Люциус Шепард - Eternity and Other Stories

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.