Machine Dreams (41 page)

I wrote the letter. It contained no greeting and was unsigned. The words came into my mind as though carved in stone, and I don’t think they will alter. This is the letter in its entirety:
They’ll never convince me I won’t see you again—I just don’t feel alone.

The psychiatrist wasn’t pleased. “That’s the whole letter?”

“Yes.”

A silence. Then he said, from his chair five feet away, “Who’s trying to convince you, Danner?”

“Everyone.”

“Who, exactly?”

“The world, the war still going on and on, people I know, guys, time—all the time going on, piling up like evidence against him, that he’s just—”

“Just what, Danner?”

“
Dead
over there,” I shouted, “you
fucker
, you made me say it—” And I leaped toward him, into him, striking out with my fists. How many times I hit him is a blur. I remember he got me back into my chair. The matronly receptionist was in the room, very nervous, and the shrink was bending down to pick his glasses up off the carpet. He signaled the receptionist to go. She did, but left the office door ajar.

“Well,” he said, putting his glasses back on and sitting down, “I think we got somewhere today.”

I was sobbing. He tried to hand me a box of Kleenex.

“I’m not coming back here again,” I said.

He looked at me resignedly. “I think it’s advisable you come twice a week for a while. You have a great deal of anger and sorrow to express.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ll have to express them somewhere else.”

I got up and put my coat on and left. An orderly in a white uniform was leaning against the wall just outside the office door. Reinforcements, just in case. He looked me over blankly. “Go fuck yourself,” I said.

I had to make appointments with several professors to quit college in the last weeks of an English honors program but, like my determined brother before me, I managed. I spent half the summer in Bellington, until I realized I was only making things worse for my parents. Worse for myself, watching them in such constant, low-profile pain.

My father keeps Billy’s Camaro in Bess’s wooden garage, and he takes good care of it. After I told him I’d decided to go to California, we walked out to look at the car.

The narrow old garage was just a kind of shed, and the Camaro looked bright and cherished, hidden in a place almost too small for it. Mitch asked if I’d like to drive the car, take it West.

“No,” I told him, “I think Billy’s car should stay with you.”

He nodded, leaning on the white hood of the Camaro. “How is your mother doing?”

“Not good.”

“Sweet Jesus,” he said, in the pale-lit garage, “we should have gotten him the hell out of the country. I’ll never forgive myself.”

“Dad, Billy didn’t want to leave the country. He’d already decided.”

My father looked out the narrow garage window at the alley. “Honey, I hate to see you go so far away.”

“I’ll come back.”

Kato was in town that July before I left; she heard I was leaving and phoned me. I went down by the billiard hall to see her. The baby was five months old and she looked like Kato. Blond, blue-eyed, with the same shape face. I think Kato must have been honest with Buck and they’d both accepted whatever possibilities existed. She told me things were better for her now, that a baby made things better and Buck was a good husband. She asked if we’d heard any news about Billy.

I went to California on the bus and arrived like a refugee, knowing no one. I found an inexpensive apartment in a rundown house on a bay in a northern coastal town. I got a job in an insurance office. All I do there is type letters, pour coffee, post the
mail. I have no diversions from thinking, and the thinking has stretched out.

Billy told me, during the summer he worked at the river, that some types of pollution actually clarify the appearance of water. The water grows more and more polluted but becomes clearer and clearer because things that are living in it die.

Maybe that’s what’s happening. I feel very clear, almost transparent. My next move will come to me.

The best way to be lucky is to take what comes and not be a coward.
In the beginning, my thoughts were murderous. I fantasized about killing Nixon, someone killing Nixon. I thought about money, trying to get money—how could I get money? Hire some weird mercenary to sink into the morass of Vietnam and find out what happened to Billy, actually bring him back. The North Vietnamese took care of pilots; pilots were officers, political leverage to be exchanged, they possessed information. But the NVA wouldn’t realize Billy had information, so much information.
These guys are the only country I know of, they’re what I’m defending.
I felt betrayed by my government but I’d expected betrayal: I just hadn’t expected betrayal to such a degree. That it would go on so long, that I would have to live with it. If I hated my government, shouldn’t I go and live in some other country? Not use the supermarkets, where there was more harvested, neatly wrapped, germ-free food than they’d ever seen at one time in Lai Khe? But my parents are my country, my divided country. By going to California, I’d made it to the far frontiers, but I’d never leave my country. I never will.

For weeks one winter on Brush Fork, Billy came to my room after our parents were asleep. They still slept in the same room, so we were young—seven and eight or so. Each night we shoved my bed away from the wall and surveyed the floor with a flashlight, brandishing two stolen dinner knives and a screwdriver. “It’s under there,” Billy said, “I can tell.” We were looking for a secret passage, a trapdoor. Every night we moved the parquet squares already pried loose and went to work on another, exposing a black gummy surface underneath. The squares of flooring were alternating strips of oak, maple, walnut, ash. We worked at
each strip until the whole parquet square came up, an hour, two hours, quietly, breathing dust. “If I find it,” Billy whispered, “I’m the king.” “King of what?” I asked. “King of the World,” he said, “king of everything that’s down there.” “You are not,” I told him, “it’s my floor.” “Doesn’t matter,” he said, “I told you the secret. I knew it was there.”

My mother discovered the project one Saturday while vacuuming. She had moved the bed away from the wall to do a thorough cleaning, and then she called my father into the room. She called us in from outside.

Mitch stood in my small bedroom, his hands in the deep pockets of his work pants. “What the hell were you kids doing here?” he said.

Billy knew we were in trouble. He explained about the trapdoor.

Mitch knelt down on one knee to get a closer look. He’d already moved all the loose flooring slightly aside. The dismantled work area was about two foot square and looked impressive in daylight. “You two must have worked on this pretty hard,” he said respectfully.

I know my father reglued the flooring and Billy helped him. Mitch probably did actually tell us there were no secret passages, that a trapdoor couldn’t lead anywhere because the house didn’t have a basement—but I don’t remember any remarks, only that his lack of anger seemed miraculous.

Now I know his reaction had partly to do with the house. He knew all about the Brush Fork house; he’d contracted the labor and built it himself. He’d designed the heating system, radiant heat piped under the floor so the parquet squares were always warm. He knew how well the floor was built; the parquet had been specially made. Billy’s investigation of the house was exploration my father understood: the house was my father’s, what he’d made, what he owned. Information he wanted Billy to have.

I think about the past now in terms of what Billy knew. The information he took away with him, his training, what he knew before he ever got to Fort Knox. The world, so to speak, how much he knew. What he’d practiced, what he’d perfected before he ever
laid hands on an M-60. Because when he jumped from the chopper, he didn’t have the gun anymore. Robert Taylor’s letter said Billy hid.

“Cover me,” Billy said, “cover me all up.”

I piled leaves on top of him until only his face showed, like a face in a hole.

“No,” he said, “that too.”

“What, you don’t want to see?”

“No, I don’t want to know where you’re running from.”

Maybe we were nine and ten. In autumn we went down into the field and crossed the creek, walked up into the woods to a clearing where the leaves were layers deep. Our game was to pile the leaves up very high: one of us got inside, buried to the shoulders, while the other ran and jumped on top. The buried one watched the attacker run forward, screaming like a kamikaze. If the buried one made any sound, the jumper won and got to jump again. Sometimes it didn’t matter but occasionally we played the game in earnest.

“Bury me way down deep,” Billy said. “You’re still bigger than me and you won’t be able to tell where I am.”

I covered him, piling on more leaves. The wind rattled faintly in the naked trees of the woods, leaves scuttling, dipping and turning in the air. The more leaves I gave him, the better chance he had. I wanted him to win, to stay hidden, stay silent. I kept piling leaves, alone in the clearing, hiding him deeper and deeper, the mound of leaves higher than my chest. I kept working until he was secret, buried, warm. Until he was nowhere.

I dream about Billy. At first I liked having the dreams because I didn’t think about what they meant. And I got to see Billy, his face, so clearly. I still see his face, usually his young face, his kid face more real than any photograph or memory. My sense of him is so strong I think he must be coming through from some completely foreign zone, a zone free of interference and boundaries. A zone that is out of this world. I wake up sweating, scared. Then I tell myself the clarity may be a direct correlative of how alive Billy is, how desperate he feels, how hard he’s trying to get through.

But in the dreams, Billy isn’t desperate. He’s just himself. I’m
the one who is afraid, who knows something terrible might happen, has happened, will happen. I’m the one who can’t stop it from happening.

You watch your little brother
, Mom would say to me. He was walking, but barely. She would hang clothes out on the line in summer, big baskets of clothes, the sheets flapping and hiding her from view. We were way down in the yard, far from the road, and Jean’s radar was finely tuned. She probably didn’t take my abilities as Billy’s protector all that seriously, since I was only about three myself. But I was very serious. I wouldn’t even let him stand up. I kept him entertained with the ball or the block or whatever he was fooling with; if all else failed, I held him down by main force. She’d come back to see why he was crying.

D
anner and Billy are walking in the deep dark forest. Billy makes airplane sounds. Danner, oblivious to her brother’s play, is stalking the magic horse. There are no cloven tracks, but the dust on the path is disturbed and the horse seems to be circling. Occasionally Danner looks over her shoulder and sees the animal watching them through thick leaves. The mare’s eyes are large and certain. Certain of what? Billy pays no attention and seems to have followed his sister here almost accidentally. They walk on, and finally it is so dark that Danner can’t see Billy at all. She can only hear him, farther and farther behind her, imitating with a careful and private energy the engine sounds of a plane that is going down. War-movie sounds.
Eeee-yoww, ach-ack-ack.
So gentle it sounds like a song, and the song goes on softly as the plane falls, year after year, to earth.

Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP:
Excerpt from “O Superman (for Massenet)” by Laurie Anderson, copyright © 1982 by Difficult Music. Reprinted by permission of the author as administered by Beldock Levine & Hoffman LLP.

Hal Leonard Corporation:
Excerpt from “You’ve Really Got a Hold on Me,” words and music by William “Smokey” Robinson, copyright © 1962, 1963, copyright renewed 1990, 1991 by Jobete Music Co., Inc. All rights controlled and administered by EMI April Music Inc. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of Hal Leonard Corporation.

MCA Music Publishing:
Excerpt from “Turn on Your Lovelight,” words and music by Deadrick Malone and Joe Scott, copyright © 1961, 1989 by MCA-Duchess Music Publishing, a division of Universal Studios, Inc. and Joseph Scott Music Co., copyright renewed. All rights reserved. International copyright secured. Reprinted by permission of MCA Music Publishing.

Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc.:
Excerpt from “Do Nothin’ Till You Hear from Me” by Duke Ellington and Bob Russell, copyright © 1943 (copyright renewed) by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. and Harrison Music Corp in the USA. All rights outside USA administered by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc.; excerpt from “I Got It Bad (And That Ain’t Good)” by Duke Ellington and Paul Webster, copyright © 1941 (copyright renewed) by EMI Robbins Catalog Inc. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Warner Bros. Publications U.S. Inc., Miami, FL 33014.