I WALKED HERE. DID I mention that? I walked the last ten miles or so. Kind of a penance. Or a tribute. I left my scooter at Ma’s, packed a ruck and walked here. Mostly in the dark. Guess I felt self-conscious walkin through town with a ruck and these old jungle boots so I left about, I don’t know, when the moon was comin up. Got to the culverts down there about dawn then came around the back way. Real slow. Real quiet. Thinkin some about the old man but mostly not thinkin.
Sun’s low now. It’s too early to hear the evening sounds from the fields or woods. Too early for the deer to show along the edge. All the creatures rest at this hour—except maybe a few nonunion squirrels.
When the sun hits the ridge it’ll disappear quick, like in any mountainous region. I’m going to stay. Stay here. Maybe gather some wood, make a small fire. Talk to the old man the way Bobby used to. He was really somethin. Talk to the deer and the fox and the bats, too. See if they’ve got any answers. Watch the garbage cans. See if the raccoons check em out. They’d stop checkin if there wasn’t any trash for a while. Watch the house, too. See if a light comes on.
I’ve cleared a small spot for sleeping but I don’t expect to sleep. Cleared a spot for a fire, too, but I’ll hold off a few days. No need to announce to the whole world I’m back, back here thinkin about it. Meditating on it. That was one of Bobby’s solutions ... to clear up dreams. He’d call it “controlled dreaming,” say it allows “the subconscious/conscious mind split to reconcile differences.”
Dreams. I still have em. Old ones. Almost like friends now. And new ones. I don’t even think of em as havin begun at Dai Do, but that’s where the shrinks tried to put it. I think they’re wrong. I subscribe to Wapinski’s theory, kind of a Grunt’s Theory of Psychoanalysis. Yeah, for me, Dai Do was there. Yeah, it was traumatic. But it’s like blaming a blown engine on the thing being made instead of on overrevving the sucker. Or maybe more like blaming a crop failure on lack of rainfall in August—but when irrigation is available. Get it? There’s a cause there but it’s not The Cause. Not for me. Like a chemical reaction where the potential for disaster exists in the test tube—but so does the potential for something really good. And it depends on the next ingredient that’s dumped in—not only on what’s there. Shrink said Dai Do was it. Bobby said it was what came later. “The initial traumas may have been traumatic,” he said, “but fact is you handled it then and you could have handled it forever if circumstances had been different. If somebody or something didn’t mess it all up.” One of the guys, this was later but I liked the way he put it, he said, “Your dreams, you know, many times they’re true. They’re right on target. Even when your life is a bucket of shit.”
Dreams! I shake my head. Dreams unfurl slowly, begin like pinpoints then open up ... massive ... a pin prick into a balloon of the unconscious. Not only the unconscious but the subconscious and the semiconscious right up the damned ladder rung by rung till you’re dreamin with your eyes about to blow out of your head like a cartoon drawing ... dreaming awake-asleep in another consciousness that prevents sleep, that prevents rest, that prevents rejuvenation.
These problems, their origins, their complications, their multiplications—from not being able to sleep—from being so tired and still not bein able to sleep. Bobby’d say, “But think where we were, where we came from.” And he’d say, “Where is that? Where?! Time, Man. Twelve-hours-out time! It can take up to three months to adjust.” His words. “Blaming sleep disturbances on memories of traumatic events can cause additional, more prolonged sleep-disturbance problems.”
Yet they all experienced it. Every one of em! To some extent or another, at one time or another. I’m not just talkin Nam returnees—Viet Vets. I’m talkin all combat veterans. I’m talkin about World War I German soldiers who had no time-zone dislocation yet who suffered the exact same time dislocation. I’m talkin American Rebs and American Union troops 125 years ago. I’m talkin Odysseus. I’m talkin a psychocauldron of wants and emotions boiling out through numbed physical exhaustion. Later, much later, Wapinski had this plaque hanging in the big barn:
If we go back we will be weary, broken, burnt out, rootless, and without hope. We will not be able to find our way anymore.... And men will not understand us.
All Quiet on the Western Front
Erich Maria Remarque—1928
After you’d slept forever, Wapinski’d say, “Fuck it, Man! Fuck that shit! Drive on! Take your nitric-acid blood, your swirling brain waves, your numbed-out, drugged-out, burnt-out body—take all that shit, ball it, wrap it, throw it away. And DRIVE ON! If I knew, or if you knew, when we got back life was going to be like it was, we’d all have returned, gone back to Nam, without hesitation. But we didn’t know. And you can’t, and I can’t, go back in some zomboid state.”
But he didn’t say that for years. He had to have his dreams first, like all of us.
It’s almost dark. Lights in town are comin on. The mall lights—parking-lot cool, mercury-vapor pink at this hour—are beginning to glow. Up over the ridge, above the sugarbush, faint stars blur together. The house is dark. Behind me they’re resting, comfortable. No technicolor, full touch, taste, smell, stereo dreams for them tonight.