John Jodzio - Knockout

I’m on the wrong side of history and I’ve got a vodka-soaked sea sponge shoved up my ass to help me forget. Reichmann’s got one up his shithole too, but Schliess can drink regular and so he’s sipping directly from the bottle of hooch and then passing it to us to douse our sponges some more. We’re hiding in a church rectory outside Winnipeg, all three of us ducking into a large armoire full of vestments whenever we hear the Americans outside.

We know each other from the military hospital in Saskatoon. My tongue was cut off by an American sergeant who liked to collect tongues; Reichmann’s lips and jaw were blown off at the Battle of Thunder Bay. Schliess can’t talk because there’s something wrong with the way his mouth connects to his brain. The doctors wired my jaw shut and wrapped Reichmann’s head in bandages, leaving only a slit for his eyes. After we all got well enough to sit up, the doctors pushed our beds together and tossed us an old sign language book to share. Then the doctors laughed. We laughed along with them or did whatever each one of us did in lieu of laughing: snorting (me), or stomping our foot on the ground (Reichmann), or laughing regular with a lot of drool (Schliess). We laughed because the Americans had just occupied Montreal and it was only a matter of time before everything that was still considered Canadian collapsed or exploded. We laughed because even though it was only early April, it was already 106 degrees. We laughed because why in the hell would we learn something new when we could just pass our vintage porn mags back and forth to each other and point at some woman’s snatch and give a universally understood thumbs-up or thumbs-down.

A few days after the doctors gave us the sign language book, the Americans shelled our hospital and killed everyone but a few people in our non-talking wing. The three of us hid in the rubble until Reichmann pulled out his sketch pad and drew a picture of a pretty woman with large breasts. He wrote the words “This is my wife!” underneath the picture. Then he wrote the words “She’s in Winnipeg!” Then he underlined both the words and the tits for emphasis. Schliess took the picture and circled her tits and wrote “Does she have any sisters?” and then there was much porkchopping and substitute laughter between Schliess and myself but then Reichmann wrote “I want to see her before I die!” underneath the tits and then there was a long and uncomfortable silence between all three of us that was luckily broken up by an American bomber flying over and dropping some more bombs and us ducking under some convenient pieces of rubble.

We all knew getting to Winnipeg was a suicide mission, but what the fuck wasn’t? We loaded up our backpacks and started to trudge. All three of us were still in our early thirties, just old enough to remember how the seasons used to change, cursed with enough years on this tumbleweedy Earth to remember deciduous trees and spring breezes filled with scents of cut grass and lavender. When we stopped to rest on that first night, I got into an argument with Reichmann about how our lives would’ve been much better if they weren’t yoked to these idyllic memories of snowflakes melting on our tongues or of us jumping into piles of raked leaves. I told him we’d be much better off not knowing anything other than blistering heat and constantly pitted out T-shirts.

“If we’d grown up in this perpetual sauna,” I wrote to him in the dirt with a stick, “the heat would feel just fine to us.”

Reichmann grabbed the stick from me, scribbled his response.

“Humans can get used to anything, no matter how deplorable or sad. We just reset our expectations and find happiness in our revised baseline.”

“And that’s a good thing?” I scratched back.

Even though his face was heavily bandaged I could see Reichmann roll his eyes at me. And when I handed him back the writing stick to respond he snapped it in half over his knee. Face or no face, Reichmann was being a dick and I started to look for a new writing stick to tell him that fact.

“Forget about him,” Schliess motioned to me. “For once let’s just have a nice, quiet dinner.”

In his previous life Schliess worked at a shelter helping teenagers whose lives had gone awry. While the war had hardened him, there was a part of him it hadn’t touched, something soft in the way he moved his hands that could always calm me down.

“Fine,” I nodded.

For dinner, I smashed up a banana I’d picked from a roadside tree and poked it through the gap between my teeth with the wrong end of a plastic spoon. Reichmann crushed up a mango with his mortar and pestle and once everything was minced into a fruity sluice he used a straw to suck the slurry through that hole in his cheek he was currently calling his mouth. Schliess tore at a piece of beef jerky and then dabbed away all the blood from his gums with his sleeve. The sun wasn’t going down anytime soon, but when I finished eating I tied a rag over my eyes and laid down on the partially melted yoga mat that I’d recently found in a ditch.

Sleep came difficult for me now. Before the war I’d been a chemist, working on cholesterol meds at a pharmaceutical company. When the war started, I immediately volunteered my services to a lab inventing chemical weapons. Like everyone else in Canada, I was caught up in the fervor of defending our borders from the southern invaders who wanted our remaining water and cooler air. While I absolutely understood the potential applications of my work while I mixed compounds and ran my beta tests, it’s a different thing altogether when you see a chemical weapon you’ve invented, one I’d named Black Krezcent, get dropped on a regiment of Americans bedding down near Calgary. I watched on the video screen as the drone’s door opened and the metal canisters tumbled through the sky and cracked open in a field and a mist of odorless microparticles spread through the air and hit the Americans’ skin and then their mouths quickly opened in screams and their skin peeled away like husks and their bodies began to flop on the ground like pieces of bacon in hot grease. Yes, I drank the celebratory champagne just like everyone else in the lab, I screamed “Hooray!” and “Liberty!” with the correct gusto, slapped fives with my coworkers until my palms were nearly blistered, but when I closed my eyes that night and for every night since, those dying flopping fucking skinless American soldiers are the only thing I ever see.

The three of us were caught by an American patrolman on the fourth day of our trudge. He looked about sixteen. He’d just shot a toucan and he was filleting it when we came through the brush. The kid got the jump on us, grabbing his machine gun before we got to our knives. I thought we were done for, that we were headed to a prison camp or he’d gut shoot us and leave us to bake in the noonday sun, but then Reichmann got down on his knees and begged for mercy.

“Mercy?” the American asked. “Seriously?”

Reichmann gave him a number of exaggerated nods to convince the kid that he should grant us clemency, but the nods were punctuated by a bunch of gritty gauze flopping around on Reichmann’s face, which made everything less convincing.

“If you would’ve got the jump on me would you be so kind?” the American said. “The fuck you would.”

Even though he knew it was a lost cause, Reichmann kept begging. He handed the American the picture he’d drawn of his wife and the kid looked at the drawing and said, “Wow, does she have any sisters?” and Reichmann groaned and shook his head glumly and some ropey blood slid off what used to be his chin and onto the ground and the kid laughed at that, laughed at Reichmann’s missing face and his bad luck and the bad luck of the three of us. Fortunately, while the boy was distracted with his giggling, Schleiss yanked his throwing knife from his ankle sheath and chucked it into the kid’s throat and then Reichmann jumped on top of the kid and stabbed him over and over in the eyes and the chest. When he was dead, we sat around his fire and ate the remainder of his toucan and smoked the rest of his cigarettes.