Chapter
ARCHIE WALKS NORTH, away from the Great Lake, past people walking toward him with poppies shining red in the rain. Poppies. Row upon row, coming at him, like nagging maids telling him to remember. Remember. Remember.
Remember.
Archie’s mouth relaxes in a straight line, his deep brown-almost-black eyes look straight ahead, his cheeks unlined, his jaw set firmly, his arms swinging in the natural military rhythm in step with his feet. They obscure his seething thoughts, his screaming heart, and his soul pounding the dark, destructed walls of his innocence.
Archie’s jaw jams teeth against teeth.
But the screaming continues.
Remember. Remember, say the poppies dancing past. One by one, row upon row.
Archie’s body rebels at the popular command.
Archie almost releases control over his mouth to scream: “Stop!”
“Stop telling me to remember!”
Archie reaches an intersection, steps around the sharp corner of a stone building, and falls against its wall on the side street. He closes his eyes as Torontonians hurry past towards Queen and Bay, towards the Cenotaph and Remembrance Day. Bile rises as a voice emerges from the past to ring in his ears.
“Son, you need to man up,” rebukes his father, whom he’s called Sir for as long as he can remember. He and his twin Stephen call him Sir as a mark of outward obedience in Archie’s mouth, flattering respect in Stephen’s.
Archie had just told him over the flip-phone…
No, he admits to himself, he’d screamed: “Sir! Sir! Come—,” and then his breath had failed him. His father had predictably repeated to man up and speak up. Archie cannot stop staring at Pawpaw, who is lying there at his feet, his faithful companion still in his hand flung out to the side. Pawpaw’s head—
No! Archie drives his upper eyelids into his lower until his eyeballs object; he screams internally but out loud too apparently, for his father yells at him down the phone line: “Stop! Stop your screaming, boy. You’re eighteen. You’re an army man now. I won’t have my son disgrace my name. Get it together.”
Archie swallows hard. “It’s…It’s.”
“Spit it out,” Sir spits into his ear impatiently.
Archie lets out all his air and says: “It’s Pawpaw.” He swallows at the birthday cake that burns his throat, demanding ejection, to leave this horrible place of—
Archie’s eyes have somehow opened themselves again, and he’s staring at bits of grey and flecks of white, covered in gobs of blood.
“What about him?” his father asks, harshness roughing his voice.
“He’s dead.”
“He was alive when I left him. What did you do?”
“Nothing,” Archie squeals. “Nothing!” he repeats, his voice pitching higher as his heart wonders why he’d done nothing. Why did I sit there listening to Pawpaw and not seen nor heard the plans in his voice? I heard! Archie catches the sob at his silent admission. He hadn’t believed it. Pawpaw had told him in the way he’d resisted his efforts to accept the tablet computer Archie had bought him. Archie had stopped in at the mega electronics store right after enlisting to buy one—his first thought on the way to Pawpaw’s place being he and Pawpaw would need a way to talk directly without Sir’s interference. His grandfather’s home, the place where he felt he belonged the most, was the first place he wanted to go to after enlisting. “Here,” he’d said, handing the tablet computer to his grandfather. And Pawpaw had said, “No son, you best have it. It’ll serve you as you go off on your grand adventure. I had my own grand adventure. It’s your turn. I can’t go with you.” The look in his eyes—
Archie sobs, and Sir hears him.
“What did you do, Archie? Tell me. And I’ll make it right like I always do.”
“Nothing, Sir. I did nothing. We all did nothing. Nothing can make this right. Pawpaw’s dead.” And then Archie flips the phone shut, turns it off, and squats down to stare at Pawpaw’s half-blown-off head searching for his eyes, wondering if the sadness he’d seen in them, the finality of endurance, is still there. But the blood and bits of brain blown out by Pawpaw’s gun covers everything.
“Grab his leg, Private! Now! Maybe those medics can get it the fucking back on him!”
Archie looks disbelievingly at his corporal. What do you mean, get it back on? Archie scans the scarred, tanned landscape with its stains of blood and holes of explosions. There is no leg.
“Private, I gave you an order. Do it now!”
Archie jumps at the ferocity in his corporal’s voice. He stands to attention, salutes, and walks towards what he thinks is a leg. It’s long; it has a bend in the middle; it’s festooned with ribbons of desert camouflage with spatters of crimson, maroon, and red-black clots all over it. Bone chips litter the surrounding ground. Archie leans down to grab it with his black-gloved hand and halts. His lunch rises into his esophagus and demands release from this field of horrors. The corporal bangs into him from behind, thrusts him out of the way to grab the leg. Anger wrenches Archie, anger at the Taliban, at the primitive people who brought him to this place, anger at them blowing up the innocents in those buildings. I was a kid. I didn’t know about Taliban tactics. Archie remembers how the news, his neighbours, shows, and posters had made war exciting, justice-making, a way out from his drab life into the grand adventure Pawpaw had told him life had held for him, to become a man’s man.
Here he is, a man, a man leaning down to retrieve a shattered leg from his corporal who is trying to reattach it to his dead friend. Dust coats his nostrils; gore drying under the sun impregnates his memory. Urine and shit and blood commingle into death’s sewage.
A sob heaves itself into his throat along with his lunch, and Archie pukes all over the blood-encrusted leg. Salt water streams down his face into his mouth; the salt is saltier than the crackers he used to crumble into his soup on Sunday lunches out after church. Church.
There are no churches here, only insignificant prayer services to a God who watches impassively overhead in this oven as humans run around killing each other. My friend is dead. He leads services to you, God. Lead the services. Past tense. He’s no more. He’ll never lead anyone ever again.
“Private! Give me that leg, now!”
Archie can’t do it, he can’t indulge his superior’s fantasy. The reality facing him is too—
Over the din of a landing helicopter, his ears capture the blown-away words of the officer, the Lieutenant who’s so young, his beard is fuzz. “He’s dead. The leg doesn’t matter. Leave your Private alone.”
Archie glances over. The officer has his hand on the corporal’s upper back, and the corporal’s face is puce with rage. Under Archie’s fear-stained eyes, the corporal’s face transforms, it falls, it dissolves. Suddenly, the man is sobbing on his commanding officer’s shoulder.
Men. We’re men, here Sir, he thinks. Real men. But not the kind you are; I’ll never be a man to you, Sir.
Archie lifts himself upright with his abdominal muscles, straining under the weight of his gear, which suddenly feels like lead. And walks back to where his friend lies in pieces. One leg gone, the other bent at a strange angle, his torso missing chunks like a malignant shark had attacked in a frenzy, and his face—his face. Archie swallows hard. He squats next to his friend, closes his eyes, drops his head, and recites the now-familiar prayer for the dead. And then he repeats the words his friend always begins their prayer meetings with. Began. Past tense. Dead tense. Tears drip off his chin to mingle with his friend’s dead blood; then Archie opens his eyes, takes in one last gory look of respect, stands up, blinks the tears away, and walks over to help the medics identify and retrieve the latest bodies Taliban IEDs had created.
The imposing man has a face like leather; dark blue, dirty fabric encircles his head. Round and round, the fabric is wound, like an artistic hat. A strand hangs down at the side, down to his shoulder. The man is Afghani. Archie imagines he’s the man who blew up his friend. The man who armed and buried the IED to explode apart another man he would never know, didn’t care to know. We are not humans to them. Archie is standing impassively as the Canadians speak friendly like to this man. It’s his first tour of duty as an American seconded to the Canadians. He thinks of himself as embedded, a stealth American, hidden from the Taliban and Americans both, surveying them from safety. But how safe? It’s his first patrol with the Canadians, and they’re in a village to search out Taliban. Archie hates the Canadians’ relaxed body language, their friendliness with these people, these people whose sole purpose is to shoot up and explode apart his friends, these people who started it all by blowing up Americans going about their business, the same Americans who keep these people’s fucking heroin economy afloat.
Archie stands impassively, his arms relaxed on his machine gun, his legs apart in an easy but ready stance, his boots firmly planted on the ground, but inside them, his toes are like springs ready to pounce, ready to pound that man’s face into pulp at the slightest twitch. Rage bubbles and froths inside Archie like a cauldron that doesn’t have an off switch, whose contents boil into steam that never exhaust themselves dry.
His new Sergeant Nadine shifts her stance slightly so that she’s abruptly closer to him. Her calm energy radiates into him; her body heat seems to reach through the country’s heat sweating him inside his camouflage and underneath his gear, to soothe him. Nadine says nothing…
…but he’s relaxing against the stone wall, and its November-chill is seeping through his outer jacket, his dress uniform jacket, and his crisp shirt. The dry cleaning’s ethereous fumes have faded. The light is dim; the rain has diminished to drops that hit his face sporadically, its clean taste a contrast to the salt staining the corners of his mouth. Archie pulls the brim of his Tilley hat down until all he can see is the rain-blackened concrete sidewalk underneath his spattered boots and the road’s run-off flowing along the gutter beside it.
A poppy slides into view in the gutter; the rain water gushing toward the drain takes the dead red plastic along with it. The poppy spills through the bars on its watery ride and disappears. Archie clamps his teeth against the grief that threatens to engulf him, to drown him into hours of crying. Every night but last night has been torments of tears, and he’s sick of them. He’s sick of crying endlessly. It never stops, clogging his nose, swelling his eyes, itching his face, filling his throat, and coating his tongue with bits of snot, while the wound in his heart pulses on. Never, ever stops. At best, the traumatic wound only retreats into his subconscious waiting for a poppy, a word, a look, a day of remembrance to come along and kick it, flare the pain up in his dying, broken heart again. When will it stop? Why won’t it stop? Why is it immortal when my friend was mortal? Why is isolation the only safe response to it? Archie blinks away more memories trying to crawl into his head, making their past his present again, memories of the last words of Sally, his father, the silence of his mother, as they informed him how he was killing their peace he’d fought for, how he needed to—
No! He yells internally. No, no, no!
Their suffering had ended when he’d left them. His suffering remains with him always. Crying and anger, his two faithful companions, along with Pawpaw’s Outdoorsman that had obeyed his grandfather’s final command to blow his brains through his skull all over his polished wooden floor.
Pawpaw had cleaned his house from the small attic at the top of the house to the dusty basement at the bottom. He’d bleached his basement walls and the counters of his kitchen. Pawpaw had hoovered his decades-old sofa and chairs in the living room until the pile was almost like new. He’d dusted every surface and polished every piece of furniture. Pawpaw had polished the wood floors of the first and second stories until the sheen had reflected Archie and Sir as they’d stared at Pawpaw’s body and later the paramedics who’d confirmed Pawpaw had left this earth a shattered mess. Chlorine smell had conflicted with the lemon scent of floor polish. As he’d drunk in the shining clean of Pawpaw’s home, Archie had thought how he’d acquiesced to Pawpaw’s unusual insistence that he stay seated on his usual worn porch chair and not help him bring out the bottles of beer, chips, and birthday cake slices to share companionably. Beer and chips on the porch had been their ritual: the arguing over which beer was better. Pawpaw always offered him Molson’s. Archie always insisted on Labatt’s. They’d bicker, and Pawpaw would stare at him with those glacial-blue eyes, saying, he had no good taste while handing him the Labatt’s and telling him he knew where the chips were, to go get them, and to not leave them in a bag but put them in a bowl. “We’re not pigs here,” he’d lecture him.
The fridge was empty; the cupboards were bare. Archie only discovered that after finding Pawpaw dead.
Pawpaw had brought him his Labatt’s and had talked about the new tablet computer and Archie’s grand adventure in words that meant he wasn’t going to be here, but Archie hadn’t heard the message, only the words.
A spill of water from an eavestrough overhead splashes onto Archie’s Tilley hat and shocks him back to the present, to the cold November Remembrance Day.
Archie shakes himself. The memories had almost dragged him into the worst day, the absolute worst day.
Archie pushes himself off the wall and starts walking. He strains to focus on the material world. The poppies, some half-falling off as their pins let go of their spot on Torontonians’ shiny jackets, come at him row upon row. Andrew’s meandering line of poppies up his right arm thrusts itself into his internal view. Archie flinches. He doesn’t want to remember. He doesn’t want to know. Archie speeds up, his strides lengthening, taking him further and further away from the Cenotaph and his duty there.
Mercifully, the memories stop their march into his consciousness. The worst one halts in its rise out of the depths as his booted feet pound down the sidewalk faster and faster.
“You’re alone.”
“You don’t belong.”
“You need to get over it.”
“You’re back here now. Time to get a job.”
“You’re not injured. You got your legs, your arms. Those men, over there,” Sir says, pointing an arthritic finger, with its knobs of joints and skeletal pieces, at the veterans nearby in their wheelchairs. “Those men,” he scolds Archie, “are real men who made real sacrifices.” He’d turned on his heel and marched out, flinging at him over his shoulder: “I’m ashamed of you. No son of mine is a malingerer. Your brother has made a man of himself. But what do you expect, he’s the older twin.”
Archie hadn’t heard his last words. His VA counsellor had come into the waiting room then, seeking the person who’s supposed to be with Archie. Archie had had to tell him that his father had left; Archie’s mouth clamps shut against repeating his father’s words. But his counsellor knows; he’s seen their mark in Archie’s deep brown eyes. Archie recognizes his counsellor’s understanding in the softening around his cheeks and mouth, in the gentle hand that comforts his shoulder and steers him towards his plain office.
Someone grabs Archie’s arm, and he whips around, his hand cocked and stops his movement as he sees the rain-spattered face of an older woman with her fading blue eyes wide. Archie drops his arm and his hand. “I’m sorry, ma’am.”
She shakes her head. “It’s okay, You were about to walk into the path of that truck,” she points down the road toward a fast-disappearing white courier truck, its red taillights like two accusatory orbs.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Archie says quietly, thinking it’s too bad she’d grabbed his arm and saved his physical body. Archie doesn’t know where his soul is hiding, yet it feels trapped in this place, in this life. Archie stands at attention on the edge of the curb, his hands clasped behind his back, his feet apart. His soul wants out of this hellhole. The war continues in his head; Archie’s heart burns from the poison of people’s hatred and condemnation.
I will never recover.
Death is the only recovery.
The light turns green. The woman tells him as she steps off the curb, “Thank you for your service, young man. You are a hero.”
Archie remains frozen in place. If only she knew his real thoughts.