Do I really want to do this? he thought. It’s not much. God knows it’s not much, but at least it’s familiar. He raised the heel of his hand to his eye and rubbed, his eyelid pulling down in a droop.
We came over in units, but one by one, and we left all together. We left in a big mess-a human meat pie-with the leftovers of all our lives molded together until we could no longer separate whose limbs were whose. They always said that you come out a man, and I supposed that was true, but I never anticipated coming out as bits and pieces of a bunch of men which may or may not have added up to one of whatever I was before. You heard echoes and voices of all the men and you remembered them so clearly you couldn’t distinguish their stories from your memories. And Tom from Minnesota with the girl he’d asked to marry dressed up like Santa Claus (“me not her”) and Jimmie Jankens from Baltimore who had a burn mark on the side of his face from a car engine exploding in tenth-grade shop (“already had a tour once, I told ’em, first when I walk in, and their mouths all drop not knowing my tour was through the shit engine block of a ’62 Chevy”) and Jessie who used to bite the skin off his knuckles when we’d wait in the leaves and you could barely hear his teeth clicking underneath the hammering rain. And which were their lives, their voices, their clicking teeth in the dark and which your own? Couldn’t really tell then, let alone now.
And so I went into the jungle in a season of a year, and I left in a season of another year.
Janson paused for a minute, his fingers straining at the bit. Then the warm, warm rain brought back Henry Wilder running through the wet, and Janson’s head dropped to the edge of the crate. He could close the door if he strained with all his might, if he bent all his energy to ignoring the searing pain it sent through his back. But it was a heavy door in a strong wind; once it opened, even a crack, everything outside fought and clawed to invade the warmth on the other side. And there wasn’t much warmth to spare.
He had let the first breath of air get through, he had let in Jimmie Jankens from Baltimore and the long, ebbless tide of the hours and days, and he knew he couldn’t go on. They were pooling at his feet and rising to his knees, and there was even less space in his mind than in the room. Slowly, he felt the panic gripping his heart with iron fingers again and again, like those decades spent on evening lookouts that still came to him in harsh whispers and the whirring, the incessant whirring of the blades of the helicopter as it moved ahead and out of the world.
He felt the tears pressing beneath the line of his cheekbones and his nose, and then he felt them spill over and down his cheek, but he couldn’t feel the crying, only the moisture. He still wasn’t used to the crying-he had not cried, not once, for the entire sixteen months of his tour or the empty box of the eleven years to follow, but after that he had started and then he didn’t know what it was, much less how to stop it. And so, with the flashing beer signs outside illuminating his room like blinks of a neon eye, with the slow rotation of the haunting fan above, with his forehead pressed tightly to the top of a BURSTIN’ ORANGE fruit crate, Janson Tanker cried more tears of penance for the years when he could not.
“I’M TELLING YOU, we got him. This guy’s fucking unbelievable-he’s like from a time warp,” Adam Diamond said, as he slid back from his large glass desk and clicked the fourth red button in from the left.
He tucked the phone against his neck, covering the mouthpiece momentarily. “Janice. Double cap, dry-and I mean fucking dry. If I wanted a latte I’d order one.”
With a deft movement of his shoulder, Adam brought the phone back up and against his ear. “Stable, not stable, who gives a fuck? He’s brilliant. No, of course I haven’t read him. Scott checked him out. Said he’s like Faulkner and-I know, I know. So Faulkner was a failed screenwriter, but Scott’s Ivy. What do you expect? It’s his way of saying he thinks he’s good.”
Adam listened for a while, working a set of jade duo balls back and forth in the palm of his right hand. They clicked now and again, but rarely touched, even when he rested his elbow on the table and raised them in his hand up next to his ear. His eyes didn’t flicker when Janice came in and left his cappuccino on the desk next to a stack of phone messages.
“I’m not talking David Rabe. David Rabe was shit-for Christ’s sake, who the fuck casts Michael J. Fox as a lead? I know… I know, Harvey. No one wants to see another Vietnam film, but I’m telling you I’ve got a longer line of thumbs up than a San Francisco bathhouse. We’re talking Platoon here, Harvey. Okay, I know. But we’ll check him out, get some raw material, see where we can run with it. Rules ofEngagement used Vietnam… Yes, yes it did. I don’t care if it wasn’t the primary line, it was in there and what’d that gross?” He whistled. “Holy fuck. And we’re just talking domestic.
“Where’d we get him? We found him, Harvey. We found him. One of Scott’s friends from his New Haven days runs a soup kitchen lower West Side. Regular guy comes in, always asks for a couple sheets of paper towel from the kitchen. Turns out-this is beautiful, Harvey-turns out he’s been writing on them. Both sides, ink bleeding through and all.
“Scott’s friend’s a warm-hearted liberal from an Upper East Side family, so he goes and buys this guy a shit second-hand typewriter and some paper. Month and a half later, the guy shows up with four sheets, typed. No, no I’m not joking. Month and a half later, only four sheets. So Scott’s buddy reads ’em-What? I don’t know why he brought them in to him. Anyway, so Scott’s buddy reads them and they’re absolute crap, right? Some science fiction shit about a world taken over by machines or something. We’re talking the first Terminator. So he sends the guy on his way and doesn’t think twice about it. One week later, the guy shows up and hands him a sheaf, a fucking sheaf of paper. I don’t know, like sixty, seventy pages. Scott’s friend reads them, goes nuts and calls Scott and Scott drives down-I know, I know. In his cherry-red Z3 to a fuckin’ soup kitchen.”
Adam broke off laughing. “He’s dedicated, Scott. Phi Beta Kappa from Yale, when it’s all said and done he drives down to that soup kitchen if he thinks it’ll yield.
“So Scott gets them, these, however many pages, and they’re gold. No, not gold. Platinum. They’re fucking platinum. Best thing he’s ever read, and keep in mind he’s our novel guy. So I tell him to run it through the loop. All tolled, five reads, all give him four stars on style and writing. Wanted to wait for the big men to make the call on story, just because it is Vietnam. So it’s up to you and me.
“Of course I’m waiting. Don’t worry, no one else even knows where to find this guy. He’s completely ours-he couldn’t find his way to an editor if we left him in the lobby of S &S. We’re waiting until we get the second half. It’s a short novel, only gonna be about two hundred pages, all said and done. We’ll wait on him, then we’ll talk. We’ll talk.”
Adam Diamond hung up the phone. It left his ear for the first time since 8:30 that morning, and it was well after 2:00. His lunch meetings often slid late, but this was late even for him, and he could feel his stomach complaining about last night’s Scotch and this morning’s caffeine.
He leaned over and hit the red button. Fourth one in from the left. “Get Cathy on the line, let her know it’s still Baldoria, but it’s gonna have to be three, not two thirty. You can reach her in the car if she’s already left.”