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"The key to the riddle is the General himself, and we shall never solve it, because, although those who were around him would recall afterward that he looked gray, ill, and exhausted, we know little about his actions and nothing of his thoughts that terrible morning."
The chapter is called retreat. Luke assumes that's what they're doing anyway, seeking refuge among sterile hospital gowns and screaming machines, tubes so glassy they reflect off the fluorescents coming from the ceiling. Many of them trace right back to Deckard. They press beneath skin heavily burned from a column of fire escaping from the two-ton vehicle that was slung at them, feed into crooks of elbows and tops of hands with great resistance from the downtrodden body.
Luke doesn't touch him, keeps both hands right on the crisp hardback book from which he reads. He wants so desperately to reach out and take the hand not inundated with IV's between one of his, but something in the back of his mind fears total breakdown of Deckard's body at even the slightest grasp.
So he keeps reading, chronicling the tumultuous day of Pearl Harbor and the shortcomings of one General Douglas MacArthur, and tries to tell the story at hand rather than recreating theirs through automatic dwelling. "Great leaders, statesmen and generals alike, rarely admit mistakes, and MacArthur had fewer misgivings about his judgment than most. As he would subsequently demonstrate, his confidence in himself was usually well founded. But not on this day."
Luke can be crass, very literal perhaps, and compare Deckard to the fast-storming general. He could, for the way Deckard launched them both into absolute chaos taking away what short, mangled strings Cipher had left behind for them. At first they appeared to have emerged victorious, exterminating the easy ones and putting the hard ones in such binds that it would occupy them long enough for Luke and Deckard to take care of house cleaning. Deckard even got his hands dirty for once, leaning in to take down one by the throat and another with a bullet between the eyebrows.
Then it went bad, and Deckard wasn't screaming at him to shoot faster anymore. In fact, he wasn't saying a thing lying on his back on cold, black office tile. More than enough was being spoken in the way his chest heaved in short motions back and forth, struggling to bring in breath. Luke tried – and ultimately failed – to keep the situation normal. Cipher's cronies escaped into the darkness of early morning, and Luke found himself in nothing but the strangest silence there ever was, periods of sound's absence and intermittent ones of Deckard's gasps.
The extraction came not a moment too soon.
Following the thorough beating up Luke gave himself for not stepping in closer to block a knife or perhaps the bullet lodged in a lobe of Deckard's right lung, he remembers something Deckard had said before much of the show had started. "You got a job as long as I got a job, yeah?"
"…He believed the most important qualities in a soldier were loyalty, courage, and intelligence, in that order. 'And by loyalty,' he added, 'I mean loyalty up and loyalty down.'" There wasn't much to be said about the facet of loyalty as it applied to both Luke and Deckard. It was an automatic thing – the way you know backing out of a parking spot is perhaps the best way to get out of there without sending the family van through a donut shop, or when the sky gets dark and warns of torrential downpours to come. You prepare for what it, know what you do with something like that, and you speak no other words as to why you do. You just do.
That certainly wasn't a one-day affair. There had been many long nights spent awake on the expanse of what served as a porch for them both, large plant pots clogged with old soil to hold the butts of the cigarettes Deckard smoked one after the other. A nice line of Coronas fit between the slats of the screen windows keeping them shielded from any night chill or offensive smell.
Until their throats were raw and their heads pounded from the tobacco and alcohol they gave each other the run-down on what was to come for this assumed partnership. Living together saved money. Sharing weapons, food, laundry duty, preparedness for jobs, just made sense. And so it was, echoing the way their bond had formed long before they were asking what their favorite assault weapons were and what laundry detergent they each used. A wave of it hits Luke's nose as he lays his fleece coat over Deckard's exposed arms, wary of the tubes and wires. The hospital's cold as hell to begin with but that perhaps is the least of his concerns.
Years ago he wouldn't have strayed from his routine to take solace with a wounded teammate. But that was then, and this is now, and Deckard is far more important to the futile mission for peace – and me, Luke thinks almost selfishly, remembering the way that only the night before they had forgone usual shut-eye for Chinese food and Apples to Apples. Brief flashes to the nights after the divorce pass before Luke's eyes as he shuts them without knowing. There's no light like the beams made when Deckard loses his shit over some slapstick rerun on the black and white TV in their garage. Luke won't go dark again if he's got any say in the matter.
"'The professional soldier,' writes Samuel P. Huntington, 'exists in a world of grays. MacArthur's universe was one of blacks and whites and loud and clashing colors…MacArthur preferred the warlike spirit to the military spirit." The first few nights spent together were, as expected, awkward. Luke felt like he was a guest in someone else's home, or at a summer camp where there was no humanly way of escaping. It eased only a little when he reminded himself that Deckard was, in fact, as human as they come, brushing his teeth barefoot with one of Luke's t-shirts to cover himself, taking out contacts and schlepping it back to bed with heavy wayfarer frames on, a mumble of don't you fucking dare tell anyone I wear these.
The beds were once Luke's grandparents' separated chastely into two twin mattresses, as was the custom for husbands and wives of the Great Society, and Luke faces Deckard's for as long as he can keep his eyes shut. They share some small talk but not enough to send one final blast of pressure between the tempestuous glaciers between them. As most new acquaintances do to get to know one another, they initiate perhaps the most stilted small talk to have ever been documented between two business partners. Deckard wears the contacts during the day to correct what he calls "bass-fucking-ackwards vision" and the heavy glasses at night to keep a childhood lazy eye at bay. His pajamas, once a moot point to Luke when he began to consider the amount of ammunition they both went to bed with under their pillows, are an abomination. Luke can make out some faint etchings of a Pac-Man pattern on Deckard's pajama bottoms he threw on before climbing into bed.
Got them from a shop back home, Owen stole the big fucking yellow slippers that are actually Pac-Man, Deckard explains, and Luke praises the dark for expertly hiding his growing smile. A passing segue about childhood excursions to shoddy arcades, losing their grips on controllers and buttons for the grease of cheap pizza from the snack shack that housed the ones that wouldn't dare to roll on skates. Luke can't watch M*A*S*H for its constant airing during childhood sick days off of school; Deckard won't touch eggplants even if he's got a gun to his head.
It's mystifying shit about men who are supposed to be Teflon with an iron core. There's no doubt that Luke dreams about some of it when he does actually fall asleep, Deckard handcuffed with a dish of eggplant parm in front of him next to a suitcase of cash, Luke finally confronting his lifelong beef with Alan Alda. The first time in a long time Luke hasn't dreamed about his own funeral, the urn that'll hold his ashes as they're carefully distributed among three precise locations of his choosing – the 50-yard line of the Colts' stadium in Indiana, the first home he ever shared with his new wife and baby, the childhood home where much had been lost to trauma but still there was something left to cling onto.
Real life chimes in and as sirens scream and alarms warn of impending disaster he begins to wonder if he'll have to spread Deckard's first. He's too mean to die, something in the back of his mind reassures him. Death will take one look at him and say fuck no. That becomes validated as clouds of doctors hone in and pull Deckard back from the edge for perhaps the third time that day. Touch and go didn't quite cut it for the ups and downs Deckard bore through an ambulance ride, surgery, recovery, and blood clots. Luke almost didn't sit in the same room as him for a change in the equilibrium could contribute to another catastrophe.
Now Deckard breathes free, his lungs having freed themselves from anesthetic burden and pulmonary distress to allow him to inhale and exhale away from a tube. Luke looks at the bruising around his mouth from where his face had been shoved into one of the tiles in the skirmish and fears for shattered teeth. If only he'd open that big mouth and say something to me so I wouldn't have to budget in having to put his food through a straw. No dice as they go into the late night, soon the early morning, the arrival of another blessed day.
The nurses are saints bearing gifts of breakfast trays from the downstairs cafeteria, blankets that aren't as scratchy as the ones secured over patients, foam cups of coffee that could have made an airplane run at one point. Luke accepts them with exhausted, tired thanks, and lets his nose hang over the cup of coffee in an attempt to revive himself with direct exposure to steam and caffeine.
He eats what he can keep down and saves the rest for the voracity Deckard will show when he wakes up. Luke can feel it somewhere beneath his heart but not before his stomach – there's no doubt Deckard's going to come out of it on this day. Luke had seen his progress through the wee hours of the night, pained grumbles but sounds of life nonetheless, tight grips of Luke's hands that made the back of Luke's throat ache with tears he wouldn't want to shed for a million years.
"Maybe all of these people are staying in this hospital because of the food they keep shoving down their throats," Luke says behind a mouthful of oatmeal that was most likely taken from the heap in the bucket out in the hall being used to fix cracks in the wall.
Again, what he can fit in his mouth is all he plans to take in, and when he stops, he heaves again a heavy breath telling him to go the hell back to sleep. He sips his coffee and finishes as much of the MacArthur book as he cans, popping in to tell Deckard of interesting things that were no way real ("Did women ask MacArthur to father their children, what the fuck?")
Outside, rain begins, falling onto the window liberated of its blinds and curtains. Luke stares as long as he can at the droplets racing down the panes of glass to converge into trails of water at the windowsills. Nurses and doctors murmuring in the hall say that what looks like an afternoon shower could boil over into thunderstorms, at worst, tornadoes. Luke doesn't worry. He and Deckard have trekked through much worst in the last few days.
A hospital-wide tornado alarm swells into an all-out claxon but not even its startle phases Luke. He's looking Deckard right in the eye. Awake and mostly lucid, Deckard asks him, words a soft scratch against the whirring of hospital A/C, "Too mean to die, hm?"