Jaym Gates - War Stories

In bed you told me about all the parts of you that weren’t human anymore. Starting with your fingers, which had been blown off three years ago, and now they’re reset with mods that can arm guns and grenades with just a caress. I could’ve told you that, for the way they pass along my skin, detonating me.

Your eyes, at least your left one, that can see in the night or the black of space, can read radiation levels and zoom in on targets from ten thousand meters away. But to me they’re green with flecks of gold, like something people used to mine, something rare and valuable that catches the light. I saw an old movie once where the cowboys bit down on coins to test their authenticity. If I set my teeth in you I would know that you are genuine.

The line of your spine doesn’t show a scar, even though that was replaced, regrown, made new so you could walk. Seven years ago you’d been ripped apart, torn out like a fish, and they said you’d never walk again. Tough guy. I smiled because I didn’t want to think about it. You smiled because you didn’t want to say it.

This was everything. These were your stories.

The months of convalescence, physiotherapy, reprogramming, refusal. Stubbornness. Let me ask just one question, and it isn’t a game, this isn’t pretend.

Why did you go back?

Don’t they have robots for this now? Isn’t this a machine war?

But it’s humans that wage war.

War is a human problem.

And the rebels have been taking our robots, reprogramming them, and sending them back. Trojan warfare.

This was more than the news said. More than the military let out.

Human beings started this war, human beings have to end it.

I touched your fingertips. Now I knew why they were so smooth. I have another question, I’m sorry.

Every time you go back to the war, they steal another part of you.

How much of you returns home? Not because these scars bother me. Not because I can almost feel the triggers when we lay our palms together.

“I don’t really come back,” you said. “They don’t fix me for that reason.”

You weren’t talking about your body.

These were your stories and they left me cold.

After breakfast I gave you the letters. I wanted to leave while you read them but you gripped my hand and made me stay. Two of us on the bed with the scent of chai tea and waffle syrup, in an apartment small enough to house voices long after they died.

Thirty letters and you read every one, the light from the screen making your skin glow.

As if you weren’t real.

But your thumb moved over my fingers like you didn’t even know you were doing it. Moving at the same speed your eyes did as they gathered up the words. Your thumb moved over my fingers like I was a trigger.

I had the quiet and the worry, as you read.

I had my heartbeat in my ears.

Who needs romance? Reality is better.

At least in moments. At least in imprints before they fade away.

Dear Tuvi.

It’s easier to write when I know you won’t read it. I can be honest. More honest. I can go through all the stages of things and be imprecise about it. Things. I can say I miss you and it doesn’t feel like I’m giving something away into a void. The void. Even if this is going into a void. You’re not here and it’s a void. You’re the one in space, in a void. Write a word enough times and it begins to look funny. It becomes nothing. If I write it enough times maybe it won’t exist anymore. Void.

I only have mundane things to say, but maybe that’s what you want to know. About the orange cat that came by the garage and everyone wanted to keep it. About how it just took our milk then went away, never returned. I raced last weekend and came in second. I think my repulsor alignment was a little off. I’ll fix it for next week. I mixed a new paint and maybe I’ll add a flag to the bike. How can any of this interest you?

The truth is I’m just thinking of you.

The truth is I’m angry that I’ve become one of those. I never expected you, and now look.

I wonder if writing these letters makes it worse. With all my focus on the words, maybe you’re more than you really are. Or maybe I made you up entirely.

I spend months missing you. It’s a currency that never dries up and I get slapped with interest. Maybe at the end of this I’ll be bankrupt. Maybe when you come home and decide you don’t care, I’ll go into foreclosure.

This is what your absence does to me. Suddenly I doubt everything. Should I wear this shirt to the bar? Do I want to talk to anyone else? I don’t feel like riding this afternoon. There’s no more solace in speed.

I go to sleep thinking of how long it would take for word to come back that you’re dead. Sometimes I don’t sleep at all.

Why can’t you at least try to write?

What’s so important about this war?

Why do you care when you can stay here on Earth (with me)?

I can hear you already: Tell a different story, Jake.

Tell me one about going cross country. Tell me all about getting lost in the trees. Give me your injuries one by one. The first crash and the last.

Especially the last because that one is you.

One night I met a soldier in the snow. He wore white boots and didn’t seem to feel the cold.

Tell me the best thing about the seasons changing. How the trees light up like fire and warm the cool blues of the sky. Nothing is as beautiful as that. Death can be beautiful.

No, let’s not take it there.

It’s not death, it’s transition.

It doesn’t matter how many parts of you aren’t homegrown from birth. Don’t you see what I do for a living?

Whatever happens, I can fix you.

Yeah, I believe that shit too.

I never met anything engineered that I couldn’t understand. Taking things apart and putting them back together. That’s what I do.

Dear Tuvi.

Just come back.

I miss you.

Don’t die.

On the last letter: Love, Jake.

And your fingers squeezed the blood from my hand.

We had two weeks the first time we met. The second time around, after six months of absence, we had another two and you said you weren’t going back.

I thought you were joking and it was cruel. But the nervousness told me this wasn’t a joke. You made the decision to stay. I didn’t ask if it was for me. Vanity is the other side of love.

There, I said it. Doesn’t matter that it’s in my head. It feels loud.

You were nervous because you didn’t know how to live in this world. I thought back to those first two weeks. Mostly we were alone. Even at the barbecue we were alone.

The only time we were never alone was with each other.

The secret to being in a room full of people but not noticing a thing is you.

At first we lived.

You moved in with your meager belongings.

Anna threw a homecoming and you didn’t leave my side.

I saw how the laughter was a strain. I saw how you were already regretting it.

“No, no, of course not.”

That was the first time you ever lied to me. I didn’t call you on it because I wanted to believe. I knew it could work. It would just take time. The things beneath your skin now could be used for other things.