Everything's an analogy
I have two stories to tell. The first one is all true; the second can only become so.
First: an entry from my notebook, dating a little less than two months ago.
"A spider taught me a lesson today. He was a little brown thing, spine-legged and gardenish, and he had been lost in my bathroom for two days at least, unable to find a way back to wherever he'd come from. A pitiful little creature, to be sure, which is probably why I didn't squish him straight when I first saw him two days ago. I thought we might coexist peacefully, with a minimum distance of two yards between us at all times (to give each the chance to flee if the other attacked.) This morning I noted that he had gotten stuck in the bathtub, where the walls were too slick for him to be able to climb back out. Still, I left him to his own devices--until tonight, toward the end of my shower, when I happened to notice a shuddering pea-sized ball by my foot. The poor spider, in my perceptive neglect, had been caught in this massive 90-degrees-Farenheit downpour, and unable to get out, was forced to crouch with his legs against his body, trying not to drown. I worried for a quick moment that he had died alreaady, looking at his tiny form huddled at my feet, but knew by his shaking that he lived. I usually dislike spiders; at that moment, though, my heart choked. "Last but a while longer!" I begged him, snapping the water off.
"What a thing to see next--something that I must have instinctively known was true, but had never seen so explicitly as to consciously recognize. The little spider, feeling that the torrents had ceased, lay still for a few seconds, as though in the hold of an apprehensive disbelief. Then, with the realization that life had returned, he sprung up, became upright and spider-shaped. He ran forward a few paces--I could read all the signs of exhilaration, triumph, and a unique kind of post-death energy I'd never envisioned before, all in his tiny quivering form. It brought home a feeling to me: facing the worst of circumstances, a waiting game for the end of life, and accepting the fact that you will die, losing hope, continuing to struggle for life because it's the only thing left to do, but with that terrible knowledge wrapped about your very existence. Then, suddenly and just as unexpectedly, deliverence. It ends, but you're still living. You survived. I would run, too. It's a pure pigment of human emotion, what I saw in that spider--this conquering bliss, this self-affirmation, not without some sardonic element I can't quite place. When you visualize it you can see it: the spider ran forward, then stopped, standing on ground that was not flooded, just wet, and staring forward at this apparation of breathable air. He had hidden from me for two days, but at that moment he didn't care at all that he was in the open and exposed. What a smart little thing, too, because I could never willingly harm a single leg of its body now: it had become human to me. I'd found a shared quality.
"What else? I found a cup, and after letting the spider dry out for a few minutes, I gently nudged its opening toward him. Tell him to not be scared and just come, I asked God, tell him I won't hurt him. And strangely enough, the spider crawled to the bottom of the cup and waited, just waited--no attempts to crawl back up the cup or anything I normally expect from past experiences of this method of spider-liberation. I carried him downstairs and deposited him in the yard, free. It's a warm night out; I hope he's feasting on the lesser bugs."
And the second: from the same source as ever.
The next day John had a few errands to run, the nature of which he didn’t specify, and Rachel went with him, leaving me alone to tend the house for a few hours. Now being at the point where I could maneuver with only one crutch, and having been struck by a sudden desire to make myself useful, I decided to spend my free time doing whatever I could for the door on John’s barn, which was in a sad state. It would be a lie to pretend here that I had no ulterior motives-most specifically I imagined the impressed smile with which Rachel might first see the door, and the delighted protest of Oh, Peter, but you could have hurt yourself!, and then my strong-shouldered reply, it was nothing at all, I’m always glad to help. And John, of course, maybe he would not have to keep the goats in the kitchen on cold nights, or spend a half-hour rounding them all up from the neighbors’ yards in the morning so they could get breakfast.
After supply-foraging in the shed, I hobbled my way over to the door and looked it over. The bottom hinge was already gone, so the entire door was hanging strangely on the lone top hinge, grating its corner into the ground at an uncomfortable angle and swaying any time I touched it. I decided to focus my attention on removing the top hinge, which looked as though it was more rust than anything else; I was surprised it was still intact. After an hour of struggling with various wrenches and pliers and fingers, and with frequent rest breaks, I managed to get it off-at which point it had mostly crumbled into reddish dust. The door fell backward into the barn, landing with a soft cloud of dust and hay specks on its dirt floor. Getting it upright again was not an easy task for someone with recently-disintegrated back muscles, but I managed somehow. Balancing the door against its frame to hold it steady and squatting on my knees in the dirt, I was just beginning to place a new hinge-which I had taken from the now-empty chicken coop-when I heard footsteps crunching on the gravel behind me.
I began to turn around, not an easy process by any means, but only made it halfway before I saw the shadow that was now standing over me, and every fiber in my body snapped tightly inward. I had had a certain portion of my brain devoted to emotions and thoughts connected to this place-John’s house-and then another entirely different and far-removed portion for thoughts pertaining to the uniformed man before me. The two sections had never been forced into contact before, so it took a few moments for the opposite neurons blocs to connect. Those boots were never meant to stand in the warm brown soil of this yard, I knew. That frame wasn’t supposed to be blocking the sunlight that wanted to be alit on the barn door, and John’s tools, and the replacement hinge from the broken-down chicken coop. And those bulky holsters slung so visibly over his chest, and all the dark black metals inside, how could they conceivably have any place here, next to the innocent goat tracks and vegetable rows?
“What exactly are you doing, Lieutenant?” he asked me.
I could form no reply other than, “General…”
He was looking at the wrench in my hand, and the hinge that had dropped to the ground, causing the door to lean at a precarious angle over my head. The badges on his chest seemed to bite at the sunlight. “Kurtis told me I would find you here. Before that we’d all thought you were dead.” There was a hint of a snarl on that last word.
I tried to stand up, but I was clumsy and rushed from nervousness and couldn’t get any farther than on my knees, held up by one leg and the doorframe. He was glaring down at me, I could feel it even though the sun behind him shadowed out his face.
“General, I was wounded, I blacked out, I didn’t mean-”
“I know very well what happened,” Handley cut in. Something dark flashed behind his frame, but it was only momentary. The air about him almost instantly evened out, controlled and arranged. “No, it’s all right, I understand-you were unconscious and you had no control in being brought here. That’s perfectly plausible.” He paused, regarding me. I could feel his eyes on my chest area, still supported by the makeshift cardboard-and-cotton brace, and the dusty crutch sprawled next to my knee as I struggled to keep myself upright. “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t return to camp once you were healed enough to do so, or even contacted base at the very least. We would have organized a reconnaissance to rescue you immediately if we just had a word of your position. Tell me, Berkeley, what kept you?”
He was waiting for my answer with a meaningful gleam in his stare, a single pinpoint highlight to tell me the position of his eyes. “Sir, you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t desert,” I pleaded.
“Of course I believe you, Lieutenant. You were one of my best men, you’d been working under me for years, I know you wouldn’t desert.”
He was still staring down at me, and his intent look had not changed: I knew there was more. “What is it, Sir?” I asked, swallowing hard.
“Well,” he started, going slow. “While I don’t doubt your word, Lieutenant, the war board is going to be harder to convince.”
There was significance in the sound of his voice I knew I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. “What do you mean?” I asked, unable to mask the quiver of the words.
Handley didn’t miss a single sound; it was impossible to hide intonations from him. “Only this: since the start of this whole war, legislation has been in act that spells out harsh penalties for deserters, traitors, spies, and all other dissenters, of course giving highly general and easily applicable definitions to all the terms-meant to keep morale up, no? You should know this already. It’s the same body of legislation, in fact, that allows us to carry the weaponry we have on this mission, and to use it at our discretion against any resistance we meet-including our own. Now, Lieutenant, you are in unauthorized enemy territory, perfectly capable of returning yet choosing not to do so: according to this ruling, I could execute you right on this spot, in perfect legality.” As though for emphasis, he pulled his side gun out, which shone blackly in my eyes. I tried not to wince, but my half-formed chest convulsed at the instance I saw it.
“Sir-I’m not a traitor,” I said again, my voice cracking.
“Then what the hell are you doing here, Lieutenant? Imagine how this looks! You, fully capable of returning to camp, not anyone’s prisoner, well enough for independent movement, are instead hanging around the enemy city? Not only that, but you’re out here fixing an enemy door? Goddamnit, were you adopted or something?”
The question brought the image of John to my mind. I had to shove him out; the man in front of me was far too real. “Please, General-” I started. He cut me off, squatting down on his knees and looking at me on eye-level. I still could barely make out the lines of his face; the sun behind him was forcing me to shrink back involuntarily.
“Peter,” he said. The sound of my name in his voice startled me; it rung out harsh and almost unnatural. “I want to help. I don’t think you’re a traitor, whatever the fuck you may be doing out here. Please-trust me on this. The war board is going to hear about your location sooner or later. I’ll have to write up a report on it, because word is going to get around anyway, and we need to make sure that there’s a reliable story out there somewhere. Otherwise the courts will only have rumors to judge you on, and you know how dangerous that would be. I’m going to make the report as favorable to you as possible, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that Kurtz told the rest of the camp what he saw before I could clear up the misconceptions. Everyone in the unit knows you’re here-and everyone believed Kurtz when he said you were deserting, with no one to tell them otherwise. Everyone who might be called to testify thinks you deserted, Peter.”
He was telling me about my own mortality. I knew where this was going. He was leading me by the hand to a courtroom a thousand miles away, where I would be read the price of turning civilian at the wrong moment. Maybe it was a trick of the blinding sunlight in front of me, though, but when I tried to picture that courtroom, or the interrogation rooms, or the prison cells, nothing real came to mind. Instead I saw a grassy slope, a cleared green field that was really nothing but a bridge between a higher forest ridge and an ancient circular stone wall below, the sun glancing off the quartz and mica flecks embedded in it. Peaceful, almost. All I could wonder was why didn’t I just fire like I was supposed to?
“Against all that, you’ve only got me.” He swept his arms wide, and they brushed the invisible walls behind him. “I’m the only one on your side. I’ll tell them everything I know, about your good track record and high ranks and trustworthiness, but what they really need to hear is a good reason why you’re still here. I can’t help you unless you tell me that why.”
He stopped, waiting for me to answer. I looked at him, and there were no words.
“Peter,” he began again. “Just tell me why you’re here. I’ll fix everything else, but you have got to tell me this. Tell me why you stayed.” I wanted to hear sympathy in his voice; instead his words were framed by a sort of desperation. He wanted to know something that had no answer: when I tried to grasp it myself, it became lost in a knotted web of instances, half memory and half circumstance, which could not be put into words. My tongue had dried to the roof of my mouth. The face-shape hovering a few inches above me recoiled upon realizing that I had become mute.
“So,” he said. Silence again. An inaudible whispered hiss dashed past his teeth. When he spoke next, it was as a military commander again.
“I want to impress upon you the full extent of this little quagmire you’ve gotten yourself stuck in. You were wounded in battle, but with no witnesses to conform that it was actually an Attican that caused it. You were taken into the very heart of enemy territory, under unknown circumstances. You might have been a prisoner of war at first, but only a few weeks later you were seen in an enemy grocery store, healed enough for movement and yet unguarded. You aided in the desertion of a fellow soldier, giving him necessary supplies for wilderness survival instead of reporting him. He was found a short while after, and told the single witness story to come out of that midperiod of your hiatus in this place: that you were staying in the care of an older Attican man, acting out the small details of citizenry while still in your army fatigues. Further investigation into the matter confirmed that not only were living in an Attican home, but it was the home of one of the foremost leaders of the enemy resistance! And, far beyond trying to spy and send information back across the line, which may have justified your action, you were silent and avoided all contact with base, all contact with me, despite having all the necessary equipment and resources to do so-Peter, it appears that you didn’t want to be found! But why? Did you suddenly gain enemy sympathies?-but you kept the raiment of your old loyalties. Fear of battles?-but you’ve faced them before, and of course you understand how much safer you would be in our camp than here. Were you planning to spy for us at some point?-but you never spoke a word. We could have made use of information you’ve been privy to months ago, but for all we know, you’ve been giving them information about us! Did you-”
Suddenly he stopped, and some small movement in his outline seemed to suggest that he was gnawing on his mouth, clamping down on some telling phrase or emotion by grinding his teeth against the inside walls of his cheeks. It took him a moment to regain control; once he did, his voice was quiet and controlled again.
“You deserted. Of course, deserted.” He paused, and I noticed for the first time the strange slight downward curve of his shoulders, a lost memento of some forlorn resignation, a pattern that matched the subtle sad undercurrents I heard slip in through the sides of his words. “Peter”-a word that cracked-“do you know what they’ll do to you? There’s no evidence on your side, nothing that can save you. There’ll be prosecution, straight and quick, you’re fitting the traitor definition to a perfect key. God, and how they’d love to do it, too-get a convenient scapegoat, someone to quell dissent for them-it’d be just what they need. You’re nothing but the poor kid who got caught up in this, but that doesn’t matter to anyone anymore. Not now that all this….” He trailed off again, and I saw him straighten into a sweeping survey of the yard, the barn, the door, the hinge dropped in the warm brown dust that also covered my hands. He saw it all laid out with bitter resentment in his stature.
“We’ve got to kill this, Berkeley.”
It jarred me. “General?” I asked.
“It’s not over yet, oh no, I can still swing you out of this.” He was addressing me, but the sound of his voice left me unsure of whom he actually thought he was speaking to. “It’ll just take a little symbolic action-just a little. Lieutenant, are you aware that the man whose house you have been residing in is actually an established leader of the enemy resistance?”
“But, Sir, John’s not anything dangerous-”
“And that you willingly stayed under his care even beyond the time when it was necessary for your survival?”
He seemed to have adopted the intones of a judge, and despite everything I knew about what had really happened during the course of the past two months, my pulse rate quickened against my ribs, and I felt the first uncomfortable, moist points of sweat swell out of my brow.
“In full knowledge that by staying you willingly abetted the enemy, thwarting the laws of your country and the leadership of your commanding officers? Do you deny that you were aware of the penalties of such a transgression, yet you continued to act in it despite that knowledge?”
I tasted acrid panic in my mouth, and was then utterly lost. “I didn’t mean to!” escaped from my tongue, the impulsive cry of a child who understands only that he has been caught, and not what he did wrong. Handley seemed to sip those words in, and I thought I could almost make out a grin through the shadows of his face.
“Of course not, Peter, no one means to do things as harmful and bad as that-they just happen sometimes. But still, you’ve broken the immutable social contract of wartime, and someone has to pay for that…someone, Lieutenant.”
“Someone, Sir?” I asked, picking up on the stressed word.
“Good boy, good boy-I have a surprise for you, Berkeley, and I think once you’ve given it a little thought, you’ll like it. Tomorrow, at precisely noon, just before everyone leaves to start their afternoon rounds, a squadron of about ten of your comrades is going to knock on your door. They will ask for Mr._______. When they find him, they will take him into custody and return to base camp, so that he can be transported to the military headquarters and quarantined for the duration of the war. And all that we need of you, Lieutenant, is that when these men show up tomorrow, you stand aside and let them in-with that, we can tell the war board that you were working all along as a key informant and assistant in the capture of a wanted enemy leader.”
“But-“ I protested, “then they’ll put him up for trial.”
Handley seemed surprised at this. “But of course! It’s just a formality, Lieutenant, they can’t just let him sit in a cell without reason.”
I blanched at the image spinning in my brain-John, in a ragged prison uniform, sitting alone in a cramped cold cell, his old muscles and bones, his kind eyes, all alone, with black-robed justices crouched outside his door-it was all too horrifying, all too unreal. And a trial-if the consequences for my crime were so high, what would they do to him? And with my help?
“That’s-no, that’s sick, I can’t…” I stuttered, my fingers shaking, patterned with half-shadows formed from Handley’s frame. Handley, for his part, bent his knees slightly to bring our faces closer, and must have turned into the sunlight somehow, because for the first time since he had first showed up I could almost see the features of his face.
“Think of it like this: one way or another, we’re going to find Mr._______. He’s not one to keep his location very secret, especially with Attica falling apart as it is. Whatever you might do to delay his arrest won’t change his sentence, but it can change yours. This is about you, Peter, and how we can help you out of this whole mess.”
“No, it’s still-”
“These men will be armed tomorrow,” Handley interrupted me, with finality in his words. “They will have weapons, standard-issue, just like what you have. And I have told them to try as best as they can to keep this arrest clean and to not hurt Mr. _____, but if they encounter resistance, I can’t hold them to that order. You have to look at this logically, now: you aren’t going to stop John’s arrest, but you can make sure that no one is hurt and that the legal costs are as muted as possible for everyone involved. Just open the door and get out of the way tomorrow. That’s all. It’s the most that anyone could do under these circumstances. We all have to look out for each other in the middle of times like this, don’t we?”
I couldn’t answer, shaking as I was with the shock of the mass chasm that had so suddenly opened up before me. This is all my fault, I heard my silent voice echo. If I hadn’t been here, none of this would have happened.
Handley stood up, once again blocking the sunlight. “It’ll all clear itself up. You’ll see.” With that, he was gone. I was left leaning against the side of the barn, unsupported, wringing the cloth of my shirt and unable to readjust my eyes to the brightness of the afternoon air.
Thanks, all.
First: an entry from my notebook, dating a little less than two months ago.
"A spider taught me a lesson today. He was a little brown thing, spine-legged and gardenish, and he had been lost in my bathroom for two days at least, unable to find a way back to wherever he'd come from. A pitiful little creature, to be sure, which is probably why I didn't squish him straight when I first saw him two days ago. I thought we might coexist peacefully, with a minimum distance of two yards between us at all times (to give each the chance to flee if the other attacked.) This morning I noted that he had gotten stuck in the bathtub, where the walls were too slick for him to be able to climb back out. Still, I left him to his own devices--until tonight, toward the end of my shower, when I happened to notice a shuddering pea-sized ball by my foot. The poor spider, in my perceptive neglect, had been caught in this massive 90-degrees-Farenheit downpour, and unable to get out, was forced to crouch with his legs against his body, trying not to drown. I worried for a quick moment that he had died alreaady, looking at his tiny form huddled at my feet, but knew by his shaking that he lived. I usually dislike spiders; at that moment, though, my heart choked. "Last but a while longer!" I begged him, snapping the water off.
"What a thing to see next--something that I must have instinctively known was true, but had never seen so explicitly as to consciously recognize. The little spider, feeling that the torrents had ceased, lay still for a few seconds, as though in the hold of an apprehensive disbelief. Then, with the realization that life had returned, he sprung up, became upright and spider-shaped. He ran forward a few paces--I could read all the signs of exhilaration, triumph, and a unique kind of post-death energy I'd never envisioned before, all in his tiny quivering form. It brought home a feeling to me: facing the worst of circumstances, a waiting game for the end of life, and accepting the fact that you will die, losing hope, continuing to struggle for life because it's the only thing left to do, but with that terrible knowledge wrapped about your very existence. Then, suddenly and just as unexpectedly, deliverence. It ends, but you're still living. You survived. I would run, too. It's a pure pigment of human emotion, what I saw in that spider--this conquering bliss, this self-affirmation, not without some sardonic element I can't quite place. When you visualize it you can see it: the spider ran forward, then stopped, standing on ground that was not flooded, just wet, and staring forward at this apparation of breathable air. He had hidden from me for two days, but at that moment he didn't care at all that he was in the open and exposed. What a smart little thing, too, because I could never willingly harm a single leg of its body now: it had become human to me. I'd found a shared quality.
"What else? I found a cup, and after letting the spider dry out for a few minutes, I gently nudged its opening toward him. Tell him to not be scared and just come, I asked God, tell him I won't hurt him. And strangely enough, the spider crawled to the bottom of the cup and waited, just waited--no attempts to crawl back up the cup or anything I normally expect from past experiences of this method of spider-liberation. I carried him downstairs and deposited him in the yard, free. It's a warm night out; I hope he's feasting on the lesser bugs."
And the second: from the same source as ever.
The next day John had a few errands to run, the nature of which he didn’t specify, and Rachel went with him, leaving me alone to tend the house for a few hours. Now being at the point where I could maneuver with only one crutch, and having been struck by a sudden desire to make myself useful, I decided to spend my free time doing whatever I could for the door on John’s barn, which was in a sad state. It would be a lie to pretend here that I had no ulterior motives-most specifically I imagined the impressed smile with which Rachel might first see the door, and the delighted protest of Oh, Peter, but you could have hurt yourself!, and then my strong-shouldered reply, it was nothing at all, I’m always glad to help. And John, of course, maybe he would not have to keep the goats in the kitchen on cold nights, or spend a half-hour rounding them all up from the neighbors’ yards in the morning so they could get breakfast.
After supply-foraging in the shed, I hobbled my way over to the door and looked it over. The bottom hinge was already gone, so the entire door was hanging strangely on the lone top hinge, grating its corner into the ground at an uncomfortable angle and swaying any time I touched it. I decided to focus my attention on removing the top hinge, which looked as though it was more rust than anything else; I was surprised it was still intact. After an hour of struggling with various wrenches and pliers and fingers, and with frequent rest breaks, I managed to get it off-at which point it had mostly crumbled into reddish dust. The door fell backward into the barn, landing with a soft cloud of dust and hay specks on its dirt floor. Getting it upright again was not an easy task for someone with recently-disintegrated back muscles, but I managed somehow. Balancing the door against its frame to hold it steady and squatting on my knees in the dirt, I was just beginning to place a new hinge-which I had taken from the now-empty chicken coop-when I heard footsteps crunching on the gravel behind me.
I began to turn around, not an easy process by any means, but only made it halfway before I saw the shadow that was now standing over me, and every fiber in my body snapped tightly inward. I had had a certain portion of my brain devoted to emotions and thoughts connected to this place-John’s house-and then another entirely different and far-removed portion for thoughts pertaining to the uniformed man before me. The two sections had never been forced into contact before, so it took a few moments for the opposite neurons blocs to connect. Those boots were never meant to stand in the warm brown soil of this yard, I knew. That frame wasn’t supposed to be blocking the sunlight that wanted to be alit on the barn door, and John’s tools, and the replacement hinge from the broken-down chicken coop. And those bulky holsters slung so visibly over his chest, and all the dark black metals inside, how could they conceivably have any place here, next to the innocent goat tracks and vegetable rows?
“What exactly are you doing, Lieutenant?” he asked me.
I could form no reply other than, “General…”
He was looking at the wrench in my hand, and the hinge that had dropped to the ground, causing the door to lean at a precarious angle over my head. The badges on his chest seemed to bite at the sunlight. “Kurtis told me I would find you here. Before that we’d all thought you were dead.” There was a hint of a snarl on that last word.
I tried to stand up, but I was clumsy and rushed from nervousness and couldn’t get any farther than on my knees, held up by one leg and the doorframe. He was glaring down at me, I could feel it even though the sun behind him shadowed out his face.
“General, I was wounded, I blacked out, I didn’t mean-”
“I know very well what happened,” Handley cut in. Something dark flashed behind his frame, but it was only momentary. The air about him almost instantly evened out, controlled and arranged. “No, it’s all right, I understand-you were unconscious and you had no control in being brought here. That’s perfectly plausible.” He paused, regarding me. I could feel his eyes on my chest area, still supported by the makeshift cardboard-and-cotton brace, and the dusty crutch sprawled next to my knee as I struggled to keep myself upright. “What I don’t understand is why you didn’t return to camp once you were healed enough to do so, or even contacted base at the very least. We would have organized a reconnaissance to rescue you immediately if we just had a word of your position. Tell me, Berkeley, what kept you?”
He was waiting for my answer with a meaningful gleam in his stare, a single pinpoint highlight to tell me the position of his eyes. “Sir, you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t desert,” I pleaded.
“Of course I believe you, Lieutenant. You were one of my best men, you’d been working under me for years, I know you wouldn’t desert.”
He was still staring down at me, and his intent look had not changed: I knew there was more. “What is it, Sir?” I asked, swallowing hard.
“Well,” he started, going slow. “While I don’t doubt your word, Lieutenant, the war board is going to be harder to convince.”
There was significance in the sound of his voice I knew I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. “What do you mean?” I asked, unable to mask the quiver of the words.
Handley didn’t miss a single sound; it was impossible to hide intonations from him. “Only this: since the start of this whole war, legislation has been in act that spells out harsh penalties for deserters, traitors, spies, and all other dissenters, of course giving highly general and easily applicable definitions to all the terms-meant to keep morale up, no? You should know this already. It’s the same body of legislation, in fact, that allows us to carry the weaponry we have on this mission, and to use it at our discretion against any resistance we meet-including our own. Now, Lieutenant, you are in unauthorized enemy territory, perfectly capable of returning yet choosing not to do so: according to this ruling, I could execute you right on this spot, in perfect legality.” As though for emphasis, he pulled his side gun out, which shone blackly in my eyes. I tried not to wince, but my half-formed chest convulsed at the instance I saw it.
“Sir-I’m not a traitor,” I said again, my voice cracking.
“Then what the hell are you doing here, Lieutenant? Imagine how this looks! You, fully capable of returning to camp, not anyone’s prisoner, well enough for independent movement, are instead hanging around the enemy city? Not only that, but you’re out here fixing an enemy door? Goddamnit, were you adopted or something?”
The question brought the image of John to my mind. I had to shove him out; the man in front of me was far too real. “Please, General-” I started. He cut me off, squatting down on his knees and looking at me on eye-level. I still could barely make out the lines of his face; the sun behind him was forcing me to shrink back involuntarily.
“Peter,” he said. The sound of my name in his voice startled me; it rung out harsh and almost unnatural. “I want to help. I don’t think you’re a traitor, whatever the fuck you may be doing out here. Please-trust me on this. The war board is going to hear about your location sooner or later. I’ll have to write up a report on it, because word is going to get around anyway, and we need to make sure that there’s a reliable story out there somewhere. Otherwise the courts will only have rumors to judge you on, and you know how dangerous that would be. I’m going to make the report as favorable to you as possible, but that’s not the problem. The problem is that Kurtz told the rest of the camp what he saw before I could clear up the misconceptions. Everyone in the unit knows you’re here-and everyone believed Kurtz when he said you were deserting, with no one to tell them otherwise. Everyone who might be called to testify thinks you deserted, Peter.”
He was telling me about my own mortality. I knew where this was going. He was leading me by the hand to a courtroom a thousand miles away, where I would be read the price of turning civilian at the wrong moment. Maybe it was a trick of the blinding sunlight in front of me, though, but when I tried to picture that courtroom, or the interrogation rooms, or the prison cells, nothing real came to mind. Instead I saw a grassy slope, a cleared green field that was really nothing but a bridge between a higher forest ridge and an ancient circular stone wall below, the sun glancing off the quartz and mica flecks embedded in it. Peaceful, almost. All I could wonder was why didn’t I just fire like I was supposed to?
“Against all that, you’ve only got me.” He swept his arms wide, and they brushed the invisible walls behind him. “I’m the only one on your side. I’ll tell them everything I know, about your good track record and high ranks and trustworthiness, but what they really need to hear is a good reason why you’re still here. I can’t help you unless you tell me that why.”
He stopped, waiting for me to answer. I looked at him, and there were no words.
“Peter,” he began again. “Just tell me why you’re here. I’ll fix everything else, but you have got to tell me this. Tell me why you stayed.” I wanted to hear sympathy in his voice; instead his words were framed by a sort of desperation. He wanted to know something that had no answer: when I tried to grasp it myself, it became lost in a knotted web of instances, half memory and half circumstance, which could not be put into words. My tongue had dried to the roof of my mouth. The face-shape hovering a few inches above me recoiled upon realizing that I had become mute.
“So,” he said. Silence again. An inaudible whispered hiss dashed past his teeth. When he spoke next, it was as a military commander again.
“I want to impress upon you the full extent of this little quagmire you’ve gotten yourself stuck in. You were wounded in battle, but with no witnesses to conform that it was actually an Attican that caused it. You were taken into the very heart of enemy territory, under unknown circumstances. You might have been a prisoner of war at first, but only a few weeks later you were seen in an enemy grocery store, healed enough for movement and yet unguarded. You aided in the desertion of a fellow soldier, giving him necessary supplies for wilderness survival instead of reporting him. He was found a short while after, and told the single witness story to come out of that midperiod of your hiatus in this place: that you were staying in the care of an older Attican man, acting out the small details of citizenry while still in your army fatigues. Further investigation into the matter confirmed that not only were living in an Attican home, but it was the home of one of the foremost leaders of the enemy resistance! And, far beyond trying to spy and send information back across the line, which may have justified your action, you were silent and avoided all contact with base, all contact with me, despite having all the necessary equipment and resources to do so-Peter, it appears that you didn’t want to be found! But why? Did you suddenly gain enemy sympathies?-but you kept the raiment of your old loyalties. Fear of battles?-but you’ve faced them before, and of course you understand how much safer you would be in our camp than here. Were you planning to spy for us at some point?-but you never spoke a word. We could have made use of information you’ve been privy to months ago, but for all we know, you’ve been giving them information about us! Did you-”
Suddenly he stopped, and some small movement in his outline seemed to suggest that he was gnawing on his mouth, clamping down on some telling phrase or emotion by grinding his teeth against the inside walls of his cheeks. It took him a moment to regain control; once he did, his voice was quiet and controlled again.
“You deserted. Of course, deserted.” He paused, and I noticed for the first time the strange slight downward curve of his shoulders, a lost memento of some forlorn resignation, a pattern that matched the subtle sad undercurrents I heard slip in through the sides of his words. “Peter”-a word that cracked-“do you know what they’ll do to you? There’s no evidence on your side, nothing that can save you. There’ll be prosecution, straight and quick, you’re fitting the traitor definition to a perfect key. God, and how they’d love to do it, too-get a convenient scapegoat, someone to quell dissent for them-it’d be just what they need. You’re nothing but the poor kid who got caught up in this, but that doesn’t matter to anyone anymore. Not now that all this….” He trailed off again, and I saw him straighten into a sweeping survey of the yard, the barn, the door, the hinge dropped in the warm brown dust that also covered my hands. He saw it all laid out with bitter resentment in his stature.
“We’ve got to kill this, Berkeley.”
It jarred me. “General?” I asked.
“It’s not over yet, oh no, I can still swing you out of this.” He was addressing me, but the sound of his voice left me unsure of whom he actually thought he was speaking to. “It’ll just take a little symbolic action-just a little. Lieutenant, are you aware that the man whose house you have been residing in is actually an established leader of the enemy resistance?”
“But, Sir, John’s not anything dangerous-”
“And that you willingly stayed under his care even beyond the time when it was necessary for your survival?”
He seemed to have adopted the intones of a judge, and despite everything I knew about what had really happened during the course of the past two months, my pulse rate quickened against my ribs, and I felt the first uncomfortable, moist points of sweat swell out of my brow.
“In full knowledge that by staying you willingly abetted the enemy, thwarting the laws of your country and the leadership of your commanding officers? Do you deny that you were aware of the penalties of such a transgression, yet you continued to act in it despite that knowledge?”
I tasted acrid panic in my mouth, and was then utterly lost. “I didn’t mean to!” escaped from my tongue, the impulsive cry of a child who understands only that he has been caught, and not what he did wrong. Handley seemed to sip those words in, and I thought I could almost make out a grin through the shadows of his face.
“Of course not, Peter, no one means to do things as harmful and bad as that-they just happen sometimes. But still, you’ve broken the immutable social contract of wartime, and someone has to pay for that…someone, Lieutenant.”
“Someone, Sir?” I asked, picking up on the stressed word.
“Good boy, good boy-I have a surprise for you, Berkeley, and I think once you’ve given it a little thought, you’ll like it. Tomorrow, at precisely noon, just before everyone leaves to start their afternoon rounds, a squadron of about ten of your comrades is going to knock on your door. They will ask for Mr._______. When they find him, they will take him into custody and return to base camp, so that he can be transported to the military headquarters and quarantined for the duration of the war. And all that we need of you, Lieutenant, is that when these men show up tomorrow, you stand aside and let them in-with that, we can tell the war board that you were working all along as a key informant and assistant in the capture of a wanted enemy leader.”
“But-“ I protested, “then they’ll put him up for trial.”
Handley seemed surprised at this. “But of course! It’s just a formality, Lieutenant, they can’t just let him sit in a cell without reason.”
I blanched at the image spinning in my brain-John, in a ragged prison uniform, sitting alone in a cramped cold cell, his old muscles and bones, his kind eyes, all alone, with black-robed justices crouched outside his door-it was all too horrifying, all too unreal. And a trial-if the consequences for my crime were so high, what would they do to him? And with my help?
“That’s-no, that’s sick, I can’t…” I stuttered, my fingers shaking, patterned with half-shadows formed from Handley’s frame. Handley, for his part, bent his knees slightly to bring our faces closer, and must have turned into the sunlight somehow, because for the first time since he had first showed up I could almost see the features of his face.
“Think of it like this: one way or another, we’re going to find Mr._______. He’s not one to keep his location very secret, especially with Attica falling apart as it is. Whatever you might do to delay his arrest won’t change his sentence, but it can change yours. This is about you, Peter, and how we can help you out of this whole mess.”
“No, it’s still-”
“These men will be armed tomorrow,” Handley interrupted me, with finality in his words. “They will have weapons, standard-issue, just like what you have. And I have told them to try as best as they can to keep this arrest clean and to not hurt Mr. _____, but if they encounter resistance, I can’t hold them to that order. You have to look at this logically, now: you aren’t going to stop John’s arrest, but you can make sure that no one is hurt and that the legal costs are as muted as possible for everyone involved. Just open the door and get out of the way tomorrow. That’s all. It’s the most that anyone could do under these circumstances. We all have to look out for each other in the middle of times like this, don’t we?”
I couldn’t answer, shaking as I was with the shock of the mass chasm that had so suddenly opened up before me. This is all my fault, I heard my silent voice echo. If I hadn’t been here, none of this would have happened.
Handley stood up, once again blocking the sunlight. “It’ll all clear itself up. You’ll see.” With that, he was gone. I was left leaning against the side of the barn, unsupported, wringing the cloth of my shirt and unable to readjust my eyes to the brightness of the afternoon air.
Thanks, all.