Hand stuck inside the front of a man’s head.
Didn’t know a face was so fragile.
Nose and lips and eyebrows pushed in.
A jawbone grinning, because it knows the secret.
Eyeball fell onto the chair.
Felt brains on my fingers.
Wiped off a man’s memories on the front of my shirt.
Set the paperweight on the edge of his desk.
A jellyfish still drowning inside glass.
Glass like water, bubbles like air.
Dancing.
Not dead yet.
It’s not dead yet.
It is not inside anymore.
It is now behind me.
Following me into the floating city.
Following me ever since that day in the jungle.
Will follow me until I die.
And become not dead again.
With it forever more.
I break from the ally onto the crowded street and immediately eyes turn on me. I am used to this. My heart beats too fast. Need to check in, get paid, go home and stay up. Watch the corners of the room and fight when the time comes.
I walk deeper, deeper into the city that becomes unmoored from solid land and begins to drift, filthy water holding up the flowers and flesh floating on top.
Got to get paid. Got to fix myself right and get behind the sandbags, rifle at the ready, and scan the perimeter. Black Shuck comes in under the wires, just like they did.
8. Roman Candles
The trio of choppers hugged the top of the uneven tree line in single file, staying below the radar and moving fast enough that the SAMs would never be fired in time. The stuttered roar of their engines sets upon the silence of the lightless hills, echoing back from the sudden rocky peaks with a madman’s cackle, and was gone just as the night shrank back, leaving everything uncertain in its wake.
The bay door was open and the airman who arrived with the chopper was manning his M-60, looking through polarized sunglasses at a black sky without sun, barrel pointed down into the void and the impression of trees cloaking the skin of the earth like fur. No cities or villages. This was a prehistoric darkness from a time before man mastered fire.
The five soldiers in the third helicopter sat in silence, each huddled low inside themselves, sorting through the recent past, maybe allowing themselves to reach back toward home, and all wondering what waited for them when the choppers touched down in a secret place never shared with them. They traveled on faith, in desperation, and with some queer sense of loyalty to an unknown father.
The emergence of flickering lights far in the distance caught Broussard’s attention. The night sky to the east was cut by green tracers, perforating the air in a silent sway, seeking the out the roaring aircraft that descended from outer space to eat up their world.
“Free fireworks, y’all!” Darby shouted, the pierce of his voice through the monotone roar startling everyone. “Just like the Fourth of Ju-ly!”
The far horizon erupted in a line of orange as napalm coated the ground, incinerating everything for what was probably five hundred yards. Could have been inches or miles at this distance.
“Bring the smoke!” Darby howled. “Bring that holy smoke, you zoomie motherfuckers!”
The man’s eyes lit up, feverish with the knowledge of what that fire was doing. Broussard imagined it himself, piecing together images of what he had seen already in this war, adding in snapshots like a slideshow. He tried to share in Darby’s enthusiasm, in his pride for the military might of the country that sent them all here, but he couldn’t. His stomach turned instead, which only made him sicker, this time with shame. Men like Darby were made for war, descending from a long line of men who set off into the unknown to find and make more of it, hoarding every inch of ground that was left behind them. Broussard wasn’t one of those men, so he closed his eyes.
The jellied gasoline burned off, leaving a roiling cloud bank of smoke that blended back into the dark as the light below faded. The tracers were gone.
Darby howled like a wolf. The airman slid the door shut again and stared at Darby through his polarized glasses.
“It’s a new world, brothers. A brave new world,” Darby said. “Grab a gun or get the fuck out!”
9. The Floating City
I walk out of the storefront and enter the fast-moving current made by a stream of motorbikes and odors and noise. The now-familiar stew of fish sauce, cigarette smoke, and rotting garbage spills out of alleys with hoarse shouts and Hong Kong club music. The canals are choked with trash and human waste. The streets are filthy. And still they come, just like I did, pouring into the Klong Toey slums from failing farms in northeast Thailand to the buzzing hive of corrugated shacks and wet markets, working where they can find a need, making and selling whatever they can, including drugs to the tourists and flesh to everyone. A floating mass of pure, naked humanity, where anyone can hide.
In my pants pocket—lighter now, with the jellyfish gone—is the payment for the Chinese doctor job down on Yaowarat. A little cash and enough lightly bruised chemical agents to get me by until they think they’ll need me again. They don’t use me all the time, because I stand out. I’m “a blinking sign,” as the ex-VC general turned drug smuggler noted through his sneering interpreter, flicking open his fingers over and over again. Not many of my kind in Bangkok. Not many of my kind anywhere on this fucking planet. Monster hunted by a monster. Drop of ink in the Yellow Sea. More like brown among brown, beans and rice and beans, but no one sees the world like that.
Just like so many of the residents, the heroin flows down into the city from the mountain country, too, turning dry and white in hidden labs dodging one American government agency while sending smoke signals to another, keeping an eye on the political winds but knowing that a customer will emerge from the skirts of Lady Liberty sooner or later. The amphetamines come from India and an unregulated factory pumping out the same sort of legally acceptable narcotics that would get you locked up if called by another name, or possessed by a different hand.
I’m fading, spent from the stress of the doctor job, and need to get back to the cave and measure up the right temperature screwball to calm my brain but keep me awake. Israel Broussard needs to take his medicine. That’s how I live, and survive. Cotton in the ears, and toothpicks between my eyelids, just like in the cartoons. I’d lose my shit without this, and the Triad knows it. Evil motherfuckers. They know everything, down here anyway. More than the government, that’s for sure. It pays to have eyes and ears among the people instead of inside clean glass buildings far removed from the realities of the world.
But they took me on when I was living in an alley, curling up between trash bags, slapping rats away from my sleeping face. Recruited me, instead of the other way around. These killers thought I was a killer, too. A great killer of men. Black American Killer GI, butcher of the yellow man. But I’m not black, I’m brown, and they aren’t yellow, they’re brown, and I’m not a killer but I’ve killed brown men, which made me a traitor. Maybe I was being paid for treason. Thirty pieces of silver by a number of different names.
These days I’ll kill anyone, regardless of shade or hue. That’s what Black Shuck has done to me. How he’s done me. It’s my real boss, that evil cosmic hound, not that tin-pot general, who’s just a tool in the Great Machine. It’s Black Shuck who turned me into the animal it used to be and maybe still wanted to be before crossing over and becoming something else. Echoes of a past life left after the transformation. Jealousy and yearning all at the same time. Animals breed animals even when the animal is no more. Don’t need chickens or eggs in the place where it comes from. Maybe it’s always been like this, and doesn’t know any other way than waiting and tracking and pouncing. I don’t know a motherfucking thing, other than the platoon of bugs crawling up inside my skin, and the terrible feeling that I might fall asleep standing up, and then face Black Shuck in the street, totally exposed, with plenty of tunnels down.