of the remainder of his face.
He bowed slightly, and for a split second all I could see of him was the flat olive green top portion of his mountaineer’s high broad hat. His well-fleshed hand vigorously pumped mine, and then, in quick succession, Gavin introduced me to his other acquaintance, “And this is Ramjana Pupesh, of the Gurkas, I believe.”
“Oh-no” Ramjana chirped in the soothing cadence of the South Asian, “I’m afraid we are forbidden to tell the specifics of our units….”
Abdul cut in “…. and that includes muster numbers, the geographical make up of our units, how or why we have been reconfigured, what our past missions were or what our present mission is or could be, over even if we are on a mission or what our future missions could possibly entail.”
“So,” Ramjana continued, “please do not put us in a compromising position by asking us too many questions of a direct nature, we do not….”
Abdul again, “… in the slightest sense wish to insult our old friend with verbal intransigence.”
Ramjana, a slighter man than his counterpart, also firmly grasped my hand. It was as if they had purposely shed the more hygienic and socially logical namaste sign of greeting (the two hands clasped as if in supplicating prayer) and sought to prove, by mauling my mitt, that hand touching did not insult their sense of ritual purity.
“Ahh,” he shook his head and smiled, exposed a perfect set of gleaming choppers, arrayed in his firm jaw, “I do not have ritual purity concerns, at least not Hindu ones. Sahib Captain Veendemark,” he answered, as if he could read my mind, “I am not a Hindu, but a Mohammedan, Sahib Captain.”
I shook my head in mute comprehension.
“I, on the other hand, do,” Ramjana explained, his squat body rippling with peels of largely silent laughter, as he raised his hand in the air for added emphasis, “for although I am Nepalese, I am a devout Hindu. Indeed Sahib Captain, I am a minority in an overwhelmingly Buddhist country. But it is not as if there is an unbridgeable doctrinal divided between the tenants of Buddhism and Hinduism, oh, indubitably not.”
“Ramajana and Abdul attended Oxford with me,” Gavin stated definitively, “and I’ve seen them flitting around London for the last month or so; you see, Langley, both their units, the Kashmiris and the Gurkas are crack special forces units, trained to operate in the harsh climatic conditions at high altitudes.”
Ramjana and Abdul were noticeably blushing, a crimson cloud passing over their collective cheeks.
“Why I once went for a little jaunt with old Abdul and Ramajana here on holiday, when I was stationed in northern India, in the Hindu-Kush mountains, and by nine-thousand feet I was feeling giddy, by ten thousand I was getting queasy, and by eleven we had to turn round because the tunnel vision was so severe that the entire world was funneling toward a black spot on the horizon line.”
“You were positively green” Ramjana remarked, smiling broadly at the reminiscence, “I thought I would have to give you the kiss of life!”
“Quite so, quite so,” Gavin smiled back.
Then it started with me: I felt a twitch at my ankle, and the sensation that a hand was just beginning to firmly grasp me. I could feel the pressure of five digits, four in a row about the front and one thumb at the rear. The hand yanked, then pulled; I resisted as best I could, but it doubled its effort, and I felt myself, quite against my will, in spite of doubled-up volition not to fall, sliding toward the cobblestoned pavement. For a moment of absolute lucidity I could see the pleasing toad colored, mottled surface of an individual paving stone: it had liver spots on it, as if it had aged under the discoloring influence of the irregular British sun. Then a dark pooling oil slick started to congeal in the mortar between the stones: a bubbling viscous smear that seemed, by the very nature of its viscosity, to be dimming the outer edges of my field of vision, to be darkening my sight irrevocably.
I sat on the low gray couch opposite the desk as Gavin fluttered about from task to task, zig-zagging like a butterfly; and just like a butterfly he stopped at random points in the room whose importance was all but invisible to the naked human eye. I rested my heavy hands in my lap. They felt so weighty, it was as if they had been soaked in mercury. If they somehow became detached from my arms, and fell to the ground, I felt sure they would splinter and burst through the floorboards.
The phone on Gavin’s desk hissed. Looking up from a memo that had momentarily snagged his interest, he kept gazing irritatedly at the phone, hoping that by the force of his stare alone it would stop. He glanced at me with an expression of annoyed persecution, picking it up while saying, “Where is my blasted secretary!” His desk was so overflowing with paper that the pressure of lifting the phone from the receiver sent a plume of documents perched on the lip of the desk floor-ward. Gavin spat into the phone “Sod it!” and upon listening to the caller’s voice visibly deflated.
“Yes. Yes Colonel, this is Budge. I’m sorry sir, of course. Yes, 0400. I’ll be there sharp, sir, yes, thank you sir.” Gavin hung up and sat heavily in his chair.
“Was that Colonel Beckcock again?
“Yes,” Gavin opened his eyes as wide as tea saucers, and then clamped them rigidly shut. In the aquatic light reflected from the Thames, it seemed like his lids were painted a dull turquoise. “Whenever that old bird calls me in for a meeting it always means the same thing. More personnel are being transferred out of my command. We’re already stretched too bloody thin as it is. How can a reduced staff handle the load that a full compliment can’t handle at all?”
I stared at him impassively. He looked crossly at me, as if judging a person he had only recently met in a new and unfavorable light. He fiddled with something on his desk below my line of sight.
“One thing’s for sure,” he shook his head rigorously as if the physical act could remove unpleasant thoughts from his mind, “we’re not going back to my flat for coffee. Its cocktails or nothing for me.” Then he reconsidered, “or if we do have brew it will be Irish style with Whiskey in it. If I have to listen to that buzzard caw for half an hour I want to be tight. Let’s go, shall we?”
As we exited the room, I thought I heard the suction of escaping air. I looked over my shoulder, Lot’s wife style, and for an instant the room was replaced by a brilliant white void, soft and soothing, with white light sending beams of radiance out and around my head. I turned back forward, and my entire body quivered from stem to stern. I again gazed back at the room. Everything was in place.
Gavin looked grave. He clamped his soft facial features into a single pucker, making his face seem as if it was momentarily drenched in heavy, filthy water. Something was bothering him. I could tell by the facial ticks that he habitually exhibited when agitated: his lower lip drooped on the right side. His top lip disappeared behind his pronounced incisors as he retracted them, as if he needed a small nosh, and half a lip would do.
A small star shaped dimple appeared and disappeared at the creases in the corner of his eyes. Taken all in all, once could trace the stars in the facial constellation, and, with the aid of this simple arithmetic, calculate the sum: an agitated Gavin Budge was unable to mutter simple truths because of his intractable Britishness, a disease that manifested itself by the translation of every unpleasant piece of life’s data below a varnish of obsolete manners and false courtesies.
I did not know why this particular cultural relic clung so tenaciously to this singularly dreary piece of English soil in the North Atlantic. Perhaps bald truthfulness about life would send too many English men and women screaming inconsolably into that black, drizzling night. A façade of gentle manners kept the dark outside intractably out.
“What’s wrong, Gavin?” I did, after all, have some American traits, no amount of cross breeding could alter that. What can be so bad that it can’t be discussed? Why can’t we just dump our disagreements on the conference room table and hash it out, sleeves rolled up, elbow grease applied?
Gavin twitched some more after my question, and then as if in the last throes of some spasm, completely relaxed and assumed a nominally soft, albeit somewhat concerned expression.
“Well, I’m a little worried about you, I must say. Its nothing extreme, mind you, you’ve been working hard lately. Well, by goodness, we’ve all had our noses to the old millstone of late, and its no wonder we’re getting a little daffy…” he looked at me with a curiously blank expression, as if he expected me to continue his chain of thought.
I was being unconscionably callous with poor Gavey. I just sat there like an impassive stone, dull and sullen, playing with the wide array of stamps lined up just beyond the perimeter of my olive green blotter. The rubber ends were each a pleasing nub, with a different geometric shape, perfect circles, tight equilateral triangles, and blocky rectangles.
Just to the right of this array was an impressive assortment of multi-colored ink stamps, sky blue, Valentine’s Day red, lily pad green, all arranged like colorful stepping stones along the central axis of one particularly impressive stamp, its bulbous business end laying face-ward, the embossed rubber head clearly displaying an inverse: DISAPPROVED. At this stage of the bureaucratic struggle, this stamp was working overtime, as already scarce resources were being stretched ever thinner, progressively tauter, across the forever expanding neck of the supply chain of being.
“Well, thanks for your patience, Gavin. I do appreciate it. I’ll try my best to not let my temper get the best of me,” I smiled broadly, what an old fraud I am! All pose and sleight of hand! I had manipulated reality so successfully that I had lost respect for my old adversary, the world.
And, for what seemed at this point to be eons (a geological and not human time span) we had both been engaged in such a pitched, clever battle of wills that we approached each other with the profound deferential respect that only enemies can truly possess. Every friend I have ever had had ultimately bankrupted themselves, both morally and physically, against the rocky shoals of my bewilderingly complex shadow obstacles. Anyone approaching me with the express intention of penetrating the elaborate sturdy screens I construct (to prevent that murky core from being breached, and my suffering irreparable harm thereby) will ultimately lose my respect. I have seen this pattern replicated repeatedly.
Gavin was fast approaching this churned up, over worked ground, and despite my better judgment I felt sorry for him. I liked Gavin, but notions of preference or personal affinity with one’s fellows was really irrelevant, not at all what was at stake in this little Punch and Judy show... no, what it was really about was martial values. What could be gained without suffering catastrophic losses? How to win the battle without having the victory cost the effort of the war?
Ultimately, one could not remain in a defensive posture indefinitely. One’s ear drums may be bleeding from our adversary’s constant, concussive bombardment, but eventually even the broadest, well planned and coordinated offensive sputters out and trails off. Eventually, one must raise one’s head from the trench line and once again peer over the parapet at our enemy, his eyes, gleaming, perhaps demonically in the inky black night.
Somewhere down the hall there was a perceptible shift in the wind currents. Papers on my desk blew in the new, prevailing direction of the breeze shift. The small hairs on the broad back of my neck stood up, giving the impression of a multitude of dull pin-pricks piercing my tough hide.
I could feel it displace air as it moved; this time it was less a shadow and more a slick, gelatinous, oily glacier in this avatar (for it shape shifts to suit the purpose of the day, black for a funeral and white for a wedding) it dripped and oozed down the tiled underground passage. No doubt it was hold up in some unused cul-de-sac, some blind alley way, where it was lurking, biding its time, plotting in its maniacal, idiosyncratic fashion (for it has time on its side, that is one thing it has, while I am en-fleshed, time-bounded!); it is always there, fashioning its infernal machines, attempting to impale me on its new, deceitful machinations.
I felt it was imperative to leave the room. A fresh geyser of water hit the overhead tarp, making a splattering nose that sounded suspiciously like hot steam spewing from a ruptured pipe. I smiled my broad, fraudulent smile at Gavin.
“Hey Gav, how about some of the Madagascar coffee you’ve been tempting me with these last few days?”
“A splendid idea, that. I could use a real break. Let me pop up to the office first and nail down a few things. You can shadow along, of course.”
We rose from our chairs, Gavin leisurely, me with some sense of dire urgency. The displacement of air was so severe that my eardrums were popping and clicking sporadically, spasmodically, as if some mischievous gremlin where tinkering with those ingeniously designed bones in my middle ear, or that taut, stretched, sensitive tympani that is the ear drum.
I could imagine, in my refracted mind’s eye, the entity that could create such an Aeolian disturbance, so I was in no less than a great hurry to exit the room. But Gavin, forever Gavin in his fussy, indomitable way, was busy adjusting the creases on his uniform slacks, pressing the tight royal blue jacket that snugged against his bird sized rib cage. I was forced to rudely seize him by his arms, my hand comfortably wrapping around the thickest span of his bicep. He was even lighter than I imagined. I hoisted him from the ground, his arms and legs stiff and immobile as if he were a small mannequin with a constricted range of motion.
“Langley! What on earth are you doing!” he then exhaled a substantial sigh, as if all the wind had been squeezed from his meager frame, and he gasped, machine like, sputtering, as I twisted him off the ground. I man handled him toward the stairs, and then bear hugged him about his waist to manipulate him to mount the step more quickly, with greater haste. I think I muttered something like, “For God’s sake man, stop struggling!” saying it through a clamped jaw as he tossed around in my arms like the insubstantial rag doll the he was.
“Langley!” he squeeked, as the darkness rumbled down the long hall, and attempted to mount the stairs in a rapid succession of waves just behind us. Just when I thought we were gonners it inexplicably stalled; its momentum strangely halted. Gavin and I stood panting and disheveled, face-to-face.
“What,” he said heavily, “what was all THAT about?” he seemed more concerned and perplexed than angry. He slipped his bird hands into his pants, trying to tuck in all of the folds of shirt that had leaked out . He pushed down his flaxen hair, which was standing up in two ridged columns, while my brain swam in small concentric circles for several interminable seconds groping for a plausible lie.
“I thought the air raid alarm sounded,” I was speaking with a pronounced lisp, it seemed I had bitten down on my thick tongue during our tussle.
“If it was an air raid alarm sounding, why, for pity’s sake, would we be going above ground?” he sputtered, now genuinely perturbed.
TWENTY-FOUR
Like all essentially damaged people, I did what I could to patch up the cracks, to build a dam, to prevent the seemingly inevitable flow that was cascading in and around me.
Of course there was my damp cave. Suddenly, after a period or relative inactivity, when it appeared that I really served no actual, vital purpose to the mission of the Quartermaster, I was swamped with work. Things got so bad that I was assigned an aide de camp during a time of acute staffing shortages.
Arthur was just a boy. His cheeks were pocked with a red, raised field of fresh acne. Often, he would show up at my doorstep, and it was apparent from the red blotch on his cheeks (as if he had taken strawberry jam and gingerly smeared it in the sunken pits below his prominent cheek bones) that he had spent some time in the men’s washroom fastidiously removing his facial blemishes. It didn’t really work, but only called attention to the pronounced irregularities of his asymmetrical facial features.
At least the ache provided a gentle repose for the roving eye. He suffered a brutal, perpetual cold and kept a yellow snot rag stuffed up the left sleeve of his uniform. During my tenure at Quartermaster I never once saw him sit down, for I kept Arthur on his toes, sending him away from my overburdened desk with stacks of folders and files destined for other desks in all corners of our cavernous building.
“I’m sorry Arthur,” I would mutter in feeble apology from beneath a pile of growing papers and folder files. The constant hunching behind the midden of papers had put a crick in the small of my back. It was painful, as if someone had inserted a barbed metal rod between the disks of my spine. I could only sit erect in that traditional, hand on the small of my back posture, face twisted in agonizing pain expression on my bulky face, “there’s just so much to do. I’m not working you any harder than I’m working myself.”
“Oh, pay it no mind, Captain. Its really a genuine pleasure to work for an American. I’d always been told, well,” he smiled broadly, shyly, exposing his large teeth, discolored to a shade of pale gray, “that Americans don’t know how to buckle down and do some serious work. But that’s obviously false.”
I looked at the pile of folders beneath Arthur’s left armpit. The arm was twitching from the exertion of its load. One folder, a tan manila envelope, just peeking out from its multi-colored cousins, contained completed requisitions for rubber boots for troops stationed in northern Australia. The causal chain, running from a slim piece of paper on my desk to, ultimately, the shodding of Aussie feet in one of the Queen’s Lancer’s Division in the Northern Territories, poised to re-invade Borneo or Burma, Hong Kong or Indonesia, was a feat of imagination even beyond the pale of my super-activated mind.
It was far easier to conceive of a supernumerary God creating the world from nothing, than imagining that papers which recently sat inertly on my blotter, (and were now was pressed in the slim, perspiring crook of Arthur’s chicken wing arm), could actually transmute into a useable object in time and space.
Being a mere sliver in such a broad based pyramidal structure, one begins to loose track that one actually performs a useful function. The day is ruled by the ever present need of clearing your desk of paper, in order to make room for more paper. For somewhere down the hall, or above you, or down the street traveling toward your little bunker on a mail lorry, is more paper to replace the paper you have just sent on its merry way, more likely than not, to some poor sod’s desk, who he is encountering the same difficulties, trying to unclog the same paper log jams.
“Well, Arthur, I’m glad I’ve upset your notions about the American work ethic,” I said gruffly, not sure if I was annoyed or amused by this little ragamuffin’s insinuations about our national character. I could have crushed the emaciated waif like a worm.
What did he understand about the tenants of Americanism? His articles of faith were fossilized in a hybrid tradition of royalism and parliamentary procedures set in jerky motion by that watered down liberalization of feudalism know as the Magna Carta. A democracy requires a more solidified sacred text, one kept under glass like a holy relic, which is constantly scrutinized against the apparent orthodoxy or heterodoxy of its citizens. This sprawling British sense of Common Law legalism was utterly foreign to the workings of my mind, to my sense of historical pragmatism and down to frontier down-to-earthism.
“Oh, Captain, I meant nothing by that,” was he whimpering? His face turned so red I could not tell where his ache began and his skin ended.
“Why don’t you take those folders down to records,” I said in my best school master stern tone.
“Yes s-sir” he stammered, and as soon as his wire thin frame left the door I felt instantly guilty. I turned crimson with anger, and stared with a gaze of controlled rage at the particularly complicated form sitting on my crowded blotter. I grasped the stubby, soft, number one pencil that was my habitual writing utensil and began to ruthlessly scratch numbers into the blanks. The requisition was for bakery equipment, heading, swelteringly enough, for recently liberated Singapore. What they wanted with fresh baked goods in a tropical zone of occupation was anyone’s guess. We were out of bakery forms, so I was using a blank form for munitions. In the space that read ordinance, I scribbled in my precise hand, scones. Where it read magazine, I crossed it out and replaced it with the scrawl, bakery. Good God, I thought, things were getting slip shod.
I heard a spray of water piddle above me. In the last few weeks I had grown disgusted at being pelted with periodic geysers of water from heavenward, so I jerry-rigged a WWI surplus tarp above my head. The green canvas sheet slanted away from my desk and I had placed two empty jugs of tar at their two symmetrical creases. Every half day or so I would empty their brown, soupy contents into the lavatory sink.
I glanced over at the tar buckets. The portside container was near overflowing. I debated tramping it over the lavatory.
“You take the biscuit, old boy.” I glanced up from my desk. Angelic little Gavin, bathed in his white gauzy haze, stood in my threshold, literally poised between two mutually exclusive worlds, mine, a stark realm of black and whites, his an androgynous kingdom of the whimsy washy middle ground.
“What’s that Gavin?” I asked with a trace of testiness in my tone. Gavin seemed not to notice my irritation, for he just beamed, exposing his white ivory choopers, and sat, loose-limbed and diffuse, as if he were made of static, in my guest chair.
“What’s that Gavin,” he said in a row rumble, trying to imitate the flat nasal tones and clipped vowels of a Middle Atlantic accent, “I said,” he continued in a normal tone, “you take the biscuit. You’ve been snapping at your aid de camp again, old chap. Now don’t get me wrong, every now and then its important to chew out one’s inferiors, flex a little muscle and all that, but under the circumstances you might not want to saddle up Arthur and ride him so hard. After all, a good horseman knows when to use the whip and when to let the horse’s natural….”
“I’ve never ridden a horse,” I interrupted.
“Really?” Gavin was genuinely affronted, even shocked in a prissy way, as if he had misjudged my credentials as a gentleman.
“Well,” I sat back in my chair, folding my hands in my best conciliatory manner, “pony’s when I was a boy.” This appendix ratcheted his frown a notch further down. I decided to let the poor little cherub off the hook, “you’re right, of course, Gavin, I should lay off Arthur.”
Gavin shook his head vigorously, and I knew exactly what was happening. He was getting exactly what he wanted from me, and now had to make it seem like this really wasn’t his goal at all. “Please don’t get me wrong Langley. I’m not trying to tell you what you should do with your people…”
I held up the palm of my hand as if I were directing traffic. I wanted none of Gavin’s soft soap back pedaling.
“I understand, really Gav, I do.” I laid my massive paw over his fine, down covered hand, “I should have a gentler touch with poor Arthur. After all, he’s doing his best just like all of us. Everyone is overworked.”
Gavin smiled awkwardly. I removed my hand. I found myself, suddenly, as awkward as Gavin’s false smile, and I realized that I hadn’t a clue what I was doing or what I was saying. For a moment I viewed my situation like a general sitting in some situation room far from the front he was coordinating.
I am at my field desk, maps spread before me, battalions, units and field strength pictorially represented by stylized soldiers, green tanks, mobile rocket launchers. And I’m succeeding. I am getting hastily complied reports by my junior officers in the field of minimal resistance encountered, of startling advances far in excess of my wildest dreams.
The enemy is in a steady retreat. But then, after these massive gains, it begins to steadily rain. And quite unexpectedly the line halts. I did not give the order to stop the advance; and it seems, to my incredulous horror, that I do not have the full control over my troops that I once through I did. If I can not control their halt, than did I really ever control their advance? I was like a man who had been hiking over flat, monotonous terrain for weeks and weeks on end, without a single landmark to break the sheer monotony of the sweeping vista. And near the conclusion of the journey, encounters a gaping crack in the earth, as deep as it is wide, a chasm whose depth is concealed in an impenetrable shadow.
TWENTY-THREE
Outside a convoy of Canadians was clogging the narrow lane immediately in front of Clare’s flat. Caught off guard, we were pressed against the flecked chimney red brick of a street facing facade as it passed, one dull green truck melting into the next, the canvas coverings stiffly flapping across metal crossbeams. I pulled Clare close to the wall to protect her. I pushed her, her gray felt coat responding to the pressure of my hand.
“Careful Lang, you’re constricting my air a little,” she screamed above the engines.
“Sorry,” I screamed back.
The vehicle section of the convey ended; then a long row of troops, four abreast, followed; they kept us pinned to the wall as well, their fatigues were a dark olive green and their faces blacked out with dull black grease, while their helmets, wreathed with twigs and branches, gave them the appearance of so many forest dwelling Mercuries.
Down the alley a truck backfired. The noise reverberated in the street, rattling the windows as if a cannon had fired, a herald to announce some ill-tiding.
Clare leaned close, her peppermint essence enveloped me.
“I know your secret!”
“What is it?” I said, dangling my ear over her round, animated mouth.
Another backfire, and her words and the concussion meshed. But I heard them; I could see the form of what she said like a light outline etched in white on a black backround.
She broke free from my embrace. Her pale yellow eyes reflected the dull twilight of the blank London sky. I saw the sickly recognition of bifurcation in her pupils. The backfiring continued. I grasped her but she broke free from my arms again and smiled. The black-faced soldiers enveloped her; she disappeared in their ranks; row after row continued down the lane as one an endless stream. A single plane, its low hum merely a rattle in the sky, was the audible coda to my next stage.
TWENTY-TWO
It was in the air. One could feel it in London. It seemed to vibrate the telephone wires, rattle the panes of glass, pulsate and roll across the slate gray sky like Ezekiel’s celestial chariot.
If you motored to the south coast, which we often did, it was even more apparent. The incessant and ceaseless movement of men and machines along narrow wet roads. Identification numbers were blacked out and insignia carefully taped over. There were night maneuvers in full swing. Gavin and I pulled to the side of the road and allowed a convoy heading south to swing past us. Sometimes charcoal blacked out faces met us along twilight roads. Black, charcoaled faces are curiously and unsettling impassive. They are secret faces, reluctant to reveal the innermost heart of their warring souls, their placidity is an oddly inhuman thing. It is almost as if, gazing into one, you saw a caricature of an ideal of what a human face should resemble. And like all ideals, it was simply a distillation of our most common elements; part fraud and part truth.
I knew it was decidedly forbidden to spread rumors during wartime. It was well known that gossip literally sank ships. The propaganda posters of the day were perversely literalistic; they controlled the industrious wartime masses with such stark reminders of the individual’s power to destroy the war effort with such gems as this: an image of a sailor drowning in choppy, debris strewn waters; his hand outstretched in one last desperate attempt to stay afloat, his face twisted in agony, fear and despair. The caption below reads: “Someone spoke!”
Another poster plastered on walls and doors featured a stylish man in a fedora and pin stripe suit driving a convertible down a pleasant, tree lined two lane highway. In the passenger seat sits a rather grim and humorous black line outline of Adolph Hitler himself; the caption reads: “When you ride alone you ride with Hitler.”
And another: curled at the left-most top of a piece of cartoonishly styled paper, is an assemblage of everyday household items purposefully arranged to resemble a scowling, demonic Fuhrer, his nose a down turned stopper and an opposing brush from a rubber cement cap, the crease between his eyes a paper clip, a staple remover a satanically twisted over a metal washer eye, a rubber band standing in for a lower wrinkle and pins, arranged around his nose and mouth, the stress lines of an all too active mouth. Above it all reads the distressingly literal caption “Waste Helps the Enemy, Conserve Materials”.
Further down the wall is a poster with a hand, whose arm is off stage to the right, is holding a frying pan full of cooking oil. The vicious liquid falls with the force of gravity into a ball of incendiary matter, bright orange and yellow, and from that tumult emerge a host of moving ordinance, traveling toward the viewer. The caption, sandwiched between the pan and the snubbed torpedoes reads “Save Waste Fats for Explosives. Take them to your meat dealer.”
Some were of a more ominous character: a hooded Hun, bolts jutting out of his helmeted temples, bright slitted yellow eyes peering over a dull black wall, his noir penetrating pupils the very embodiment of a noxious evil that only Germany can produce in the eyes of its enemies. The caption, in white block letters against the black, featureless wall, reads: “He’s watching you,” the You twice the length of the ‘he’s watching’ segment, as if to prove that no one is immune from the Hun’s supernumerary skills.
Brown eyes gaze from a deceptively placid face whose malevolence is only revealed by an unkind slant of an upturned brow, and the subtle maniacal smile pressed, reluctant and duplicitous, from anemic white lips. Above, the disquieting caption is in newsprint black, capitalized like a scandalous headline in some yellow daily rag” “WANTED! For Murder: Her Careless Talk Costs Lives.”
It was a time when such unmediated and drastic events seemed all too probable. It was as if the laws of cause and effect were no longer fully functioning. One could speak to a neighbor about a ships movement in the North Atlantic and through a feat of mystical connection lead to its utter destruction
In such a supernatural environment of fabulous case and effect, it was best to keep one’s mouth firmly shut.
But the conclusions were there for the picking: this was the staging for the largest invasion in the history of humanity.
As if in a counter poise in my life, situations accelerated. A certain unwavering momentum had brought me to this dreadful moment.
Back in London again: I kissed Clare’s fleshy, salted lips. Her small quick tongue darted in and out of my mouth. She sat on my lap, her elongated fingers caressing my temples, stroking the hair on the back of my neck, brushing along my broad shoulders with her feathered finger tips. I pulled up her little blue and white fisherman’s jersey and followed the pleasing bulge of her smooth abdomen. She was panting with pleasure. Situations were accelerating. Suddenly, as she sat in my lap, lapping from my mouth, Clare spit the words out:
“You’re such a fraud,”
“What do you mean? There is nothing false about me at all. What you see is what you get.”
“I just don’t know,” she said, leaning her slim arm over my shoulder, running her spindly fingers through the short hairs of my neck. “Something about you just rings hollow, untrue. Despite your obvious presence here, there is a part of you that you’re holding back.”
“It’s all there for you to see, darling,” I said with duplicity.
“No. There are times when I get the fleeting impression that you are more than one chap. It happens more than you may suppose. When you’re not looking; when you’re turned around; when you’re guard is down; when you’re drunk, or when you too painfully sober…”
“What happens?” I asked with a noticeable tremor in my voice.
“A part of you detaches itself from the main bulk, I think, and takes on a life of its own…”
I prevented her from speaking any further. My tongue moved into the furthest recess of her mouth. I carried her to the bed; she wrapped the pale yellow high green downy forearms around my neck. She was all beneath me; slow, lugubrious, quiet, purposeful; a full fusion of Clare and us.
When we were through we lay still on the bed. Her soft hand was still wrapped around my head, cupping the lowest portion of my skull, at the bumpy protuberance where spine joins skull .
“You’re still a fraud,” she said, tickling the lobe of my ear.
TWENTY-ONE
Clare shimmered into hazy focus. She held her small pale hand’s close to her face, as if reading one of wayward Hume’s dispatches. Then, distinct:
“Then why,” Clare asked, poking me in the ribs, jarring me to answer, “if it was such a great experience, why didn’t you finish at the university?”
An excellent question. The tea cup resting on my palm was so tiny it seemed like it originated from a child’s tea set.
“I don’t know. Endings have always been difficult for me.”
“Not for me. When something is over, its bloody over. I just end it,” she said resolutely.
“Well you’re young, you’ll learn .” I answered sagaciously, “I just didn’t want to complete my studies. And I didn’t need a college degree to get into Johns Hopkins. I only needed to pass the medical boards… which I did with flying colors.”
“But you didn’t finish medical school either.”
“No. Again, endings are not my specialty. I would rather just fade away then end.”
“Why?” she asked, raising her brow in a V, which always signified a perplexed or stymied Clare Mumpy.
“It seems so artificial, to end.”
“What about death,” she said, “that is the ultimate end.”
“I don’t believe in death. At least not my own death. It seems empirically unsound. My own death is a completely meaningless concept to me. That I should cease to exist. It’s even absurd for me to say it. How could that be? It would be as if the world came to an end.”
“You have a rather high opinion of yourself, Langley.”
“It actually makes all the sense in the world. If I end then the world ends. I have no other point of reference but myself.”
“If you die Langley, rest assured, I’ll still be here. The world will still exist”
Situations, once so fluid and effortless, so banally and logically segregated and separated, were coming apart at their literal seams; they were becoming bogged down in a limitless practical and conceptual morass.
It all falls down… changing directions, sliding us to new, truer vistas, unable to hold up the pretense… of purposefulness, they flutter away…
One may as well begin here:
If there is a chink in the woodwork then one must peer through. The crooked boards, knotty and rotting, invite a peek. Take the roving lens: old furniture, broken, twisted, black with age, soot, and dust, piled to the ceiling of the parlor. Cushions, trailing behind a central mound of tangled featureless objects. There, if you push aside that old, detached radiator is Father’s desk. An old mahogany affair that has already been rifled through, all important documents stored in a strong box, with the exception of one, whose properties, I fear, not flat, featureless, formless, letters and words on paper like this feeble article you are reading, but all too three dimensional:
Dear Mr. Vandemark: We regret to inform you that your application for a combat position in the American Expeditionary Force has been denied…
In my hands, a document from 1917 has a strange animation, it pops into multi dimensions, like a collapsible diorama:
The trench was dug in a zig-zag pattern, so, if overrun, it was more defensible. I was moving along the line, giving my men words of encouragement before the show. They were scared, scraggly recruits from Lincolnshire, and I, a veteran of numerous battles: the Somme, Verdun, Pescadilly… somehow, miraculously, I had survived them all. I had a reputation as an Iron Man. I was not overly reckless, but not inordinately un-fond of risk taking. In a war where personal behavior accounts for nothing (it is a wrong-place-at-the-wrong-time conflict) my luck is supernatural. A shell explodes in a spot on the line you just passed! But it is not bravery or foresight or advanced planning that led to such salvation, but that blind goddess Chance. She spins her wheel in the dark. She strikes the innocent and guilty with equal hailing barrage of blows.
I removed my cigarette case from my belt. I had engraved the name of each battle on its bulging bright surface. Three so far. Perhaps, when I blow the whistle and I must swing my body over the parapet and begin the laborious march across no-man’s land, the case will see its last engagement. After all, it is odds we are discussing here. The age of Determinism is upon us on a mass scale. All of these heart breaking, mind bending, and ruthlessly cruel engagements have proven that one must press forward blindly, atavistically….
But I have a secret. It is a small nugget that I keep imprinted between the sheets of my twin selves, and it has preserved me from harm. My secret is a maxim, a mantra that is unlikely to have a wider currency among the ranks of humanity because it is, like most profound ideas, astonishingly simple, yet painfully difficult to adopt: I do not care if I live or die.
Without that burden, when relieved of that fundamental drive, suddenly a wall cascaded down and I found myself sitting, serenely, placidly, like some orientalish totem, stripped of the of veil of existence finally, and irrevocably, seated lotus style in a wide empty room that lacks walls and a roof but contains, miraculously, marvelously, no sense of space, no depth, but a cushion of a static, sparkling whiteness…
Sitting on the lip of the parapet I checked my wrist watch: 06:00. The creeping barrage across no-man’s land commenced all along the three meter gap between us and the Hun trenches.
“Alright boys, God protect us all!” I yelled, clenching a whistle in my lips. To the left, one of the Lincolnshire lads poised a football in his outstretched arms. I nodded to him. He sculled the ball beautifully, flawlessly; it arched into the steel gray morning sky and disappeared into the yellow churn of the creeping barrage. I blew the whistle and swung myself over the parapet. Glancing to my left and right one hundred thousand men were advancing on a fifteen-mile front. The barrage was supposed to move forward, protecting us from German fire, we began to run… the run, a head long dash into our own fire; we had to stop, something had gone bloody wrong… the barrage was moving backward, knocking down row after row of Linconshire boys, whole villages of boys wiped out because of a miscalculation in someone’s mathematics…
The barrage ceased. All around me was a pocked, open brown broken landscape, lunar cratered, twisted blackened trees splintered and toppled.
Now, from the other direction a hails of shells. Gerry is firing on us. Shells fell around me in a random pattern. Parts, pieces, innards of Lincolnshire lads were spewed all about, as if tossed about by a random hand. Once every boy was dead and I stood alone, the shells poked holes in the ground, puncturing the dirt, revealing, exposing, the whiteness beneath…. and brilliant space!
And as more shells exploded more of the Western Front evaporated, and more of white light poked through, until a dizzying height revealed itself, and I began a fabulous free fall. The last shell hit, the last piece of brown oozing dirt cascaded into the snowy static abyss, as I fall, yet remain motionless, am in space, yet do not exist, like a gap, a space that is not ------
