Day Two

*Whew* the next one's finished!

Enjoy!


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Here is something I am learning. Words, taken individually, are nothing.
“Who”
“Are”
“You”
“Oh”
“God”
“Peter”
“I”
“Thought”
And so on. Focusing on individual words as they come is madness, meaninglessness. Like snowflakes, they melt into the air before you can make out each one’s uniqueness. You have to accumulate them, stockpile them, let them whirl in a blizzard and pile up in your head, drifts and waves, a tundra, an entire landscape, until each element is an indistinguishable facet of the whole. And then you can look back at the glittering expanse and see yes, there is meaning here, yes this is something manufactured and whole. A dive into the memory stirs a thousand images and scenes, shared secrets and confidences. This man’s name is Conrad. Conrad Beckett. He puts down his rifle and takes our shoulder gently in his hands, tending a garden of blossoming nerve responses. He is checking to see if we are alive, and I realize that we have not responded, groaned, motioned, made any evidence at all there is something, indeed, inside this body.
Say something!
“Ungh.” Oh, that’s wonderful! That sound, so bestial! It sounds so real, not a carefully engineered rumble of the vocal cords.
“Oh, thank God. I thought I killed you! Can you hear me?”
We nod, neck muscles tighten and loosen, tighten and loosen. Eyes pinched shut as if in pain. What a strange thing, to be here, now, experiencing all the data fed into this brain, carefully selecting the responses, maintaining the façade. The brain is an invaluable help, and before me flash memories of all the people Peter has seen in pain throughout his life, his family and friends, small injuries of the toe or finger, dog bites and driving accidents, soldiers blown open and ripped apart, their final faces pressed into memory forever.
“I’ll be right back. I’m going to get help. I’ll be back.” Conrad has wrapped some cloth around the shoulder, and it hurts, it is urgent, the nerves are saying. See to this immediately. So let’s just lie back and look at the stars. How many do you think there are? A joke of course; we already know. Seeing them through lensed eyes is new though, and the subtle scratches and scars tear the light like paper, making the plain orbs flicker and stretch outward. How odd, to see them this way. Now that I am settling into this body, going through the memories, learning what is typical and what is outlandish, I realize what a strange existence we have found ourselves in. The smell, for example, filling the nostrils with the scent of dead and decaying bodies, waste, mud, cigarettes, bodily odors. The very trench we lie in, the threat of harm and death it protects us from, the land we are in and the reason this body is here, so far removed from what is ordinary, normal, from what this body expected when it was sucked into this life.
Conrad returns with others and a stretcher, and we are pulled onto it, our weight in other’s hands, and they tell us how everything is going to be all right, but I can already notice the effect of the wound. Can’t you feel it? As the blood pumps into the cloth, organs shut down, muscles grow slack. Keep the eyes open! I want to see what happens. Through the trenches they carry us, along the communications trench, into a tent full of blood and bile and metal, and we are slid onto a slab big enough for us. A man approaches with a knife and I realize that he intends to cut into our shoulder, look into our body! No no, he won’t see us if we stay up here, safe away from the shoulder and the bullet and now a lump of leather is being forced into our mouth, bite down he says and we bite down, tongue exploring the newcomer with tentative touches and long strokes. And now the knife is inside us, inside us, a tooth, incisor, eating away the bad thing inside us, the bad thing… It swallows the bullet, and he is away, the doctor, and I race down there into the shoulder to tie the ligaments together, to bind the arteries and strands that maintain function, sensation, locomotion. I am not ready to lose this body, so newly claimed, to lose this mind, so full and unknown! The doctor insists we remain there, in his tent, to rest, to heal, to recover. This body agrees, and so let us pull ourselves into the brain – where all the activity is during sleep – and surrender to that sweet process, and, briefly, return this body to itself.



Chapter One

He has seen it, just seen it, still has the blood on his hands. He reaches over and wipes them off on sandbags, feeling the rough particles scrape his hands clean. One of our own, one of our own, shot by one of our own. It grows to the proportions of a children’s rhyme in his head:

One of our own,
One of our own,
Shot by one of our own,
In this muddy land his fate has been sown,
In this muddy land he defaults on life’s loan
One of our own,
One of our own,
Shot by one of our own.

He shakes his head to banish the verse. He isn’t even supposed to be awake. He was roused by the shot and Conrad’s cries for help, lending his aid to Peter… Strange one. He has seen many men take a bullet, or shrapnel in the leg, and all had cried out or clawed at the wound or moved against themselves, but Peter just lay there and looked up at the stars and let his good arm be folded onto his chest. He pulls the sheet up to his chin. There is really only one way to respond to this environment, he thinks, clearing his mind. His ambition is to carry away in small spoonfuls the barriers within his mind, to secure in sleep some kind of escape.
James Carson has lived on dreams since he was a boy. He remembered when his father signed the Covenant, and he had sat in the corner and recited it to himself under his breath, feeling as if angels were behind him, coaxing and binding him to the words:
“Being convinced in our consciences that Home Rule would be disastrous to the material well-being of Ulster as well as of the whole of Ireland, subversive of our civil and religious freedom, destructive of our citizenship, and perilous to the unity of the Empire, we, whose names are underwritten, men of Ulster, loyal subjects of His Gracious Majesty King George V, humbly relying on the God whom our fathers in days of stress and trial confidently trusted, do hereby pledge ourselves in solemn Covenant, throughout this our time of threatened calamity, to stand by one another in defending, for ourselves and our children, our cherished position of equal citizenship in the United Kingdom, and in using all means which may be found necessary to defeat the present conspiracy to set up a Home Rule Parliament in Ireland. And in the event of such a Parliament being forced upon us, we further solemnly and mutually pledge ourselves to refuse to recognize its authority. In sure confidence that God will defend the right, we hereto subscribe our names.” And he imagined the roll of names, hundreds of thousands of names stretching over the horizon, sturdy hearts and willing hands for the King, and his own heart sturdy and his own hands willing along with them.
He remembered, just years ago, his father, who had laughter like a bag of coins, showing him how to work the German gun that had come in from Larne.
“And after she’s loaded, you wait. Wait until the nationalists come for our homes, for our wives and sisters and daughters. Wait until they come to destroy the Empire and rebel against the King and blaspheme against the Lord. And then you line them up in your sights, right along here, and pull your finger back gently.” And the bullet tore open the feather pillow his father had propped up against the stone and it spewed feathers into the air, but without wings they all drifted back down to the grass, where they became matted with mud and ground into the earth. And he had thrilled to imagine the feathers flying out of the nationalists, and how the mud would be red and thick. But the nationalists never came, and never came, and then the war came.
It was never a question within him. King and country needed him, Ulster needed him. The battle for Ireland would not take place in Ireland no, it called its soldiers across the waters and across the land, called them to prove their might to God on the fields of France, to buy their rights with German blood, with their own courage.
So now here he was, staring down the barrels of those same guns he had trained with, readied with, acquired the means to protect his own with. Those that now tore flesh and spirit, cleaving the two apart, leaving heavy ragged bodies on the ground and in the trenches, worse when it was longer, when the bullet shattered not the full manacle but a single link in the chain that binds body to soul, and for the next days, weeks even, successive links were undone as the spirit flew ever higher, until the final connection breaks, and the inner light flies away forever. And so at night he batters within himself against himself, struggling to pull open the silver doors that divide within his mind. He wants a British Ireland. He wants to see his parents again. He wants to see beyond the barbed wire and the machine guns. He wants to dream and in dreaming be free.


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Good night!