“But…”
Don’t you love me Peter? After all I do for you, after all I have done to save you, you won’t even answer my one simple wish? How dare you defile me, cheat on me!
“No! I’m sorry! I don’t, I don’t know what to do.”
That’s why you have listened to me, Peter. You came to me, and I took you in. I am more than your friends, than Isaac.
“Isaac?”
Yes, you remember him, look how he failed you. How your family has failed you. Only I have stood by with you.
“What do I do? I don’t want to live—-”
Quiet my little warrior. Get rid of her, you only need me. You always only needed me.
I take the picture and fold it, and place it in my pocket.
I said get rid of her, fully.
I shoot up again quickly. Cloud can no longer chastise me, for we are one now, even more so in my dumfounded state of decay and peace. Lost and in bliss. Calm.
I lie on my bed. Ready to finally rest. To escape.
But then I realize what I am as sleep nudges my eyes.
“No, no, no, no, no,” I mutter uselessly into the pillow.
Something grasps my bicep. There is a cold needle in my arm. Who put it there? I am higher with Cloud. I am calm. I fall asleep.
XXI
All of a sudden, I am ripped away from my drug induced sanctuary, and back in Love. I guess I should have known the date I was to return—but Cloud doesn’t let you worry about trivial things, it doesn’t worry about anything. I was gone for nearly two weeks in Jericho.
I enter the airfield and find the helicopter that will take me back: a gutted and refitted Pave with a black mustache painted on the front. The hull is crowded with supply crates and stacks of body bags. The side gunner gives me a double take. “You’re the Medal of Honor?”
I grab the top railing to steady myself as the helicopter rises, and nod.
“Where you heading?”
“Southern Kuplar, bottom part of the Confederates.”
“I’ve made three trips there so far, rebels are getting tougher I heard, ever since Khaf.” He glances at the body bags I am resting against. “Don’t worry, those are for the locals.”
The Pave flies over the alien jungle topography to my isolated outpost where Love resides. Out here, the pesticides used to clear miles of alien plant life for farmland do not reach. Out here, the land has not been terra-formed to fit my home world. It is wild and unfamiliar. It makes me miss home more than ever. The jungle swallows me with its vast hues of light and dark greens. I am gone. My last visit with Cloud ended as the chopper left. I stick my head out into the rushing wind to hide my tears.
The chopper slows down as it approaches a clearing in the infinite jungle. It shakes from strong turbulence, then circles over the LZ a few times till it’s meters above the ground where I hop off with my sack back into the field life.
Isaac looks up at me. All the marines are shirtless under this strangely hot day in fall. Sweat pours down their bodies as they assemble a foxhole and sandbag wall. “Look whose fucking back guys!” he says.
“How’s it going, Rosa?” says Isaac as the others crowd around me. “Gonna take us out with that new pension?”
That’s right, my hawk is still tied to my helmet. “It’s going, depends if you earned it. How about you fuckers?”
They all mock and jeer at me and my Medal of Honor. Tarnus’ new name for me is princess since I am a pretty boy all clean shaven and trimmed due to the holotour, in contrast to everyone else out here—filthier than shit. The same day I get here, I’m sent out with Easy unit into the jungle for rebel hunting.
“No need to be tense, bud,” says Isaac on our first night. We are covered in black paint, the world a shade of whites and greens through our night vision googles.
“Yeah, never met a rebel out here,” says Rommel, “boring as fuck.”
“The only good thing is we can get dried meat from the village,” says Alex, handing me a folded paper filled with something. “It’s tangy, but good.”
“How the hell do you always have that shit on you?” says Isaac.
Blake halts the line. “What did I say about noise discipline?”
I look at Isaac, his teeth show up black on my goggles as he smiles.
Rommel leans in towards my shoulder. “Just don’t go near their fruit groves, someone from Bravo lost both his legs from an IED.”
I’ll have to be careful where I piss at night.
The nightmares come back.
The next morning, Isaac sits with me in a foxhole while the rest of Easy are on patrol. I pull out a worn piece of paper, and look at the last line of our poem game, the word is Evil. What should I write? Cloud, you helped me once. Cloud… where are you? Cloud I need you! Come back!
“Who you talking to, man?” says Isaac, worried and leaning over me.
“Huh, oh shit. Just day dreaming I guess.”
Isaac sighs, then goes back to resting on the grip of his HMG, whistling a tune.
I put the pen to the paper.
Envy vilifies ignorant love,
“Whatcha writing there?” says Isaac after looking over again. I hand him the paper. He looks at it and cracks a half-smile. “It’s been a while.” I nod. “I’ll have to think on it, okay?” He puts the paper away for now.
“Hey, bud,” he says after some time.
“Yeah?”
“What’s the name of that girl?”
“What?”
“That girl. You never told me. You know? The one in your photo.”
My left leg becomes stiff, unmovable, where she is folded away inside a cargo pocket. The photo is now a dagger embedded into my leg, cutting off the nerve.
“Cloud.”
“That’s a weird name. Was her sister Starchild too or some shit?”
“I don’t know.”
“It was just a joke.”
“It always is.”
Nothing happens for a few days. We build a new firebase of two spread out foxholes in a clearing, and waste our hours patrolling the area’s few paths inside the jungle. From the chopper, the jungle just looked like a rolling ocean of bright green with occasionally darker spots. Inside though, the air is stale and thick, and foliage goes waist high making it difficult to travel off trail. But the weirdest part about the jungle is the way trees grow here. They form around a network of one huge trunk, something you’ll probably never see due to the endless walls of foliage. Out of it are near infinite amounts of braches that are the size of normal trees back at home, and it is these branches that are the actual trees we see on our patrols here.
The trees—those huge branches—grow upwards like normal, and then split off or tangle around other branches. Because of this we see trees growing sideways out of other trees, growing in arcs over the paths and into the bases of trees on the other side, and trees even growing upside down towards the earth from the sky, dangling from bigger branches dozens of meters high that are concealed within the canopy. And this canopy is what makes the air horrible. But more unsettling is that it doesn’t block the sun out, though it can completely cover hundreds of square miles without a single gap, but that the canopy roof made of leaves and smaller branches, is translucent. The light we view artificial, almost neon, like someone placed a huge pair of sunglasses over this area of the world.
In a nearby clearing like ours, after you walk through a jungle path for about three kilometers, is a small village that knows no English, or so they say. They happen to have an uncanny sense to know when we desire ancients and women though. Our night patrols normally end hitting the village temporarily for such—at the expense of our paychecks of course. In the dark of night on the third day, I stay behind a little longer in the hut we conduct our usual business in as the rest of my unit exits.