Richard Lovett: Phantom Sense

I sat up, pulled the phone from its charger, dialed.

“Yeah?”

“It happened again.”

“Flashback, hallucination, or phantom eye?”

“Nightmare.”

Or maybe a daydream. Sometimes it’s hard to tell. Long ago, after a mission on which we only escaped because I could pinpoint the enemy well enough for our snipers to get them through blacked-out windows, I got wondering how, if I were the enemy, I’d beat myself. Flash-bangs was how I’d do it. Or anything that would knock out my swarm over a broad front, all at once. Make me a norm, render the patrol helpless. Then close in for the kill.

We got about halfway across the valley. Still out of Sense range.

The first to buy it was the grunt assigned to baby-sit me. PFC Aston Stanley. One moment he was worming forward toward the next bush. The next, a high-velocity round punched through the hollow of his neck and into his chest. I knew because I had several bugs right there and could feel the impact, feel the consciousness vanish as the shock made jelly of his chest and gut.

“Sniper!” I yelled, and was already moving, one-two-three seconds before I heard the report of the shot that killed him. Three seconds away. A thousand meters. Impossibly beyond Sense range.

A bullet raised dust in the spot where I’d been half a second before. I braked hard and rolled back the direction I’d come from, just in time to dodge a second round. However many snipers there were up there, they were damned good. And obviously equipped with night scopes.

Desperately I looked for a place to hide. Reversed course again, dog scrambling, hands and toes. This time, the round missed me by farther than before, but that was false reassurance. At this range, the bullet only spent a little more than a second in flight. I couldn’t outguess the sniper forever.

There were no rocks big enough for meaningful cover. Bushes were worthless. As long as the sniper knew where I was, he’d just shoot through them. He might miss a couple times, but he’d get me eventually.

It was the Sense that saved me. At the first sign of trouble, I’d scattered my reserves, looking for somewhere, anywhere to hide, dedicating my biological eyes to my frantic efforts to dodge.

What my Sense found was an arroyo, cutting across the valley floor in front of me. I didn’t even bother to see how deep it was. Still scrambling—getting to my feet took too much time—I zigged, zagged, got lucky three more times, and then was falling, headfirst, as a final round spat gravel from the gully wall.

As far as Denise knew, I was about to ship out on yet another mission and wanted every possible minute with her. We’d always been like that, spending those last nights clinging to each other, willing the clock to stop, determined not to waste those precious moments sleeping, because they might be all we’d ever have. For once, there was no risk of being shot, but I still wanted to carry every second’s memory into De-con.

Absurdly, it was that desire that cost me my marriage. Irony strikes hard when you have years to regret.

Before CI-MEMS, those final evenings had been just her and me. Then, that had been enough. When you’re young, you’re sure you can read your lover’s mind.

I don’t know what happens to most couples. Maybe, if they stay deeply enough in love, they never forget how to read each other. Me, I quit having to guess. CI-MEMS didn’t literally tell me what she was thinking, but it did let me know her mood as clearly as my own. When she said, “I love you,” I could feel the depth of it, as hundreds of tiny sensors read the trivia of breath, heart rate, skin conductivity, and skin temperature—not simply as data, but as a gestalt that converted her words to a reality at least as much a part of me as she was.

But now, my swarm was dying and the damn kid’s remote was making a hash of what remained. Hour by hour, I was becoming more disconnected. Hour by hour, Denise seemed more distant. At the time, these seemed like separate crises. Only in retrospect did I put them together.

She was in the kitchen, opening cupboards, moving boxes and cans to see what lay behind. Her way of working out a shopping list. Me, I just go to the store and buy whatever looks useful. I’ve had enough hyper-preparedness on missions.

She didn’t notice until I came up behind, put my arms around her, and nuzzled her neck. “I’m sorry about all the times away. This is the last one.”

She turned, pulling back to see me better. “Really?”

We’d talked about retirement before, but only in a general way. “Really. There’s just one more thing they want me to do. It’s even in the States.” Actually, it would be on base, but I wouldn’t be allowed to see her until I was released, so there was no sense telling her. “No risk of anyone shooting at me.”

I expected her to launch herself into my arms, but instead, she drew further away until she was backed up against the edge of the counter. “It’s about time. Cora used to worship you. You may have noticed she’s not been around much.”

I had, but I’d put it down to general teenage-itis. But now that I thought about it, she’d been that way on my last couple of furloughs, too. Emotionally AWOL from me, just as I’d been from her. Obvious, now that I thought of it, but most of the time, she’d been beyond Sense range. If a tree falls in the forest, and all that. After enough time, the Sense doesn’t just help you interpret reality, it is reality. When she had been around, the contacts had been fleeting hints of a vague wrongness I’d ascribed to normal teenage angst.

But I hadn’t really tried, either. Both of those furloughs had been cut short. Emergencies in places where American troops weren’t even supposed to be. More opportunities for the tallies of success and failure I’d quit making—not because I’d truly managed to focus on one mission at a time, but because each number in the tally—whether a life spared or a life wasted—was a person, with his own Denise and Cora waiting somewhere.

Tell that to the psychs, and they’d say I’d ceased to believe. But it wasn’t that. Some of these people really were bad guys. But in the process of doing what I had to do, year after year, I’d done something to myself, something that made it both more urgent and more difficult to be around Denise, around Cora.

Or maybe I was just burning out. There’d been some pretty hairy missions and even if I could have talked about them, I wouldn’t have, because to say anything would have been to reveal just how close I’d come to dying so many times. Without the Sense, I wouldn’t have made it through more than a handful of them. Without the Sense, I wouldn’t be alive now. With it gone, I would soon no longer feel alive.

“I’ll make it up to her.”

“If it’s not too late.”

There was an edge to her voice I’d never heard before. Or maybe it had been there—it wasn’t as if we’d never argued—but no longer able to Sense beneath the words, I suddenly found it overwhelming.

I let a few flies buzz close, but they told me nothing useful. Skin temperature 94.2. Respiration 16. It was just data. My swarm had shrunk to the point where I could no longer tell how she felt .

“Are we okay?” I blurted.

“What do you mean?”

“Are we okay?” I hesitated. Took the plunge. “Do you still love me?”

“What on Earth would make you ask that?”

“That’s not an answer. Do you still love me?”

“Like when we were kids?”

“Yes… No… Like when…” Like when we clung against the partings. When we thought each moment might be our last . “Like we used to.”