(no subject)
Men and War || jiyong/seungri ||
If you hadn't found me, I'm sure I would have found you.
The rain pours like thunder against the window of his taxicab and Jiyong thinks he’s in a dream. He thinks the street-signs and the red-lights and the yellow-indicator of the car in front of him are dreams. He thinks the little strip of boutique shops and bus-stops are dreams.
He thinks the pretty girl talking to the pretty boy is a dream and he wonders vaguely when it was he woke up from his nightmare. He wonders when he first lost the ability to tell the difference between his nightmares and his reality and which he’d rather die in.
His army-greens are starched stiff and his back is rigid against the fake-leather of his seat as he directs the driver down this left and no, not this right, the next one, please. Thank you.
He counts coin in his palm with fingers that struggle over curved-edges looking for the subtle lines of his rifle and the sharp point of his bayonet. He holds his hand towards the light and glances out of the driver’s line-of-sight as the other man picks out his due with eyebrows raised.
“Thank you, sir.”
Jiyong ignores the driver as he stands on the curb, his fingers locked in a fist as he struggles with the thought of peace and the weightlessness of his grip without his gun.
He bites his lip and struggles to remember how to walk.
-----
For thirteen days Jiyong doesn’t speak. For thirteen days he lies on the soft of his second-hand mattress and wonders what the fuck anyone expects him to do now that the war had ended.
Sometime midway through his third week back he cashes his final army-cheque and counts the twelve notes carefully with slow eyes before he leaves the bank. The woman behind the counter watches him with wide eyes and he wants to slap a smear of lipstick across her cheek for her sympathetic smile.
He buys himself a packet of cigarettes and a day-old newspaper.
-----
He’d never had one of those bullshit night-time revelations where he’d woken up to find an enemy bayonet poking holes in his world only to look up the arm of the person attached to that weapon and see himself mirrored back at him.
He’d scoffed at those who had.
And he thinks, as he struggles through the last wisps of sleep, maybe this is payback.
His skin is sticky with night-time sweat and the flimsy curtain he’d made from a threadbare bed-sheet glows with the shine of the street-light down the road. He rubs his fingertips into his eyes, back back back into his eyes.
He’d never slept on the front-line. He’d never really slept on the front-line. He’d closed his eyes and he’d had his dreams and he’d drowned his prayers for death behind the routines of army-life.
But he’d never really slept.
There wasn’t a man he’d known who did. There’d been those who were better at it. At hiding the hysteria of insomnia behind their bravado, the shake of their hands and the twitch of their eyes behind the bang bang bang of a near-dusk firefight
But even them; even the most numbed of soldiers, weren’t numb enough to sleep.
Whiskey, he thought.
-----
“Getting a bit wild out there, isn’t it?” The man behind the counter smiles, soft eyes and gray hair and dirty apron over pressed slacks.
Jiyong nods his head in a curt nod, his shoulders tense as his eyes trip over the menu.
“Does your mother know you’re back?”
Jiyong glances up with narrowed eyes. “What?”
“When I got home I didn’t speak to anyone I’d known for nearly a year. I regret that.”
Jiyong watches the other man in silence, in soft question.
The man smiled. “25th Infantry Division, deployed to Vietnam in ’66.”
Jiyong doesn’t answer
-----
There had been a boy who’d served with Jiyong sometime during the second-half of his tour, a nineteen-and-something year old boy, all soft smiles and softer laughs coupled with mean eyes and meaner accuracy.
He’d come in as a replacement for another nineteen-and-something year old boy who had spilt most of the blood from the wound in his abdomen onto Jiyong’s fatigue-bottoms in a firefight two-and-a-half weeks earlier.
This new boy was as warm as he was cold and would often squat close to Jiyong in their shared foxhole and whisper the words his back-home sweetheart would write once a week into the dusk-time cold with a grin and a grimace like Jiyong wasn’t already wondering where the bullet was that would eventually blast a hole through his cerebellum.
“I’m sure she’s fucking my cousin.”
Jiyong didn’t learn his name and never wrote to his mother or collected his possessions from his dead body.
-----
Jiyong doesn’t know why it is he continues to return to the quaint, little coffee shop on the corner. The man behind the counter, the owner, had never again brought up the war.
But his smiles were the same and he’d never tried to pat Jiyong on the shoulder and buy him a drink and well done, son, you’ve done your country proud and this, to Jiyong, this means something.
“Here you are, sir.”
Jiyong glances up at the soft voice. This boy perhaps meant something as well, Jiyong thinks.
This boy who was all gentle smiles and shaking fingers and muttered apologies when Jiyong’s tea ends up more in his saucer than in his cup. This boy who had smashed three plates since Jiyong had been coming here a month ago and who blushed such a cherry-red under his father’s loving chuckle.
“Thank you,” Jiyong answers, with a smile that doesn’t seem as much a flirt as it does a thank you.
He drinks his tea and he reads his newspaper and he pays his tab and he smiles when a voice calls him back from the open doorway.
“My name’s Seungri.”
-----
“I have weak lungs. That’s what they told me. I have weak lungs and there are a million more young-men behind you in line who don’t, so move.”
Seungri laughs softly.
“I was so disappointed. Which I know is ridiculous,” he glances up to meet Jiyong’s eyes. “But when you’re constantly surrounded by people who have served- They don’t really give two hoots about your weak lungs.”
He laughs again.
“So I stayed behind and I tried to find things to do. Things that would help. I was half-way through my undergraduate medical degree when war broke out so I bluffed my way into the army-base hospital drop-off.”
He drags his finger down a cut in the wood of the table.
“Probably shouldn’t have been there. But- There were so many patients and so few doctors, you know? So few anyone. They took one look at me and didn’t care if I had weak lungs. I think I was just another face-less pair of hands.”
His laugh is bitter like poison.
“The first person they told me to help was about seventeen. He had a wound,” Seungri’s fingers brush against his collar, “in his neck. The doctor in charge told me to hold a bandage to the wound, but the blood just kept coming, over my fingers and into his eyes.”
Seungri meets Jiyong’s gaze.
“He died later. Once we’d put him on a list to be shipped out to a proper hospital. I never knew his name. I don’t think anyone did, they’d torn off any identification he had to get at his neck.”
A silence breaks between them, echoing in the corner of the empty shop.
“I stayed there for eight months. And I probably helped no-one- but it was something, I think.”
“Sometimes a soldier doesn’t need anything in the world expect a pair of hands that have never shot a man dead on him and a pair of eyes that have never watched that man fall smiling at him. I’m sure you gave them that.”
Seungri laughs gently at Jiyong’s words, his eyes warm with tears. “Da said the same thing.”
“He wasn’t lying.”
-----
Jiyong receives letters. He receives letter after letters after letters that say I believe my son served with you, that say I’m heading down your way, what do you say about meeting up? that say I haven’t slept for a month and I want to murder everyone around me.
He doesn’t respond.
-----
“Do you still practise?”
“Practise what?” Seungri asks with a questioning smile as he washes glasses in a sink of soapy water over the counter.
“Medicine.”
Seungri pauses. “Gosh no, I dropped out. I don’t think I could touch another wounded person again.”
“Oh.”
-----
Jiyong doesn’t notice how far Seungri had wriggled into his life until he wakes up at a quarter-to-whenever in the middle of the night and can’t get back to sleep.
The boy is- the boy is refreshing. The boy is clean and innocent and covered in blood that isn’t Jiyong’s friends and for some reason that makes it alright.
Seungri didn’t see Taeyang’s chest tear open under mortar fire, he didn’t see the deeply-set enemy line blast platoon after platoon into oblivion, he didn’t see the hatred in the eyes of young boys that allowed them to commit the atrocities their mother’s warned them against; the atrocities that were supposed to be the work of the enemies alone.
And he didn’t see Jiyong pressing his rifle down the throat of that prisoner and asking him to tell me to pull it, tell me!
And he didn’t see Jiyong break, break, break down and he didn’t see Jiyong build himself back up again and Jiyong thinks, because of this, he can pretend that Seungri will never see the ghost that he has become.
-----
“I’ve murdered people.”
“It’s not murder during war.”
“What is it?”
“It’s surviving.”
“What is it once you’ve died?”
“It’s still surviving.”
-----
Jiyong watches Seungri out of the corner of his eye as the boy tries to hide his shivers. He sighs. “I’m sorry for dragging you out here, Seungri.”
The boy smiles. “Not a worry.”
“I couldn’t sleep.”
Seungri’s smile widens softly. “I know.”
They sat side by side on the gutter in front of Seungri’s father’s house, pressed together as Seungri’s shoulders hunch forward and he tries to rub feeling back into his legs.
“You’re the only person who understands. I- I wasn’t going to come.”
Seungri leans his head against Jiyong’s shoulder. “It’s not a worry, Jiyong.”
-----
But Seungri has seen and sometimes Jiyong has to remind himself of this. Remind himself that behind that soft body were the same devils that Jiyong tried so hard to hide.
Seungri had seen. Seungri has seen the after-effect of what weapons similar to Jiyong’s were designed to do. He has sewed skin together that may well have been torn with Jiyong’s bloody bayonet. Pulled the bullets from gaping wounds that Jiyong may well have fired.
Seungri has seen and when Jiyong snorts at him and tells him to fuck off about the war and what do you know, how are you any better than some brain-dead, smiling civilian? Seungri slaps him across the face and asks him when the last time it was he told a dying man that he’d never see his wife again, and would he like to write her a letter?
“When, Jiyong? When was it that you sat beside a man and copied out his dying words to his oblivious wife and made sure to leave all his goddamned grammatical errors in so that when she read it she could pretend that he had written it and not worry about the fact that he had lost both arms in a land-mine assault?”
Jiyong doesn’t have an answer.
“I didn’t think you would.”
----
But mostly they’re alright. Mostly they sit with a pot of tea between them and Seungri will chat about his father and his education and how he’s not sure what he wants to study at university anymore but that he’s thinking history sounds interesting.
Jiyong listens and he nods and he says that yes, history does sound interesting.
“Do you think we’ll make history?”
“You and I?”
“Our war?”
Seungri exhales before taking a sip of his drink. “If it does I hope that our children learn the lesson from our war that we didn’t learn from our father’s one.”
-----
Three days later Seungri enrols and is accepted into the degree he wanted and Jiyong buys him a book as celebration: Dispatches by Michael Herr.
Seungri smiles at him over the shoulder of his father’s hug.
-----
“I wonder if I’d been shot would I have ended up at your hospital.”
“I’d rather have never met you than have had you at my hospital wounded,” Seungri murmurs. “You found me anyway.”
“Perhaps.”
“If you hadn’t found me, I’m sure I would have found you.”
“Perhaps.”
-----
“I’m glad you found me.”
“Me too.”
-----