Ghosts

This is a love story, but it’s only an afterthought, because a man can love and be burned to ashes in the same story.

If he even lived half of a normal life, maybe he could have looked back and recalled the way books made him feel as a child, certain and sure, or the way his sister’s voice sounded when she was excited, as if words were exploding out of her mouth too fast to catch them. He’d tell stories of how his grandmother’s backyard always lit up with fireflies on warm summer evenings, how his father sat him on his lap and allowed him to taste whiskey for the first time.

In this life, she would be erased. He wouldn’t be able to remember the shape of her eyes, the curve of her spine, the way her legs looked in pantyhose. Maybe he would have been able to breathe in the part of her life that wasn’t his to claim, where she was alive, and despite the static of the radio and the fidgeting of her hands at the hem of her skirt, he would have told her he loved her and she would have replied with a shy smile and flirtatious eyes as she said, “of course, everyone does, in the end.”

If I told the story backwards, it would be a tale of war that ended in love, the beat of a heart being swept into the currents of an adolescent life. The story would end with meeting the prettiest girl at the carnival and buying her popcorn, watching as she threw half of it away several minutes later, not wanting to ruin her figure. If I told the story backwards, it would end with the innocence of holding hands, the chasing of a dream. It would start without any enchantment, strangers making love with guilty bodies, brown eyes staring at the ceiling and counting all the plastic stars as his lips tried to rewrite history.

What a pretty thing it is, to see nothing but sunshine, where the past is annihilated, leaving only the good things to bloom.

* * * * *

When he was young, he would play in his friend’s backyard, toy guns in hands as they chased each other, skinning their knees as they shouted threats at a turned back, “I’ll kill you, you fuck, I’ll shoot you dead.”

This was the world that could never be stolen from them, where the day ended with their mother’s roast beef and potatoes she had spent all day preparing, scolding them for their dirty clothes and foul language, all while putting band-aids on skinned knees, kissing away the pain, never being able to forget why their life had become nothing but picket fences and rose gardens.

Their world now was muck up to their knees, heavy equipment weighing on their shoulders, a heavier mortality weighing on their hearts. He would watch his platoon, watch their eyes as they hid the madness and thought of home, where perfection in pretty dresses waited for them to fulfill their empty promises. Promises were the most important thing here; they promised each other protection, commitment, to pull through. They would promise to their God that they would be good men again if he let them make it out alive. God would accept some of their pleas, but didn’t tell them that the years he gave them would be tainted with shaking fevers, that their bedrooms at night would smell of war and in their dreams everything they touched would explode.

The forest promised them things, too. It promised sleepless nights that left their eyes sunken in and hallow, it promised to make the air stiff and hard to breath, wrapping its hands around their throats, licking their cheeks, leaving them trembling. At times a red-orange dust kissed their clothes, making promises that they wouldn’t soon forget without some damage.

Even in the midst of a war, he could close his eyes, pretend the guns weren’t real, his friends weren’t dying.
What were they searching for again? They’d march, their limbs aching, their own bodies starting to feel as foreign to them as the ground they stood on. Even when loneliness crept in, they would just light up a smoke and with faded eyes scan the horizon, only breathing in when the air released its grip on their throats. They rested their bones on the ground, ignoring the roots that tried to suck them in, the land trying to steal more of them than what it already had. They’d close their eyes and wish to have a dreamless sleep, just this once.

* * * * *

He met Joyce the summer he left for the service. She was beautiful in the way a man in love saw a woman, hidden in memories he created, exaggerations forgiven under the circumstances. He wanted to tell her that she was magnificent, that the space between her shoulder blades was prettier than the grandest painting, that her lips could be painted any color and he would still want to kiss them. She traced the sidewalks with her feet, her skirt flowing to just above her knees, and he followed, trying to savor every movement.

“You know, the moon is very pretty. I’d like to go there someday,” she smiled, turning to look at him.

“Is that all?”

She laughed in response. “Oh, no, I’d like other things, too.”

“Well, what would those things be?”

She smiled, not responding. She bounced on her heels in front of him, and he tried to grab her hand more than once, but it always just out of his grasp.

* * * * *

She was the first person he called when he got home. His parents hugged him, his mother kissing his cheek with a deep red lipstick that left a mark that only smudged when he tried to rub it off, but he reached for the phone, wanting to hear Joyce’s voice. His father clapped him on the back, told him that he was proud, so very happy to see him back in one piece, while his mother cried, retreating to the kitchen to find the cigarettes she hid in the drawer under the sink, but all of it was forgotten when Joyce answered the phone, her voice young and caught in the midst of laughter. “Yes,” she breathed, and he could hear her shushing a friend. “Who is this?”

“It’s Sam,” he told her.

“Sam?”

There was a long pause, time enough to notice the sound of his mother dropping something in the kitchen, his father laughing and the sound of the fridge opening, the dog’s feet running up the stairs, and finally, “oh, Sam! Of course, how have you been?”

She agreed to let him pick her up, and he would every day, parking in front of her house and watching as she walked slowly toward the car, shouting something behind her as her mother waved. They would drive around until it started to get dark, occasionally stopping to pick up more cigarettes or to see a movie.

He knew his intensity scared her, and she would sit in the passenger seat of his car, pretending it didn’t. He would tell her stories about war, and she would watch with a firm expression, an accumulating resistance. “This is how it was, Joyce. Are you listening?”

Eventually, she told him that she couldn’t live within his reach any longer; she was suffocating under the ghosts he was creating. He understood, but he wanted her to see the world the way he saw it. She needed to see how life burned with secrets and the nights slaughtered even the brave.

“You should’ve seen them, Joyce, and the way that man sobbed after he shot him. The look in his eyes. ‘Barely a man,’ Carl said, ‘if you can’t shoot one of ‘em-”

Her eyes would close as he talked, and maybe she was envisioning the quietness that surrounded death, how it haunted the ground and left the soil dampened, the smell of decay knocking you over even before the flesh started to rot.

“Why are you trembling?”

Her eyes were sad, and she took his hand in hers but didn’t look at him as she stared out the window, off toward the lake. “I’ll pray for you, you know.”

When she was gone, long after he dropped her off at her parent’s porch, watching as she walked with quick jumps up the stairs, he’d rethink what he could have done differently.

“I have this all planned out,” he would say. “We can make this out alive.”

“This war won’t be the end of us,” he would say, adding a reassuring smile. “You’ll always be with me.”

“These men are dead, Joyce, they can’t suffocate you anymore,” he would say, and he would have reached over to place his hand on her thigh, adding a soft squeeze. “Stop choking now, Joyce.”

* * * * *

This is a war story, where violence presses in on them, no matter how they fight it off. In a war story, there is the image of a constant firing of guns, of smoke and fire, of desperate faces looking into questioning eyes as they search for their reason of being there.

He would drink the rest of his whiskey and try not to cry, imagining the taste of her lips, like cherry soda on his tongue, and the innocence in her eyes. She was still young, he wanted to tell them. She looked at things with virgin eyes, with lips that never touched skin that wasn’t her grandmother’s cheeks, she didn’t know any better. He could almost picture her there, kissing new constellations in to the night sky, drawing beauty in the ugliest of places.

Morning would come and as they faded back to green landscapes, he would turn to look at her, sad and lovely, and she would ask with desperation in her voice, “Don’t I know you better than the rest?”

* * * * *

They all were holding onto ghosts.

They told him to try harder to forget her, that she had no place here amongst the gunfire, where the forest never stopped screaming, but he could never imagine a place where she didn’t belong with her creamy skin, her big, brown eyes. Even in his dreams she appeared, grinning and leaving the air smelling of honeysuckles, the night no longer a slaughterhouse but an endless cosmos, a wonderful illusion. She would dance over to him, making art from her movements, and she would be gone by the morning, taking the moonlit glow with her.

He would ask his buddies, “how do I make Joyce love me?”

“Smile at her more,” they’d say.

“Buy her something pretty,” they’d say, lighting cigarettes and laughing.

“Don’t tell her about us,” they’d say, and they wouldn’t be looking at him as they voiced this.