Roy Scranton - War Porn

It took the sun a long while to come over the mountains and until it did my vision was bound to the few gray yards around the trailer. It was day but not day, dim but not night, a fugue of half-thoughts and disconnected images, pulsing with power beyond easy meaning—a crow flapping, glowing black against the gray—a shadow like a man crouched with a knife—parking lots aching with pink blur—so overwhelmed by thought I’d have to sit back, set down the pen, set down my coffee, and it goes on—glass towers gleaming out of gray cityscapes, blinding silver—an old man with a red guitar—the booming flame of rockets trailing smoke—a girl’s face, her freckled cheek downy with fine hairs, fleshy lips spread in a smile over crooked teeth. I sink in reverie—and what, what does it mean?—then scrape a few more lines with my pen. Nothing even approximate. Another failure.

I’d moved that June into the mountains just outside Newport because my uncle had finally bought a house and moved out of his trailer. He wasn’t sure what to do with the land, so he said I could stay there over the summer if I did a little work for him. There’s no TV, he warned me, no cable, no internet, no phone, no mail, but I could get letters delivered in town.

I was at loose ends, which I’m sure my mom had told him. I’d spent the winter in Eugene, taking a couple classes at Lane Community College and working as a delivery driver for an organic juice company. I’d been dating this girl but it ended badly and I was itchy to move on, tired of the scene with all its dreadlocked anarchists, tired of weed and patchouli, the protests to save trees, stop globalization, and free Mumia. I thought about trying again with the old ex-girlfriend up in Portland, but that just made me feel worse.

My uncle’s offer seemed perfect. It’d give me a chance to get my head on straight, really figure shit out. I thought I could work part-time and write some poems, maybe finish that screenplay. A good word from my aunt got me work at the bookstore, which was more than enough to get by. I closed shop three nights a week and the rest of the time just chilled, read, smoked a little weed, and helped my uncle with his odd jobs. I wrote letters to the ex-girlfriend in Portland. I wrote poetry. I hung out with this guy named J.J. who worked at Ripley’s Believe It or Not! I hung out with Lisa from the bookstore and her husband, Mike, a house painter. I met a girl named Alice at Nana’s Irish Pub and we started hooking up. She was a total flake, which I guess is sort of what I wanted.

The sun came over the rise around ten, burning off the fog, unveiling vivid green. I’d lose my sense of boundlessness then, my dreamscape of wandering intellection, and come back to the blood-filled breath of life, the hum of bugs and the warmth of sunlight. I’d come back to the fact that I didn’t know what I was doing, that I was killing time, that when I went into town later I’d be the same aimless transient I was yesterday, still no goal, no point to my story.

Often I’d hike to the top of the mountain, about two miles from the trailer, to a clear-cut along the ridge where the view opened and beyond my farthest gaze unrolled the wide Pacific’s endless sweep.

I’d watch the blue waves and think, today you’re coming up with a plan. You’re gonna figure your shit out. You going back to school? You gonna get certified at something, get a real job, be a plumber or a nurse or tend bar? Thirty wasn’t quite around the corner but it wasn’t so far away, either, and I felt the need to do some thing, accomplish some thing, do something real.

Oh, sure, I knew it was all a con. I knew the system was out to get me. I knew we all wanted to be free and live our lives and make art and all that bullshit, but I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been to the dentist. And what if I broke a leg, or got sick, or hit by a car? How would I pay for anything? And why did my circle of friends seem to be shifting, turning seedier, more addiction-prone, less aware of their own lives as a series of choices they’d made and more inclined to ascribe to events wholly metaphysical causes—I just had a feeling, you know, it was like the universe gave me a sign, sometimes you do a reading and it’s just like so spot on, it was like there was this voice telling me… How much longer would it take till I was trapped in a world without responsibility, where things just sort of happened and we all just got along, stumbling in a fuzz of pot smoke, excuses, and superstition?

Yet there I went into town, working at the bookshop, drinking with J.J., fooling around with Alice, getting high, ending the night in a hazy drive back up the mountain or crashed in Alice’s bed, waking to strange light through a strange window burning away the illusion of ease life wore by night and revealing beneath it the grim furrows of bad habits too deeply rutted to pull out of.

Fog, thick, hung in the trees. I got up early and shuffled through the trailer, started the coffee pot, rolled a cigarette. I opened the door and let in the mist, let out the smoke, hoping yet again for clarity.

I left my notebook and pen untouched on the table. For some reason that morning poetry seemed even more futile than usual. I was always going over the same plucked field, picking at the same thoughts and sensations. What was the point of thinking things? Writing them down? Nobody read, nobody cared—no one needed the navel-gazing mystifications of yet another confused and sensitive young soul.

I opened the fridge and saw I had a couple eggs, so I put on a pan and started it warming, melting butter. I cut two slices from a loaf of organic multigrain and laid them on a plate.

For company I turned on NPR. At first it wasn’t anything, just a stream of meaningless sound, then as I stood over the stove with an egg in my hand the babble squirmed into sense. Someone had flown a plane into the World Trade Center. No, two planes. Both towers. One was collapsing, smoke rising up, people jumping. It was an attack of some kind. We were under attack.

I turned up the radio and cracked the eggs, listening to voices cry out over the sizzle of butter frying.

i am an american soldier

i am a warrior and a member of a team

i serve the people of the united states

and live the army values

Trucks roll, gunners scanning the horizon. The sun an incandescent smear. I sweat and turn up the music.

We drive south through the desert in a line, miles long, of big green machines.

We stand in the heat by the road and the wind whips sand at us. Waves of grit slide and ebb across the seething black. Engines hum.

In the distance two Bradleys spin heaving clouds of dust as they circle a cluster of hooches and rumble over a hill. We hear the noise of their guns then their engines fade. Smoke oozes up. An Apache hovers overhead.

Blackened humvees jut up from the sand.

Pictures come out of hadjis getting fucked with at one of the prisons. Hadjis getting punched, hadjis standing on boxes, hadjis with panties on their heads, naked hadjis getting laughed at by skanky Nasty Girl bitches.

I know what I’m looking at, but at the same time, fuck ’em. Fuck ’em to their goddamned shitsucking hadji hell. They’re shooting at us every day and I’m supposed to give a flying fuck about human rights? Fuck that. Once they quit chopping people’s heads off and lighting dudes on fire, then maybe we’ll talk.

Command comes down and says just what you’d expect, reprehensible unprofessional blah blah blah, but who the fuck cares? A few bad apples, they say, make sure you know the regulations, but we all know the score.

The muezzin calls out five times a day. Gunfire breaks the night. No running water. No electricity. No air conditioning. No grass, no carpet, no windows. No fans. Little shade, bad food, no joy, little laughter, no decent sleep. Everyone in the world wears camouflage—the others talk gobbledygook and stare.