Part 8 (2/2)

”Green VW bug,” said Lauren.

”My car,” said Julie. ”Great.”

”They wanted me to call the police,” Lauren said. ”But I was too upset. I didn't even get the license.”

”Lauren,” said Gretchen disapprovingly. Gretchen hated women to look helpless. Lauren looked back at her.

”I was distraught,” she said evenly. She began picking up the finished cannelloni and lining the pan with neat rows. Little blankets. Little corpses. (No. I am being honest. Of course I didn't think this.) Poncho had returned immediately to the couch and his books. ”Chicks shouldn't wander around the city alone at night,” he commented briefly. Lauren loved his protectiveness. Gretchen was silent.

”Then I asked to use the phone,” Lauren said. She wiped her forehead with her upper arm since her hands were covered with flour. She took the pan to the stove and ladled tomato sauce into it. ”The phone was in the kitchen. James took me in; then he went back. I put my keys on the floor, very quietly, and I kicked them under the table. Then I pretended to phone you.”

”All your keys?” Julie asked in dismay.

Lauren ignored her. ”I told them no one was home. I told them I'd been planning to take the bus, but by now, of course, I'd missed it.”

”All your keys?” I asked pointedly.

”James drove me home. d.a.m.n! If he hadn't been there . . .” Lauren slammed the oven door on our dinner and came to sit with us. ”What do you think?” she asked. ”Is he interested?”

”Sounds like James was interested,” said Gretchen.

”You left your name with your keys?” I said.

”Name, address, phone number. Now we wait.”

We waited. For two days the phone never rang. Not even our parents wanted to talk to us. In the interest of verisimilitude, Lauren had left all her keys on the chain. She couldn't get into the apartment unless one of us had arranged to be home and let her in. She couldn't drive, which was just as well since every gas company had made the boycott list but Sh.e.l.l. Sh.e.l.l was not an American company, but we were still investigating. It seemed likely there was war profiteering there somewhere. And, if not, we'd heard rumors of South African holdings. We were looking into it. But in the meantime we could still drive.

”The counterculture is going to make gas from chicken s.h.i.+t,” said Julie.

”Too bad they can't make it from bulls.h.i.+t,” Lauren said. ”We got plenty of that.”

Demonstrators had gone out and stopped the morning commuter traffic to protest the war. It had not been appreciated. It drove something of a wedge between us and the working cla.s.s. Not that the proletariat had ever liked us much. I told our postman that more than two hundred colleges had closed. ”BFD,” he said, handing me the mail. Nothing for me.

YOU ARE ON the surface of the moon and the air itself is a poison. Nothing moves, nothing grows, there is nothing but ash. A helicopter has left you here and the air from its liftoff made the ash fly and then resettle into definite shapes, like waves. You don't move for fear of disturbing these patterns, which make you think of snow, of children lying on their backs in the snow until their arms turn into wings. You can see the shadows of winged people in the ash.

Nothing is alive here, so you are not here, after all, on this man-made moon where nothing can breathe. You are home and have been home for months. Your tour lasted just over a year and you only missed one Christmas. You have a job and a wife and you eat at restaurants, go to baseball games, commute on the bus. The war is over and there is nothing behind you but the bodies of angels flying on their backs in the ash.

PONCHO NEVER CALLED. We went to the city meeting on the helicopter, all four of us, to help the city make this decision. The helicopter was item seven on the agenda. We never got to it. Child care had been promised but not provided. Angry parents dumped their children on the stage of the Berkeley Community Theatre to sit with the council members. A small girl with a sun painted on her forehead knocked over a microphone. The conservative council members went home. Berkeley.

Lauren found Poncho and James in the dress circle. Poncho was covering the meeting. Lauren introduced us all. ”By the way,” she said carefully, ”you didn't find a set of keys at your house, did you? I lost mine, and that night is the last I remember having them.”

”Keys?” asked Poncho. ”No.” Something in his smile told me Lauren must have overplayed herself that evening. He knew exactly what was going on.

”If you do find them, you will call me?”

”Of course.”

Julie drove us home, and I made Lauren a cup of tea. She held my hand for a moment as she took it from me. Then she smiled. ”I thought we were boycotting Lipton's,” she said.

”It's a British tea.” I stirred some milk into my own cup. ”That should be all right, shouldn't it?”

”Have you ever heard of Bernadette Devlin?” Gretchen asked.

We never saw Poncho again except on TV. On 29 June he told us all American forces had been withdrawn from Cambodia. Your birthday, so I remember the date. Not a bad lottery number either. So I always wondered. Were you really drafted? Did you enlist?

Poncho lost his job about the same time Nixon lost his. Some network executive decided blacks didn't need special news, so they didn't need special reporters to give it to them. Let them watch the same news as the rest of us. And apparently Poncho's ability to handle generic news was doubtful. The network let him go. Politically we regretted this decision. Privately we thought he had it coming.

G.o.d, it was years ago. Years and years ago. I got married. Lauren went to Los Angeles and then to Paris, and now she's in Was.h.i.+ngton writing speeches for some senator. Hey, we emerged from the war of the words with some expertise. Gretchen and Julie had a falling-out and hardly speak to each other now. Only when I'm there. They make a special effort for me.

Julie asked me recently why I was so sure there ever had been a real war. What proof did I have, she asked, that it wasn't a TV movie of the decade? A miniseries? A maxiseries?

It outraged Gretchen. ”Don't do that,” she snapped. ”Keep it real.” She turned to me. She said she saw you about a month ago at Fisherman's Wharf in San Francisco. She said you had no legs.

It doesn't alarm me as much as you might think. I see you all the time, too. You're in the park, pus.h.i.+ng your kids on the swings and you've got one hand and one hook. Or you're sitting in a wheelchair in the aisle of the movie theater watching The Deer Hunter. Or you're weighing vegetables at the supermarket and you're fine, you're just fine, only it's never really you. Not any of them.

SO WHAT DO you think of my war? At the worst I imagine you're a little angry. ”My G.o.d,” I can imagine you saying. ”You managed a clean escape. You had your friends, you had your games. You were quite happy.” Well, I promised you the truth. And the truth is that some of us went to jail. (d.a.m.n few. I know.) Some of us were killed. (And the numbers are irrelevant.) Some of us went to Canada and to Sweden. And some of us had a great time. But it wasn't a clean escape, really, for any of us.

Look at me. I'm operating all alone here with no affinity group and it seems unnatural to me. It seems to me that I should be surrounded by people I'd trust with my life. Always. It makes me cling to people, even people I don't care for all that much. It makes me panic when people leave. I'm sure they're not coming back. The war did this to me. Or you did. Same thing. What did the war do to you?

Look how much we have in common, after all. We both lost. I lost my war. You lost your war. I look today at Vietnam and Cambodia and Laos and I feel sick inside. Do you ever ask yourself who won? Who the h.e.l.l won?

Your war. I made it up, of course. It was nothing, nothing like that. Write me. Tell me about it. Please. If I have not heard from you by Christmas, I have decided to ask Lauren to go to the monument and look for your name. I don't want to do this. Don't make me do this. Just send me some word.

I am thirty-five years old. I am ready to believe anything you say.

DUPLICITY.

They took Alice out every single day. Sometimes she was crying when she came back. Sometimes she was limp and had to be carried. This was not much like Alice.

Alice had been Alice the day she and Tilly had returned to the base camp and found it violated. The tent had been ransacked. The camp lantern had been taken and some of their more brightly colored clothes were gone. A box of tampons had been opened and several unwrapped. Alice picked one up, holding it by its long tail like a dead mouse. She laughed. ”What do you suppose they made of these?” she asked Tilly. She stuck the tampon into one of her ears, plugging the other ear with her finger. ”Very useful,” she said. ”Yes? Sleep late in the mornings. Miss the birds.”

Alice's cheerfulness was so marked it required explanation. Alice, who was an artist and amateur cartographer, had told Tilly that the blank s.p.a.ces in maps were often referred to as sleeping beauties. This surprised Tilly, who had never given it any thought. She could not imagine anyone actually functioning with this optimistic att.i.tude toward the unknown. Not without a lot of effort. Here be dragons, was Tilly's philosophy. Expect the worst and you'll still be disappointed. Her reaction to the intrusion into their camp had been one of barely controlled alarm. She had known this trip would be dangerous. They had come so casually. They had been very stupid.

But Alice had been Alice. ”It was clearly investigative,” she told Tilly calmly. ”And not malicious. Nothing was broken. If they had wanted us to go, they would have found an unambiguous way to suggest it. This was just curiosity. Though I do wish they hadn't taken our light.” Alice had been sitting outside the tent in the sun, since she could no longer work at night. Propped open on her knees, she'd had a lap desk which folded and unfolded; she'd been penciling a curve in the Nhamund River onto her graph.

The map Alice and Tilly had brought was based on high-alt.i.tude infrared pictures. The maps Alice was doing would be much more detailed. On that day she had been working on something whimsical, partly map, partly picture. She had noted the turn in the river and then, in the water, had added the head of a large river turtle-the tracaja. On the day of their arrival, a turtle like this had watched them for hours while they emptied the boat and set up camp. Alice had sung the turtle song from Sesame Street to it, bringing civilization, she said, to the backwards turtles of Brazil, who could have no knowledge of the advances other turtles had made globally. Alice had nieces and nephews and a predilection for information there was no reasonable way she could know anyhow. Tilly didn't know that song.

Two untidy brown braids rested on Alice's shoulders. A slight breeze blew the unrestrained wisps of hair into her face. She held them back with her left hand, added an arrow to the map with her right. ”You are here,” she'd said to Tilly. Brightly. You are here.

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