I hailed two taxis and sent them to Ops where they were waiting; the drivers laughing at the panting, puking rabble I herded into the compound. Reid met me at the gate with pale questions and whimpering objections, but I shut him up with a promise that we would make up twice the time the next two nights and told him that everything was all right. That's what he wanted to hear: that everything was all right. Had he for a moment suspected that his wife's lover had arranged this delay? His face answered, Don't they always.
I told him that I would appreciate it if that dick-head Dottlinger didn't hear about the incident. He hesitated before answering, and I wanted to scream the truth at him. But he was really worried about who was going to pay for the cabs. So I did. Then I went to get Morning and we went out back.
Turning from me, he walked over to the fence, anger still shaking his hands. "Well, what the hell you want?" he asked when I didn't say anything.
"What do I want? What do you want? A stunt like that – Jesus Christ, Morning."
"So I screwed up, man. So what? Didn't you ever make a mistake? Didn't this shit ever get to you? Is it ever too much?"
"What?"
"I don't know," he said, turning as the beacon on the control tower turned. "Just too much."
"You make me sound like a sergeant: but that's no excuse. We're all in the same shit."
"It's not a fucking excuse, it's a reason. Can't…" Silent for a moment, he turned back to the fence, hung his fingers in the mesh, staring out like a… like lost child? caged animal?… more like a man who didn't know if he wanted in or out, or even which side was in or out. "I'm just tired, man. I feel like I'm nine hundred years old. It's all too much, the army, Town, this stupid job; it's too much sometimes. Sometimes I wish I could go to sleep forever, then I wouldn't have to fuck with the world. I can't stay straight; I can't even go to hell right." He paused; I waited.
"That's funny. I was thinking about something today, you know. About problems. I used to be good at math, you know," he said, speaking as he had that first time I saw him talking to the mirror, detached, commenting on his soul as if it were a problem of formulas. "Really good at math. I should have majored in math or physics or engineering or something like that. At least that's what they always said, and I might have, if I hadn't tried to major in accounting to spite my old lady. God, you know, she used to put my old man down for being a bookkeeper. A cipher, she called him. Classic, huh? So classic it's a bore, you know.
"But there was another reason, too, why I didn't major in math. I didn't understand… I couldn't… I could work problems, could really work hell out of them. And not just plugging numbers into a formula either. When I started calculus, in high school, the teacher gave us a problem, something about getting a ladder around a corner in a hall, just to show us what one looked like. And I worked the damn thing without calculus. She couldn't believe it. She loved me because I was her best student, but for a moment I could tell that she thought I had done something wrong, and she never liked me after that for some reason. But I worked the damned problem, by God, I worked it, just like I solved all the other ones, but the thing is, the thing always was, I didn't know how I knew how to work it. I didn't understand why my mind worked that way. No one else could work it, but it was easy for me, but I didn't know why, or how. I could just do, you know, but I couldn't understand how, and that almost drove me bugs, man.
"Just like when I started school. I could read before I started the first grade, and I knew that no one else could, so when this old bitch starts off with flash cards and the alphabet crap, I raised my hand and asked, "Where are the books?" The class all laughed and giggled, and Miss Minder, who was old and hated kids, probably for good reason, threw a fourth-grade reader in my hands and told me to read and so I read, and when I finished a page, said, "Where are the hard books? This is only a fourth-grade reader." All the kids laughed and Miss Minder almost cried she was so mad, and I thought I was going to be the leader of the band. But I quickly discovered that nobody liked me because I could read and they couldn't, and then they didn't like me because I made good grades. So for the next eight years, until it became all right to be smart, I was the dirtiest, dumbest kid in school. On purpose." He paused as four jets roared over then settled like fat mallards against the runways.
"Always had trouble with my head, man. But in high school I let it go; it was enough to be able to do it. It was like footbalclass="underline" when the coaches tried to teach me how to throw a pass, tried to change the way I threw a pass, I couldn't pass for shit, but my way, I could do it. Finally they left me alone, and I just threw the goddamned ball. But then that got to me too. Somehow I wasn't throwing the ball, somebody else was. Or maybe it was more like having a machine in my head that plotted trajectories and found ranges and figured windage and force vectors and triggered the muscles. I always felt left out of the process."
"No," I interrupted, taking the cigarette he offered, "you are the process."
"Aw, bullshit, that's no good. I'm not part, if I don't feel like I'm part, huh? No.
"Then," he said, pausing to light up, his face fired by the match, crimson like the hot exhausts of the jets coming over our heads, "Then at Carlton I found out something. The hard way." He laughed, but it sounded more like a snort. "I was making it with this chick, this good chick, down in Madison. A good kid but, Jesus, a bad scene. I was drunk most of the time, and mad at her most of the time for reasons I still don't understand. Maybe because she made me happy, maybe for no reason at all. But I'd get mad, madder than hell, then I'd tear her into little pieces. I made fun of her Church, her meatless Fridays – here's a piece of meat for this Friday, I'd say – her family, her friends, then I'd screw her and make her cry with passion, then laugh at her hypocritical tears, as I called them." He nicked his cigarette over the fence, then walked back into the shadows next to the building.
"But she loved me, man, and she hung on, though God knows why. All the way. Until one really bad night when I was drunk, blind, stupid, black-out drunk, laying on the floor of her apartment, beating my head on the tiles, keeping time to the music from the beer joint below. I busted my head all up and bled all over the place, broke furniture and all that kind of shit. And that was all right; but I wouldn't stop it with the head, beating away, and she couldn't stop me, and I wouldn't stop until I finally drank and battered myself into oblivion." He lit another cigarette. His face was as tired as his voice in the quick light.
"Then the next morning she said, very calmly, very plainly, that this was too much. "Too much, Joe,' she said. 'You hate yourself too much. Either I'll get lost when you get your head and heart together, or else I'll get torn up in the fight. That's too much,' she said.
"I hated losing her," he said, looking up at me, "and I gave her all the horseshit about being afraid to live and too ignorant to die, which was just true enough to really hurt – I seem to know weak spots naturally, too – but I sort of understood something about myself, why I'd been beating my head on the floor. I hated it, pure and simple, and in spite of my new attempts at being an intellectual, I hated my head because it wasn't part of me. It has always felt like somebody's head besides mine, and I didn't understand, and I hated. She didn't understand either, but she knew enough to get the hell out of the way. Enough." He stopped talking again, and a jet engine being tested filled the silence with a steady, grating roar which seemed to rise out of the very night itself. Something was waiting in the darkness, an animal, a beast, all mouth and desire, growling, eating the very darkness, dissatisfied with the night.