Doubleyou

Are favorites replaceable? The question oppressed me. A man cannot memorandize peacefully in the face of such conundrum.

I slammed a fist into my desk and left yet another Memorandum only halfway done, gasping, wounding, lying splayed across the field, you could say—distastefully yes, but nonetheless splayed—not dead but dying, alone, calling out for me, as shameful an act for a wartime writer as it was for a retreating staff sergeant.

I read back what I had written and spit on the floor where my disgust landed and began to freeze immediately in the December cold of my apartment. Favorites…favorites. My kingdom for a favorite.

But how to assuage myself? Prayers for inspiration?

A stock-taking of my boys!

6.22, not a soldier, from Old City, the first, a driver, rib-giver, always drivers with me, for a reason I can’t explain, gone, driven off.

12.2, a bullet through the thigh, Islander, the deep set of his eyes, the picture frame to his grace, true face like an ox, fond of thin cigars and jellied fruits. 5.4.6, a bullet through the gut, jaw-line made of roof beams, Ridge Runner, a drawl to melt your heart, letter writer, always demanding I bring him stamps, always winking with his demands.

20.8, gangrene, ever weak with fever, humble, hawk-like, a Granite Boy, always asking for ice no matter the weather, constantly overheated, with a morning dew across his brow and cheek bones.

1.2, a simple number, Mainiac, far from wanting to be left alone, pain in the bones, a sort of traumatic rheumatism, bed-bound but jolly, likes to remind me of my own eyes, how he sees himself in them, slightly rodent-like, but not in a unpleasant fashion, an ace with a Howitzer before one rolled back on top of him, always asking for tobacco, which I rightly provide, which he hides because the nurses don’t want him smoking. Maybe?

23.13.3, a good, reductive number, an Oregonese, of western stuff, leg bent up by a chunk of shrapnel, infected, infused with the finest, fond of blackberry cordial paired with whatever Shakespeare I can spare from my library.

20.8 the 2nd, second to none, Michigander, biggest hands I’ve ever seen, star pitcher on the regimental Ball team, Hunky the Hurler, his lieutenants dubbed him, though neither a Hank nor a Henry, bitched by a splinter left to get septic, always asking for jerky, fuel I guess, gas I happily provide.

15.3. Oh but 15.3, barely 20, barely boy, newly admitted, a Buckeye from Ohio, but a buck most of all, blue-green eyes, more than six feet high, eighteen hands of a man, for whom I’d give the pair of mine to save more than nine times over, unforgettable, a Memorandum in and of himself, a sculpture, an equine engraving, a western monument gliding east to meet us, granite, noble and manly manner in his talk, with our Declaration engraved deep within his brown-gold skin, a bullet in the shin, the bullet gone to pieces and gliding through him, as any American bullet would be wont to do upon finding itself lodged in such thoroughbred flesh, lover of delicate little sweets, which I have to restrain myself from letting him eat out of my cupped and waiting hand.

15.3! Oh, it was 15.3 I would go to see.

Outside Central I composed myself, breathing ten seconds of freshness out of the cold December air. I took the back path to avoid the guard station and that Nurse Foot-Hawley who worked it Saturday evenings. 15.3 was in Ward C and, stepping in, I caught his eye immediately, with its golden lashes, but I didn’t go right to him. The ward was full of laughter, the boys talking and joking with one another. I howdy’d the ward, and they howdy’d me back, and with gusto. Maybe it was due to the impending Christmas. Or maybe it was just the cyclical nature of suffering and our collective need to forget it. There were just some nights like these from time to time when good cheer got the better of the formaldehyde and the boys who were dying died a little slower and the boys who were healing seemed primed to stand up and dance.

I made my tour of the room distributing my boys’ requests from out my satchel, stamps to 5.4.6, tobacco to 1.2, which he hid under his pillow, saving 15.3 and his hard-candies for last.

“Hey, Saint Nicholas, nothing for me?” said 10.12, a boy from Illinois I had yet to get to know. He was shot through the shoulder, but I was told he would survive. He had a coy look in his eye and I struggled to meet it.

“You’ve never told me what you’d like,” I said, looking away.

“And you’ve never asked,” he said.

“Well, it’s your lucky night then, soldier. I’m feeling generous. What can I do you for?”

“I always see you in here, loitering, asking all the men to tell you about themselves.”

“That I do.”

“But I never hear you admit to anything about yourself.”

“There’s not a lot to tell,” I said.

“I doubt that, somehow”

“And so, what would you like to do about that?”

10.12 lifted himself up on his one good arm, pinning me down with his two good eyes.

“A game of twenty questions!” he shouted.

“Twenty questions!” a chorus of the boys’ voices rang out, all with huzzahs. 10.12 kept staring at me, smiling. There were yellow gaps between his teeth. “It would be my pleasure,” I said, the right and the brave answer, to which my boys applauded.

I pulled up a wooden chair and sat beside 15.3, his bed facing 10.12, directly across from him, my questioner. 15.3 placed one of his strong hands lightly on my shoulder and gave it a squeeze. I hoped my shoulder felt supple and at ease, with worthy muscles.

“Do you have it?” 10.12 said, his eyes never breaking.

“I do.”

“It has to be something emblematic.”

“It is,” I said, imagining it, “twenty to you.”

“Is it smaller than an elephant?”

“Yes.”

“Is it bigger than a mouse?”

“Yes,” I said, counting 10.12’s questions with my fingers.

“Can it scream?”

“Yes, I guess it could,” I said, to which 10.12 winked.

“Does it have a back?”

“Not that I know of.”

“Does it have a bottom?”

“Yes, I suppose it does.”

“Of course it does,” he said, looking around at his fellow soldiers, a smirk on his face.

I looked too, around at the men, each in their individual beds rearing for answers, and at their joyousness towards simple things: twenty questions or a blue joke or an infectious song.

Together, they made up such a directory of the American entirety, each missing something crucial or burning alive from the inside out, with a hole where one should not be. Americans. This room was the whole of the nation, states depicted in singing souls, souls laid out like maps on a bed, western and eastern, central, squirming fighters unflinching in death, forgiving in life.

It is a strain, trying to grip the amorphous shape of history in your hands while you’re living it. With victory, these men would be beatified, venerated as saints for freedom. In defeat, they would be made demons. What a thin and porous difference. What an American paradox. What a state of osmosis, dying as an American, where new and unexpected fates are invented daily, and where the castle of Heaven and the smokehouse of Hell are built with the exact same porous, pumice stone bricks.

“Doubleyou.”

“Doubleyou!”

“Yes,” I said, coming back.

“The question is to you.”

“What’s the question?”

“Day dreaming, I see,” 10.12 said, “I said, does it breathe?”

“Not necessarily,” I said.

“How do you mean?”

“It’s full of air.”

“Hot air?”

“Is that one of your questions?”

“No it isn’t. Yes or no answers only, you know the rules,” 10.12 said, a new twinge in his voice.

“Then yes, it breathes. Fourteen to you.”

“Is it as hard as iron?”

“It is not.”

“Is it harder than that flower in your buttonhole?”

“It is.”

“Does it have skin?”

“It surely does.”

“Is it an apple?” one of the other boys shouted from the back.

“It is not an apple!” I shouted back.

“Quiet, you,” 10.12 shouted at the boy, “I’m asking the questions.”

“That counts, doesn’t it?”

“It doesn’t.”

“Surely it counts,” I said, “boys?”

“It counts!” shouted the chorus.

“You’ve had your half. You’re at 10,” I said to 10.12, who’d lost his smile. The violence of men was something I tried to train myself to live within. I said to myself, be brave, and looked 10.12 in the eye. Curly red hair, with freckles. Impish. I knew who he was. I knew him through and through. And as such, I also knew his beauty. I knew where it was hiding. I alone could find it.

A man is just a man, same as a Memorandum. Only inverted. A bad man is haunted by an invisible good, whereas good Memoranda … a good Memorandum burns the badness of men for its fuel. That is how it lives on, even when its mother is gone. There is the source of timelessness and history. The angelic and the demonic. The angels looking in the mirror and finding horns hidden in their hair. The demons growing out their horns until they form a halo.

I made sure to note all this down in my mind for tomorrow's writing. “Is its skin tight?”

“It is.”

“And do you stroke it?”

“No you don’t stroke it,” I said, smiling, my smile flipped upside down as it crossed the room, in 10.12’s studied reflection of me.

“You don’t stroke it?

“No you don’t stroke it.”

“Well then, do you spank it?” 10.12, the coy coming back to his lips. “I get the impression you know what it is,” I said, trying to smile.

“Maybe, but I still have eight questions.”

“Seven.”

“Fine, seven.”

“Do you play it?”

“Yes, you play it.”

“And do you take it for a fool?”

“Compared to how I take you, not in the slightest.”

“Funny, old man, I was just thinking the same about you.”

I was losing the secret battle with myself for chastity. The boys went quiet. The violence of the war reentered the room and for the first time all evening, one of the boys in Ward C moaned against his pain.

“Would you ever strike it?”

“One would strike it.”

“But would you strike it, Doubleyou?

“That’s your seventeenth.”

“Answer the question.

“If it was my duty, I would strike it.”

“And would you let it strike you back?”

“No I wouldn’t,” I said.

The boys on either side of 10.12 were laughing quietly and not trying very hard to hide their laughter.

“What am I at?”

“Two more,” I said, trying to stop my voice from wavering.

“Just like I planned it,” he said, the coy of his lips ripening into a smugness. “Is it in this room with us?”

I looked around the room, giving 10.12 exactly what he wanted.

“No it isn’t.”

“I don’t like a liar.”

“And neither does your mother,” 15.3 cut in.

“What did you say?”

Both boys, both blown to bits in their own ways, sat up in their beds. I turned to look at 15.3. Bed bound but upright he was still a magnificent bust. Winged Victory, but legless. And even more imposing. He loomed over 10.12 even from across the room.

“Ask your last and be done with it,” 15.3 boomed, sending bravery right through me.

10.12’s smile had not faltered, but the new squint to his eyes gave him away. “Fine,” 10.12 said, evil overtaking the corners of his mouth, “is it …” But before 10.12 could unleash his twentieth, two nurses sprinted through the ward door, past the feet of the forty beds, and quickly out the other end of the room. We heard them throw the doors open to Ward D, followed by shouting whispers. A boy was surely dying. And the reality of such a thing on the minds of one’s comrades silenced even the most entertaining of games. We waited and listened for the death rattle, God’s terrifying instrument. I looked at the faces of the hushed boys, with their expressions of praying, but with eyes open.

____
“Doubleyou” is an excerpt from a work in progress. Will Mountain Cox lives in Paris. His debut novel Roundabout is available from Relegation Books.