ghosts in earthly colors ii
Funny, the times he remembers best are not the moments when he saw action, but the lulls. The days of marching single file, knee-deep in collected rainwater, cow shit, rice paddies, with Elks behind him, bisecting a pain pill in one hand with the thumbnail of the other, and Dan in front of him, who was from up North and didn't do much but complain about the heat and swat at mosquitoes. He had a talent for this, and his uniform was always freckled with dots of blood, since he caught them in the act nine times out of ten. They had been together long enough to memorize the freckles on the back of each other’s necks, their speech patterns, the nonsensical themes of their conversations. He remembers the rain starting and stopping. The shooting starting and stopping. Everything existing in cycles.
All that matters in life happens in the moments of absence.
James had come from Massachusetts and spent his life sneaking away from burgundy brownstones, stepping over stray fan blades and trash can lids and the remains of ceramic pots, and avoiding his secondary school teachers, and faking sick, and huddling over radios with men in white sleeveless top, and baseball, baseball, baseball, the sacred red soil of the field, and the scent of leather gloves, and the smooth white plates, and walking through the playing field at night was the same feeling as being born, again and again. He was never any good, not like his best friend who just knew where the ball was, knew with some preternatural sense they were too young to name. Still, it was all James had thought about, ever, in his earliest memories, baseball, never good enough to be a pro, but talented at hopping the fence with Thomas in old Keds sneakers, and a ball they'd stolen from the drug store on Tenth Avenue, which had been lost, found, stolen, fought over, won, and now permanently affixed in his field of vision. The bats were James's father's, who had died of cancer three years ago. His mother cleaned hotel rooms in Boston proper, and slept deeply through the night, and would never notice the crack of an opening window or the chime of glass Coke bottles being heisted from the refrigerator.
To say he hadn’t wanted to go to war was a lie. A baseball game, an international conflict, an outcome dependent on delicate fractions of time, on the changing nature of the players, what was the difference? Americans played to win, always.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.
Vietnam was too humid, and the night that Elks got shot in the head was unearthly in its darkness. There was only the sound of gunshots and illusory speedtrails following bullets, and James, with his hands over his helmet, falling to his knees, and his captain screaming get down get down get down, and stupid thoughts going through James's head, I already am.
If anything, he wanted it to be quick and soon and painless, and before he was forced to go home. Maybe he was already dead, and his heart was still marching on, double time, waiting for her to dig her little hand into his chest and squeeze. He had already seen her twice since that day on the river, shy, tiptoeing behind the company, peeking out from behind trees, huts, and rocks. Men were shouting around him, and for the first time since the baseball fields of his youth, he felt something other than inanity and boredom, and he shoved his hand into the pocket of his army-issued jacket and wrapped the earring around his fingers and waited for the shooting to stop. He’d never felt strongly about anything except for baseball, and this - this fear, and paranoia, and blindness, and it had gone to his head. He felt drunk, and wonderful, and terrified. (Three days later, after his fifth sighting of the ghost, he’ll throw it into a field of horsetail grass and scream, “Fine, take it back,” and she will, but it won’t mean anything.)
The shooting stopped. The shouting stopped. Elks was dead, but other than that, everything went back to normal. Or, at least, as normal as it got it Vietnam. They marched and fought and shot and cowered like whipped dogs and prayed and prayed and prayed, even though he’d always claimed to be an atheist (a real God would take care of all these translucent souls floating around, bumping into things, brushing shoulders with the living, lacking all purpose.) More than once, he dreamt of catching his ghost by the throat, and snapping, “What are you, really?” but he was afraid of the answer that might follow. Ghosts were terrifying in their sincerity.
Elks didn’t stick around to haunt him, and so James stole what was left of his pain pills before the helicopter lifted Elks and all his possessions into the sky, and he swallowed two of them with water, and that’s probably why he felt so slow and heavy when the shooting started up again, and then he was cursing himself, he had fucked himself over, drugged himself for the one time he felt, above all, hopelessly and ruthlessly alive. But maybe that was all for the best in the moment the bullet entered him, burrowing through his torso, bright and blinding, and painful. Then he was bleeding away, bleeding into the cool Vietnamese soil, the world backwashed in red, his ghost materializing over him, a look of mock concern that - under other circumstances - he would recognize as a concealed threat, no one gets to kill you but me. He reached for her neck and was rewarded by a sensation of sub-cold that entered between his ribs, and then everything inside was locked in place, his lungs wouldn’t move, his voice box.
He thought, don’t touch me, but he also though, please save me, and by the time he closed his eyes on the battlefield, he still had no idea which was happening.
“If we had met when you were alive, would this have been different?” James asks.
It’s such a stupid, childish question, but he has to know, because in the night he wakes between each heartbeat afraid that the next one won’t come, reaching for her, terrified of her, and of her not being there. She is sitting cross-legged between his thighs, dripping water unto his sheets, tilting her head and narrowing her eyes in a gesture that is surprisingly canine. The earring falls against her neck. “If we had met when we had been alive, I think you would have tried to kill me.”
“Probably not, unless you did something stupid,” he says.
She considers this. “I was doing stupid things all the time. I drowned.”
“Drowned,” he says. It seems too simple, too mundane. “Like Ophelia.”
She tries to pronounce the English name, but gives up on the second try, and he decides maybe he shouldn’t tell her that story because he can’t picture her singing and distributing flowers to soldiers on this battlefield of national defeat: there’s a rue for you, and there’s some for me. She courts him, and he entertains her suit. She is beautiful because she is a child, and will be a child always, and if children are allowed to live for too long, they are murdered by adults, a slow death by poison, and that will never happen to her. The nurse brings him bland food on a tray, along with a handful of violently purple grapes, and the ghost presses them to her mouth before dropping them into his lap, and they will taste like death, but the indirect kiss will be sweeter than the lipstick-bitter mouths of any of the girls back home.
Grapes, he thinks, remembering Catholic School, are associated with blood. The blood in his heart, making its last few marches through his body, lost, near the point of panic, moving through the jungle in child-like sorrow, past the beetles, and orange snakes, and parrots, and temples carved into the sides of a monumental cliffs. Surrounded. Last inning. All players on the field. All things fragmented, so that even the most mundane forms appear as symbols.
All games, like baseball plays, like wars, like people, must have an ending
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.
“Besides,” he says, but he doesn’t know what thought he is continuing, “I don’t know anything about you.”
She shrugs, spitting the single grape she had kept into her palm with a look of disgust. It is whole, wet, and unchewed. “It doesn’t really matter. Being dead outweighs all of my other qualities by far,” she says and refuses to elaborate. Her sigh is directed at the uneaten fruit.
“I don’t even know your name,” he says. James hopes she does not notice the nervous energy in his voice.
She wags a finger at him, letting the grape fall carelessly from her hand. Even the most awkward and clumsy of her movements take on a numinous quality, Eastern spirits and their multiple aspects: maternal and homicidal, erotic and demonic. She is both reality and a subversion of reality. “You know I won’t fall for that one.”
He wants to know what the hell the nurses did with his handbook.
He wants to know why the monk the Special Ops guy promised never fucking showed up.
The ghost picks another grape from the plate and closes her hand around it. When she loosens her grip, the grape is gone, replaced by a baseball which she bounces twice in her palm before aiming at James. A lazy, curved toss that he should catch easily, even with the wires and tubes attached to his arms. He holds out a hand, but hears the ball hit the metal bedframe and drop unceremoniously to the floor. “You’re out,” she says, gleeful.
“I’m supposed to get two more tries.”
“Since when have we been playing fair?”
There are two marks left on the nightstand. James wonders how many men are killed by ghosts, out here, and how many Washington admits are killed by ghosts. “What are you going to do to me?”
“Nothing you haven’t tried to stop me from doing.”
Elks was the sort of person with Theories. He was also, without doubt or comparison, the single most perverted man that James had ever met; which meant something, seeing as he had gone from the hormone-fueled world of team-sports to the hormone-fueled world of warfare, boy’s games, both of them. Because of this, he spent the majority of their evening ritual of digging foxholes engaged in a one-sided monologue in which he alternately philosophized and asked James questions about his girlfriend back home.
“Love at first sight? Soulmates? All that shit?”
James dug his heel into the ground, and did not mention that women had never made him feel much of anything, that nothing had ever made him feel much of anything unless there was a chance that he could lose and lose hard, and that maybe Vietnam was the best thing that ever happened to him and he never wanted to go home. He shrugged. “Guess so, yeah.”
Elks stopped digging. It irritated James. Every night, their foxholes got deeper as Charlie got bolder and Charlie got smarter, but sometimes - in the night - the war was very far away, and he forgot its texture and scent. “You know what I think, brother? They make two copies of you, in case one gets fucked up or fucks up, one or the other. Even if you never get to meet, it’s okay, because they’re still out there, doing the same job as you are.”
James thought of the girl in Massachusetts. Her name was Shannon, maybe. He sat in front of her at a movie theater. She had her feet up on the back of his chair, and there was a globule of petrified gum on her left shoe. Later that night, she’d called him ugly because he was, with a baseball cap to hide his thin hair and an inert, expressionless face. She’d kissed him with tongue, and he liked fighting with her better than he liked fucking her, but at least his uncle had stopped accusing him of being a fag. “That makes no fucking sense at all, Elks.”
Elks took his helmet off, and beneath it he was wearing a checkered headscarf. It was a bad habit, and when Elks took a bullet to the head, several days later, the irony would not be lost on James. It was one of the few times Elks was actually wearing the damned thing. “Yeah, brother” he said, shaking his head. “You’re right. It’s probably one of those things, like, thinking about it too hard will reveal some god-awful secret about the universe, and then you go crazy.”
Twenty years ago, scientists figured out how to split the atom in two. Less than ten years ago, Kennedy put a man on the moon. “There are no more secrets about the universe, Elks.”
“Ha. Wouldn’t that be the worst one of all?” Elks lit a cigarette, cupping it in his hand so that the ember could not be seen from a distance. “Fuck it, brother. When I get home, I’m going to learn German, and read Kant. What about you?”
James shrugged. He had already made the decision not to go back to school. He did not miss his family, except in some vague obligatory way, and it was more nostalgia than genuine longing, and he couldn’t remember the names of any of his friends, and sometimes he dreamt of a baseball pitch after the rain, but this game was so much better, even with Elks on his team.
God, he loved this country.
“I’m going to get a degree in business,” he said, and pressed his tongue to the back of his teeth. He only ate the bread and dessert cans of his C-rations. They felt soft.
Maybe Elks was on to something, he thinks now, tracing the ghost’s carvings in the nightstand with his index finger. Maybe, in this world, there are only two of them, gaining in scale and ferocity, player against player, straining towards one another, but she’s cheating and he is disheartened, disinterested, and this could have been the best game of all, and she could have been his favorite playmate, and all his miasmic longings are suicidal, at best. There’s nothing like this in the handbook, nothing at all, nothing that tells you how to cope with a dead girl’s wet hair, clinging to your face like seaweed, when she folds her body over to kiss the corner of your mouth, and she tastes like algae and stomach acid, and her skin feels amphibious, and somewhere his future-never-to-be-wife is singing about murder and whiskey, and he doesn’t care, he can’t think except for stop no please, and the ghost’s fingers are curled around his pubic hair and tugging softly like she’s not sure what to do, and she’s just as scared as he is, and when she straightens, he coughs up the river water that has transferred from her mouth to his and shoves her off. There is a freshwater mussel clinging to the sleeve of his hospital gown. “That’s disgusting.”
“What you do is disgusting.”
He doesn’t want to argue, does not want to admit guilt or cowardice, or defend the necessity or hidden morality of war, because he doesn’t really believe any of those things anyway. He does not say how the war arrived in his life as a means of salvation; he’d spent nine months living in a dormitory, filled with such restlessness that he ate all of his meals standing, pacing each time he put down his fork, and how the manila folder that arrived with his name on it was all that could calm the staccato sensation in his chest. He could not debate or defend Communism or Capitalism if his life depended on it, and it has, and look where that’s got him. “I did my job. Anyway, fuck you and your little countdown, just kill me already.”
He got a letter this morning, saying he is discharged and being sent home. He does not know if she is aware of this.
“That’s nobody’s job. You think my death was justified because of where I lived on earth.”
If time has not stalled, then it is lazy. The air, too viscous. The nurse materializes to change his IV, and then dematerializes. They no longer change his sheets or wash his hair, and he misses the sensation of the warm sponge against his forehead, the linen-smell of powdered soap, but his ghost throws a tantrum when they touch him, and tips the bedpan over, or drops jumping spiders down their dresses, or rips through the screens and lets the mosquitoes in, and they mutter, “That poltergeist again,” but they all know by now, that it’s him. He is marked, cursed, and they must sense his despair, and reverence, and shame, despite the letter on his nightstand that says he is going home. They’ve all seen it happen and sigh, a heavenly maternal sound, and while they can’t understand the endless green wall of jungle, and the missions, and the pursuit of an unseen enemy, and how it all coalesces, personified into one great Buddha-figure of War with a capital W, at least when they misunderstand -- they do so with the upmost tenderness.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.
“I’m going to do it, because you are far too perfect to ever leave,” she says, without being prompted, and he makes every attempt to suppress the swell of pride the words begin in him.
One notch left.
“Have you spent one moment of your life thinking about other people?”
“This has nothing to do with revenge.”
“You’re right,” she says, “It doesn’t.”
The one nurse who is not afraid of him wipes his eyes and talks to him about God, and asks why he’s crying, and he can’t stand to hear it, because the only God he wants to know are the old spirits of the jungle encroaching on the mortal world.
“Are you doing this to save me?”
“That’s even stupider than your first assumption.”
For some reason, she made him think of his father, his poor father, who smoked too many cigarettes and died, but did not leave any kind of hole or emptiness behind; pinched out of existence, along with his memories, and his aftershave, and his collection of signed baseball cards, like they hadn’t been there all along. What was the difference? Why did some people disappear and some remained tethered to the earth, bobbing above the ground like helium balloons?
She had been following him for a full week and, “Whatever,” he told her, even though she had hardly spoken yet, and Elks was watching him over his shoulder, you okay, brother?, this place isn’t getting to you, is it?, and James shrugged and ignored the little ghost inside of himself that desperately wanted to rise to the bait, tucked neatly beneath his stomach.
Later that day, they had done a sweep of a village in the delta, and shot two goats just for the hell of it, and he felt the world dismantling into its simplest, geometric forms - the strike of a gunshot, the yelp of an animal. James was not a conversationalist, his arguments were clumsy, and he failed so many classes in highschool that they only let him graduate out of misplaced sympathy, but this, he could understand.
Ba-dum, ba-dum, ba-dum.
When it happens, it is simple - just like everything else. He registers the commotion around him, but his attention is held by the great War Buddha, golden and speechless, and his disciple of a girl, all white gown and black eyes and mad heart, and he can feel her shoulders heaving with laughter as she kisses him and the water fills his mouth and his lungs and his limbs and he drowns in a hospital bed, but the sound of the blood sloughing inside of him is louder than it has been in all his life.
In 1975, the United States Army distributed the final and most thorough edition of the Guide to Defending Yourself Against Indigenous Non-Living. It circulated for exactly four months before the war ended, and the soldiers returned to America, where ghosts did nothing but moan in empty Victorian-style houses and, on occasion, get tangled in electrical boxes.
The most notable revision was the addition of a new chapter on the ghosts of American soldiers who had died on Vietnamese soil. It was the longest chapter by far, as these particular spirits had caused more disruption to both sides than any other species; however it was mostly composed of psychological hyperbole, and no soldier in possession of the manual truly took its advice into consideration. The stories circulating between companies were far more informative and terrifying, since no one could imagine who would want to stay here, here, of all places, forever and ever, only the real crazy ones, who felt as if some invisible force had drawn them, and who were excited by the way Charlie endlessly eluded them because it meant they got to keep playing, it meant the game went on and on. In the worst stories, the dead American soldiers were teamed up with dead Vietnamese villagers with bundles beneath their arms, and hand grenades hidden in their hats, covered in mud and blood and cow shit, because those are the ones for whom the war had nothing to do with Capitalism and Communism, East and West, with Right and Wrong, those who were the ones who loved the war for the war’s own sake, a lonely and powerful devotedness. Those were the scariest ones of all, slumping across the lines of charred earth, through the radiant spin of insects, emitting a low sound like flutes and cymbals, marching forever.
Ghosts were men who became the reflection on the barrel of their pistols, on the damp jungle floor.
They printed no new editions of the handbook, because the war ended, the soldiers went home and spent their money on shoes and houses and cars, or lost themselves to the untranslatable pain of having no home, and for those that remained, Vietnam was yellow and green, like land in its becoming.