I take walks around Seattle every day, building up my muscles, my strength, airing out my head and my thoughts, just watching people go on about living. For the first few weeks, I felt both deeply sad and somehow superior, for all the amazing and terrifying and deadly things I’ve seen and the brave and insanely dedicated people I’ve known and faraway places I’ve been. Here, people just walk, just drive, just talk, sitting in coffee shops, some staring at nothing as their implants guide them around the world …
Not every second could be their last.
These people I understand and envy and pity at the same time.
Mostly at the ends of my hikes I find a place that’s new and peaceful and observe the play of light and shadow on trees, or the sheen and sparkle of rain and grayness, on buildings, on faces, on gardens and flowers and clouds and birds and squirrels, and slowly get back to realizing that the simplest pleasures are the most important, the biggest reasons we’re here—if there is ever an explanation for being alive, for observing, for taking up space and eating food.
For not being a War Dog much longer.
Assuming true physical form, true emotion.
Putting on flesh.
One evening at dusk I make my way back to the condominium, where Alice and her husband are setting out dinner in front of that fabulous view of Puget Sound. They put a whiskey-and-soda in my hand—I can drink again, after a week or two when anything of the sort made me queasy, just as if I were still sweating out Cosmoline.
And Alice tells me, setting out a fourth place at the table, that she’s invited a guest to join us.
“I hope you don’t mind,” she says, with a cat-on-mouse expression that dares me to object, to get all pissy and closed down and neurotic. I don’t dare do that, so I smile and ask who it is. I know it isn’t Joe or DJ. I’d feel them, somehow.
But then I do feel who it is.
“It’s a young woman,” Alice says, more cat than ever, playing with me, playing with me for what she thinks is my own good. “She’s in town finishing medical treatments and she asked if we were open to a visit.”
“Sure,” I say.
“She says you were very sweet out there”—Alice waves her hand at the sky—“when you weren’t being a complete bastard—but you were pretty sweet to her when it counted. She says don’t expect anything, but she’d like to see you again. I answered for you.”
Someone else putting on flesh.
Stu brings in a freshly opened bottle of wine. The deep green bottle glints in the setting sun. His golden smile is big enough to show teeth. He wants me out of here as soon as possible. “We’re having pinot noir with the salmon,” he says. “Special occasion.”
God save me.