I popped it into my mouth.
Sometime after Abbie left, Maureen arrived. We made plans to get together later in the week. I kissed her goodbye and turned to leave.
“Deets, what are all these paper airplanes doing on the floor?”
Scratching the top of my head, I tried to focus on my answer. “Man, looks like there was a war of some kind.”
Chapter 7
About twenty minutes after taking the LSD, Greg said, “Here we go.”
We spent the afternoon in my apartment, the air popping and whirring, colors becoming more vibrant, music emanating from our movements.
“Deets, what’re you doing here?”
“Here? I’m here?”
I felt the room around me wrinkle.
“Want to go out? See the streets?”
What a turmoil the city was—whistles blowing instructions to people marching in their giant, talking shoes, taxis that ran on wheels of spinning light, chattering robots peering from windows. We wandered around looking for shelter from the sensory onslaught, ending up in a quiet bar. After a while, Greg said that we’d better get out of the place, that a Mafia hit was about to go down.
I answered, “Yeah, meatballs,” and we went into spasms of euphoric laughter. Never had anything seemed funnier.
We walked out, each guffaw triggering another louder one. Some guy in a blue suit with rabbit ears told us to shut up. The drug kicked into high gear, and with our minds overwhelming our bodies, we both lowered ourselves to sit on the street-side curb. Knees and wheels moved past us at eye level.
A taxi stopped in front of us. The driver yanked a cigar out of his mouth, spat out the window, and yelled, “You’re a couple of fucking freaks.” He stuck the smokestack back in his mouth and pulled away, grumbling to himself, “Damn freaks.”
After he left, I’d get flashes in my mind of a cab with smoke billowing out of it, and I’d tell Greg where the taxi was in the city.
“The stogie man’s over on Eighth. He’s still pissed at us.”
And a little while later...
“Cabbie update, man. He just picked up a woman in a blue dress over on the East Side. Man, I think she’s smoking a cigar too.”
Greg was hunched over in laughter when Santa showed up.
“Hey boys, having a good time? Let me help you some. See that grassy area over there. It looks like a much more comfortable place to sit than on this street curb.”
Feeling innocent bewilderment at Santa’s words but trusting in his manner and insightful wisdom, we stood up. I recognized him as the man who had been to Rolly’s performance a few nights earlier. He accompanied us to a park and sat with us for a while. When I turned my focus towards a tree, fascinated by the brilliance of color in its leaves, he vanished.
Greg was lying on the grass with his eyes closed. A pigeon strutted nearby, it’s beak flashing to the ground every third or fourth step.
Odd, how pigeons travel.
My eye went to the far end of a nearly bare tree branch. The sole leaf occupying it slipped loose. Twirling and flipping downwards, it sang a song that had me feeling empty, as if friends and strangers had gathered together to watch my life from a million miles and years away.
“Never could control
The way things were to be
Always thought you just got up and went
Didn’t realize you were sent”
The leaf spiraled towards Greg, then hovered and fluttered down onto his chest. He jerked up into a sitting position, looking around anxiously. “Let’s get back to the apartment.”
His mannerisms reflected an increasing uneasiness as we maneuvered our way through the streets. Once, he put his hand on my shoulder to stop me, then turned and looked back the way we had come. The pigeon was waddling along behind us.
It followed us for seven blocks.
As I opened my building’s front door and stepped inside, the bird burst into the air, its wings bustling, then landed a few feet away. Listening to the chortle of pigeon talk which I found unintelligible, I believed it to be an urgent message intended solely for me.
Greg’s agitation had worsened. “Machine gun nest.”
He jumped to one side of the stairwell, flattening himself against the wall. “The whole building’s shaking.”
Caught between a babbling bird and my friend’s war, I had to get home, to my drawings, my records, something familiar. I began ascending the stairway.
With every step I took, Greg would duck into a tense crouch. “Get down, man, that’s artillery fire.”
A door behind us clicked shut. I heard someone sneeze in a nearby apartment.
“Snipers everywhere. Damn, we’re surrounded.” Greg’s head pivoted back and forth, up and down.
I looked to the landing above where a cartoon hallucination of a cow doing the jitterbug shone brilliantly on the far wall.
Lowering my head, I spoke gently in Greg’s ear. “I see a way through this. Hang in there. I’m following a happy, dancing beast that knows how to defuse the situation. It’s cool, come on.” With an encouraging nod, I reached my hand out to him.
“Your hand, Deets, it’s glowing gold.”
I looked, but only saw my flesh.
Greg gusted out a deep breath. “Man, this is heavy stuff.”
Inside my apartment, the soldier fidgeted on the sofa. To sooth his jitters, I got him a glass of water, then went to put some music on, but I never made it across the room, dropping to my hands and knees instead.
“Wow, man, look at this rug.” I lost myself in intricate patterns of the fibers, their textures pulsing with a sparkling radiance. Microscopic crystals floated around me, dividing softly into iridescent liquids. “This air is amazing.”
I heard a groan. “Aah, not this. No.”
Greg’s body had sunken deep into the broken cushions of the sofa. He was clutching an old pillow.
“Hey Greg, you going to be all right?”
He started to thrash around, yelling, “God, no.” Spittle flew from his lips.
I jumped up, not sure what to do. Then a human-shaped shadow appeared in the corner of the room and moved, propelled by a barely audible hissing, to stand behind me. But its presence seemed vague, on the periphery of my concerns, and I turned my attention back to my friend.
Greg reached his hand out. “Deets, help. Help me, man.”
At first, I envisioned his eyeballs splitting into little shards, but a moment passed, and I realized he was in agony, gripped by some terrible vision. His mouth was frozen open with an unspeakable horror that couldn’t escape his lips. His upper body lurched backwards. He began to flail his outstretched legs vigorously.
“Get off of me.”
He clawed at his clothes, frantically brushing and swatting at whatever he was seeing. I focused my attention on scads of small, screaming, spider-like creatures stuck to him.
“Deets, help me. Please.”
I sat next to him.
“Okay, Greg, you’ll be all right. Stay cool. We’ll ride this through together. It’ll just take some time. Hang in there. I’m right here with you, man.”
He moaned and twitched.
I hallucinated his body cracking and ripping apart.
“It hurts so fucking much, man.”
The shadow figure, still standing behind me, said, “Then he should cry. Touch him there.” And a hand darker than the blackest depths, older than the first stars, emanating a dreadful terror, reached over my shoulder and pointed towards his heart.
The room disappeared. Where Greg’s body had been, I saw only an aura of rainbow colors. In that moment, I believed existence had never happened. I reached my hand past the glow of wonderful light to where Greg’s heart lay. A mass of blood and putrid gore flew out of him. A flash of a small white feather swept from out of no
where at the glob, and in the next instant, both were gone.
The room returned. Greg was sobbing. Deep gasps of air wracked his body as tears flooded down his face. He cried and cried, not able to stop. If he tried to catch his breath, a deep wailing would burst from him instead. I picked up his hand, wrapped my fingers in his, sat back, and waited.
Eventually, his tears turned to sniffles. He ran a sleeve under his nose and reached for his water. After draining the glass, he cleared his throat, and from the stricken tone of his voice, I knew what he was about to say would terrify me.
“We were moving down a jungle trail. It was muddy, slippery, with wet vines slapping at our faces every step. The path ran alongside a cliff—about a ten foot drop down to a sandy river bed with just a trickle of water running through it. We could see a group of hooches about a quarter mile away. All of us were tired, wounded, and really pissed because everything had gone wrong all day. We had blown an assigned target, got hung up in a maze of dense bamboo, been in a wicked firefight, and lost good friends. On top of that, it looked like we were going to have to spend an unplanned night in the bush without support.
“So we’re proceeding on this path when the guy in front of me, our explosives expert, loses his footing and slides down the embankment, landing on a pile of rocks. Man, you could hear his leg bone snap. The lieutenant sends two of the guys down to help Rocco. Martinez, a really good guy, steps on a mine, and body parts are flying all over the place. I got hit with Ludlow’s arm. He was black, so I knew it was his. Weird what goes on in your head at times. I remember thinking, ‘Damn, Ludlow, get your arm out of my face.’
“The three of them are dead, nothing to recover. The whole situation was a trap from the start. About three land mines must have gone off. LT is screaming at everyone to stay away from the river bed. Leave them be. A couple of the guys tell him they have to at least get the tags. The LT says whoever tries to recover those dog tags will end up dead meat, so forget it. We carefully made our way to a clearing where a dirt road ran through some paddies and into the village. Figuring everyone there heard the explosions, we spread out and approached it.
“We had been looking for a Viet Cong agent. Oh Christ, man—I was in a special operations unit. We were assassins. All trained snipers or knife men. Back in training, I had won a number of medals and contests as a sharpshooter, so the brass put me in this hush-hush squad and shipped me out to Nam. We were an oddball mix of navy, marine, and army killers. Some spook ran the unit. We crossed borders, shot dignitaries, snuck into enemy villages and did what we had to do.
“We had reliable info that this agent—he was a Buddhist monk—would be coming down a certain path that morning. Three of us set up an ambush while the LT and the others waited nearby. At the expected time, the monk comes down the path, stepping out from behind a tree and, damn, if there’s not three of them. All in orange, with the shaved heads. We didn’t know which was our mark, and there not being anytime to signal my partners, I figured we’d take out all three easy enough anyway. So I squeeze off my round at the same time the others do. Two of the orange robes explode in a mess of blood and the three of us fire again. I mean quick, y’know. We’re trained and good at this.”
Greg’s pressure on my hand tightened.
“Damn, Deets. Three fucking bullets flying at this guy and he seemed to gyrate his body, leap about seven feet in the air—and no bullets hit him. I mean his feet were seven feet off the ground. And he’s gone. Shit, we all jumped out of hiding and ran to where he had been. Not a trace. Couldn’t hear a thing. And we had a clear view of the path. We searched the area and the squad joined us. Man, the dude had evaporated.
“So LT decides we go hunt down the informer. Find out what the hell happened. We snap a Polaroid of the two dead bodies and get the hell out of there. Man, everything you could think of went wrong. Headed north instead of south. Radio went dead. Ran low on water. You name it. Then we come across a fucking column of North Vietnamese regulars and sat still watching them as they passed by. It took hours. Finally we move out and bump into a squad of more NVA. We get pinned down, and gooks are popping up all around. They swarmed us, and we’re hand-to-hand—slashing with bayonets, firing point-blank. Somehow, I’m alive when the fighting ends, and I can hear my buddies start to call out.
“Dead bodies were stacked all around our position. We lost four guys, and most everyone of us has some kind of wound. Blood, fucking everywhere.
“So when Rocco, Ludlow, and Martinez get tagged outside the informant’s village, we’re all ready for murder. And man, that’s what happened.”
Greg puffed up his cheeks and blew out a long gust of air. “Shit, Deets, I never thought I would tell anyone this.”
I had no idea what to say, didn’t want to guess what he was about to tell me. I was still grasping for a reason to explain how I was sitting in a room holding hands with a man who described himself as an assassin and had killed a Buddhist monk.
“We demolished that village. No one gave any orders, man. We were like a swarm of ants. One mind, y’know. We torched hooches, rounded up women and children. I went into one straw hut, and there was this old guy sitting on a dirt floor, just waiting for me. He knew what I was going to do the moment I walked in. Shit, you can see it in their eyes when they know it’s their final moment. I don’t know what you think when you have about five seconds till the end of your life, but this guy was really calm. I shot him through the forehead. I ripped out the back of the hut and found this teenage girl hiding behind some barrels. A couple of other guys came into the yard, and we pushed her around, taunted and stripped her. Then we each raped her. God, there was gunfire, and screaming, little children wailing. Smoke filled the air. I had just shot, probably her grandfather, and there I am forcing myself on a hysterical virgin. Shit, man, we were crazy. I don’t know what happened next, but I remember pulling a woman by her hair out of a ditch and seeing a man walking towards me. He was kind of limping, and I shot him. After he fell, I went over to see if he was dead. I could tell he was retarded. Y’know, by the features of his face. Why the hell else was he there? There were no men in the village except for the two I shot. What a fucking mess.
“Some of the guys were shoving about a dozen women and little kids into a building. Christ, I go over, and, like we were all hypnotized at the same moment, we each toss a grenade into the room. I moved away and shot someone running through a rice paddy.
“It went on and on. Chaotic. We probably were there for about an hour. I think, when we first got there, the LT questioned some of the women about the informer, but nobody, none of us, tried to stop the massacre after it started. Nobody. Damn. We left the place in flames. Some might have survived, I don’t know. It seemed like when there was no more destruction or killing to be done, we just moved on out of the burning rubble.
“I heard a lone cry when we were about a hundred yards down the road. A baby’s. It weighs on me, man.
“I’m so terrified of who I am. I don’t know how I murdered all those people. War broke down my boundaries. Even with all that military discipline, people can lose it in a flash. I mean, shit, the solution is always to kill. Jesus, dear God.”
He took a deep breath. “I don’t know how I’ve been able to hide what I did so deep inside me. You did something to help me face it, Deets. I don’t know what you did, but thank you, man. Christ, my soul feels looser, like I have a chance.”
As Greg sat there and gently cried some more, I got up and moved in zombie mode over to the window. Having felt every word of his story as if I had been at the slaughter myself, I needed to find myself in the ruins.
Outside, a pre-dawn gray was gently pushing away the night.
The street below was deserted except for a man standing beside a parked car. While clenching a cigarette between his teeth, he maneuvered both his hands in rapid intricate patterns, as if molding or inspecting the air between them. I could se
e streaks of orange light flashing between his palms, the last hallucinatory twitchings of my first acid trip.
Leaning my forehead against the windowpane, letting the coolness of the glass sink as far as it could into my brain, I watched the man’s performance, not really caring what he was up to as he wiggled his fingers to start the day. Defeated by Greg’s story and numbed by the awareness that his terrible experience now rested in my memory, I begged for a moment of sanity. Then, unexplainably, absurdly, I barked like a dog. Just once. “Wuf.” I don’t know how he heard it, but the stranger beside the car jerked his head around to stare straight up at me. A razor-like glint shot from cold predator eyes.
Dull, worn out, chemically poisoned, I felt unaffected by his visual stabbing.
Raising one forefinger, he quickly scribbled at the air—the movement looking like a controlled spasm. He flipped up a few more fingers, then clutched them back down. Finishing off his hand signals by jabbing the index finger straight up at me, his thin lips curled into a mocking grin. He opened his car door, drilled me with one more glare, then drove away.
The finger dance, the cruel eyes, seemed an unnecessary addition to a troublesome trip. “Man, that was bizarre.”
Thinking the morning air would clear my tired, overloaded mind, I gathered my pencil box and sketch pad. “Greg, why don’t you crash, man? I’m going out for a while. I’ll bring us back something to eat.”
I didn’t want him to be there when I returned, yet I worried for him and wanted to help him. His confession had shaped a deep connection between us. But at the same time I could still hear the screams of the village, smell the smoke, and taste the fear as I thought how it would be justice to stuff a grenade between his legs.
Walking towards 6th, my mood lightened when I saw a taxi cruise by. Gripping the wheel tightly, still mumbling, was the stogie man. The cab came to a stop at a nearby corner. Laughing, I tapped on his window and wished him a good morning.
Mayhem (The Remarkable Adventures of Deets Parker Book 1) Page 4
