Episode 5: Death of a Minor God

DEATH OF A MINOR GOD

by Ella Boehme

Our story ended the same way as it began, with a house in cinders.

Fantastical twists of life were what brought us together, what shaped us, and what would eventually bring us to our finale. History repeats itself, and I know that better than anyone. 

The long grass on the slope moved with the wind, like a shallow sea parting around where I sat. The oak trees, under the cloak of night, shielded me from prying eyes. If anyone were to look out the windows of the police station below, their vision would skim right over me, just another one of the dappled blue shadows cast by moonlight. 

The watch on my wrist, scuffed and darkened with age, moved in reverse, second by second. Once the hands stopped, it would be all over. Snuffed out, like a match flame, nothing left but smoke dissolving into the night sky. 

Death can only be avoided so many times, can only be cheated until there is no cards left to play. At some point, we all must turn and look death in the eyes and accept the fact that the game is up. 

Many decades ago, in the midst of World War II, I could have met the eyes of death. I could have watched it pass me to scoop up his bedraggled skeleton, and I could have kept walking. 

But I didn’t.

I had seen too many others die to let him become one of them. 

The charred bodies in the rubble of blackened stones and bricks that were once houses; the sick in the trenches, their life slowly seeping away; the battlefields, dotted with the dead. The eyes of those who have been in war and survived, like kaleidoscopes; broken, shattered, unrepairable. Starving families, their eyes gaunt and reflected with the fear that goes hand-in-hand with survival in a world determined to kill you. 

I was a spy and a messenger in the very center of the war, ducking through destroyed towns and crawling across empty fields to bring warnings or commands to troops. I tried to save lives that way and sometimes, it worked. I was good at what I did; this was the second world war I had been through, after all. But I was not always successful. Sometimes I was ignored, along with the messages I brought. The generals didn’t want to listen to a woman who had just waded out of a river or staggered from the woods to pronounce that they all had to listen to her. Their egos, in the end, were what killed them, but that didn’t make it any less terrible and sad.

I was in the midst of one such journey when I stopped in the small town, to warn the troops of an air raid. They were camped in a copse of trees, five miles north, and I had to get there by the next morning at the latest.

The name of the town escapes me. Maybe I never learned it. When you’ve lived as long as I have, it’s hard to remember every detail. The adrenaline of the mission, the steely resolve that was necessary to survive, often filtered out things that weren’t essential knowledge. All I knew was that I had to get to these troops, and I had to warn them. To do so, I had to pass through the town, trying not to be seen, but I wasn’t so lucky. 

He was on a dock, near a cottage overlooking the dark sea and the moon high overhead.

At first, I tried to hide, to sneak past unnoticed. That’s second nature, as a messenger in war. You never know who will distrust you, who will decide you’re on the wrong side.

But the sound of the bomber planes stopped me in my tracks. The ripping, shuddering crescendo that sent everyone’s heart into a free fall.

I stopped, in the square of light cast by the cottage window and stared at him.

He stared back.

We were only feet away from each other, but he didn’t move.

Instead, he just let the smoke from his cigar curl into the air and leaned against the pole of the dock. Nonchalantly, as if the sound of the bomber planes weren’t invading the sky, as if we weren’t in a war to end the world. 

Although the terror of hearing the bomber planes was nothing compared to the terror of them going silent. That meant it was inevitable; the engines had been cut; the bombs dropped. The calm before the falling storm.

We had seconds at most. The man smiled at me, closing his eyes, the glow of the cigar sending faint light across his face. He was accepting his death, waiting to die as casually as if his own mortality was equivalent to losing an unimportant card game. Laying down his hand, knowing it was a losing one. 

I did what I was not supposed to do.

I saved him.

When the bombs hit, turning the air to fire, they hit the rest of the town. They hit the copse of trees five miles north, but not us. When the blast waves and then the shock waves surged out, like freight trains armed with deadly shrapnel, only one piece embedded itself in the post next to the man’s leg. The post stayed standing, and so did the man.

I could hear nothing but ringing in my ears.

We were standing in a circle of green grass, fifteen feet in diameter. Unscorched, undamaged, except for the one piece of shrapnel in the post. The cottage, and the rest of the dock, were rubble and ash.

We were the only souls left breathing, next to the house in cinders.

Later, when we could both hear again, it was an understatement to say I had some explaining to do.

His name was Finn. 

We fell in love in a time of war, something that many think is impossible to do. It is difficult even to hold onto your humanity in times of war, they say, like holding on to a slick rope 

to tether you to the shore, while the riptide carries you out to sea and your hands lose their ability to grip. That’s how impossible it is to be human in war, they say. But I disagree. I think in times of crisis, when the air smells of death and gunpowder and the world is sticky with blood and coated in ash, we hold on tighter, are more determined to show that we can love as hate controls everything else. After all, it is love that gives anyone the bravery to go to war, because love is courageous. Hate is nothing but fear.  

I have been through enough war to know. 

We survived that, though it was hard, and painful, and we either cried ourselves to sleep or lay silent with eyes too barren to shed a tear. We were always on edge, like fragile vases, and one crack would make us explode into shards of glittering glass. 

That was not the end of our pain, nor the end of our love. 

On a ship, going to the United States when the war was over, we stood on the stern and stared at the endless ocean. 

That was when I gave him a way out.

“You don’t have to do this,” I said, my voice only an attempt at strength. “This life--it’s a blessing as well as a curse. We will live to see the rest of history. Until the end, most likely. You have no idea how terrible that can be.”His grip tightened on the railing. “I want to do it,” he said quietly. 

“There’s no way out.”

“I don’t care,” he replied. He agreed anyway, though there was no way he could know I was lying. No way he could know that I wasn’t telling the whole truth. 

The first time I had to get him out of jail was during the time of the bus boycotts in Montgomery, Alabama, in the 1950s.

We had been in Europe during the Holocaust. We knew how dangerous dehumanization was. We had seen it at work then, and we saw it at work here.

Snipers were firing into buses. Churches and homes were bombed. Hate hung heavy in the air, hate that wrapped around you like a thick curtain, slithering its way down your throat and curling to rest in your stomach. It made us nauseous and sick. Others were invigorated by it. They loved it, welcomed it, their eyes so clouded that they were unable to see others as human.

We were passing a bus stop. It was the middle of the day, hot and so humid that even the trees seemed to be drooping, dripping with sweat. A black woman with her two young boys walked by us, but they were stopped only feet ahead. A white man, his eyes crazed, was shouting at them, his voice getting louder and louder. Hateful, terrible words, like shrapnel and bullets. 

I felt Finn’s hand grip mine, tightly, almost like an apology, then release. The man was getting dangerously close to the woman and her children. His body language was clear to anyone who had ever watched a fight - he intended his assault to be more than verbal.

Finn got there first.

His palms struck the man hard in the chest, sending him backwards into a gutter. The back of the man’s head hit the asphalt with a nauseating, hollow thwack, and he didn’t move again.

Then there was a policeman, running across the street, his face twisted with rage and his gun in his hand as he screamed at Finn to get on the ground, shouted for someone to call an ambulance.

I met Finn’s eyes, now close to the concrete. The message was clear; he was telling me to go, that he would be safe, and it would be worse for both of us to get mixed up in this. 

And I knew he was right. One of us had to get out of here, and it had to be me. He was under my protection now. They couldn’t hurt him.

I vanished into the background, though I wanted nothing more than to throw the policeman off him and push the barrel of the gun away from his body. But that would end badly for both of us. I stayed just long enough to let the other officers show up, to find out what station they’d take him to.

I was on my way to that station, under blue cover of dusk, when I met the man at the crossroads.

At first, seeing the male figure on the road ahead, I thought it was Finn. But what would Finn be doing out here in the dark, in the fields between the woods, where two dirt roads crossed before going their separate ways? How could he have known that this is where I would be, that this was the route I would take to get him back?The answer was simple; he couldn’t have known. This wasn’t Finn.

The man’s appearance tended to shift, morphing to become a resemblance of whoever you loved most. A pencil sketch, a faded photograph of their likeness. So of course, his features and silhouette were an echo of Finn’s. 

My heart sank. 

“I know what you’re doing,” he called to me before I had quite reached him. “This kind of thing is fun for you, isn’t it? Toying with life and time like you are.”

I stopped, leaving a wide gap of still air between us, not wanting to get too close. “I haven’t done anything against the rules.” My tone was icy, and I didn’t bother to control it.

He raised an eyebrow. “Causing inevitable misery is more about morals than rules. I’d think you would know that. You in particular should know that.”I felt my face grow hot. “I saved him,” I snapped. “Saving someone isn’t miserable.”His face was a mask of indifference, but I could feel him laughing at me behind it. “You know what you’ve done,” he said. And even back then, I did know. I knew the moment I’d stopped the bombs from killing him. I knew, but I didn’t acknowledge it. I pushed it away, drawing curtains around it, pretending that it didn’t exist.

He reached into his pocket and plucked something out, holding it in his hand. I barely caught it when he tossed it to me. 

“Figure it out,” he said. 

“I’m not breaking any rules,” I insisted. “I shouldn’t be punished.”He smiled, even as he was dissolving into the wind. “Just because it’s allowed doesn’t mean it comes without consequence.”

I stared down at the object in my hand.

It was an old-fashioned watch, made of tarnished metal and a scuffed glass face. Unlike a regular watch, however, the hands were moving backwards.

I stuffed it in my pocket. For now, I had to concentrate on saving Finn. I had a plan, and it would work. The world would make sure of that.

I crouched by a patch of dry grass, in view of the police station window. I could see one of the officers in there, though not the one that had arrested Finn. This one looked much more tired. What with all the protests and boycotts, he had probably been out all day being a harbinger of injustice. It made me hope that the trick I was about to pull would lose him his job.

I slipped a book of matches from my pocket and struck one, the flame sputtering to life. There was no wind to blow it out, nothing to make it dance, so I wasn’t worried about starting a wildfire when I dropped it on the grass, setting it ablaze. For good measure, I picked up a medium-sized rock and hurled it through the window. I could have entered another way, but I suppose they deserved it.

I didn’t stick around to see the officer’s reaction. I melted into the shadows on the side of the building, watching as the policeman stumbled outside, stomping on the fire and cursing. That was all the time I needed to slip through the broken window. The glass sliced into both my palms, and into one of my thighs, but I just pressed the wounds into my clothes and kept going.

The 1950s were a good time for jailbreaks. They weren’t as openly distrustful of the general public as they are now, though they flaunted their prejudice. The prejudice is just more veiled nowadays; we pretend everyone is equally loved and viewed, but below the surface, it still writhes there, like a nest of snakes under the floorboards.

I didn’t have to work to open the jail cell. I just placed my bleeding hand on the lock and pushed open the door.

Finn looked up from the bench. Moonlight cast sharp shadows across his face, making him look like a different person. He didn’t smile when he saw me, just stood.

“Your hands are bleeding,” he said quietly.

“I know.” I glanced behind me, checking to see that no one had heard us. “Come on.”We left using a back door. That was unlocked too, perhaps by sheer luck or a bigger force than that. Finn looked over at the front of the police station, where the officer had stamped out the fire and was calling in reinforcements. As we edged into the next street, Finn saw the broken window.

“Couldn’t you have done it the easier way?” he asked, still not smiling.

I shrugged, one hand wrapped in the hem of my shirt, the other pressed against the cut on my leg. “They deserved it.”I healed quickly. Within the next fifteen minutes, the blood had stopped, and the cuts were closing. Slowly, but surely. Flesh wounds were never a looming problem for me. I guess that was one perk to my terrible, prolonged existence.

I speak about it as if there is no choice other than to live. I was stupid, ignorant of what I already knew. I had another choice. A little voice in the back of my mind has always told me I should have taken it, from the beginning, but my selfishness silenced it.

After that night, we had to leave Montgomery. It was probably safer to leave Alabama altogether, since we didn’t know who would be looking for Finn.

We started moving out of our house the next day, packing the belongings we could carry into our red Volkswagen bus. Everything we couldn’t take with us, we dropped off at donation 

centers or thrift shops. To everyone else, we must have seemed like a young couple, changing their life on a whim, living on what was left of the wild edge of the world just to see if we could 

make it. We were the youthful ones that gave in to the insatiable urge to challenge ourselves, to initiate ourselves into adulthood. 

That’s what we seemed like to them. 

They could have no idea that we had been young since the second world war, that we would be young until the third one, or the fourth, or until the world inevitably came to an end. They had no idea that the reason we were running wasn’t to live life to the fullest, it was so Finn wouldn’t live life behind bars. 

The drive through Alabama, heading for Mississippi, was quiet. That wasn’t unusual for us. Neither Finn nor I were talkative or extroverted people. We’d seen too much, which meant we had two options: withdraw into ourselves for comfort or explode outward for the same reason. We chose the former. After you know each other long enough, through the weathering and destructive winds of time, sometimes you don’t need to talk. Being with the other can be enough.

This was a different kind of quiet than we were used to, though. A heavy, questioning silence, with a danger much more present, rather than a distant memory of it. Finn didn’t have to say a word for me to know what he was thinking. He was trying to talk himself through the fact that he didn’t know whether he’d killed the man he pushed into the gutter. That, and the fact he would never know. He could be a murderer for killing the man, or a hero for saving the woman and her children. A murderer, a hero, or both. Never knowing would tear him apart.

But he had more than one lifetime to heal. 

More than one lifetime to be torn apart in more ways than that. 

It was easier to evade capture, to escape your crimes back then than it is today. We camped out on the side of the road in our bus, got our food from convenience stores. Back then, you could still drink out of creeks, as long as they looked clean and were far enough from a town. We kept a gallon jug in the bus anyway. It was summer in the South--in other words, hot--so we slept under the stars, the moon rising over and over again, moving with us and our little sliver of life. Just the three of us--myself, Finn, and our bus, fondly dubbed Ladybird.

Once we crossed into Mississippi, we stayed in towns, campgrounds, the backyards of friendly people. There were more friendly people back then. One place we stayed was with a woman with red trumpet vines all over her house, in full bloom. She let us stay in the backyard, in a patch of soft grass in her garden. We fell asleep each night among lavender, tomatoes, and long stalks of whispering corn. 

We were good guests, cleaning up our bedding every night and spending the days wandering through town or the surrounding woods, so as not to bother her. 

She offered us dinner, assuring us we weren’t imposing, and it would be her pleasure. Good old Southern hospitality. Finn was handy with a fishing pole, so that afternoon, we went down to a nearby pond to catch some catfish. A group of boys were using a rope swing, frayed and dangling from the branch of a cottonwood. They sailed through the air, gangly limbs flailing and hair flying out behind them before they splashed into the muddy water. Some of the older ones did flips or somersaults mid-air, or tried fancy diving techniques, ones the younger boys tried to copy. We stayed on one end of the pond, by the reeds, where Finn’s fishing line wouldn’t accidentally hook one of them. 

That evening, we sat on the porch, eating the catfish, fried with collard greens and potato salad. Cicadas buzzed in the trees, and fireflies winked in and out of the violet sky. 

The woman’s name was Marsha. She was probably about as old as Finn was, but she showed it, and he didn’t. I wondered if she’d tell us stories about the good old days when she was young or give us the sermon on being young that old people always seem to give. 

I call her old as if I’m not older. 

She didn’t give us the sermon, though. She might have seen in our faces that we’d been through more than she had, or that we weren’t so young after all.

We ate in silence.

Those years, between 1956 and 1963, were the golden years--for us, anyway. We traveled around the South, and for a small time, almost a decade, we weren’t witness to any massive, terrible world-changing events. Once in a while, when we were staring at the sea or sitting in a field of fireflies or driving during sunset, with the open road ahead of us, I dared to think that the curse that defined my existence might be gone. In reality, it was like a coiled snake, dormant only for the moment, waiting for the moment to strike.

And strike it did, after eight beautiful years.

 I have seen death. Worse than that, I have seen murder. Murder, that purposeful and heartless destruction of life, the terrible thing I was destined to see for the rest of the earth’s existence--the thing I had cursed Finn to endure, as well.

Death in war is one thing. At least in war, death is expected. 

By that time, we were in Dallas, Texas. We’d been there for almost three months now and had ended up rooming in an average-sized house in the suburbs with three friendly college-age girls. Neither Finn nor I looked much older than they were, so they welcomed us. For the first few nights, we slept in our bus, but they quickly reassured us we didn’t have to and offered us one of the guest bedrooms. Finn got a job working in a coffee shop, and I was as a cashier at a local supermarket. As it turned out, immortality didn’t pay in cash. We would have kept going with our nomadic lifestyle, if not for that little catch.

The girls were nice, but one of their boyfriends had moved in about a week ago, and a few weeks before that, another of them had adopted a Great Pyrenees, which made the whole place rather cramped. When we’d saved enough, our plan was to get back on the road.

We were well into November, and it was raining the night that Finn and I got home from work. He’d waited for me and picked me up when I was done working.

“President’s in town tomorrow,” he told me, but I’d heard it a thousand times from various customers and co-workers that day. Funnily enough, as long as I’d been around, I hadn’t met or even seen many presidents. Or any world leaders, for that matter. I had seen firsthand the 

terrible effects of their decisions and seeing them cheered on and praised made me so angry I didn’t trust myself in their presence.

I was sure this president had commanded horrible things to happen as well as any leader did; but unlike the others, I hadn’t seen the effects. For eight years, I had hidden out in the backroads and backyards of the South. I still saw awful things on occasion, but not the world-shattering type I was accustomed to, nothing that I knew was a direct result of the president’s actions. 

“Everyone else is going to watch the motorcade,” Finn continued, referring to our roommates. “I thought we might as well go. Make a day of it.” He glanced at me. “You know, walk around downtown Dallas, get something to eat. Seeing the president will just be like a bonus.”I would have laughed, but that was just our reality. I’d lived through every president. He’d lived through everyone since Woodrow Wilson. After a couple lifetimes, they felt less important. Just more faces and photographs, blowing by in the wind, only quick enough for a glimpse. Never long enough to get a clearer picture and pin it in your memory.

But of course, we had to go see President Kennedy’s motorcade that November day in 1963. It was what cursed us that led us to be there, because as long as the world was turning, it wasn’t done with us.

We ended up standing on Elm Street, on the grassy knoll that would become so famous in later dates. The crowd was in a good mood, laughing and chatting, craning their necks to see the start of the motorcade. 

As the black Lincoln Continental rounded the corner of Elm Street, with President John F. Kennedy and First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy waving from the open-topped convertible, I’d like to say that I felt something, that a chill washed over my body or I knew something would happen before it did.

The truth is, when the first shot went off, I thought it was a firecracker, a motorcycle backfiring, or maybe a rifle salute. Anything but what it really was.

The crowd reacted, if only slightly. I flinched, the sound too loud and sudden. Kennedy didn’t fall, but he ducked, clutched at his throat. Jackie peered at him, her concern tangible from here. 

I didn’t make the connection, but Finn did.

“They’re shooting!” he shouted, grabbing onto my arm to push me to the ground, out of the path of a wayward bullet, but we weren’t the target, and whoever it was hit what they were aiming for.

Everything seemed slurred. It must have been only a second, but in my mind, it felt like hours. 

The second shot seemed to crack the air in half.

We were close enough to see the spray of blood and bone, to hear Jackie’s agonized screams. Oh my God, no. They’ve shot Jack. To see the president’s head jerk back, then fall limp. To watch Jackie, sobbing, trying to climb from the convertible, men in black suits sprinting to catch up to them, to use their own bodies to shield from damage that had already been done.

Then the whole scene disappeared behind the panicked crowd.

We would have been trampled if Finn hadn’t acted. That man never fails to have his wits about him. I was in a daze, a horrible dreamlike state, but it wasn’t a dream, it was a nightmare, it was real.

We stumbled down the sidewalk, away from the motorcade, Finn pulling me along. Everything still seemed off, muted, like I was in a glass box, separate from the rest of the world.

“Hey! Are you okay?”Our roommate, her Great Pyrenees on a leash, was approaching us, saying something about how the dog had run away and she had to get it and she had only seen President Kennedy way at the start of the motorcade, but that was enough. I was watching the dog, but Finn told her.

“The president’s been assassinated. They killed him. Shot him. We saw it.”She didn’t believe us. Why should she? At least, she didn’t believe it at first. But then she began to register the panic of the people passing, the firecrackers she must have heard that weren’t firecrackers at all, the cheers that weren’t cheers but screams of horror.

Within hours, the whole world would know.

President John F. Kennedy had been assassinated. November 22nd, 1963, in Dallas, Texas.

Even now, it stays in my mind. Death that came out of nowhere, like a lightning strike. Oddly enough, it wasn’t the brain matter and bone fragments that haunted my nightmares. It was Jackie Kennedy’s anguished screams that lingered with me, echoing in my ears. With all the 

horrific things I’ve experienced, that single moment, those single cries of one woman, may be 

the most haunting.

We couldn’t stay in Dallas after that. Since then, I have never been back to that city, and I don’t plan to return. Amidst the shock of our roommates, we packed our belongings into Ladybird. A goodbye wouldn’t have made sense, not right now. Our leaving wasn’t the biggest concern, to them or to anyone, but it didn’t matter to us. We just had to get out.

We had enough money to travel out of the state, so that was what we did. 

But we only had a fleeting moment of peace before the next terrible thing. 

I thought we could avoid the war. I thought what with Finn and I being so off the grid, they wouldn’t even be able to find him to enter his name in the lottery, much less draft him. But I should have known those hopes were naive. There was more at work than just the government. The same forces that saved us time and time again were the same forces to curse us. 

We had been living in a little trailer in Arizona, out in the brush and cacti. I’ve always loved the desert. It’s so empty, so quiet. Harsh, but soft around the edges--void of humanity and their clutter and noise, for the most part. Way out here, you have only the coyotes for company, and that’s how I like it.

Once, I watched a coyote kill a rabbit, springing from right behind it and snapping its neck. No fuss except for the death scream that small animals do. I remember thinking that it was harsh, but not cruel. Animals are that way. They aren’t kind or unkind, cruel, or gentle. They are simply alive. Humans don’t have that luxury of living. We have created a world where morals exist, and in my opinion, it was the worst thing we ever did.

I say that as if I’m one of them. Maybe by now, it’s fair to say. 

The letter came on an overcast summer day. Billowing clouds, hung heavy with gray rain, drooped sluggishly overhead. Without anything taller than the cacti around us, it seemed that the clouds were so close we could almost touch them.

Finn was walking back down the road, his figure hazed a little by dust and heat waves. It was a dirt road and met the highway past where the eye could see. That was where our mailbox was. We didn’t go out that often. For one, it was a long walk. For another, we never got any mail.

That was why the letter in Finn’s hand surprised me.

I came up to meet him, a sick feeling curdling in the pit of my stomach.

“A letter?” I said, keeping my voice casual. “Who’s it from?”In response, he passed it to me.

It was addressed to Finn J. Malkin. A little shock went through me at that; who knew his full name besides me, and who knew he lived here?Then my eyes landed on the return address.

Selective Services.

“Oh.” My own voice sounded faraway, distant, an echo in the rocks. “Oh.”

Finn nodded. His face was set. “We were lucky to have the time we had,” he said, quietly, and then turned to the house, dropping the letter in the dust. There was no need for either of us to open it, not now. We knew what it said, and we knew what it meant.

I enlisted to serve as a combat medic. For once, I realized, I was choosing to be in the thick of war, making a choice to be a part of it. In the other times, I had been drawn into war, in the wrong place at the wrong time. Not now. Perhaps I was finally learning to step up and face the terror that would follow me anyway, instead of running for it.

The real reason I was doing it, though, was because of Finn. There was no way I could stay in Arizona, putting around the trailer and sitting in my lawn chair listening to the silence. Not while he was fighting for his life across the world.

We had to sell Ladybird, which was strangely more painful than going off to war. We had come to love that bus like a child, but we couldn’t take her overseas, and we couldn’t leave her to rust in the desert if we never came back. 

While cleaning her out, getting her ready for the market, I found something under the back seats. 

It was a watch, old-fashioned. Despite all the years it had been there, it looked the same as it had the day I received it. It hadn’t even collected dust. Holding it in my hand brought back a vivid memory of dusk, a crossroads, fireflies, a man whose face never stayed the same.

I put the watch on my wrist. Maybe now, I had an idea of how they had found Finn, how he had been one of the unfortunate ones to get drafted.

Some say war is hell, but I say that hell pales in comparison to war.

I have been in the deepest parts of war, where the air is flame and shrapnel and smoke and the earth is bodies and rubble and the water is blood and tears. That is war. Every time I enter a new one, I think I’ll be prepared this time, or at least that it will be a little less hellish.

And every time I am wrong.

Each war is something different, for me; each has something that I remember, something that isolates itself from the rest in its horror. World War I was the rolling fields and flowering orchards and picturesque towns destroyed and blasted to pieces by shells and gunfire, muddy trenches and uniforms, rivers clogged with the dead. World War II was blood mixed with dirt, the sound of planes and dropping bombs, the smell of smoke and ash, snow and ice and frostbitten skin.

From the Vietnam War, what I remembered most was the sound.

We were posted in the jungle, and the jungle is never silent. I remember the shrieks and trills of animals, bugs, and birds and who knew what else, throughout the day and deep into the night. The gunfire and explosions, seeming so out of place in the lush green jungle. The chopping of helicopter blades, shredding our sanity. 

One of my worst memories took place one night in the jungle, pitch black, the air heavy and still. A sound I’d never heard before slinked from the darkness, separate from the insects and night birds. Drums, and the sound of a funeral procession. 

I stared into the trees. I didn’t know of any villages nearby. Who would be having a funeral, out here in the middle of the night?

Then, a horrifying wail rose from the void. Gasping, sobbing words I couldn’t understand, but made my heart jackhammer against my chest and my breath come fast. A child’s voice, crying out in fear, in a language I didn’t understand, pleading with the drums.

“What-” I couldn’t speak. My eyes were filled with tears, from sheer terror. “Who is that?”

The nurse beside me laughed, but it had no mirth to it. It was a laugh bordering on breaking from fear. “Operation Wandering Soul.”

Images flashed through my mind, what could be going on out there in the night. “Are they-” I couldn’t finish the sentence. “What are they doing to the child?”

She shook her head, her face barely visible in the dark. “It’s not real. It’s a recording. Some idea the CIA had. It’s supposed to scare the Vietnamese soldiers, some kind of psychological experiment.” She gestured into the dark jungle. “There’s speakers somewhere out there. Probably some troops, trying to flush the enemy out.”

“How-”

“It’s supposed to sound like the ghosts,” she said. “Vietnamese ghosts, screaming to the soldiers from the afterlife.” 

There was no way to sleep. Now, knowing what it was, the tapes weren’t as haunting as the reason behind them, at the way humans were willing to dig deep into the minds of others, use their beliefs against them. If I were terrified, whilst knowing it was a loudspeaker out in the jungle, not understanding the language or the culture, I could only imagine the fear of others who did.

Operation Wandering Soul and the occasional echo of gunfire kept me awake that night, and kept me awake years later, when the sound of it was only a memory. 

The job of a combat medic was a heavy burden to carry, both literally and figuratively. The soldiers had to kill and stay alive; we had to stay alive and keep others alive. Though I’d been in war before, and was one of the more confident medics, I would be lying through my teeth if I said I wasn’t just as scared every time I went out. The ear-splitting sounds of shells, the bullets shattering the air like glass set my adrenaline to its highest point. But lives were on the line. Anyone who died on my watch was one more person that wouldn’t make it home to their families because of me. 

I supported men on my shoulders through the jungle, holding their stomachs together or trying to stem the bleeding stump of a limb. Some were silent, others cried or prayed under their breaths, some begged me to save them. I couldn’t listen or reassure them. I just had to hope that we could make it back in one piece and concentrated all my attention on doing so.

The day was muggy, cicadas mixing with the sound of war. Sawgrass sliced at my pant legs, twigs reaching out to snag my bloody uniform. It wasn’t my blood, luckily for me--not for the soldier whose blood it had been, spurting steadily from the stump where his arm used to be. 

I scanned the underbrush, keeping low to the ground and quiet as possible, then froze.

Someone was lying half in and half out of a muddy pool, their gun nowhere to be seen. Blood was staining the water around them. It was an American soldier; I could see the flag patch sewn onto their uniform. Their head was turned away from me, and they seemed to be unconscious. Unconscious, or dead.

I reached him, kneeling down, still looking around for any signs of danger, and examined him.

Oddly, I noticed the name patch before I noticed the face.

Malkin.

My stomach lurched. The world seemed to be tilting around me, all the sound muffled, like it was a hundred miles away and my head was wrapped in blankets. Suddenly, I’d forgotten how to breathe.

“Finn?” I whispered. My voice came out like a squeak, but that was probably lucky, because anything louder might have drawn unwanted attention. I frantically searched for signs of life, and my heart dropped with relief when I felt the rise and fall of his chest. It was shallow, and hard to detect beneath his uniform, but it was there, and that was what mattered.

There was a bullet wound in his side, and he was losing blood. He had probably lost a lot already. We didn’t have much time.

“You have to get up,” I told him, keeping my voice low.

He made an unintelligible sound, his eyelids twitching. 

“This is going to hurt,” I murmured, and then summoned every inch of my strength, grabbing him under the arms and pulling him out of the water. He groaned in pain as I dragged him through the mud, finally releasing him when only his boots touched the pool.

I stared around wildly. A stretcher would be best, but I didn’t have one. I could run back to camp, but it would take too long. Someone could find Finn and finish him off, or I might not be able to find him again.

I remembered how, on the grassy knoll in Dallas, he had put my safety first even when the world was dissolving into chaos around us, how he had been strong and done what he needed to do when I was paralyzed with shock. Now, I had to do the same for him.

I pulled his arms around my shoulders and rose to a crouch, him slung over my back. He was heavy, as I expected, but I had to do this, one knee-bent step at a time. We had to make it back to camp.

On the slow trek back, through mud and grasses and trees, I wondered if Finn would die. I could die, but not in the same way others could, and I thought I had passed that on to Finn. Ironically, the curse might be what kept us both alive—alive to see the world’s next crisis, but alive, nonetheless. 

There was a rustling in the brush ahead of me, and some sort of instinct prickled through my body. I don’t know how I knew, but I dropped flat on the ground, among the high grass, taking Finn with me.

He groaned at the impact, his weight crushing the air out of me, but I willed him and myself, with every fiber of my being, to stay still and quiet.

Footsteps moved towards us; words spoken in a language I didn’t know. Vietnamese soldiers, most likely. If they found us, we were dead. And wasn’t that only fair? It was war. I would be ignorant to expect anything different.

I squeezed my eyes shut, picturing the years I had spent with Finn in the South, living in Ladybird. I remembered our voyage from Europe to the United States, and our home in Arizona. 

I was acutely aware of the watch on my wrist, feeling as if I could hear it ticking, like a bomb ready to go off.

The footsteps passed, fading into the ambient noise of the jungle, but I waited for longer than necessary to get up and take Finn the rest of the way to the camp.  

Finn survived, but by a hair’s breadth. The bullet had missed all his major organs, barely, going in cleanly one side and out the other. I had expected something like that. He had lost a lot of blood, so it took him a long time to recover. He was sent back to the United States to heal fully, and I finished out the rest of the war in Vietnam, on my own.

We kept correspondence in letters. That was what got me through it, I think, getting Finn’s letters and writing him back. I didn’t know how I’d gotten through earlier wars, without a lifeline tying me to the rest of the world.

We reunited at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, when the war was over. He had an impressive scar in his side, and the old injury flared up sometimes when he was overwhelmed or excited, but otherwise, we had made it.

Then, there were the dreams.

One or both of us would wake up screaming and shaking in the middle of the night, the ghost tapes, or the screams of dying soldiers ringing in our ears. The sound of helicopters brought us back to the jungle, and loud noises made us jump and tremble for hours afterward. We got each other through it, though; each of us knew the pain and fear the other felt. We were the only ones who could help each other, even when we were fighting or ignoring the other. We had stuck 

together before then, and we would stay together now. The ever-present fear would never disappear, we would just have to learn to cope.

We got a nice house in Central California. Comfortable, two-storied Victorian in wine country, surrounded by rolling hills of golden grass and dotted with oaks. Most of the people in our small town respected us to some degree; they knew we were veterans of the war, and every once in a while, if we were at the store or on a walk, someone would thank us for our service.

We got a year and a half of peace. Even the universe thought that was fair, considering the war, but it had to find some way to ruin us when a year and a half was over. 

Our house was set on fire, from the living room downstairs. Finn shook me awake to the smell of smoke, and the two of us had to climb the rose trellis down the side of the house in the middle of the night in our pajamas, coughing and piercing our hands and feet on thorns.

 We stood in the grass on the side of the house, under an oak tree, and watched our house burn. There was nothing else to do.

Finn grabbed my arm, pointing to the field by our house.

Someone was standing underneath the tree, watching us, a clear silhouette in the moonlight. Even from here, his figure sent a chill down my spine.

“Finn-” I began, but he was already gone, tearing across the grass towards the figure by the tree. I would have screamed after him, warned him, chased him down, but the first responders chose that moment to arrive.

They arrested Finn for arson. Apparently, his running away when the emergency vehicles got there was a sure sign he was guilty. Their story had been that he was trying to kill me by 

setting the house on fire and leaving me there, and they wouldn’t hear any word I gave in protest. They kept Finn at the police station for questioning. His mugshot was under the headline of the small town the next day. Local Veteran Accused of Attempted Murder and Arson.

And that was how I ended up here, on the side of this hill, staring down at that same police station where Finn was now. I remembered when this had happened the first time, in Alabama, and I glanced at the watch, though I’d looked at it a hundred times in the past day and knew what it would say.

“I need one last favor,” I said to the stars. “Just to get in. I don’t need to get out.”The stars didn’t respond.

I slid down the hill, coming to a stop at the bottom. The cement wall of the station was stoic and cold; there was no way to tell where Finn was, not by looking, but I let my instincts guide me, used my last favor to pass through the wall.

Maybe I was allowed that because I knew I wouldn’t be getting back out.

My eyes adjusted to the dark cell, Finn’s face coming into focus. His smile was wan and crumpled. “We always seem to find ourselves here, don’t we?” he murmured.

There was a noise down the hallway. An officer, doing the rounds. I moved closer to Finn, unclasping the watch from my wrist.

“Remember,” I said, my voice shaky, “on the ship back from Europe? When I said there was no way out, that this was how it would be for the rest of time.”Finn nodded. His face was so tired. “Yes, I do.”I placed the watch in my palm. “Maybe that was true back then, but it isn’t now. Not 

since Alabama.” I exhaled. “There is a way out. If you want to take it.”Finn stared at me wordlessly. He was made up of so many layers of painful memories, so different from the man I’d saved so long ago. He was like a tree, trying desperately to grow but constantly crushed by rocks and snow, rebuilding just to the point of survival before being crushed again. He was human, plain, and simple. The only difference was that he had my protection.

Saving him had been selfish. 

This had all been for me, not for him. I had put him through hell for decades. He followed, and suffered, because he loved me. He made a sacrifice. Now, I would have to return the favor. 

“The watch is going to stop soon,” I said quietly. “When I decide it will. And when it stops, this will all be over.”Finn raised his eyebrows. “Over?”

“Wherever we go after this life. That’s where we’ll go. This life will be over.”We didn’t need to speak after that, not out loud. Finn understood. 

He stepped forward and took my hand, the watch still grasped in my other fist. 

I looked deep into his eyes. Brown, like the earth after a rain, like dappled shade in autumn woods, like smoke drifting in the night sky. Sad, tired, broken, but still with some hope for the future, hope that dwindled every time death and pain exploded around us.

In that moment, I saw him for what he was. 

He was dark alleys, littered with rubble and accompanied by the soundtrack of bomber planes. He was a barrier between hatred and the innocent, the sound of skull on asphalt, the loneliness of a holding cell. He was fireflies and the taste of catfish and muddy ponds and sunsets and cicadas. He was screaming crowds and trampling feet and sudden gunshots, a cool head in the midst of disaster. He was the desert, the endless sky, the howl of coyotes, the shudder of rattlesnakes. He was the ghost tapes and gunfire and sawgrass and humid heat. He was fire and smoke, blood and bone.

He was human.

I squeezed his hand, tightly, and when the officer came around the corner, all he saw was an old-fashioned watch lying on the cold ground, the hands slowed to a final stop.