He needed to get rid of some of this shit –the books and magazines, the photographs of his war and the places he’d been and the things he’d seen. He needed to get out from under that story; it kept things too fresh for him, even as what he had actually experienced became more unreal all the time.
It had too long been a comfort to him to be able to say, Here, here is the document, this is my testimony, these are accounts of what my life once was and what it has never come all the way back from. It was a terrible thing –the thing itself, but also these other things that kept him paralyzed in a confusing series of moments and images– and had cost him friends and family.
He couldn’t help himself, though; he would buy each new book as it came out, oddly thrilled to have one more corroboration, another opportunity to retrace those old memories.
He now had literally hundreds of books on the war, thousands of images and accounts at his fingertips, and he had studied the thing backwards and forwards, from every imaginable vantage point, and he still couldn’t quite find whatever it was he had been and what the experience had done to him. It wasn’t –as some people tried to claim– that it was something he couldn’t bring himself to forget, but rather that the continued appearance of these books, films, and television programs somehow seemed to keep alive and acknowledge the one monstrous bit of history that he could call his own.
He would spend hours scrutinizing each picture and frame, looking for familiar faces, recognizable terrain, some piece of information that rang true or jibed somehow with his own experiences. He was looking for the war he recognized, but also for the war he’d missed, looking, ultimately, for any little thing that could make sense of the experience, anything that might somehow explain it all away.
He didn’t want justification. He’d never spent any time looking for that. From the beginning he’d taken it for granted that the thing would never make any sense. He was looking for something that would untangle the things that were all knotted up inside him. It had, though, long since reached a point where he could no longer really explain what he was looking for, or even what he was looking at.
Some of the photographs could still stir up hot, dark things in him, could still leave him blinking in disbelief. He’d been in an ambush north of Saigon with the photographer Henri Huet, who was blown up in a helicopter several years later. They’d been trapped in high saw grass that morning, pinned down by AK-47 fire from the trees. Soldiers were dropping all around him by the dozens, and there was Huet, crawling around in the midst of the carnage, intently shooting away with his camera. For years he’d studied Huet’s images in books, but nothing ever looked even remotely familiar.
That wasn’t my war, he’d think. That wasn’t the way it was. Frozen like that, those paralyzed black-and-white images couldn’t come close to capturing the terrifying jumble and blur and gulping stop-time panic of those moments of ferocious noise and chaos. The silence in the pictures was all wrong; he’d never known a single moment of such mute repose as he saw in photographs of even the most unimaginable horrors. The photos were too condensed; too much was lost in the cropping. For every one image of frozen suffering there were dozens, even hundreds, sprawled outside the frame, and worse, stretching backwards and forwards from that one moment seized from the larger nightmare. And each of those moments, fuzzed out to its furthest and most chaotic borders, had its own raging soundtrack, was blown over with the most fearsome, inconceivable, full shitstorm racket of war.
Still, looking at those pictures got things running in him every time, summoned the old noise in his head and straightened him up wide-eyed and gulping.
After his wife left him he sat around drinking and paging through books, listening to Sonny Rollins drill holes in the air around him. Or he would sit at his window –he lived in a small attic apartment, and had one window– looking out at what was on occasion a busy street. Yet sometimes he would sit there and not see anything moving for what seemed like hours at a time. It made things questionable, big things like consciousness. Was he awake? Was he dreaming? Was he even still alive, even real?
He seldom ate. His appetite was like a very slight shadow that would surprise him from time to time. He suspected that there wasn’t a single one of his neighbors that could have picked him out of a lineup.
Was it too much? Was it too hard? It could be, he supposed. It sometimes was.
