Midnight

by Anna Dove

  Carlos buried his head in his hands.

  “Who would dare do this,” he asked softly, almost as if he were asking himself.

  Neither Elizabeth nor Haley said a word.

  Secrets, like vinegar, must age.

  7. Tehran

  “The harder the conflict, the greater the triumph.”

  -George Washington

  “Cigarette, Rick.”

  “Almost out - slow down there.”

  First Sergeant Jack Hoffman pressed the fresh cigarette between his lips, lighting it with a red lighter, and inhaled as the tip glowed in the falling dusk.

  “Gotta get some more, then,” he mumbled with the cigarette clenched firmly.

  “Yes sir, planning on it.”

  Rick, or Richard Armand as he was fully named, pocketed the pack of cigarettes.

  The two Marines sat down at the table in the bare room. The Tehran Joint Base, utilized as one of the main bases during the US occupation of Iran, was not known for its comfort.

  Jack withdrew the cigarette from his lips and blew out a stream of smoke over his right shoulder, twisting his head slightly as he did so.

  “How’d today go,” he asked, as Rick leaned back in his chair and pulled another cigarette from the box.

  “Fuckin’ fantastic,” said Rick dryly.

  “See your friend?”

  “The kid? Yeah. He tried to sell me another magazine.”

  “You said no?”

  “Of course. Can’t get too close to the fuckers. Smile one day and blow you up the next.”

  Jack took a drag and shrugged. He traced his boot in a little circle on the floor.

  “Up to you - I know some guys like the human interaction.”

  “I’ve got enough of that on base.”

  The distant sound of machine gun fire interrupted them. Both darted to their feet and Jack opened the door. Silence, and then returned fire, from within the base.

  “Shit,” mumbled Jack, and slipped out into the evening light. Rick followed.

  A group of Marines approached them from the left, around the corner of a dormitory building. Jack held up his hand.

  “Who and where?”

  “Sir, Hezbollah group. Probably the same as was six months ago under Saddam Al-Bassar. Firing on the east side by the gate.”

  The deep blue desert sky faded as they made their way quickly towards the eastern end of the base. They could hear the machine guns unloading. Jack had also been present for the attack six months prior, in which seven Marines were killed and eighteen critically wounded. He did not want the same to happen again.

  Then, a whistling sound came from above them and they looked upwards. Too late. There was no time - no time to breathe, or move.

  The explosion hurled them all sideways, sending bodies into the air. Two men were flung into a brick wall, and crumpled to the ground. Several surrounding walls cracked, and fell. Dust rose rapidly as the displaced air moved upwards in a vacuum.

  Jack lifted his head from the ground and pain shot through his chest. His eyes took in the scene - Marines lying in the dirt, face up or face down, some moving, some not. He could not hear. He touched his fingers to his ear and drew them away sticky and red. His fingers sought the ground again and the dust coated them.

  To his right lay Rick. The man was very still. In the deafened silence, as the dust rose into the desert sky, Jack forced himself to his knees and moved over to Rick. He pressed his fingers to Rick’s jugular artery and felt the steady, if faint, beat of his heart. Although sharp pain stabbed through his ribcage, Jack hoisted Rick under his arm and rose to his feet, crouching and dragging his friend to a nearby wall. He propped Rick up against the wall and slapped his face. Rick opened his eyes, stared at Jack unseeingly, and then closed his eyes again. Jack looked back at the others. Some were crawling over to where he was. Others lay still.

  One man, Private Jennings, was crawling under the shadow of a wall that had been loosened by the explosion. His left leg seemed to be immobilized. He was yelling something at Jack, but Jack could not hear. He watched as the man’s mouth opened and closed. Jack’s chest shot more pain inwards and Jack winced but moved towards Jennings to pull him out.

  The wall above the man suddenly collapsed, a ton of brick falling, slowly, slowly, as Jack watched in horror, and then there was no Private Jennings, only a great pile of rubble. Jack stopped, stooped over, and fell to his knees. He picked up a brick and held it in his hand. There was no sound. No sound of gunfire, no sound of yells or screams, no sound of missiles. Jack held the brick for a few moments. Jennings had been through basic training with him. He had raced against Jennings, eaten every meal with Jennings for two months, shot targets with Jennings, gotten drunk off bourbon with Jennings. Jennings had a wife and three children. They lived in Arkansas.

  There were other men. There were other men besides Jennings. Jack looked up, dropped the brick, and stumbled over to a man who lay unconscious, the nearest man to the explosion. Blood dripped from the man’s ears, mouth, and nose. Jack felt for a pulse, and feeling nothing, moved to the next man. He dragged the next man, who was alive, to a propped position next to Rick. Back and forth went Jack, panting, taking short breaths that fit into his broken ribcage. Sweat dripped off his brow but he did not feel it. Like a machine he stumbled, back and forth, back and forth, until all the living Marines were stabilized against the wall.

  A sharp pain in his chest brought him to his knees. He felt his body crumble and his forehead meet the ground. Rolling onto his back, he forced himself to breathe. He could not hear. The world was quiet. Above him stretched the dark blue expanse with the last lights of day fading to the west. His eyes searched for a point to fixate upon, but found none in the vast depth of the heavens. Again the pain in his chest - he cried out but could not hear himself - it sounded like a dull roar in his mind. His tongue was dry and stuck to the roof of his mouth. The pain in his chest worsened. He could feel his body revolting against whatever had happened.

  A face - indistinguishable - appeared above him. A mouth moved - he could not hear what it said. He felt movement. His body was being moved. Again the pain shot through him, and this time it blinded and numbed him and drove him to the point that his consciousness faded. The sky, the face, the base - all fell away.

  7. Baker Island

  “Things are not always what they seem; the first appearance deceives many; the intelligence of a few perceives what has been carefully hidden.”

  ― Phaedrus

  Just north of the equator in the Central Pacific Ocean, about 1,650 miles south of Honolulu, rests a small, uninhabited atoll by the name of Baker Island. An unincorporated territory of the United States since 1857, its land area is less than one square mile, a mere pinprick on the globe. In the early 1900’s a brief attempt at colonizing the island occurred, and a lighthouse and several dwellings formed the colony of Meyerton. However, in 1942 the island was evacuated given its proximity to Axis powers, and subsequently, in 1943, the Allied Forces occupied it and used it as a temporary air base. For a few months the air base remained operational, but early in 1944 the island was abandoned, and left with a lone airstrip and scattered remnants of military buildings, equipment, and debris, all of which soon began to succumb to the creeping vegetation. In 1974 Secretary of the Interior Rogers Morton designated the island as a National Wildlife Refuge, as well as the surrounding local waters that were rich with coral and aquatic species.

  Occasionally, if they felt like it, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service would send a representative to the island to document the status of things. Flat, overgrown, same military remnants. Lots of coral. White sands. One decayed submerged shipwreck now the playground for fish. Nothing different, nothing changed.

  This is what the representative would write on paper, perhaps with a little more scientific detail, but in essence the same. In reality, though, when the representative landed the small aircraft and stepped down onto the deserted island, he had immediately wi
shed he had never come. The singular lighthouse stood strangely out of place, a ghostly shell of civilization past. The grasses below his feet whispered in the breeze and the waves crashed up onto the beach, as if the island were breathing. And yet there was a strange silence, a lack of human noise, that filled his ears and made him think of nightmares he had dreamed when he was a child. The old rusted bulldozers creaked sometimes, and here and there were strewn archaic pieces of weaponry. Here a wheel, there a scrap of sheet metal. Some white birds flitted to and fro, looking at him sideways through their black beady eyes before whisking up into the air. The representative did not like this and as soon as he had taken some pictures and written some notes, he stepped back up into his biplane and sped away to Honolulu, where he quickly forgot entirely about the island.

  On May 2, 2029, only one month after the representative had visited for his checkup, a Beech S35 Bonanza light aircraft circled around the island slowly, having approached from the north. It was a pale shade of green that matched perfectly the color of the grasses. Landing bumpily on the old airstrip, it came to a halt and two people spilled out of it, both in Air Force uniform. They wore sunglasses and looked around at the desolate island before them. Then, shouldering backpacks, they began to trek away from the airstrip towards the lighthouse. Walking easily, they seemed to chat cordially as they passed by housing remnants and pieces of rusty equipment. Reaching the lighthouse, they crossed just by it, and then, without a sound, disappeared. The earth appeared to have swallowed them up without a trace, and the slim grasses bent in the breeze, whispering softly.

  An hour passed, and then two. The sun climbed up to the top of the sky and then began its journey to the western horizon, casting low shadows on the island as it neared its destination. Birds darted to and fro, catching fish and bugs, and the fish swam in and out of the shipwreck and the coral. Just as the shadows grew long and the sun dipped low in the western sky, there was a little movement, behind the lighthouse, and both of the visitors appeared, their figures slowly emerging from the earth. They made their way back to the aircraft, and climbing inside, rose into the sky and flew northwards until they became a speck that eventually vanished altogether.

  Over the next few months this scene became very regular. The aircraft would circle, land, and then people would trek to the lighthouse and disappear. Sometimes, they stayed out of sight for days or even weeks, sometimes for only a few hours. Frequently they would bring packages and reappear without these items. Before rising up again into the air, they would pour more gas into the tank from little containers.

  About two months after all of this began, one particular visitor arrived; he was a tall man, lean and with neatly cut brown curly hair. He wore a different uniform, one of a Marine. His face was angular, with strong brow and jaw, and his eyes darted around him with quick perceptiveness and clear intellect. Stepping off the plane, he stretched.

  “Now, Jack,” said another man coming around the front of the plane, “it’s a short ways up this way.”

  Jack nodded and followed his companion, trudging through the grasses of the sandy soil and watching as the birds soared overhead. It had been barely weeks since he had been pulled suddenly from his second deployment in Tehran, and received orders for Baker Island. A strange place, this was, he thought. So isolated and lonely. Still, he thought, beats Tehran. Recently, he had not been sleeping, plagued by persistent nightmares, images of his friends blown to pieces, his heart racing, hearing echoes of gunshots fired months before. The chaplain and the therapist hadn’t helped much. Not long after he had stopped going to the chaplain and the therapist, he was summoned to Baker Island, to oversee a classified operation on nuclear electromagnetic pulse testing. Jack assumed that they had chosen him due to his military experience in nuclear site inspection and development. After enlisting at eighteen years old, Jack had used his military benefits to complete an undergraduate and then a graduate degree in nuclear physics. Plus, although it was before his time, he knew a good deal about the nuclear testing in the 1960s above the Pacific.

  “Down there,” he said to his companion, pointing southwards. “That’s where they tested them a while ago, Operation Fishbowl. Supposedly lit up the sky in all sorts of colors. They called it a rainbow bomb. Some people in Hawaii held parties to watch. It was like the northern lights but even more spectacular. Can you imagine?”

  “Must have been incredible,” said his companion dispassionately, and turned back to the path.

  Presently they arrived at the lighthouse, and walking to the back of it, Jack’s companion reached down and slid open an iron grate on the ground, about two and a half feet wide. A ladder stretched down into a tunnel below, which was lit with what seemed to be electrical wiring.

  “After you,” said Jack, and his companion climbed down, and Jack followed.

  They were in a small tunnel that led to a metal door with a wheel handle, almost like that which steers a ship. Jack grasped the cool steel, turned it, and pushed the door sideways. It slid slowly, heavily, soundlessly and as it did so, the adjoining room came into view.

  It was a cramped computer laboratory. Seven individuals worked at various stations, intent on the tasks before them. Jack shut the door.

  The others, turning from their work, snapped with rigidity into military form, their arms by their sides, facing the newcomers.

  “Here is First Sergeant Jack Hoffman. Taking over now.”

  For six months Jack worked on oversight and management of the project, but began to find that other factors were influencing his abilities. The nightmares worsened and became more frequent and he struggled with sleep deprivation, leaving his brain tired at best and delusional at worst. Although he strove to manage the project well, he found himself incapable at times of focusing or performing at the necessary levels. Deserts filled his mind, flashes of the sun, heat, gunfire. Bodies. Bombs. Smoke. Farsi.

  After a while it was too much, and he was honorably discharged. At first, Jack behaved well, renting an apartment, working in a post office off and on, but then, he began to drink in the evenings, and then in the afternoons as well, and then all day. He lost his job, and his apartment, and found that his increasing misery would only subside after he drowned it in alcohol, feeling as if he were only a burden to mankind. Then, he lost the veteran stipend, because his addiction disqualified him according to a recent law passed, but his old friend continued to provide Jack with fifteen thousand per month and some drink as well, in secret. His old friend Rick, with whom he had been previously deployed in Iran and whose life Jack had once saved, had a stable job in the White House, working as an adviser for the Chief of Staff under President Gilman, who had been elected the previous fall.

  8. While the District Sleeps

  “Power is not a means; it is an end. One does not establish a dictatorship in order to safeguard a revolution; one makes the revolution in order to establish the dictatorship. The object of persecution is persecution. The object of torture is torture. The object of power is power.”

  ― George Orwell, 1984

  The clear night sky stretched like a canopy over the marble city of Washington, D.C., high and dark above the pillars and terraces, domes and monuments. On 1st St. NE sat a particularly assuming building, a great white pillared behemoth commonly known as the Supreme Court, sprawled at the top of an ascending courtyard. It extended powerfully from side to side, seeming to reach out its arms as the final arbitrator, the guard of everlasting justice. It shone like a beacon in the starlight, daring the surrounding darkness to enter.

  The steps of the Court building towered impressively above the street and the heavy columns reached up to support the engraved roof, which read “Equal Justice Under Law”. The courtyard in front of the building stretched wide with two still fountains on the left and the right. The fountains were bordered by another granite wall, only about two and a half feet high, that formed two opposite semicircles. Steps led up to the courtyard, and on the bottom step, lounging in an obvio
usly drunken stupor, sat Jack. Jack no longer believed in Justice, and so deemed these steps just as appropriate for lounging as any others.

  He looked very different than he had on the island. He was tall and very thin. His sleeves did not fit his arms; they hung on him like a loose sail on a mast. It was doubtful that he had changed his apparel in quite some time; his blue jeans frayed at the knees and the seams and bore all sorts of suspicious stains. The soles of his sneakers did not offer much cushion from the unforgiving concrete. His left hand rested loosely on the neck of a bottle; his right propped up behind him to support his weight. At one time, he might have been a handsome individual, with strong facial structure and thick curly hair; but those had been eroded into gauntness and an unruly head of hair and an unruly beard to suit. Bits of leaves and food had permanently lodged themselves all over his person, and he seemed impervious to minding the state of his body or clothing.

  Presently he began to talk to himself, not in a threatening or insane manner, but rather very simply, very matter of fact. The imbibement of much alcohol impacted only slightly the diction and particular cadence of his voice; he spoke in a deep, slow, intentional tone.

  “Now, Jack, you know the plan. Out here on this island, just finish the job. Just finish the job.”

  He looked up mournfully at the stars and paused.

  “Now, Jack, it’s one thing to have war. War, you’ve got them, you’ve got us, at best we end up writing a national anthem, at worst we’re goners. But it’s war—it’s them and us, man to man, gun to gun. Hm. Gun to gun,” He lifted the bottle and took a chugging gulp, and then shuddered slightly. Setting it down, he shook his head a little, and then became distracted with the bottle label, turning it toward the moonlight.