Jaym Gates - War Stories

If I’d only known that first night how far the cold ran.

But who am I kidding?

The news shows the footage of the ships blinking in, like stars. Spontaneously birthed.

One, two, five, nine, fifteen.

Popping in like God is sticking pins into the night sky.

Almost three years you’ve been gone.

I can’t do the math.

The theory of relativity states that the further out you are, the harder it is to forget you.

Do you know you left one of your T–shirts in my drawer? Actually two.

I’m sorry but you don’t get them back.

When she told me you were at the VA hospital I nearly crashed trying to get to you.

The theory of relativity states that the second you’re in my orbit again, I forget the past three years.

Time contracts right back to that moment. When you left me. Do you want to take it back?

My footsteps on the hospital floors.

Take it back, take it back, take it back.

I’ll wait for you.

I’m not angry anymore.

I was selfish and scared.

I’m not brave.

I touched your spine and the scars on your skull. I was afraid with all the lives you’d lived up, there wouldn’t be one left for me.

They put you to lie on a flat bed.

They’re growing your insides.

They’ve printed out your skin.

They’re giving you a new eye.

Your body seems transparent in the light of so many lasers and the glue they use to hold you together.

I imagine you turning to look at me. You see me through the doors.

You see right through me.

Here to give me a new paint job, Jake?

Let me get my hands into you. Let me meld this bone to that, drive this rivet in, attach an extra plating for heat resistance. Heart resistance. I can make you run again. I’ve designed you something new. You’ll be stronger, faster, and happier. I’ll scour out all the things you’ve seen, I’ll burn the bad dreams until they’re winter blue.

Just let me touch you.

I don’t care if you’re cold.

I don’t care where you’ve been.

This is what I’m good at.

I’m good with you.

They say not to expect the same you.

I’m not the same, so we’re even.

Distance and time flayed us both alive.

I promise you soba noodles done just the way you like. A little spicy, served with chopsticks. Open your eyes. It’s been a long sleep. You won’t remember, maybe, but that won’t stop my dreams.

We don’t have to leave the covers when it’s a snowy Sunday morning. Later in the afternoon I’ll pack your coat with ice. We’ll chase each other down the block and cheat the rules. I’ll teach you how to ride in bad weather and you’ll dent every piece of machinery I own. The fluid in me can manufacture you. Let’s pretend we grew up together. Let’s be born anew. Say the scientific names of the stars because romance isn’t as sweet as reality. Give me an idea of what it’s like to lose gravity. I’ll be the thing you fall back to.

Everyone is waiting.

We’ve got more places to go. I’ve mapped the route. We’ll pass through every season and stop at the beach and all the seas. You’ll get salt in your eyes and I’ll allow myself to cry. We’ll have a picture perfect ending that’s all about horizons. There are more colors in a sunrise than there are stars in the sky. Let me show you.

I’m waiting.

Then we’ll awaken and figure this out.

You don’t have to know right now.

There’s no more war to run back to. Just this one inside of you.

Here, that’s my fingertip.

I know you can feel that. I see you move.

Even if you return to space, this time I’ll follow you.

Here, tell me a story. Tell me there will be no more killing. Tell me there will be no more enemies.

Tell me a story and begin it with I love you.

FRIDAY NIGHT WAS GOING TO be just how Friday nights usually were. A few pints of Guinness, although it’s never as good as it is back home in Donaghmede. A kebab from the Istanbul, heavy on the chili sauce. Maybe one or two JDs at the Talbot to finish. It was pretty much a sure thing he’d end up scuttered and wake up sometime Saturday with a head–splitting, sandpaper–throated hangover. That was the plan, as far as planning went. It was Friday night, after all, and he’d just been paid two days ago.

Town was more relaxed than it had been for months. People were out again, allowing themselves to get back to some kind of normal. The latest round of bioterror threats had put a damper on that for a time, but now they’d faded away without anything much new to be scared of. Time for a few drinks, some food, people’s guards starting to drop at last. It was almost a party atmosphere on the streets, and it was as if Kevin could feel the weight lifting. He hadn’t realised how oppressive it had all been, how much it had affected everything.

The downside was that the squaddies were out too. That always added an extra dimension for a young Irish migrant worker in a garrison town. Weedy, shorter than average, Kevin O’Farrell was easy game for skinhead soldiers pushing him about “for the craic,” as they would say. That kind of shit’s okay as long as everyone’s having a laugh, right?

He headed up Queen Street, fists in his hoody’s kangaroo–pouch pocket, sticking to the far side of the road from the squaddies’ pub, The Union. The chip shop next to the pub spamyelled him, sent taste–centre endorphins kicking down to his belly, making him hungry when he was not. Special deals for our regulars, Kevin. He Xed it.

The Union burned amber on his meSphere, a threatening glow layered over the real by his enhanced–reality lenses. It was a squaddie pub and it knew from his meSphere profile that he was a Mick. There was an app for that. There always was. Fuck ’em all and back, eh?

There were three of the gobshites outside, sucking on cigarettes held in meaty–clawed hands. Pressed dark–blue jeans, heavy black boots with a mean shine, white polo shirts, tattoos of union flags and barbed wire. StreetThreat flagged the situation as level 8: squaddies, booze, a vulnerable ethnic who’s fair game because he’s young and male.

Kevin kept his head down.

HeadKutz spamyelled his meSphere: half–price weekday haircuts, and, for a moment before he Xed that too, his vision was overlaid with head and shoulders of how he might look with a buzz, a flick, a sweeparound, rather than the shaggy urchin mop he had now. Even as he blocked HeadKutz, he had to smile at the real–time wizardry that had taken CCTV stills of him and realityShopped him almost beyond recognition.

Bad move, that. Walking past a squaddie pub, smiling.

Just as Kevin had layers of apps in his ’sphere feeding his enhanced perception of the world all around, so too did they. They’d be standing there with their lagers and their cigarettes and their testosterone, and they’d see Kevin: flagged up as a Mick, coming here and taking English jobs. And smiling about it.

They weren’t all like that, of course, and Kevin was smart enough to know as much: he’d never make the mistake of lumping them all together the way some of them did to everyone else. But the ones that did… their realities were enhanced, their meSpheres knew what they liked and what they believed, and they filtered out the irrelevant noise. Everything was enhanced, and that included prejudices.