Sins of the Reaper - 7

When the sun began to pierce the bare and spindly branches of the surrounding trees, I still had not slept. After relieving myself, I returned to the warmth of the poncho liner even though I knew I should keep moving. Instead, I stared at my surroundings with listless, unseeing exhaustion, my thoughts returning helplessly to the bakery where I would never toil again.

A mere two days before, I had worked through the quiet early morning hours, much as I always had. But instead of Bea's memory haunting my thoughts, Lilly’s ghost shadowed me as I sliced and weighed the bread dough before hand rolling each piece and covering them with plastic sheeting while they rested. Her laughing voice returned again and again to tease my thoughts as I cut donuts and silently plucked the resulting holes. Her remembered lips pressed tenderly against mine as the donuts bobbed in the hot oil, my sticks effortlessly turning them as they browned.

Hours later her potency remained undiminished as I walked from the bakery to Portinari’s office in the midmorning brilliance, her following steps so convincing to my listening ears that I found myself glancing over my shoulder to see if I might catch her unawares as she followed behind me.

Once in the darkness of the chamber, remembered emotion leapt and sparked under El’s touch as she gently affixed the connections to Madeleine, tremors of quivering feeling sliding down the nape of my neck to the base of my spine. But as El slipped quietly away Portinari abruptly asked, “What are you afraid of Mr. Candide?” her voice cold with unexpected irritation.

“That I can never go back,” I answered haltingly as electric sensation slipped sinuously across my shoulders where they rested lightly against the back of the chair, Madeleine’s silent tremors and shocks rippling across my arms and legs, my body impossibly awakening even as my consciousness grew numb and cold.

“Then why are you here?” she abruptly demanded. But I was mute, Bea cruelly whispering “Remember me,” before vanishing to God only knows were.

I flinched with surprise as Portinari abruptly commanded “No more secrets,” like an unassailable fact rather than an invitation to bear my soul, her white hair glowing threateningly in the darkness, the floor beneath my feet beginning to tremble with life. "No more secrets," she hissed as El had unexpectedly jabbed a needle in the back of my neck, the grey and featureless room where I sat disappearing in a blaze of color as an explosion lifted me off my feet and tossed me across the hard ground in a thunderous roar, the earth turning summersaults, my arms and legs moving as if no longer connected to my body, the audible cracking of my bones ringing in my ears.

When the earth stopped turning the world had gone eerily still, the clouds on the horizon majestically bright and billowing as Judgment Day.

I felt no pain at all.

And then the strangest thing … I could see the carnage behind me as if I had never fallen at all – as if the explosion had freed me from the prison of my flesh – withering smoke twisting away from the site of the IED, its tendrils rising above a darkened torso lying still on the desert floor, bits of gore and uniform strewn in a scatter-shot pattern before ending where a boot sat upright as if a leg should still be standing in it, a broken and roasted tibia poking out of its top – even the muscles formerly attached to it burned away. A second prostrate figure lay in a shallow depression a few yards away from the booted foot as bullets tore at the ground on either side, the soldier either insensate or unbothered by the terrifying proximity of death. I was slow to realize that the helpless figure in the depression was me.

In the distance Michael and two other soldiers from my squad maneuvered toward my prostrate twin like a blurry imitation of life, Michael’s M249 spraying bullets as he ran. It’s an ambush I tried to yell but no sound came from my lips, my phantom manifestation unable to wave its arms or cry out to stop him. I remember the horror of the realization that he was going to his death even as I was doomed to live, the memory of my helplessness engraved in the marrow of my bones even if unforgivably absent from consciousness for half a lifetime.

The image even now two days after the initial remembrance of it brings helpless tears to my eyes, the clarity of the carnage strewn across the valley floor and Michael bravely charging as freshly remembered as if I was blown up only yesterday. The realization that my alternate self was both immobile and invisible ruthlessly ended my short-lived separation from my body, the bullets I had so casually observed only a moment before, spraying sand and pebbles onto me as I lay terrified on the ground in the next. But even then, it had not seemed unusual that I had briefly observed my injured self and the pantomime actions of my fellow squad mates as if from a disembodied dream.

As Michael’s tracers arced slowly above me, I tried again to yell for him to stop, my voice sounding as if it resided deeply within my head, the expected sound from my mouth only a whistling silence. "Kiss me," Lilly’s voice whispered instead as I tasted the salt in the blood flowing from my lips and Michael’s anxious face abruptly stared into mine, his lips moving with frantic and silent earnestness before a tremendous force knocked him violently to the ground beside me. It was only then that I realized the explosion had deafened me.

Somewhere in the discombobulating tangle of my memory Portinari’s voice warned – “Madeleine awakens the good man with the bad, the wheat and the chaff together,” the little Chiclero pointing a heavy revolver at my head like God’s holy judgment, his finger convulsively tightening on the trigger as I dove beneath its flaming report, a sudden swipe of my k-bar opening his belly before shifting my grip on its haft and thrusting it into his chest to the hilt like a moment of decision that cannot be unmade, a moment of corruption from which there is no returning.

The piercing whine of a mortar overhead finally penetrated my deafness, Michael’s vomit splattering my face and uniform, the explosion after the mortar round penetrated the earth covering us both in a shower of dirt and stones. As a second round whined in the trembling air, I thought to myself – you never hear the one that kills you – like a plea to the warrior God, an errant stone striking a glancing blow on my cheek at the sound of the second explosion. The next one will carry us to Elysium, I prayed as I feebly blinked grime away from my eyes and spit it from my bile covered mouth, Michael coughing weakly before taking my dirt crusted hand in his. Even though I answered his gesture with a reassuring squeeze it was Lilly’s hand that I imagined in my own, her remembered tears as we embraced at the airport somehow more real than the weakening pulse in his grip. Panic fogging my vision and numbing my brain, her face seemed a chalky blank, my memory of her suddenly more precious than either Michael’s life or mine.

I tried to think of something comforting to say as a sudden spasm shook Michael’s arm but the grinding brraaat of mini guns drowned out any thought of conversation, the fleeting shadow of an A-10 suddenly darkening the depression where we both laid, twin 250 pound bombs wobbling away from its wings before it climbed steeply into the bright sky above us.

“This is death,” I whispered as brief flashes of Lilly’s eyes teased my thoughts and the almost simultaneous blasts shook the ground beneath us like the wrath of God. Dirt and heavy stone floated above us as Michael rolled onto my body with a grunt – darkness falling as it always falls – like a terrible dragon cast down from the starry heavens, its red scales rippling across my forearms like a bloody shadow of the world from before.

But instead of terror I felt an inexplicable calm, scattered images from my forgotten youth beginning to flit across uncomprehending eyes, mother playing Moonlight Sonata on the piano as my five year old self watched in lonely admiration, the photograph of her with me as a babe in arms resting above her fingers as they raced passionately across the keys, her image in the photo serenely gazing into my sleeping features as if from a beatific vision.

I remembered too my father’s bitter expression as he stared at the sacred picture before mumbling his final goodbye, its image pulsing with all of its former hope of glory, the life that I once imagined us living slipping away as the door closed for the last time behind him. You’ll never amount to anything his voice echoed within, but even the memory of the claustrophobic blackness of the closet where he sometimes locked me or the terrible silence at the dinner table as my siblings and I sat in rigid terror could not dislodge the sense of peace suffusing my being in that moment.

A series of events and faces from my youth paraded ruthlessly past my eyes, every image distinct and clear in spite of the swiftness of their passage, years of living played out in mere seconds. In the end Lilly pressed her weeping face once more into my uniformed shoulder before I boarded the plane to Afghanistan to tumble again and again into the depression where Michael’s lifeless body lay clinging to mine.

When I returned home from war, the grief I had failed to grieve became an invisible barrier between Lilly and I, Michael’s remembered arms still clinging tightly to me as the world I once knew swooned in the all-encompassing darkness. I found I could no longer look her in the eyes anymore without turning them ashamedly away, the realization that I had thought only of her instead of comforting my friend making me begin to hate her as if she was somehow to blame.

Nietzsche once said “that which does not kill us, makes us stronger,” but there is a wasteland where the mind seeks rest but never finds it, where bitter truths overwhelm the puerile logic of a man’s youth and threaten him with a kind of waking death, feeling and emotion gradually draining away until the body feels more like a dried and empty crust than living flesh. Some call it depression, others simply call it madness, but I call it what it truly is –the second death; the despair that kills the soul as assuredly as a knife piercing the heart kills the flesh.

But somehow in spite of everything Lilly’s memory still won the day, her remembered arms wrapping around me from behind like unmerited grace, the warmth of her embrace so convincing in the moment that when the chamber’s overhead lights abruptly sparked and began to slowly brighten, I wept true tears, my flesh aching with forgotten passion and life. She had never stopped loving me even though I had ceased to love her.

The sensation of her arms strangely lingering a whispered "Don’t let go" finally pierced my lips … "Please don’t let go." No one has touched me tenderly in over thirty years, but for a teasing instant it seemed as if El’s silvery head pressed softly against my cheek rather than Lilly’s remembered blond, her youthful arms clinging tightly around my chest with the same intensity of feeling that Lilly once demonstrated in a formerly forgotten and distant world.

A moment later her comforting touch dissipated even as my eyes blinked in the enveloping brightness, the desk where Portinari coldly observed me collide with my past a blank space on the floor.