Читать книгу Rillas and Other Science Fiction Stories - A. R. Morlan - Страница 6

THE BEST LIVES OF OUR YEARS

...sociologists of the time predicted initially that if there was to be any so-called “positive” effect of the Esperme Virus Plague (EVP) in 2007, with its resulting drop in the male birth rate (down 59 percent in North and South America from 2007 to 2009 alone and dropping between 45 percent and 70 percent worldwide, with Africa and the South Pacific-Australia-New Zealand areas experiencing the most significant decreases in live male births), it would involve the overall shape of future civil and world wars. While there remained no doubt—thanks to Operation Desert Storm in the preceding decade—that women were capable of waging war, under the circumstances of EVP (and the eventual barring of all fertile males from active combat in 2012), it was believed that those women already in positions of power in government and the military would be more likely to rely strongly on negotiations rather than overt military action in potentially explosive diplomatic and territorial situations, due to their innate maternal and familial protection instincts (which, after EVP, were exacerbated by the added need to protect the ever-dwindling male members of society), with all previous notions of women’s rights, equality of the sexes, and rejection of the “Mommy Track” to be cast aside by those women now experiencing the onus of possible human extinction within the next 200 to 300 years. (According to the initial projections of Dr. Olivier Dreyfus, discoverer of the first strain of EVP; those figures are currently undergoing intense worldwide scrutiny.)

Unfortunately, sociologists—like practitioners in any speculative field—can be wrong....

—Dr. Coriane Katan, The War of All Mothers (Doubleday/Warner, 2085).

i.

red

I didn’t look at the letter as I fished it out of the narrow slot of the opened post office box; that Tyvek envelope they send the notices in says it all, the second your fingers touch the damned thing. After ten years behind the window, I’ve seen enough draft notices stuffed into the router’s bags to just about know those suck­ers by smell. By the almost antiseptic sort-of-plastic stink of them; the odor of bandages and suitcase linings and those little rain bonnets with the flimsy ties that always broke when Grandma tried to take them off in a hurry. And the reek of the plastic kits they issue to new recruits, the War Bags designed to be worn Velcroed around a waist, or around a thigh or upper arm if your waist is ballooned from within by child.

Enough of the returning War Bags come through the post office for me to know their scent as intimately as I know the odor of my own menses. That slightly acidic, slightly warm redolence which somehow manages to permeate the oversized Tyvek envelope they stuff the War Bags in after plucking them off the bodies of the fallen.

So...trusting my nose, and my fingertips, I wasn’t about to waste my eye’s time by reading my own name on the draft notice. It’s always been a given, I suppose, that I’d be called; Tashia is five, and Alan still makes his deposits at the s’bank on a monthly basis (thanks to me taking the filled, vacuum-bottle-protected vial to the s’bank myself—His Unique­ness hasn’t ventured out of the flat since ’16 or so; he’s still got the raz from the last time he got s’mugged, and won’t go near any woman other than me bearing an s’vial in her hand).

At least he hasn’t gone full-blown EVP; they can still use his s’ in the banks, or so the credits for withdrawals he gets in the mail tell me. I know more about his payments than he does—I do every step of his banking except for signing the backs of his checks—so even without my P.O. check, they’ll be set should I have to go.

When I go, now. I resist looking at the letter during the sub ride home; just the presence of it in my bag is enough. I know without bending down to smell it that it is already stinking up my bag, infecting all my civilian personal things with that syntho-blood aroma. Across from me, another ’muter’s paper is folded in her hand so that I can read the inner front ­page headline, the one closest to the spine of the paper:

“WAR IN MANDELIA CLAIMS 15,000 U.S. TROOPS”

Another war-euphemism, like “fallen” for the dead, this one out­stripping the Penta-Pret’s propaganda department. “Claims,” instead of kills. Like war is someone who plucks up the foot-groaners, collecting ‘groans like seashells on a tide-washed beach, claiming the best ones for her store of soldiers. Like, “This here ’groaner is mine, I’ve claimed her.”

Maybe “envelopes” would be a better word for what war does to ’groaners. The envelope taketh you away, the envelope giveth you back.

The ’muter folds her paper yet again, to swatting size, and gets off at the stop before mine. Through the opposite window, I see her (young, thin, hair puffed ’n’ piled, suit ’n’ tie improbably bright olive) slide through the crowd, waving her paper like a scythe. I try to imagine someone like her getting a draft notice, showing up at the ’cruitment center, losing that piled puff of hair with just a few swipes of the razor, standing in line with gov’issue uniform parts in hand.... Midway through the scenario, I give up. ’Muters in suit ’n’ tie are just too valuable back home, got to keep the corporate machines clicking along. Today’s version of Joe Col­lege from Grandma’s teenhood, when the ’groaners were grunts, and only guys burned their draft cards.

Minutes before my stop comes up, I try to picture Alan going through the draft notice routine, but it’s just too improbable. No man goes farther into battle than having his voice issue orders from a safe bunker, miles from real action. And those ’groaners are oldies, past worrying about EVP further messing up the chances of the boy-s’ making it past the tough hide of the egg, past worrying about making girl babies whose kid-machines are defective. And past s’bank donation checks, too.

No, even if His Uniqueness back home were a woman, like the other eighty-five percent of us in the world, I still couldn’t see him making it as a ’groaner. He’d have to leave our flat first....

My stop; elbowing past the ’muters and on-leave ’groaners and palm-outs huddled behind their “My man’s EVP, no s’deposits” signs, I reach the stairway leading up to my street. More palm-outs; men in the last stages of EVP—no-colored behind beard stubble, mucus running out of their eyes, nostrils, past mosaic-parched lips, and women whose clothes are cut away to show the scars where they’d been de-repoed, de-kid-machined. I feel around in my bag for the draft notice, wave it around, let them catch a whiff of its reek. I walk the last block unimplored by the palm-outs.

In the lobby, I press the buzzer one-handed, peeling open the enve­lope’s gummed flap with the other hand, pressing the notice against my thigh for leverage. The gov’ seal is there, over the computer-standard greeting—“Dear Ms./Mrs. Ingram”—but I am buzzed through before I have a chance to read more. No voice confirmation, no Alan fearing some s’mugger will barge into the flat, knock him on his back, yank down his pants and s’rob him at knife-gun-fist point because she can’t make a legal s’ withdrawal due to being a (take your pick) felon, drugger or ex-’groaner mustered out for a non-repo-related infraction. Maybe he thinks they can smell the live s’ on his breath as he speaks, I tell myself, riding the elevator to our floor. The ’vator is empty, for once; I have a clear view of myself in the round convex security mirror in the upper corner, a leftover from the days when women had to worry about men, rather than just worry for them. I take myself in, as I am now, freshly post-civilian: hair pulled back in P.O.-reg flowing tail, light-over-dark uniform, shoes thick-soled enough for stand-on-your-feet comfort. I still have the unfolded letter in my hand; it has a date for my arrival at the ’cruitment center, but I will look at that later on. For a few more precious seconds, this is my life.

For the space of time it takes the elevator to travel up, up to my floor, I am still a woman, in the old sense, as if any female today can ever be a complete woman anymore (considering how we’re all mothers not only to our young, but to our spouses or whatever man we have to defer to at the job, on the streets, or wherever one happens to encounter a unique member of an increasingly female society)—each step I take is for me, not for the Pentagon-Pretties in their leather chairs and uniforms with pants and half-inch-long hair under their uniform caps.

The ’vator reaches my floor. Doors slide open, wait for a few seconds, then start to close again. Sliding sideways through the diminishing open space, I catch a last glimpse of myself—hirsute, skirted, female—before the ’vator closes itself to me and descends to the lobby.

Smoothing the skirt against my legs as I walk, savoring the feel of air circulating around my moving limbs, I tell myself that Tashia will be fine while I’m gone; Alan is a good mother, and once I’m gone, he can have a messenger carry his s’deposit to the s’bank. They have men with vaccine-arrested (but not cured) EVP just for that purpose.

Not wishing to make Alan take an unnecessary trip down our hallway, I get my keys (already scent-tainted) out of my bag and begin to unlock the six deadbolts set into the edge of our door. Alan has never had to do this; he hasn’t been out of the flat since we had the fifth and sixth deadbolts installed. Through the fine gaps where the door and the door frame don’t seal perfectly, I hear an odd sound coming from within the apartment. Too even to be crying, too loud to be moaning—opening the door, I see something rippling over the nap of the carpeting within. Radiating out in a sun-like formation from a central bare spot. The low yet persistent noise is coming from farther down the inner hallway, but the bright-color ripples on the carpet have command of my attention for the moment.

Bending down, I run my fingers over one of the rays of color, feeling the strands separate under the pressure of my fingertips, splaying out against the carpet’s springy fibers. Hair...still smelling faintly of mild shampoo, the kind Tashia uses—

A pound of footfalls coming toward me, coupled with Tashia’s “Mommy,” attacks my ears. Looking up I see Tashia’s legs first, encased in pants, oh God wherever She is, a little pair of overalls like little boys used to wear, like Alan wore in the days when he was a child and actually saved in the hope that his own little boy would...and then I slowly raise my eyes, to take in her little-boy pullover shirt, the one with the blue and red rugby stripes and the little white collar—and instinctively stop looking after one glimpse of Tashia’s head, of the whitish scalp showing through the places where Alan’s electric razor clipped too close, leaving almost no stubble at all.

Tashia stops short of the spot where her hair is resting, fanned out in an approximation of the shape of her head, saying in a voice I hear only faintly, coming like static through the pound of blood in my ears, “Mommy, Daddy said it was gonna be like Hallo’een, but ’stead of candy I was gonna get a big s’prisel’ ’long as I closed my eyes an’ layed on the floor there—” she may’ve been pointing at the rays of her hair, all I could see was red and black, hazing before me “—only it buzzed and tickled and then Daddy went ’way without giving me my s’prise—”

Fainter still, I hear Alan, babbling either to me or to himself or to God, from somewhere down the hallway, “—fixed it, don’t you see! They don’t take little boys, not for the war, little boys are too rare, too unique...saved the bibbies, and the shirt, knew I’d have a boy someday, little boy, with a buzz cut like I’d get every summer...’fore little boys were special, and never left home any, any more. Like their Mommies do...see, Tash’s a boy’s name, and little boys don’t go away...they’ll never look, never check, boys are too special, have to protect the sper—keep it safe, from the dis-ease—”

And Tashia...my girl, my Natashia, she doesn’t care that she’s dressed like a boy, or is shorn like a first-day ’groaner in the ’cruitment center barber chair. She’s boo-hooing about not getting that “s’prise” Alan promised her...he’s congratulating himself for finally becoming a boy-maker...and I glance down at my draft notice, praying for an early date of recruitment on that sane-smelling form....

ii.

white

30.08.46 (eleven hundred hours/thirty minutes)

From: T. Sgt. Natashia Ingram

c/o SC Box 987760

APO AP 96266

To: Captain Janet Ingram (Ret.)

P.O. Box 5490342

FDR Station

New York, NY 10150-0342

Dear “Capt.” Mom,

Got this machine* to myself for don’t know how long, so this will have to be brief. (*Usually EVP’ers are chained to it!)

Looks like the ’Delas are in retreat; their antique SCUDs are no match for our MOAWs, but that could change any sec, as you remember from your hitch here. Wish I could be more specif; but the CO would rip off both my tits if I said more (not that they don’t have pens to black out classified info!). Needless to say, we’re XXXXXX, so don’t expect to take the gold ribbon off the doorknob any time soon!

Went to XXXXXX to see the Li’l General; your grand­daughter weighs over fifteen pounds, and measures over twenty-five inches long. Tall like you. Should make a great captain eventually, you know how the tall ones are automatically officer material. (I don’t think Gen. Boles would be what she is today if she were a Size 6 Petite!) Wish I knew who the gen-dad was; tried pulling in a few favors, but all I’ve heard on the wire is that he was (is?) of Mid-East descent, which is unusual, since EVP hit harder there, ’specially since it split off into EVP I and II. Like Leia, the ’ner on XXXXXX always says, tho: “All gen-dads look the same...smooth, white, and bald as a rubber bulb on top.” My CO calls ’em “loaded tampons,” but considering that only XXXXXX ’ners in the squadron are carriers now, I’m inclined to think of ’em as blanks!

Don’t know how you and the rest of the ’ners in your squad made it through the POW camps without monthly gen-dad blasts; it’s still bad for the POWs, but they will go easy on a carrier. Might be with-unique, fresh source of gen-dad for them. One of our ’ners brought back some of their gen-dad (same make of blaster we use, only the bulb is softer, more like wet Tyvek) she’d ’vaged off a fallen; it was confiscated, tho, and XXXXXX so we won’t know for a while if it took. Only hitch is wearing the gen-dad belt; the cold element in there sometimes leeches out, and causes chem burns. Last night, I had a dream about you and Dad; he was telling me what a good boy I was, only it wasn’t like we were in the old apartment, but I was in a ’cruitment chair, getting my first shave, and you were just standing there with a draft notice in your hand. Not saying a word, just holding out your free hand as my hair drifted down, like you were catching leaves in the fall.

I wonder if that’s how guys used to feel when they were drafted or enlisted. I can’t picture it; the EVP’s in the offices are all so old they’re natural shine-heads. Got to thinking. When it came to the whole war process before EVP, were we women jealous of what the men were able to do in war, or secretly proud that we didn’t really have to get in there and fight? Once there was EVP, was it then “put up or shut up” time? Tried to bring that up once, in the bunker, but for all of us, it was like trying to figure out what the world would be like without sunlight, after we’d lived all our lives with it. Sort of a fairy-tale life, where women took pills not to have children, and men wore rubber sheaths on their s’rods to stop them from blasting the women, and not just to try and stop AIDS or EVP. I can read about it, talk about it, and know all the while that it was true, but for me it wasn’t, period.

I know you remember what it was like. Just like you remember Dad before EVP, and him eventually dying from it like just about all the men who got it and didn’t respond to the vaccine. I’d ask you, but I know I’d never get my answer....

You asked about the POW situation; we only see them for a short time, before they’re shipped out to XXXXXX. Looks like their army is treating the ’ners on their side ’bout the same as us, maybe a little worse. Some of the POWs that come through here are only twelve, maybe less. No hair down there when they’re stripped for delouse. Don’t know how they ’spect to get results from the gen-dads the youngest ’ners carry. Probably give ’em blanks.

Lights are flickering; happens every time a XXXXXX flies overhead. Which means that XXXXXX is coming back, either more POW or more wounded. Least I hope it’s just wounded. I hate seeing what they do to the fallen ’fore our ’ners can get to them. Hacked, or ringed with burning tires and always split open if they’re carrier due to evacuate soon. Most of the time they’re totally claimed when we find them. Worse if they aren’t; we have to XXXXXX them.

I wonder, honestly, if even pre-EVP male ’ners had to do that. Even if you won’t—or can’t—answer.

Lights again, almost out, taking the keys of this thing with them. Insane to send electronic machines; too susceptible to brown/black­outs. An EVP just toddled up, wants his toy back.

Salutes and hugs, Tash

04.09.46

From: Major Emi Takei

c/o PSC Box 976591

APO AP 96266

To: Captain Janet Ingram (Ret.)

P.O. Box 5490342

FDR Station

New York, NY 10150-0342

Re: T. Sgt. Natashia C. Ingram

Dear Captain Ingram,

It is my sad duty to inform you that on 31/08/46, your child Natashia was injured/killed in the line of duty during a MOAW missile attack on her bunker.

Her War Bag will be sent to you under separate cover, along with her Purple Heart and Bronze Star.

Her daughter/son Diee will remain in Army custody, per Property Regulation 5499872-C, as outlined in the standard enlistment forms Natashia signed upon joining the Army in 2034. You will be informed of the child’s progress as she/he advances in military training. Again, I am sorry to inform you of the injury/loss of your child. May God comfort you and look down upon you in this time of sorrow, and may She comfort your daughter Natashia.

With regret,

Maj. Emi Takei. C.O.

U.S. Army

Captain Ingram,

Please excuse the form letter above; it is regulation, and you & I know reg is God around here. I knew your daughter, and while she and I did not always agree on principle (or proce­dure—a habit of hers I seem to have posthumously inherited!) I found her to be a woman with a questioning, insightful mind—not a prickle-headed ’groaner blindly following orders (in my case, touché!) despite their logic or their true necessity. Not that she ever disobeyed any order given by myself or any of her superiors, but Tash was aware of the purpose (or lack thereof) behind day-to-day Army life, and chose to rationally and intelligently question the why of this woman’s Army.

Would that I had had the answers she was so desperately seeking.

Maj. Emi Takei (Soon-to-be-retired)

LIST OF CONTENTS:

War Bag, T. Sgt. N. C. Ingram:

Dog Tags

Genetic-donor receptacle belt (empty of donor syringes)

Diary (edited to conform to regulations 87943-A and -B)

Emergency MRE’s (three packets)

African-American phrase book

Misc. photographs (Infant Recruit D. M. Ingram-Hussam)

Letter dated 30.08.46 (unmailed at time of death)

iii.

blue

Norma was taking ears again. We were bunkering, cleaning out aban­doned subter dwellings of the enemy fallen, burying those who’d been left by their evac units, but ears (and noses and lips—upper and lower) were off limits—unless your mother was a lieutenant colonel, and her mother was a ma-frucking-jor. Norma can fillet the whole frucking hide off an enemy ’ner and wear it over her uniform, if she wants. Claims she’s a pre-EVP relation to ol’ General Norman S. hisself.

She is big enough.

“G’eee over here,” Norma barked, stretching the “G’eee” out hard and fast, like when you give an order to a K-9’er.

I didn’t know if that was her way of saying “Get” or a corruption of my name, Diee, but I sure as fruck wasn’t answering. I may be an I.R. born to a draftee tech sergeant, raised in Mandelia’s kibbutz-cum-boot camp, but I don’t lick any lips. Upper or lower.

Staying where I was, I shook powdery grayish snow off a Mongol-English phrase book, watching Norma through lowered lashes as she raised the fallen ’Gol ’ner by the meaty scruff of her neck (her rounded yellow-brown head was covered with a quarter inch of stubble), took out her laser-knife from her parka, and with a hum and a flash of rod-focused light, the right ear, followed by the left, rested in Norma’s wide palm.

“Lieutenant Ingram-Hussam, g’eee over here!”

I put the phrase book into the ’Gol ’ner’s War Bag, taking the time to untangle the straps before approaching the earless corpse. Patting the Velcro male section onto the softer, female patch on the ’Gol’s outside belt, then resting the straps across her body (I wasn’t strong enough to lift her and secure the straps under the uniform back), I leaned back on my heels, asking, “What, Norma?”

Glaring, yet unable to protest (we shared the same rank), Norma said, “I think this one’s a he.”

“I think not, Lieutenant.” Rocking back ’n’ forth before I built up the momentum to rise in a long, fluid movement (loving Norma’s narrowed eyes and puckered lips as I did it), I dusted semi-melted snow off my pants before walking away from her, adding over my shoulder, “I don’t see the wisdom in using a nonexpendable member of any society as missile-munchie.”

Muttering “Thesaurus-tongue,” Norma opened her parka pocket—the rasp of separating Velcro carried far in the cold, dry air—and hid her latest ear harvest.

Norma wasn’t the first to call me that. Once I gained access to my mother’s War Bag effects, after her mother died in ‘63 when I was seventeen, I started to talk (and think, which no one can ridicule) like her. My mother was one of the last voluntary lifers. Why she kept re-enlisting I never could figure out, even after reading her censored diary. Black lines, passages, all inked out to protect long-declassified informa­tion. What was left was her first weeks in boot, her first carrier term (aborted male EVP-positive), MRE gripes (“Mucus Regurgitated Every­day!”) and her thoughts, about everything else.

Those passages I memorized; there’s little room in a War Bag for your own gear, let alone someone else’s. Also I don’t have to worry about harvesters like Norma going through my bag should I die, and misreading my mother’s words.

My mother came from a real family, something even Norma can’t lay claim to. A mother who eventually had to work once EVP began s’ busting every man on the planet; a father who started out full of male-bonding hope and wound up drippy-eyed and -nosed, curled in a ball in a room he hadn’t left since he found out his wife had been drafted. And whose granddaughter would be born into army-sanctioned servitude, in a society that demanded each member do her duty—be it by serving the Pentagon machine, or by endlessly bearing future cogs for said machine.

Or, as my mother wrote:

I guess being army-doc blasted beats trying to do it on your own, month after month, in the privacy of your home—the latter way means reporting back to the s’bank within a week of withdrawal, empty vial in hand, ready to pee on a strip of treated plastic. In the army, there’s something in the latrine water—once you’re a carrier, you know immediately. As long as you don’t flush prior to rising.

If you prefer being blasted so hard it feels like the tip of the gen-dad probe will burst out of your navel (I swear all medics have balls somewhere on them!) it is surely worth not having to pee on a wand of chemical-treated plastic!

I would’ve liked to have spoken to her. My mother. I’ve an old picture of her. Looked like every ’groaner since the War Protection Act of ’12. Round bare head, squinting eyes from too much combat in the sun, tanned face, and a blur of a smile. Same as me, save for my naturally darker skin. Not much opportunity to tan in Mongolia come winter. It’s always winter after those bomb “tests” over the Ukraines.

Norma—her ears safely hidden in her parka—was rooting around in the fallen ’Gol’s uniform; the rending of fabric brought me back to reluctant reality.

I closed my eyes until I heard her whisper, “Diee. G’eee over here...told you.”

Oh, God, it was true. They were sending men into battle. Some how, some way, the ’Gol’s had a surplus of men, enough to sacrifice new sources of gen-dad. How many? I asked myself. Ten, fifteen percent? I’ve never lived in (never known of, period) a time where men made up more than five to seven percent of the North American population. And most other countries were worse off than the U.S. and Canada.

Norma was about to switch on her laser-knife when I opened my eyes and asked her to wait. Crawling over to the earless ’ner, I peered down at the patch of exposed flesh between Norma’s circling hands.

It was and it wasn’t like a gen-doc: the long thinness was right, but there were two lightly haired bulbs of flesh above. And it was all attached, seamlessly. It was real...and sadly defenseless. Pointing the laser-knife at it, Norma remarked, “Just think...a world’s trouble centered around a little virus getting into such a little organ,” as she used the turned-off knife to lift the s’rod from the rest of the body. The whole thing was so opaque I couldn’t see where the s’ was hidden. Even the bulbs were deflated.

Norma was clucking, moving the dead bits this way and that, while I sat back on my heels, rubbing my face and scalp with my palms, wishing my mother was here, now, with me, Norma, and the dead man.

A few weeks after I was born, she’d written in her diary:

It puzzled me as a child, and it still makes me wonder—when it came to EVP and men, which was the real enemy of womankind (as opposed to humankind)...EVP, or the male organs it attacked? And once the war on man’s ability to reproduce himself (i.e., man) was waged—and all but lost—were we women attacking each other because of what had happened to the men, or because there were no longer any men to attack? Is that why the women’s army (and navy, and marines, and air force, and—) became more stringent, more basic, more butch than the old army, navy, and so on ever were? When men waged war, they took the time to not wage war; time to take R & R for the sake of Rest and Relaxation, not Rest and Recuperation (what yours truly’s doing now: feet up, hair growing in, womb free of gen-docs for at least three months). Do we wage war so vigorously, so joylessly, so grimly, because it’s always been so, or because we must do it better than it was done before? And in our case, must “better” mean...meaner? Shiny-headed killing wombs-on-legs, with little sense of bonding, of comradeship—just one-upmanship and “we’ll show them” attitude, all directed at the unique men we have to both protect and better?

I wonder—are we waging war for the sake of humanity, or to forsake humanity? To prove forever and ever that even if we can lick EVP—not that the female doctors seem as driven to conquer it as their (dwindling) male counterparts seem to have been—we’re still the better “men”? That real men only need exist on any level as gen-doc donors?

Were we women so put down that we need to forever fight to prove how strong, how capable, how indispensable we were all along?

“Well, Diee, make up yer mind—off or on?” Norma’s thumb rested on the knife’s switch—and said knife was resting, “blade” up, under the limp s’rod of the fallen ’Gol. One flick of her thumb and the s’rod would be severed, two more knife flicks and the ’Gol ’ner would be as good as female. Good as us.

“No. Better put a marker by the claim, so’s the docs at the base can check it—him—out later. Might be able to analyze the s’rod, and the bulbs.”

Norma—puffed up with importance over finding the first male ’Gol ’ner in the history of at least this war—waddled out of the bunker, into the drifting snow outside, in search of a red flag marker. Alone in the empty-walled bunker, I started to roll up the ’Gol’s bedroll—until some­thing fell out at my booted feet. A book, filled with carefully printed lines, in phrase-book English, no doubt penned in hope that if he was taken prisoner the ’Gol could prove to us American ’ners that he was ready and willing to learn the American way, to side with us if necessary. I’d seen this sort of thing before: copybooks filled with stilted English phrases, some written over and over, schoolgirl-fashion.

But this ’Gol—this guy—had something different on his mind, aside from learning English:

Morning of each day I sit, wait, as day become noon, noon become night, as I wonder “Why I fight? Why my mother? Why her mother? Must I fight harder, because I man in woman world?” I one of few men, but we grow in number. Women, they try hard next to me, more hard than with other woman. And always, I hide manness, other soldier tell me, “They know you man, they kill you harder.” But they woman too—so, then, my women, they do same to their man, if any? If that so, who is enemy?

I slowly paged through the thin diary, looking for a name, an age, something to identify this man lying behind me. I didn’t want to touch him again, couldn’t violate his War Bag. All I found was “I” and “me.” Perhaps that’s all I needed to find.

For my mother, in her diary, never mentioned who she was, never needed to use her own name. She knew herself, or tried to, considering that she belonged to a generation born to alien roles, and to an alien situation which reversed the roles of the sexes.

Yet my mother knew of this lost past, and took the time to discover pasts lost well before that of her own mother was devoured by an invasive virus:

I remember reading a sociology textbook, how back in the early 1900s, baby boys wore pink, because it was such a healthy, robust color, while girls were dressed in blue, a delicate, gentle hue. It wasn’t until after one of the world wars—I forget which one, they were spaced so far apart then—that the norm switched around, and blue became the “masculine” color. Considering the mess we “pinks” are in, perhaps that older assignment of colors for babies of different genders wasn’t so wrong after all.

Outside the cave, I heard Norma swearing, “Where the fruck is that damn flag?” as I reached the last page in the ’Gol’s diary, where he’d had the time to write one final line:

“Snow today—cover land. Soon cover me.”

Closing the book, the pages falling together with a soft chuff, I rocked back and forth on my heels, eyes shut, but still seeing what my mother had written in her diary, not long before the MOAW missile fragmented her like so much shrapnel:

Lull in the fighting—I don’t like it. Don’t know what will happen next. Better to either be in a battle or be coming out of it. This way—too much uncertainty. Get too relaxed. My mind is racing, racing. Remember a war movie I saw in basics, really an after-war film from the 1940s. No color, like old TV. The Best Years of Our Lives. Three men-grunts, coming home from one of the world wars. Second one, I think. Yes; no movies during first world war.

Anyway. The three—one was maimed, navy one—couldn’t adjust to life without war; war had given them all purpose, justification, glory. Came home to uncertainty, rejection, degradation. Seemed to me that the war years weren’t the best years of their lives, but had instead sucked away the best lives of their years. Oh, the movie had a sort-of-happy ending, but the maimed one was still maimed, and the poor one was doing work on junked war materials. The one who was rich before got to be rich again, but his daughter was in love with the low-life one. Strange to see a war actually end. And the women had stayed at home. Must’ve been why it finally ended.

Watching, I kept thinking it was all a dream-life, with women razzed about having to stay home and take care of the home front. Thought maybe EVP must’ve gotten into us women, made us hard, tough, mean—everything the men have lost. But seeing the play-soldiers of old, I think: They have lost something we women can never have—the ability not to be manly under certain circumstances. We women are so wrapped up in being wo-men, both in one, that we are neither.

And later, during history class in my last year of school, while learning of Desert Storm, I read a microfiche of an old pre-EVP newspaper, and an article about the first instances of bunkering (high-tech scavenging) in the Kuwaiti desert. This reporter who wrote the article came across one fallen soldier, named Mardy. Mardy had a diary, like mine, like all of ours. He hoped the war of his people and ours would be over soon, He asked God to make it so. He felt betrayed by his life. He had a girlfriend, Diee, whom he never saw again. And when the American reporter found him, Mardy was dead, mouth open, hand over his heart. And the reporter read of Mardy’s words: “I open my eyes and cry, sitting, thinking, ‘O God, will you accept me?’ I close my eyes and remember. Then I cry again. There is sand on my face. It is about to cover me. It is my destiny. I want to shout in my loudest voice but life doesn’t follow me.”

And before he left Mardy, the reporter buried him in those same sands. Reading that, I realized, in war there are no real enemies. Only victims—of our countries, of our races, and of ourselves. We need no other adversaries.

War, politics, EVP and AIDS before that—all shadow boxing partners. Only we do the actual moving.

My mother died a couple of days after writing those words. Oh, she did write a letter to her mother, but it only skirted the questions gnawing at her, perhaps in deference to her mother’s rank, more probably in de­ference to her own un-faceable fear. Yet hers was a war of equals, of women hurting other women. No fear of being killed faster and dying slower. My mother fought a war, not others not quite like herself.

“...who is enemy?”

Sitting by the earless ’Gol, his soul resting cloth-bound in my hands, I wish I knew the answer to his—and my—question. Just as I wish I knew who was doing the real moving—me, or my image on a snow-flecked earthen wall.

Author’s Note: The newspaper article mentioned in this work appeared in the Tuesday, July 30, 1991 edition of USA Today, and was written by Jack Kelley. The diary passages quoted were written by Hussam Malek Mohammad Mardy, to whom this work is dedicated.

Afterword for “The Best Lives of Our Years”

Looking back on the genesis of this story, I suppose it amounts to my overwhelming disgust over the events which made up the end of the Gulf War (senior), including the treatment of those enemy soldiers who tried to surrender, only to be literally buried alive by their own military vehicles, driven by our soldiers...somewhere along the line, even the barbaric rules of war had been hideously breached, and the horrors of the second Bush (“Dubyah”) Presidency’s Gulf War were yet to come, even as they had been anticipated by the events of the 1990s war. That war marked one of the first instances of women being used on the battlefront in a supporting role, a situation which blossomed into the current Middle East war(s) creating female vets coming home sans limbs, or worse. Now, I’ve read that women will probably be in combat soon. Never have I hated to see something I once wrote about in a fictional sense coming to fruition more than I hate this current military turn of events.

Getting back to the actual writing of this story, I had the first two sections outlined in my head long before I finally wrote it in 1991; I knew part one would be “red” and part two was “white” but I had no idea what “blue” was going to be. I had an inkling it would involve the granddaughter of the woman in part one, but I couldn’t come up with a viable scenario for her part of the triad of war stories. Then, I read the account in the July 30, 1991 issue of USA Today of the live burial of those enemy soldiers, and I had my ending for the tale. But when it comes to war, and war, in any century, all I can eventually do is hang my head after seeing or reading accounts of what actually happens in battle, and ask myself: How can any civilization do something so stupid so many times?

But I think I know the answer to that earless ’gol’s query: We are the enemy. We always have been, and as long as we fail to figure out how not to settle arguments through battle, we’ll never cease to be the enemy.