How can anyone claim himself as beside the point?
He looked away first, and she realized she really, really liked Nash.
Vespertine
HENRY SAT ON the couch in his living room. The TV was off, the lights were off. He sat in the half dark, and he could not stop it. It came over him.
He has on a uniform. He is flying with two others. The sky is beautiful, an early morning green-blue. The water below is almost the same color. Only the jungle is different. It is a succulent green, the faint yellow-green of snake bellies and new leaves.
Henry sat on the couch, in his living room. He was awake — his eyes were open. He was sweating and clenching his hands, digging his fingernails into his palms.
It is a camouflage green C-123 Provider. He is not in the cockpit. He can see himself, the spray operator, by the bomber doors, operating and checking huge canisters marked with orange, white and blue paint. The canisters ride four across, snapped in, and he can see through the hatch in the bottom of the plane the spray of white aerosol trailing behind them. They are flying very low. They are buzzing rice paddies and villages. They are aiming for total saturation of the foliage. But it is all fucking foliage, isn’t it? It’s a jungle. Some of it splashes back on him when he adjusts the tanks. He can hear anti-aircraft fire from beneath him. They are so low-flying, bullets seem to back-spray from the ground. One of the drums gets punctured by a bullet, and defoliant sloshes on his arm and chest. The plane pitches back and up, gaining altitude at a sickening speed. He moves away from the hatch toward the interior of the plane.
It smells not of decay but of disappearing, of disintegration. An invisible eating away. But that’s not how it works, it doesn’t eat away like acid. It gets into the metabolism of things and overstimulates them until they die. It hyper-accelerates growth until the organism is undone. Herbicide, he thinks, is a better word than defoliant, but neither conveys the endless insinuation of the stuff, the occupation. He breathes the dank spray — it’s heavy, oily, metallic. It almost doesn’t smell, but it clings to you, gets between you and your sweat then sinks into your skin.
Later he will wash his face and hands. He will blow his nose. It’s in his hair, his throat, his eyes. His throat is constantly sore; he rubs his eyes and they sting but they don’t tear. It’s not tears but the stuff itself welling up right under his eyelids. All night he can feel the inventory of its invasions: a stickiness now, between the legs, under his arms, after he showers. As the night gets hotter he realizes the stuff is coming out his pores, it is part of his body now. It inhabits him, in his lungs, in his cells, in his future, in his wife’s uterus ten thousand miles away. It has a half-life, it has a genetic legacy. It will appear in the yet-to-be-born. It has sleeper cells hidden for fifteen years only for you to suddenly taste it, out of nowhere, in your mouth, a slick of oil in your spit.
He sees the plane from outside, like a movie. He is floating over the flat expanse of the whole Ca Mau Peninsula. For a moment he sees everything at once. But he starts to fall, he follows the spray down as if he were floating on it and sees it fall on forests of mangrove and jackfruit trees, rice paddies and rainwater cisterns. He sees people looking up, confused, standing under the trees. He sees them eating and drinking the stuff as it lands on everything in blanket coverage. It is extreme, jerky close-ups now. He hates this, but he gets so close he can see faces, mouths. He hears breathing. He smells their moist skin.
It can get really bad when this happens.
He shakes it off. In truth, he can force himself back sometimes. He feels his throat constricting, and that falling sensation, like when you wake too quickly from a dream and you jump in your bed.
He blinks and again sees the interior of the plane. He leans against the wall outside the cockpit, catching his breath.
He was lying down on his couch, covering his head, but it didn’t leave him.
As he looks up, he hears the sounds of gunshots in quick, automated succession, ricocheting. The pilot turns from the controls and looks at him, his face young, smiling, and then as Henry watches he grows swollen red sores on his cheeks and mouth. It is that stuff again, trying to get out. Henry looks away. He sees the sign, handwritten, over the cockpit area, in white, over a drawing of Smokey the Bear in his hat. It reads
Only you can prevent forests
When it finally stopped, Henry’s body was covered in a cold sweat. Hives and welts appeared on his face and arms.
Partial list of Henry’s symptoms:
acne, or chloracne (adult, itinerant)
hypervigilance
insomnia (constant, chronic)
depression (underlying, with occasional acute crisis)
suicidal ideation (see above, crisis)
hallucinations / intrusive thoughts / night terrors
sense of helplessness: intractable, long-term, overwhelming
shame
despair
Jason’s Journal
DID YOU EVER wonder what your body would look like by age forty if you never exercised, not even once? Gage, my next-door neighbor, answered any curiosity I had on that score. He has recently moved back in with his parents. Really. Apparently that is all the rage among the loser set these days. Gage, in all his dissipated glory, is someone I would call a pal. I first noticed him huffing his stuff onto his parents’ lawn on a sunny summer afternoon. He had retreated to the home front for as yet undiscovered reasons. But the important thing here is that he arrived with crates and crates of long-playing vinyl records. Naturally, these caught my eye.
My friends — what few friends I have — are the types of guys who will argue about whether the RCA single version of “Eight Miles High” is superior to the track issued on Fifth Dimension, the Byrds’ album release. It isn’t, but it is cool to ask the question because it proves you know there are two versions and you are conversant with both. It is even cooler to maintain that the album — a common, reissued object — does have the superior version, and not the rare, hard-to-find single. (This is true, despite the fact, perhaps inconsequential, that the LP version is actually the superior version.) It is perverse, and very sophisticated, in these circles, to maintain the common, popular object is the better object. Only a neophyte or a real expert would argue such a thing. So are you getting the picture on my pals, here? I knew instantly that Gage was one of us. Or I should say, given his seniority agewise, we were one of him. We who live for bonus tracks, alternate versions, reissues, demos, bootlegs. Cover versions. Obscure European or Japanese reissues in 180-gram vinyl. Or original issue, original packaging. Authenticity. We like the inside story, the secrets. We constantly feel the best, coolest stuff is being withheld from us. In other words: there is never enough information. There is always more stuff to be had. A new master unearthed, a track unnoticed at the end of a long silence on a master tape. In a safety deposit box, in a basement. Someone didn’t notice it!
Gage had thousands of albums in plastic protective sleeves. He had boxes of compact discs and stacks of 45 rpm records. I watched him unload them onto the lawn. He was wearing black jeans and a black T-shirt, which didn’t conceal his paunch, despite what they say about the slimming effects of all black. But black, particularly all black, as we all know, is very rock-and-roll, very rebellious. Deeply subversive. So look out, right? I remember watching him as he sat and drank a beer, resting between the minivan he was unloading and his room in his parents’ house. Apparently winded after like two trips upstairs. I watched him from our yard, and I saw my future, very possibly. At fifteen I already have an alarming jump start on a future paunch. Although mine is more pudge than paunch at this point, I could still see where I was headed.