built it came forward. Then it was no longer deniable.”
“Even though I was technically cleared, the stink of it followed me. I was discharged four months later, not honorable, not dishonorable- just discharged; I didn’t even know you could do that. I had a fiancé, a Captain. His mom had been flying to Florida when the blink… her plane went down into the side of a mountain. He told me he knew it wasn’t right to blame me, but he couldn’t not blame me, either. We would have had beautiful kids… but it’s a very different world, now. People fight over scraps in the streets like dogs. It’s not a world for children.”
I pause, half-expecting him to make a move. I’d mentioned my loneliness, but also my desire to not have children- a more potent combination of man-bait (at least to the male mind) as there is. Instead he says, “You should go.”
“I thought we were having a good time.”
“We were. But I put something in your drink.” He takes his eyes off the sky and looks to me. “Gram, she’s crazy. She wanted me to drug you, and bring you here. She blames you for my grampa- he had a pacemaker. But she’s wrong about you. You’re not… you’re not a bad person. You should go.”
I want to; my libido has given way to nervousness, but my legs won’t move. I force myself up with my palms, but my legs don’t budge, and I start to slide toward the edge of the roof. I try to dig my fingernails into the roof’s shingles, but my hands are weak, and I barely catch the gutter as I roll over the edge. Blake’s there in an instant, and grabs my wrist. “Pull, goddamnit- you’re heavy.”
“That’s not nice,” I slur, though there isn’t much pulling I can do. And then I make the mistake of looking down. The world begins to spin and I can’t feel my arm enough to know if I’m twisting around or if maybe he’s let go and I’m falling. I black out.
I come to, heaving for air, pinning Blake to the roof beneath us. He’s breathing heavily, and I’m confused and I kiss him, though I realize too late that isn’t why we’re panting, and pass out again.
I wake up to the rising sun on my face. I’m at the airfield, and I know before my eyes adjust to the light that I’m leaned up against my plane, because I recognize its smell; it’s always burning just a little bit of oil. I’m roped to the rear wheel, and there’s somebody standing over me, too wide to be Blake.
“Good morning,” an older woman says, and her voice wants to be pleasant, almost is, except that underneath there’s something cold and mercenary. It’s in her smile, too, which I finally see when she steps between me and the sun. But it isn’t in her eyes. Her eyes are full of hate. It’s a look I know well enough.
“If you want, you can consider it a moral test. You could have told my grandson, ‘No.’ I know he’s a pretty boy, but if you wouldn’t have tried to slut him up, maybe I’d have let you walk away. Probably not, but it might have made me think that somewhere in there you were a real human person, that you cared, and weren’t just out to take every man I ever cared about away from me.” She’s red in the face, and her fists are white, clenched and shaking; if she were a man, or thirty years younger, I think she would have hit me.
But she closes her eyes, and sighs. “My Walter had a pacemaker. The blink fried it, cooked his heart in his chest.” There were about 3 million people worldwide who had pacemakers when I dropped that bomb- not the easiest statistic in the world to find after computers stopped working, but it’s not like I was sleeping anyways. To put that number into perspective, estimated deaths from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki range up to about 166,000.
“I woke up to the smell of an overcooked burger; it made me hungry. I rolled over to tell him I’d make us sausages, but he was dead.” She steps to the side, so the sun blinds me again. “I thought about opening your chest, putting a radio inside and letting an electrical storm have you, but that, that would be too good a death for you.”
“I want you to feel around your back, you feel that cone? That’s a W-78, or rather one of the three warheads from a W-78. I know you were an Air Force pilot, dear, so stop me if I’m rehashing for you, but the W, I believe, marks it as a nuclear weapon, and it has a yield of around 350 kilotons of TNT.” Fat Man and Little Boy were each about 20.
“You can’t see it, and more’s the pity, but I wrote ‘Skinny Bitch’ on the cone, though now that I know you better, I probably would have named it ‘Ugly Whore’- hindsight always being twenty-twenty. The plan is to fly the both of you into the sky; take off will be a bit painful, as you’ll be dragged the length of the runway, but I’m told you’ll survive, and once we achieve altitude, the warhead will arm and release, and the both of you will fall until it detonates.”
I know the surrounding area enough to know the damage it would cause. “The town,” I say. “There are a few thousand people living here. And there are crops, that feed folks outside the blast radius. People will starve.”
“Then their deaths will be on you. What’s a few thousand more in the scheme of things, when you’ve already killed millions?” And she’s right. Pacemaker deaths were the tip of an iceberg. Millions more died when other medical devices failed, killed by diseases medicine could no longer combat, by starvation when food production and transport suddenly and radically had to change. She walks around me and starts the plane’s engine.
“Gram, this is crazy.” For the first time I realize Blake’s here. “You can’t do this. She’s a person, she’s real- alive. You can’t-” then something in his voice changes, “I won’t- let you.” I hear the safety slide off a gun, an old M9.
“You’re not going to shoot me, Gram.” Blake makes a move for the gun, and I hear their struggle. The gun goes off. I strain to see around the plane, but all I can make out is their legs. That moment lasts forever, staring at two pairs of legs- then Blake falls.
Gram comes around the plane, fast. She’s crying, but trying to wipe the tears away without letting me know what she’s done and how terrible she feels for it. But she also gets too close; I latch onto her right knee with my legs as she rounds past me, and twist hard. There’s a soft pop and she keels over, screaming. The gun falls out of her hand, just past where she could reach. I kick her several times in the face, then wrap my legs around her head and pull her closer as she fights me. Then I put her head in a leg lock and squeeze until she stops moving.
I might have kept a hold of her, but I hear stirring behind me. Suddenly the rope around me gets tighter, then starts to slacken. “I should have been more specific; I meant she wasn’t going to kill me.” The rope falls to the ground, and Blake helps me to my feet. He's bleeding, and he'll need a doctor.
“You’re a strange man,” I tell him.
“That’s the nicest thing you’ve ever said to me.”
I think for a moment. “That’s true- but I haven’t known you all that long. And you did drug me before we got to the nicer niceties.” I hear his grandmother’s breath rattle out of her throat, heavy, barely there, and I realize I owe him a great deal, and kiss him without thinking, then whisper, “Thank you, for saving my life… though you did almost get me killed.”
“You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?” He smiles, but the blood loss is starting to get to him, and he stumbles, and likely would have fallen if I didn’t catch his shoulder.
“That’s presuming you live at all.” He smiles again, but it isn’t carefree; he’s old enough to know that the quality of medicine isn’t what it used to be. His odds are about as predictable as a coin’s toss. Maybe I’m just bitter about the drugging, but I don’t feel I can sugarcoat it for him; maybe I just know that if he does die, it’s one more body on my pile, a stack that’s always growing, one my plane might not be able to lift me above some day.
Table of Contents
Weakness
Sergeant Ruocco hanged himself.
We were scheduled to leave in a week. It was going to be our second tour; we'd been on nearly 75 missions together. Our sergeant was solid- solid as a rock. And that was the
trouble. He was our go-to man, the one we all looked up to and tried to be like, the one we brought our problems to.
He didn't want to go back. But he couldn't take time away from combat, because he knew that would be taking time away from us- letting us all down- and he couldn't do that. I think that's why he never took time for R&R- though that was nothing special- less than 5% of soldiers in-theater take R&R. But he couldn't face another tour in Iraq, and probably two more in Afghanistan after that.
I don't think he was afraid to die, but now, I recognize the way he carried it when we lost people. I know things weren't perfect at home; I don't care how much love you've got, a world of separation will test any marriage. But maybe if he'd had more time with his family, more time to just decompress...
I'm not saying I blame the bosses. This isn't PTSD; they're not trying to hide it or anything, the Army's just big, and just reacting too slowly. Our suicide rates have doubled in the last four years. We can be in a country a world away at a moment's notice, but it still takes time to reform an entire culture.
The Army's doing what it can. The Surgeon General of the Army is asking for more mental health professionals to join up. The Army itself is asking for help- that's a step- hopefully one we can emulate, the way we