Ben Fountain: Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk

“Looking proud there, soldier,” he murmurs, just between the two of them.

“Some things can’t be helped, Sergeant.”

Dime chuckles. “You say good-bye to your girl?”

Billy nods and turns to the window. He knows he will never see Faison again, but how can he know? How does anyone ever know anything — the past is a fog that breathes out ghost after ghost, the present a freeway thunder run at 90 mph, which makes the future the ultimate black hole of futile speculation. And yet he knows, at least he thinks he knows, he feels it seeded in the purest certainty of his grief as he finds his seat belt and snaps it shut, that snick like the final lock of a vast and complex system. He’s in. Bound for the war. Good-bye, good-bye, good night, I love you all. He sits back, closes his eyes, and tries to think about nothing as the limo takes them away.

Thanks are owed and cheerfully given to the Ucross Foundation and the Whiting Foundation, both of which supported the writing of this book. Many thanks to Gary Downey, Evan Mayer, Bethany Niebauer, and Eric Reed for guidance on military life. Very special thanks to Heather Schroder and Lee Boudreaux, for keeping faith. And, finally, profound thanks to my wife, Sharie, without whom I would be, quite simply, lost.

B.F.

Ben Fountainis the author of Brief Encounters with Che Guevara . He has received the PEN/Hemingway Award, the Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers’ Award, an O. Henry Prize, two Pushcart Prizes, and two Texas Institute of Letters Short Story Awards, among other honors and awards. His fiction has been published in Harper’s, the Paris Review, Zoetrope: All-Story, and Stories from the South: The Year’s Best, and his nonfiction has appeared in the New York Times and the New York Times Sunday Magazine, among other publications. His coverage of post-earthquake Haiti was nationally broadcast on the radio show This American Life . He and his family live in Dallas, Texas.

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