Odyssey; not for us, man: we went in and out of the combat zones, lickety split and just as quick got stateside, back to the World; stumbling the streets in our derangement and grandeur; knocking on home-sweet-home doors and stepping into living rooms with the Namscape still etched on the backside of our eyeballs; Dad in his armchair with a drink and Mom beside him waiting for me to speak; and, Meg, let me say their questions came out of the pages of the ladies’ magazines where the articles went, “How to Talk with a Vietnam Veteran,” and suggested avoidance of the topic of death. Well, madam, I’d say, and I did say, I don’t know what to say. Certainly no mention of the war. Not a word. Not one single word the first five weeks I was in the house. Days fell into routine: sleep in as late as possible with the shades drawn until the hot day got too hot and I dragged myself up and went downstairs to face their eyes — not judgmental, I wouldn’t call them that: expectant, knowing. Fuck plot and fuck story and fuck the way one thing fits to another and fuck cause and effect, because there wasn’t none, and if there was we didn’t see much of it. Maybe history was moving forward back in the States. Hell, it most certainly was grinding. The Year of Love was turning itself over to the Year of Hate. There was a purgative thing happening. Ideals were falling neatly to the wayside, one at a time, and giving over to violence. Nam was seeping home. One man at a time it was coming back, talking the talk. We felt it there. Like I said, our crewcuts were giving way to long hair. The men went home and the music came back and we listened to it from tinny transistor speakers. On a fulcrum the whole thing shifted when Soldier #1 put his weight down, stepped off the transport to kiss the soil, the whole thing went down on one side and up on the other. Soldier #1 was Rake. When that boy got home the whole show went from rehearsal to opening night. Number 1 got to Michigan and began the beginning; started it all up. I’d be dead and gone by the time that moment came along, but I could feel it in the wind — that hot jungle wind, the stench of burning hootches (ain’t nothing like the smell of burning jungle roof, ain’t nothing like the thick smoke coming off a hootch that’s been Zippoed to flame). Just conjecture and speculation on how it would go down when the crazy fuck got to the world. Billy-T, he’d say to me: We’d be hunkered down against the bomb blasts called in to some coordinates, scared shitless, naturally, that we’d be a Close Air Support casualty ourselves (needless to say we hated and loved CAS; loved ’em for coming in to save our asses and hated them for coming in to save our asses). Hunched down waiting and Rake would be saying, Billy-T, man, when I get back I’m gonna take the state by fucking storm; I’m gonna haunt that place like a motherfucker. I’m gonna be their worse nightmare, etc., etc., etc. Ah, shut up, man, Singleton said, just to tighten the triangle, to make it right, and Rake said, Fuck you, man, and Singleton said, You’d like to, but I’m corn hole sore, and Rake said, in that seriously real, tight, nasty voice he could get, I’m not kidding, shut up, grunt boy, or I’ll frag your ass right here and now. (No, he wouldn’t’ve said it that way; he would’ve said, simply, Singleton, shut up, in the voice, and for the sake of peace between us Singleton would’ve shut up, and he did shut up; I remember that much, leaving behind just the tension, wordless, that was then, a few seconds later, demolished when the fighters came screaming in just over the trees and unleashed their bombs mercifully and the percussion was enough, just then, to wash it away while we plugged our ears and got as close to the dirt as we could and prayed (at least I did). Being dead doesn’t sanctify the living, or the memory of what the living went through. My word is only half good. The truth of what I’m saying might be nil, Meg, or it might be perfect. It’s not for me to pick apart and I’m not gonna do it. Forget heaven. Forget eternity. Some sorry-ass shit has been laid down under the guise of the eternal. Don’t even ask the question: don’t get into the pearly gate shit with me. Don’t try to get me going on the intimate particulars of what transpires down in the so-called living world when in truth I don’t have the slightest inkling; you go into the pinhole of death, sit there, and sit some more until your eyes adjust to the perpetual cave dark and, in doing so, allow yourself to imagine, now and then, that you’re starting to see some light, some glint of it at least, but then you come to realize that it’s just a variation on black and nothing more or less. All those neurons; all that memory, zapped. Maybe it hangs on as long as it can in some eternal place, maybe not: all that hangdog belief put in the afterlife becomes so much hokum, one way or another, anyway; to inhabit another, to walk the earth in the form of a dog or a cat, to reform yourself into some Hindu spirit dervish — roiling and forming before some bewildered farmer’s eyes as he looks up from his toil behind the mule and plow, reins in his hands — all that’s just one more way of trying to imagine yourself into my shoes, and it doesn’t work and it isn’t real. Truth is there’s nothing more than a zip closing the body bag — personal containment unit — and you’re gone, flag-draped (eventually) and shipped home like a hunk of cheese, refrigerated — naturally, by the high altitude — flushed by some Army mortician, powdered up, and, if you’re in shape for it, put on display for all to see. Do I remember the funeral? Hell, yes. What I remember is the way you clutched yourself, Meg, as if holding your own guts in — and I’ve seen that, believe me — and the way you quaked and sobbed, and the way the tears popped from your eyes and strung themselves down your cheeks. Did I stare at you? You were thin then, and sallow-skinned, but still beautiful, your hair fine and yellower than I remembered in Nam, during those furtive long jack-off sessions when I imagined myself in deep. Did I imagine the way your lips would move over the hymns that were sung, the voices lifting through the church (First Congregational) with a bit too much gusto, reverberating in the high arched reaches while the organ tried to outdo the voices but failed? Hell yeah, I did. I imagined your lips moving out of sync — like they would later, drugged up by Rake — into formations that were meant to look like utterances but really weren’t, because you weren’t looking down at the hymnal that your father held open in front of you. Did I scan the faces, seeing my mother and father and brother and the neighbors in anguish, and the minister (believe it or not, his name was Breeze, Dudney Breeze) in his vestments? You bet I did. Did I have that Huckleberry Finn groove going that came from attending your own funeral when in truth I was alive and well, albeit hunched down in a hole trying to survive a friendly ambush — for lack of a better phrase. Hell yeah. Did I imagine your face a couple of hundred times, pained, twisted in front of your loss, blooming like a flower with grief over the death of your boyfriend in Nam, taking in the fact that you would go on with the rest of your life without me? You bet. You see, death isn’t much more than an imagining of death in the face of the end itself as it came when you were trying to feel as alive as possible but were having trouble doing so because you were, at that moment, under heavy fire, or riding point through some bad-vibe part of the Mekong, tired but trying to stay alert, hot alert, but faltering because you were by nature a kid who liked to go off into reveries: by nature you’d deviate from all of your training and boot-camp conditioning at exactly the wrong moment. That was your way of rebelling against existence. That was how you got around the truth of your situation. You started to imagine the life you (if you survived) might have and then along the way you got to the possibility of your own death and then, naturally, casually, laughing about it, you got to your own funeral and then really zeroed in on the details. Asleep at the wheel, so to speak. Was I the only guy in the unit who slept on his feet and found himself dreaming, not some half-ass daydream thing but vivid and spatially detailed dreams? Hell no, I wasn’t. We all did the same thing, except maybe Rake, who had very little to go back to and couldn’t foresee his death the way he could foresee the death of others. Rake drew a blank in the dream department. He could only conjure nightmares, and we all know that nightmares don’t stand the test of time. So let me go back and reiterate what I’m saying here, right now: the dead can look back in time and look down at the world in that way live folks like to imagine, but they do so only as living souls dreaming their way forward to death and, in doing so, looking back. Otherwise it’s just black with some deceptive hints of light that aren’t really light but tricks of the dark and after that an eternal nothingness, etc. etc. etc. Was I having strange visions that summer in Vietnam? Was I spotting angels in the trees and hearing music coming out of the ether? Did I say to Rake and to Singleton: Man, did you see that figure up there in the trees, man? Did you see the angel in the trees? I most certainly did. Was I the only one? Hell no. Was I the only guy who, in the stress and fear and weariness, saw spectral formations of light or whatever that took the shape of human figures with white robes and wings attached to their backs? I’d say not. Were these delirious mind-fuck creations of a mind so wasted — not just from the shit we were in on recon, but from some of the shit I took in Saigon — hallucinatory creations of my own gratefully dead mind? I’d say not. Was I the only guy who saw a vision of Saint Jerome up in the trees outside Hue; a striking re-creation of the da Vinci painting, beating himself senseless to mortify his flesh? Most likely. Did I come up with this image because my old man had a book, and in that book was a replica of the Leonardo painting — not a bad one, either — and I drew upon it when I saw my own vision up there in the trees? Most certainly. Would it be possible to come up with the original vision without making use of something seen before? I’m sure it would, but I didn’t. When we went out on recon patrol, I had to rely on what I’d seen before, and in so doing took the shortest route to my visions because I wasn’t strong enough (who is, really?) to rise to the task of creating something from whole cloth. When it came to conjuring up an angel in the trees of Vietnam I had to lean on what I knew, and I drew inspiration from a Christmas card I had picked up one sunny afternoon at the Upjack house; an angel with wings, a pouty face, pointy breasts — somewhat alluring — through a thin, almost translucent robe; the wings sparkled with glitter that came off on my fingers. Was I illegally in the Upjack house? Did I break into the house in search of funds? I most certainly did. Did I — to use a word I love — burgle the house? I did indeed. Am I being regressive in my approach to this part of my story? Yes. Is there any other way to get at it? No. You see, only through posing concise questions to myself — walking point; taking the flack, trying to sleep through a shelling — could I find the story, or at least part of it. My own, that is. Did I love this girl, Meg Allen, one summer? I suppose you might say I did. I mean, what is love but a retrospective bliss seen from afar — even the next day, or the next second. I loved her and she loved me. I went AWOL and we headed to California. Was she seventeen at the time, a girl whose mother drank herself into afternoon fits, if she drank, or shook with delirium if she didn’t? Did she have the finger marks of a slap on her cheek as she stood barefoot in my doorway? Was she immediately enamored by the figure I cut — striking, I like to think, with my long black hair, my ragged old leather vest with fringe? I’d say yes to all of the above. Did this girl — and the vision I had of her, a vision that shape-shifted as my second tour of duty went into its fifth month, after I’d seen friends killed — become something more, in my mind? She most certainly did. What did she become? She became nothing less than an angelic vision from my past that represented, I like to think, some potential future, frozen in time, unchanged and still seventeen (or eighteen) upon my return to the States — maybe nineteen. But let me stop here. The dead don’t speak. For Christ’s sake, the dead don’t riff on the living. The dead are silent and entangled in the past. The dead, with me as an exception, can’t say a word. Anything said by them is the pure fiction of the living and nothing more. For the sake of illumination, to draw some strings together, to fill in some blanks, because if I don’t do it, alive or dead, who will? Let’s just say I was dreaming this up on point, or riding shotgun, during the weary patrols, exhausted from the fear involved. Just say I made all this up in my own manner, foreshadowing, tightening the neck of the sack that would close in upon me eventually. In that light, let me regress, floating from one possibility to another, Ebenezer Scrooge — style. Early on, when we were on patrol, I imagined it: the state of Michigan itself, in the shape of a mitten, and the world back home as it would be upon my death; but like I said that’s about it, terminus; the only way into me is through the end point and then through whatever visions I might or might not have had before that point — all projecti