Eternity and Other Stories

by Lucius Shepard

  GRob nudges him and Wilson glances up to see that she’s pointing at Baxter, who has taken a seat among the flowers some twenty yards away. “Baxman?” he says.

  “Don’t come near me,” Baxter says. “Come near me, I’ll mess you up.”

  GRob puts a hand on Wilson’s arm and says, “Leave him,” but he shakes her off and screams, “Baxter, this is total bullshit!”

  “Walk away,” Baxter says.

  “That all you got for me? Walk away? After the shit we seen together? That’s it?”

  Silence.

  “You better talk to me, Baxter!”

  “Devil’s loose in the world, man. Where we goin’ go? The devils, they got it all now.”

  Fuming, Wilson can’t fit his feelings inside of words.

  “War’s over, man,” says Baxter. “I’m shuttin’ it down.”

  “Baxter! Goddamn it!”

  “I’m with you, man. I hear what you sayin’. But you need to walk away. Right now.”

  His words are badly slurred, almost unintelligible, and Wilson understands from this it’s too late for argument, that his own words, if he could find them, would form merely an annoying backdrop to whatever sweet ride of thought Baxter has chosen to rush away on. Tears are coming and he’s furious at Baxter. Were their good times and shared fear simply prelude to this muscle-spasm of an exit? Did people just invent each other, just imagine they were tight with one another?…

  “Charlie.” GRob touches his hand and Wilson jerks it back from her angrily, saying, “Don’t call me that! I hate that fucking name!”

  “I know,” she says. “Hate’s good.”

  As they move off smartly across the field, Wilson glances back to see the cute yellow canary and the skuzzy black-and-white cat cavorting on Basknight’s faceplate, growing ever smaller, ever more indistinct. He doesn’t know what’s on Baxter’s privacy screen and he doesn’t want to know. Baxter’s always changing it. From an old Pong game to a photograph of a Russian meteor crater to an African mask. All stupidly announcing some sloganlike truth about the soon-to-be skull behind them. Wilson decides he’s sticking with shots of the Rockies for his screen. They don’t say diddly about him, which is better than saying one dumbass thing, and it’ll never seem as monstrously puerile as Basknight’s Sylvester and Tweety Bird cartoon.

  The figures of Baxter and Basknight dwindle to anonymous lumps, and Wilson summons them onto his helmet display, taking an angle low to the ground and looking up, holding them both in frame so they resemble ancient statues, relics of a vanished civilization, weathered soldier-shaped monuments commemorating something, though he’s forgotten what.

  • • •

  1830 hours

  Wilson no longer feels like scrap iron, like a wild dog, like a movie star with mad fucking weapons. He feels like Charles Newfield Wilson. Charlie. Walking through the valley of the shadow, waiting for the jaws that bite, the claws that snatch, and whatever else hell has in store. Scared shitless, even though he’s got a pretty, deadly blond at his side. He knows he should run some battle juice, but does more IQ instead. Dangerous levels. His mind’s eye wheels, encompassing fragmented images of childhood, phosphorescent flares like the explosive firings of neurons, an assortment of sense memories accumulated during the past few hours, a kaleidoscopic succession of what look to be magazine photographs, most relating to a museum display of Egyptian artifacts; these and other categories of things remembered all jumbled together, as if overloaded files are spilling their contents and causing short circuits. The insides of his eyes itch, he can’t swallow, his heart slams, and his vision has gone faintly orange. But soon the flurry and discomfort settle, and it’s as if he’s been fine-tuned, as if a bullet-smooth burnished cylinder has been slotted into place inside his twitchy self, a stabilizing presence, and he begins, for the first time, to have a grasp on the situation, to not merely react to its hopelessness, to accept it, and, by accepting it, by announcing it calmly to himself, stating its parameters, he comes to believe that all is not lost. They are in hell, maybe with a patch or two of heaven mixed in, and they cannot contact command. As with any battlefield, the situation is fluid, and, as has been the case with other battlefields, they can’t trust their instrumentation. He’s been here before. Not in so daunting a circumstance, perhaps, not on a field that—as this one seems to—was fluid to the point that it actually changed shape. But essentially they’re in the same position they were in during other covert actions, conflicts that never made the news back home. Recognizing this gives him hope. If your situation is fluid, you have to become fluid. You have to understand the unique laws of the place and moment and let them dictate the course of your survival. He switches off his instruments. He no longer wants to see things as digital cartoons or confuse the issue with readings that can’t be trusted. They’re on the right path, he thinks. Going forward. GRob nailed it. Going forward is who they are.

  As they walk through the flowers, GRob asks him about Colorado, where he went to school, did he have a girlfriend, and all like that. By this, he realizes how scared she is. She’s never been much of a talker, just a mad fucking soldier like Perdue…and maybe, he thinks, that’s at the heart of her fear. GRob and Perdue were tighter than he and Baxter. They went on leave together, and there’s no doubt they were lovers, though Wilson knows GRob had an eye for guys. Plenty of times he caught her checking him out. But GRob and Perdue were a unit, they neutralized each other’s fear and now Perdue’s gone, GRob’s unsure of herself. In context of this, he wonders why he’s not more unsure of himself now that Baxter’s gone. He doesn’t believe it’s just that IQ is insulating him from fear, and he’s coming to accept that he and Baxter didn’t have anywhere near as strong a bond as GRob and Perdue. What purpose they served for one another is unclear. Yet even as he thinks this, he suspects that he does understand their relationship, that they weren’t really tight, they were flimsily aligned, doing big brother-little brother schtick to pass the time.

  “I got this thing about flowers,” GRob says, and takes a swipe with her rifle as she tramples down the yellow blooms. “My uncle ran a funeral home in Tucson. I used to hafta come over after school because my mama was working, and my uncle would babysit me. It was like flowers all over the place. Guys would give me flowers, I’d hate it ’cause they made me think about dying.”

  “They’re just flowers,” Wilson says. “Not a metaphor…right?”

  She gives a salty laugh. “Yeah, I forgot.” They walk on a few paces, then she says, “Hard to believe it, though,” and this sparks something in Wilson, a flicker of comprehension, something that seems hopeful, helpful, but he doesn’t pursue it, he’s too concerned with keeping her straight.

  “I’m not re-upping after this tour,” he says. “This does it for me.”

  After a pause she says, “You said that after Angola.”

  “Captain Wilts got me drunk and preached me a sermon. What can I say? I was a jerk.”

  “I’m short. I got six weeks left. I could take it all in leave and catch a plane somewhere.”

  “Tangiers, how about?”

  “Y’know, I been thinking about that. Maybe not Tangiers. Somewhere away from the Arabs, man. Somewhere closer to home. Maybe Mexico.”

  “Mexico’s cool.”

  “My parents used to take me down when I was a kid. There was a town on the Gulf. Tecolutla. A real zero place. Palm trees, a beach, some crummy hotels. No tourists. I’d like to go there.”

  “Might not be like that anymore.”

  “Tecolutla’s never gonna change. A few more people…sure. But there’s nothing there. The beach isn’t even that good. Just a whole buncha nothing…and mosquitoes. I could use some nothing for a while.”

  “You might get bored.”

  “Well, that’d be your job, wouldn’t it? To see I didn’t.”

  “Guess we better practice so I can prepare not to be boring. Get to know your ins and outs.”

  She doesn’t respond right away,
and Wilson wonders if she’s actually considering dropping trou and fucking in the flowers, but then she says, “I’m reading heat. Fluctuating. Like it’s a fire up ahead.”

  Wilson switches on his helmet array. A wall of fire over two miles deep, maybe an hour away, extending to infinity. “The suits might handle it, we move through fast.”

  “They might,” GRob says. “They might not.”

  Through her faceplate he reads a grievous uncertainty, an emotion he refuses to let himself feel. He knows to his soul there’s hope, a path, a trick to all this, a secret adit, a magic door. “I’m not shutting down,” he says. “And it’s no use going back. Like Baxman said, ‘Devil’s loose in the world.’”

  “You believe that?”

  “You don’t?”

  “I saw it, but…I don’t know.”

  “What else you gonna believe?” he asks. “That we can walk back out, debrief, hit the PX? That we’re tripping? That we made this shit up? Those are the options.”

  Her face hardens and she won’t meet his eyes.

  “You wanna hang out?” he asks. “You wanna take a rest, sit for a while? Maybe lie down? Just chill? I’ll do it. I’ll stay with you, that’s what you want. But I’m not shutting down.”

  Time inches along, five seconds, ten, twenty, becoming a memorial slowness, a graven interlude measuring her decision. She looks up at him. “I’m not shutting down.”

  Wilson sees from her expression that they’re a unit now, they’ve become a function of one another’s trust in a way he and Baxter did not. They’re locked tighter, like a puzzle of plastic and metal and blood with two solid parts. They’ve made an agreement deeper than a week together after the war, one either he can’t articulate or doesn’t want to.

  “Fight the fire with fire,” he says.

  “Summers back in Arizona, I walked my dog in worse heat’n that.”

  “Gotta burn the flames, GRob.”

  “Muscle up to that motherfucker…make it hurt!”

  “We trained hotter places! We breathed smoke and shit ash trays!”

  “We racked out in the fiery fucking furnace!”

  “Are you glad about it?”

  “Damn straight I’m glad! I got some tunes I wanna play for whatever bitches live in there!”

  “High caliber tunes?”

  “Golden gospel hits, man!”

  “Can you walk through the fire?”

  “Can a little girl make a grown man cry?”

  “Can we walk through the fire?”

  “Aw, man! We are so motivated! We’re gonna be waltzing through it!”

  • • •

  1926 hours

  They hear the roar of the fire before they see its glow, and once they’re close enough to see the wall itself, no end to it, reaching to the roof of the cave, a raging, reddish orange fence between them and the unknown, a fence that divides the entire world or all that remains of it…once they’re that close, the roar sounds like a thousand engines slightly mistimed, and once they’re really close, less than fifty feet, the sound is of a single mighty engine, and the cooling units in their suits kick in. GRob’s faceplate reflects the flickering light, the ghost of her face visible behind it. As they stand before the wall of fire, considering the question it’s asked of them, Wilson goes wide on his display screen, taking an angle low to the ground and from the side, looking upward at their figures. It appears they’re in partial eclipse, the front of their suits ablaze, the backs dark, their shadows joined and cast long over the yellow flowers, two tiny people dwarfed by a terrifying magic. He shifts the focus, keeping low and viewing them from the perspective of someone closer to the fire. Their figures seem larger and have acquired a heroic brightness. It’s a toss-up, he thinks, which angle is the truest. GRob says, “I can’t believe this shit,” and he’s about to say something neutral, a mild encouragement, when it hits him, the thing that’s been missing, the hidden door, the trick to all this. It’s so stunningly simple, he doubts it for a moment. It’s an answer that seems to rattle like a slug in a tin cup. But it’s so perfect, he can’t sustain doubt. “Yeah, you do,” he says. “You believe it.”

  She stares at him, bewildered.

  “Where are we?” he asks.

  “Fuck you mean?”

  “Hell. We’re in hell.”

  “I guess…yeah.”

  “The Islamic hell.”

  He runs it down for her. The induction of chaos by means of military device, the imposition of distinct form upon primordial matter, the anthropomorphic effect; the villagers believing that the flowers were the gateway to Paradise, and then there it was in its metaphorical form. But in this instance there was a truth congruent to the anthropomorphic effect; the cosmic disruption caused by the materialization of Paradise on the earthly plane brought about the day of judgment, allowed hell to be hauled up from wherever it rested on seventy thousand volts or ropes. Or maybe the villagers lied, maybe they wanted the Americans to think it was Paradise and knew it was hell all along. Maybe that’s why what they told the interrogators was classified.

  “So? We been through all this,” GRob says.

  “Are we in hell?”

  “Yeah…I mean, I don’t know!”

  “You do know!”

  “Okay! I know! Fuck!”

  The way she’s staring reminds him of how Baxter would look at him when he said something Baxter thought was dumb. But this isn’t dumb, this is their only chance, and he continues laying it out for her.

  “We’re in hell,” he says. “The Islamic hell. Which means Islam is the way.”

  “The way?”

  “The true religion. We’re in the middle of a verse from the Qur’an. It’s the perfect fucking irony. An American bomb brings about the Islamic day of judgment. And now the path to Paradise lies ahead. How do you escape from hell? People intercede for you. They make a case you deserve getting in.”

  “You’re trashed!”

  “How can you not believe it? We’re here!”

  She has, he thinks, been on the verge of scoffing again, but when he says this, her stubborn expression fades.

  “You see? We’re not infidels…not anymore. We’re believers. We have to believe ’cause it’s happened to us.” He points at the wall of flame. “You said it yourself. We gotta go through somewhere bad to get somewhere good. You felt that. Well, here we fucking are! We have to go through hell to reach Paradise. It makes sense that the last people allowed into Paradise would be infidels…converts. That they’d be the lowest of the low. It makes raghead sense.”

  “We’re not converts,” she said. “You hafta take classes and shit, don’tcha? To convert.”

  “We been jumped into Islam, we don’t need classes.” He puts his hands on her shoulders. “What’s the name of God?”

  She wants to buy into it, he can tell, but she’s hesitant. He asks again, and she says, tentatively, “Allah?” Then she turns away from him. “This is so whack!”

  “It’s not! We been going like it wasn’t happening. Ignoring the reality of the situation. It was there for us all along…the answer. Only thing we had to do was accept where we were.”

  “But…” GRob swings back around. “Even if you’re right, man, why would anybody intercede for us?”

  “I told you! It’s the ragheads! They gotta have somebody to be sweeping up in heaven. What’s better’n a couple of ex-infidels they can rank on? Look! You can’t even question it. We survived! Out of seventy-two—out of the whole world, maybe—you’n me survived. There’s gotta be a reason for that.”

  He keeps at her, explaining the obvious, the simple truth he’s excavated from the wreckage of heaven and the fires of hell. He hears himself preaching at her like how Captain Wilts preached him into re-upping, trying to convince her that a walk in the fire is just what they need, a trip to salvation, and recognizing this similarity, seeing that he’s conning her, even if it’s for her own good, even if the con is sincere, intended to instill faith, because t
hat’s what’ll get them through, faith, the foundation of all religion…Recognizing this, he suspects he may be conning himself, and understands that, also like Captain Wilts, he’s not giving her the whole picture. He’s not sure there’s room for two infidels in heaven. Maybe only the last person allowed in can be an infidel…at least that’s the sense he has from what Baxter told them. If such is the case, he wants it to be GRob. He’s evangelical about this, he desires in his soldierly way to save her. She’s his sister in the shit, his blooded friend and ally, and possibly she’s more than that, so he continues banging words into her head, preaching up a storm, until he sees faith catch in her, a spark of understanding flaring into a flame and incinerating doubt. Watching her face glowing with reflected fire and inner fire, he feels his own doubts evaporate. There is a reason the two of them have gotten this far. They’re both going to make it.

  “Do you hear what I’m saying?” he asks, and GRob says, “Loud and clear, man!”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Paradise!”

  “What’re we gonna do there?”

  “Walk in gardens of silver and gold!”

  “How we gonna get there?”

  “With superior firepower!”

  It’s not the answer he wants, and he repeats his question.

  She falters and then says, “By the grace of God!” but she almost makes it seem another question.

  “By the will of Allah!” he says.

  “By the will of Allah!”

  “Allah be praised!”

  He pounds the message into her, motivating like he’s never done before, but it’s not his usual bullshit. He feels it; the words sing out of him like silver swords shivering from their sheaths until at last she’s singing with him, delirious and shiny-eyed, and she lifts her rifle above her head with one hand and shouts, “There is no God but Allah!”