Charlotte Rogan - Now and Again

“You can’t control them, but you can write them down,” said the therapist at the veteran’s hospital where Danny went when the voices got too loud, when he had to shout to be heard above them, and when Dolly went to stay with her mother for another night. “Writing is as good as therapy, you’ll see,” said the therapist.

Danny was already starting to notice things he hadn’t seen before. He was already starting to find words for them. The reception desk was gunmetal gray and the sun exploded in at the window and the therapist’s eyes were bombed-out black and the atmosphere in the room was riddled with tension. When Danny started paying attention to the words, some of the tightness went out of him. It was like putting the safety back on in order to smoke a cigarette or take a piss.

“Writers aren’t the same as other people,” said the therapist. “They use their pain as material. When life deals them lemons, they make lemonade.”

Danny didn’t think he was dealing with lemons, but instead of arguing about the exact nature of his hand, he said he’d like to write a play, or possibly a television series. He had an idea for a show where some returning soldiers banded together to stop the war. For the first time since coming home, he was hopeful. For the first time it seemed like he could give the voices a useful task to do, but the voices had ideas of their own.

— I’d like to see you try! one of them said, and another one called the therapist a quack.

— Don’t listen to that quack, said the voice.

In any case, appointments were hard to get, and after three months of shuttling between therapists and prescribing doctors, Danny had a diagnosis, but no real understanding of what was wrong with him or how to fix it. He purchased a spiral-bound notebook, and instead of blocking the voices out, he listened closely to what they were saying. At first they berated him for everything he had done wrong in his life, and then they started in on the things he thought he’d done right.

— What are you doing with Dolly, anyway? they asked. Are you trying to ruin her life as well as your own?

Occasionally he heard his own voice rise in explanation or defense, but just as often he silently acknowledged that no defense was possible and merely sat with the sand-colored notebook in his lap and watched the volcano of exploding body parts and wrote the ranting down.

6.3 Le Roy Jones

Le Roy aimed his weapon at the mouse-shaped target on the screen. It was tempting to neutralize it, but no, he’d save it for later — let it almost reach the safe house and get it then. He was creating the game for his programming class, and already he had five levels of complexity when only two had been required. He liked it that in the game world, he could have purple dreadlocks and tattoos and an ability to show mercy but also to make instantaneous life-and-death decisions. He strode across the virtual landscape pushing trees and boulders out of his way and gaining strength and speed by capturing targets. Five points for the square blue ones, fifteen if they were round and red — more if they had little ear buds and a tail.

“What are you up to?” asked E’Laine when she came home from work. “How was the shop today?”

“Good,” said Le Roy. He was surprised to see E’Laine. If he didn’t want to be surprised, he had to read the list they made together each evening and he had to set the alarm and he had to take off his headphones and turn his chair so it was facing the door. He knew he’d hit his head and it had changed him, but he liked the way he was now even if certain things caught him unawares. He liked working at the shop’s computer repair desk and he liked his online classes and he liked creating games and playing them. He liked the Boolean universe, where things were true or false, yes or no, one or zero — everything logical and ordered according to rules he was learning in his classes.

While he was distracted by E’Laine, his avatar rounded a corner, smack into two of the crosshatched monsters who roamed the hills of his online universe. Luckily for him, a roving robot programmed to annihilate enemy forces saw them and fired, saving his avatar from a serious loss of power. He panned the screen out, saw that the mouselike target was almost at the safe house, took a reading, and punched in the coordinates. Then he hit the enter key and blasted it to smithereens.

“What should I get for dinner?” asked E’Laine.

Le Roy didn’t know. “What do you want?” he asked.

“Shall I make lasagna?”

E’Laine was learning. He liked questions where he could say yes or no, either of which would flip open the gate to the next decision point, the one about helping with the dishes, for instance — yes, of course he would! He was learning too. And the one about walking down to the ice cream store and the one about strawberry or fudge brownie swirl. But sometimes she said a lot of complicated things about their relationship or asked the love question, and who knew what that door would lead to. Marriage, E’Laine said, and children and things Le Roy used to care about but couldn’t even imagine now.

“Do you want to make the salad?” asked E’Laine. It was a funny question, but he said yes, and then he did want to. He wanted to dice the tomatoes into one-inch squares and measure out the oil and salt with the blue plastic measuring set, everything in proportion, and later, when she was licking ice cream from his chin, it seemed fine to say he loved her even if he couldn’t quite remember how love was supposed to feel.

6.4 Joe Kelly

Joe Kelly arrived home to a parade. He was ushered into a light-blue convertible next to a man in uniform he had never seen before and driven through the streets of Hoboken in a long line of cars on loan from a local dealership. The cars in front and behind were full of people with pressed uniforms and stunned eyes just as he himself was stunned and pressed. They stopped frequently, and every time they stopped, someone would lean in at the window to kiss him, the unexpected proximity triggering his adrenaline button and causing the sweat to pool in his armpits.

“What’s the matter, man? Doncha like girls?” asked the soldier sitting next to him in the back seat.

The breeze was cool on Kelly’s brow, but he felt hot, as if the desert heat were trapped inside him or applied like a compress to his body, as if it were a feature of the cloth the uniform was made of or maybe stitched directly to his skin. Sometimes it was a child who leaned in to kiss him, held aloft by a relative who grinned and yammered at him, and sometimes it was a pretty young woman Kelly would have liked knowing before the war. Back then, he would have enjoyed sitting in the shiny car. He would have enjoyed imagining he owned it. He would have imagined one of the women was sitting next to him instead of the soldier and that she was kissing him for real. He wouldn’t have minded sitting in the car now if he hadn’t had to take a leak so badly, so at the next stop, he jumped out without opening the door and relieved himself at the side of the road.

“Hey! Hey!” shouted the bystanders. “Cut it out!” But Kelly paid no attention to them, looking instead at the glittering sidewalk and imagining a line of ants were enemy forces and he was the mighty rain god, dispatched to do them in.

“What did you do that for?” asked the other soldier when Kelly hopped back into the open car, and Kelly told him he had had to take a leak. He enjoyed kissing the girls a lot more after that.

6.5 Danny Joiner

— And what do you say to the charges?

— Charges?

— Of burning the American flag. Let’s start with that.

— I didn’t burn the American flag.