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“What,” Hawkeye asked him one sweltering Korea night, a lone voice in the dark, “won’t you believe in?”
BJ shifted on his cot, the sheets sticking to his back. “What do you mean?” he asked, sotto voce , wary all the time of Frank snoring just across the tent.
“I mean,” Hawkeye said, “what won’t you believe in?”
BJ shifted again, and let his head hang down into the empty air between their beds. His vision began to fuzz as his intracranial pressure increased, uveal vessels perfusing away as best they could regardless, feeding the fibrovascular tissue keeping his irises extremely and pointlessly dilated as he stared into the blackness where Hawkeye, somewhere, was waiting for an answer.
The generator hummed. Frank snored. Klinger’s heels clicked steadily as he circled the camp. The night was dark, the heat was stifling, and the operating room waited patiently for their inevitable return.
BJ watched static-patterns pulse and sweep in the dark. “Well,” he said eventually, “I guess I won’t know it when I don't see it.”
There was a long stretch of silence, long enough BJ was half-convinced Hawk had fallen asleep, until something moved and two blue-green spots of light flashed, shifty and narrow, floating in the space above Hawk’s cot.
“Good answer,” Hawkeye said, invisible except for the steady catlike reflective shine of his eyes.
Leukocoria, Dr. Hunnicutt thought, and BJ, who knew better, closed his eyes and tried to sleep.
///
“Rudyard Kipling,” BJ quipped. It was very possibly the shortest sale of a soul ever negotiated.
Captain Pierce glanced at him passively and then turned back to the little fellow, Corporal O’Reilly, before he snapped around and looked BJ over with intense interest.
“Give that man a lady in the balcony,” he said, squinting against the harsh midday sun.
“Hey, listen, that Jeep is government property,” Corporal O’Reilly cried, indignant, vying for his attention, so Captain Pierce took him gently by the shoulders.
“So are you,” Captain Pierce said, not unkindly, and that perplexed the kid enough he went quiet.
“Pierce,” BJ said, empathizing, “I’m just a little confused.”
“Hawkeye,” Captain Pierce said, his cadence corrective. With the rank left off it took BJ a second to place it as a name. Clearly not his given, clearly an alias of some sort—or maybe only just a nickname? There was something about the other doctor that was setting him on edge, making him suspicious, kicking up his cynicism. Pierce seemed nice enough, quick with a quote and quicker with a joke, but there was something sharp in the way he carried himself, not dangerous exactly but not without the potential. A sheathed scalpel sort of feeling.
“Don’t let a little confusion throw you, Captain,” Pierce said, improbably pale blue eyes flashing.
Dr. Hunnicutt let his gaze flick up to the man’s eyebrows—also pale—and thought briefly of an article he read in his residency, something on genetic pigmentary defects. By a Dr. Waardenburg, maybe. He looked at the man’s hair and discarded the idea just as quickly. It was missing the characte ristic white forelock, all of it a rich black shot through with silver—just how old was Pierce, anyway? Not too much older than himself, judging by everything but the hair. Premature achromotrichia, then. Stress induced, he’d bet the house on it.
With that observation Dr. Hunnicutt receded and BJ came to the fore just in time to bite back on the overwhelming and entirely alien urge to introduce himself by his full name, the name nobody, not him, not Peggy, not the Army, not even his parents, had ever used. Instead he said, simply, “BJ.”
Pierce inclined his head, the icy blue of his eyes fading silver under the hard glare of the sun. “Well, BJ,” he said, emphasizing the nickname with the slow pleased smile of somebody throwing down or perhaps picking up a gauntlet, “one of the first things you learn here is that insanity is no worse than the common cold.”
Corporal O’Reilly looked at Pierce and then turned his head to regard BJ. His glasses caught the sun and obscured his eyes. The lenses reflected a stranger in duplicate—someone wearing BJ’s face all wrong, reversed and shadowed under the severe brim of a military cap.
“How are we gonna get back?” the corporal asked him, spacey and kiddish and very nearly impossible to read.
BJ shrugged, helpless, and watched his changeling reflection do the same.
“Let us welcome yon weary traveler with food and drink,” Pierce said sonorously, his arm draped possessively—protectively? Was there a difference in a war zone?—over Corporal O’Reilly’s shoulders as he led them into the bar.
We must not look at goblin men / we must not buy their fruits , BJ thought as he accepted his first of many drinks on Korean soil. As he accepted the first of many from Captain Pierce. From Hawkeye. Their offers should not charm us, / Their evil gifts would harm us.
We must not look at goblin men, but—what could a fellow do if one looked at you first?
///
“Mail call,” Klinger said, pausing in the doorway of the Swamp. He was wearing a full-skirted, collared dress in a cheerful yellow, a white silk shawl draped over his shoulders.
“Nice heels,” BJ noted, accepting the handful of mail Klinger held out to him. Peg, Peg, Peg (and Erin), Peg again. And one from his father-in-law. None from his parents yet.
“Nicer legs,” Hawkeye called, glancing up from his snooping through Frank’s side of the tent. “Do your part to raise morale and take your hems up a few inches, why don’t you.”
“Think your lady’s singlehandedly funding the US Army Mail Service,” Klinger said to BJ, tossing a newspaper onto Hawk’s cot.
BJ smiled, breaking the first envelope open. Peg’s neat, looping cursive covered four tightly-folded pages.
My heart, the letter began, The morning I write this is my first without you .
“Ms. Fairfell’s Bisque Takes First Prize at Lobsterfest,” Hawkeye read aloud, shaking out his newspaper. “Recipe on Page Three.”
BJ turned the letter over. —up all night. I tried not to wake Erin. She’s just like you, though—already she can read me better than she has any right to.
“I never tried lobster. Had crawfish, though. They’re kind of the same except for the size, and also the mud,” Klinger said.
“Cook until garlic is fragrant and tomato paste coats vegetables,” Hawkeye said, laying down on his cot, the newspaper held aloft. His ratty red robe fell open, spilling over the edge of the bed.
—I won’t ask you to be brave, the letter said. Just be careful .
BJ blinked back a surge of upset and tucked the pages back in their envelope.
“Pour in seafood stock and wine, then stir in bay leaf and thyme. Now that’s my kind of poem.” Hawk dropped a hand to his stomach, rubbing lightly at the hollow of it.
“You want to go to the mess?” BJ asked him, setting the envelope aside.
“I’d rather eat rusted nails,” Hawkeye answered. “Oh, listen to this. ‘Add in butter, heavy cream, and lobster, stirring until thick, and then garnish with chives.’ Pure smut on page three of the paper. Ms. Fairfell, if I had pearls, I’d be clutching them.”
“You wanna borrow a string?” Klinger asked. “Otherwise I’m headed out.”
“Hey, lady, care for a drink?” Hawkeye asked, throwing the paper aside.
Klinger shook his head and pulled his shawl tighter. “I can’t. The neighbors will talk.”
“Come on,” Hawkeye said, smiling wider. “My treat.” He held out a precariously full martini glass.
“Whoa,” BJ said, blinking hard against a sudden craving. He hadn’t seen Hawkeye move to the still. “When’d you get that?”
“I’m grateful for the offer, sir, but I’ve got to be going,” Klinger said, his eyes carefully averted.
“If you’re sure,” Hawkeye said.
“Yes, sir.” Klinger curtsied, deep and only slightly joking, before he stepped backwards out of the Swamp.
“What was that?” BJ asked, watching Klinger’s yellow skirt disappear around the corner.
“A very well-mannered man,” Hawkeye said, and took a sip of gin. In the shade of the Swamp, his robe looked almost purple.
BJ picked a rolled pair of socks off the floor. “Seems you’re pretty well-respected around here.”
“I’m well-liked,” Hawkeye corrected. “Generally at the expense of the respect.”
“Maybe so. But that can lead to its own sort of regard.”
Hawkeye’s face went a little sour. “I hope not. Nothing’s as precarious as being on a pedestal. There’s no safe, slow downhill. It’s cliffs in every direction.”
“You’d better be careful saying things like that, or I’ll start to respect you too.” BJ jump-shotted the socks into his trunk, flicking his wrist like he was shooting a free-throw. When he looked over again, Hawkeye’s expression had gone mostly flat. He’d only known Hawk for a few weeks, but he was beginning to pick up on certain trends. Like the fact that that face meant introspection. Which meant he had maybe five minutes tops to jostle the guy out of his own head and into something appropriately distracting, or he’d be stuck in a terrible stormy mood for days.
“Come on,” BJ said, casting around for something to do.
“Where?” Hawkeye said, listless. “Why?”
“Let’s go take a few chips out of your pedestal,” BJ said. He tossed Frank’s helmet over. “Rough up the marble. Put some hairline fractures in the foundation.”
“What did you have in mind?” Hawkeye asked, turning the helmet over and over.
BJ shrugged. “Figured we could fill that with creamed corn and then yell ‘air raid.’”
Hawkeye nodded, still a little distant.
“Come on,” BJ prompted, raising his own helmet in toast.
After a moment of hesitation, Hawkeye clinked them together.
“To keeping your feet firmly on the ground,” BJ said, and reached out and hauled Hawkeye up, forearm to forearm.
///
“Pierce has corrupted you already, I see,” Frank said distractedly. He was shaving at the mirror, his straight razor making minute rasping sounds against the skin of his cheek.
“What makes you say that?” BJ asked, struggling to pull off his left boot. The right one was missing, for some reason. He figured he could worry about that in the morning.
“It is the morning,” Frank said, wiping his razor against the towel draped over his shoulder.
“Did I say that out loud?” BJ asked, and then went tumbling backwards off his cot when his shoe finally came off. He’d ingested probably somewhere north of a bathtub’s worth of gin, and his balance was, understandably, a little off. Frank was still shaving when he dragged himself back over the edge of the bed.
“You’re a surgeon, Hunnicutt. I expected a higher standard of behavior from a Stanford man.”
BJ settled onto his cot and idly shifted a few envelopes around on the trunk acting as his nightstand. They seemed very interesting to him just then. Something about the shape of his name in Peg’s neat curling cursive was captivating. “Are you blaming Hawk or aren’t you?”
“Hawk,” Frank scoffed, lathering his shaving brush aggressively. “That’s not his real name, you know.”
“Of course it’s not his real name,” BJ said. “I know it’s not his real name. Just like I know yours isn’t Ferret Face.”
Frank stiffened in indignation. “That’s Major Burns to you.”
“Frank,” BJ said, just to watch the guy twitch, “What’s with the military attitude? We’ve been up to our elbows in the same casualty’s ribcage. Surely that’s enough to get us on a first-name basis.”
“You would do well to insist on a little more formality,” Frank said. “I was like you, once. Going around giving my name to anybody who asked. Well, let me tell you, that’s no way for a man to conduct himself. Not when there’s things like Pierce around.”
“Things? I think the word you’re looking for is people,” BJ said, glancing out the Swamp’s door towards the showers. Hawkeye was taking a long time. “Surely you learned about them during medical school.”
“It’s too late anyhow,” Frank said to his reflection, scraping a patch of shaving cream on his jaw away. “He’s got me. And Margaret. And the colonel. And Klinger and O’Reilly and a whole slew of nurses and every last man who's gone under his knife. And you, mostly, but not yet. Not quite. But it won’t be long, not with the way you’re going.”
“What,” BJ started, and then cut off, feeling as though this was a conversation he ought to have been sober for. “What do you mean he has you.”
Frank glanced up, catching his eye in the mirror. “You don’t know? You don’t have a sense of it?”
“Of what?” BJ asked, lowering his voice when Frank glanced quickly at the door.
“I thought you knew,” Frank said. “You wouldn’t tell him your name. I thought you knew.”
“Know what?” BJ asked, his neck prickling. “What the hell are you talking about?”
Frank’s reflection stared at him, his razor frozen in the air. After a long moment he said, “Pay attention.”
“What?” BJ asked, incredulous.
“Yeah, Frank, what are you talking about?”
BJ startled hard enough he nearly went over the side of his cot again. Hawkeye was leaning against the inside of the Swamp’s door, his arms crossed casually. His hair was wet, and the collar of his bathrobe was damp. He had entered the room in utter silence.
“Hawk,” BJ said, relieved, though his heart rate was still running doubletime. “You scared the hell out of me.” When he looked over Frank was back to shaving. A small rivulet of blood was making its way down his neck from a cut on his jaw.
“Sorry, BJ,” Hawkeye said, strolling over to his bunk. “Didn’t mean to sneak up on you. Frank, here—that’s a different story.”
BJ watched Frank’s hand visibly tighten around the handle of his razor.
“What do you want, Pierce?” Frank said, not looking away from the mirror.
“That’s a pretty nice razor,” Hawkeye said mildly. “New?”
“I had my wife send it to me,” Frank said.
“What’s it made of?”
“Iron,” Frank said, his tone steely. He held it up to the light and the edge flashed red. “Pure iron.”
“Oh, really? Iron? Cold iron, is it?” Hawkeye bared his teeth in a not-funny-at-all-actually grin.
Frank’s grip on the razor tensed further, edging towards threatening.
“Kipling?” BJ asked uncertainly, hoping to break the strange, malevolent tension building in the Swamp even as Hawkeye’s phrasing stuck in his head. “Cold iron. That’s—” he paused, struggling for the rhyme. Hawkeye turned and stared.
“Tears are for the craven,” BJ said at last, recalling only one stanza completely, “prayers are for the clown—Halters for the silly neck that cannot keep a crown. As my loss is grievous, so my hope is small, for Iron—Cold Iron—must be master of men all.”
All at once Hawkeye’s grin shifted, turning sharper and realer. The building metallic taint of violence in the air dissipated like so much gunsmoke in the wind. “You’ve got a real ear for poetry.”
Frank went back to shaving.
“Kipling?” BJ asked again.
“It is Kipling indeed,” Hawkeye said, and inclined his head when BJ appended an instinctive little hallelujah . You can take the man out of Protestantism, but no matter how hard you try—and BJ had tried—you can never really take Protestantism out of the man.
“He made rebellion 'gainst the King his liege,” Hawkeye continued, speaking less in poetic meter, and more as though he were relating a story. “Camped before his citadel and summoned it to siege.”
“I don’t remember the rest,” BJ admitted, when Hawkeye seemed to be waiting for him to pick up the end of the stanza.
“I do.” Hawkeye’s gaze went distant and nearly regretful. “Woe for the Baron and his knights so strong, when the cruel cannon-balls laid 'em all along; he was taken prisoner, he was cast in thrall, and Iron—Cold Iron—was master of it all.”
Frank quietly wiped off his razor and tucked it into his pocket.
“A different kind of iron than I meant,” Hawkeye said, watching Frank put up his towel. “Or his at least was more symbolically resonant. Sometimes iron means war. Sometimes it means violence. But sometimes iron just means iron—a sword, a knife, a blade.”
“Cold iron,” BJ said, rolling the phrase around in his head. Sitting up was making him dizzy, so he laid back. “Isn’t that how you kill the fae?”
“I guess so.” Hawkeye shrugged. “It’s also how you kill anything.”
And somewhere across camp Radar O’Reilly lifted his head off his desk and hollered Choppers!
///
“Table for one,” BJ called towards the door of the OR, rolling his left shoulder. Recently it was starting to click with an ominous predictability. He sent a brief, directionless prayer against rheumatoid arthritis into the void as two enlisted men took away the boy he’d sewn up.
Across from him, Hawkeye dropped a piece of shrapnel into a tray. It fell with the wet malevolent slap of broken surface tension.
BJ leaned briefly on the operating table, taking some weight off his ankles. Hawkeye was bent low and vulture-like over the kid on his own table, his face unparseable in heavy shadow. He had been quiet too long.
“Heart rate,” warned his anesthetist suddenly, at the same time BJ asked, “Alright, Hawk?”
“Oh, dandy,” Hawkeye said tightly. “Clamp. Clamp, now, come on.”
“Steady on,” called Potter, wrist-deep in a ribcage.
“Steady off,” Hawkeye parroted distractedly. “Steady up. Down. What’s steady that we can append only so many modifiers?”
“To steady,” BJ said, “is both actionable and locational.”
“How so?” Hawkeye asked. “Pack that off, please, sweetheart.”
“Tachycardia,” the anesthetist said. “He’s going shocky. Losing too much blood.”
“So get him some more,” Hawkeye said, pulling another sliver of metal out of the kid. “No need to be stingy. B-positive. Be positive. BJ.”
“To steady, as in to make steady,” BJ said, watching sweat soak the off-white cotton of Hawkeye’s surgical mask. “You want me to step in?”
The anesthetist half-stood, clutching nervously at the manometer. “BP dropping.”
“I’ve got it,” Hawkeye said. “I’ve got it. Last piece. Come on, kid, stick it out with me. Come on. Come on. Come on. Come on.”
The OR was silent except for the slimy organic sounds of two gloved hands in an abdominal cavity.
“BJ,” Hawkeye said, not looking up.
“To steady — that’s locational,” BJ said, tension ratcheting up his back until he thought he might snap like an overwrought violin string. Hawkeye’s hands were absolutely stable, his gloves the color of Merlot. “To, as in towards, steady.”
“Ad stabilem.” Hawkeye brought out a miniscule scrap of metal. It hit the surgical tray with a damp metallic thwick .
The anesthetist let out a choked little moan, her hands fluttering uselessly over the manometer dial. “The systolic just went off a cliff. Doctor, he’s — you’re losing him—”
Potter craned his neck. “Son—”
Father Mulcahy stepped forward, out of the shadowy fringe of the OR, Bible pressed against his chest. Its gold-embossed cross glittered.
“I’m not losing anybody,” Hawkeye snapped, visibly blanching. “Father, do you mind? You’re in my light.”
“Hawk,” BJ said.
“You’re not going anywhere.” Hawkeye threw a saturated sponge blindly towards the bucket. It missed by a mile. “You hear me, kid? Come on. Suture. Sponge. Where’s that blood? BJ. Talk.”
“The ability of a pair to ‘go steady’ implies a certain locational quality to the state of ‘steady,’” BJ said, watching the sphyg fall. And fall. And fall. “Steady is somewhere you can be. It’s somewhere you can go.”
“Well then we’re going there,” Hawkeye promised, suturing expertly, his left hand perched half-inside the kid’s guts like a strange red bird. “You and I, kid, ad stabilem.”
“Doctor,” the anesthetist said, hand on the kid’s carotid, horror painting her tone sure as the insides of the kid were painting the front of Hawkeye’s scrubs, “He’s — there’s no—”
“BJ,” Hawkeye interrupted.
“Ad stabiles,” BJ corrected, not looking at the gauge. Not looking so hard he thought the force of his un-gaze might up and scrub the sphyg from existence. “Stabilem is singular. You want the plural.”
“Plural,” Hawkeye agreed, “Ideally. But I can take or leave myself. Him getting there is what matters. Take that sponge, please, nurse.”
“Come on, Hawk,” BJ said, speaking over the unmistakable click of a gauge dial hitting zero.
“I’ll be grammatically correct if you want me to,” Hawkeye said. “For you I will be. Ad stabiles, then, Dr. Hunnicutt. Come along.”
“Ad stabiles,” BJ said, feeling something true in the words.
“Ad stabiles,” Hawkeye said, so sure and steady it came out more than half-incantation. He was spooling out a perfect mattress stitch at a speed that would have put Peg’s Singer machine to shame. “Ad stabilem. Stabiles. Stabile. Stabilia. All of us. We’re getting there.”
The anesthetist was staring at the sphyg with her hands over her mouth.
Father Mulcahy hesitated at the foot of the kid’s table.
Margaret counted sponges.
BJ’s shoulder clicked, something inside the joint rasping.
The OR held its collective breath, before —
Hawkeye pulled his hands up and off the kid like he was being held at gunpoint, his gloves dripping red. His eyes burned, his triumph nearly animalistic.
Father Mulcahy stepped back into the shadows.
And somebody took away Hawkeye’s kid, and brought in another one.
///
“Oh, Christ,” the most recent kid on his table said, squinting around BJ to stare at Hawkeye. He was pale-blonde and narrow-faced with a set of prominently crooked buck teeth.
Hawkeye, who had pulled down his mask to take a sip of orange juice, squinted back.
“No, I don’t think so,” he decided, after a moment of bidirectional staring.
BJ angled his head towards the sound of Klinger’s heels. “How many to go?”
“He’s the last,” Klinger called. “For now.”
“Why are you here?” the kid hissed at Hawkeye, looking at BJ like he hoped he couldn’t hear him.
BJ cut away the kid’s trousers below the left knee. Minor bullet wound. As much as any bullet wound was minor. A clean, shallow skim over the fleshiest part of his calf. Wouldn’t even need stitches.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” Hawkeye said, half-collapsing over a table.
BJ prodded at the edge of the wound, and flicked out a chunk of grass that had dried into the blood. It needed irrigating.
The intercom buzzed. “Attention officers: In direct defiance of article twenty-six of the Geneva convention, breakfast will be served.”
“Doesn’t that just take the cake,” BJ said to the room at large, washing out the kid’s scrape.
Hawkeye set his juice glass down. “I wish it would. Then I wouldn’t be obliged to eat it.”
“Look,” the kid said, apparently giving up on not being overheard, propping himself up on his elbows. “I saw you. You were there. At the front. Are you following me?”
BJ frowned, patting the wound dry.
“You saw me… at the aid station?” Hawkeye guessed. “You put in a shift up there?”
“You were there,” the kid said, dead certain. “In the forest. You were there. It was you. It wasn’t but it was, and you were there. What are you?”
BJ peeled his gloves off and pulled on a new pair.
Hawkeye looked over, clocked that the boy’s scrape was properly dressed, and pulled off his cap.
“Hey, fella,” BJ said, stepping up and glancing at the kid’s tags. Pvt. Richard Stith. “Rich. Can I call you Rich?”
“Just don’t call him poor,” Hawkeye called, balling up his bloodied scrubs.
“Richie,” Richie said. He stared at Hawk with open anxiety.
BJ glanced back at Hawkeye, who shrugged, baffled.
Richie’s gaze pressed hard into the side of his face. “You can see him?”
“Him?” BJ asked, pointing at Hawkeye.
Richie nodded.
“That’s Dr. Pierce,” BJ said, turning back and gently pulling Richie’s left eyelid up. “He’s a local haunting.”
Hawkeye pushed his hands towards the ceiling, nose scrunching as something in his back audibly crunched. “I tend to appear in ORs, bars, and nurses’ dreams.”
BJ pulled off his mask. “Your pupil dilation is fine. Do you have a headache? Any dizziness? Ringing in your ears?”
“No,” Richie said. He turned again and eyed Hawkeye nervously.
“Dr. Pierce,” BJ said, pulling out a pen light, “Why don’t you go and get us a spot in the mess.”
“You only call me doctor when you want something,” Hawkeye lamented. “Fine, Dr. Hunnicutt. I’ll aid you in this senseless act of self-destruction. Just once.”
“I prefer to call it brunch.” BJ clicked off the penlight, and shook his head. No signs of a concussion or skull fracture. No sign of a head injury at all, besides the kid’s obvious confusion.
“Don’t be long,” Hawkeye said, slouching backwards through the OR door. “If you let the oatmeal get cold they’ll take it off your tray and lob it at the North Koreans. Even I don’t know how to treat the sort of injuries you get from that.”
Richie watched the door swing to a stop behind him.
“Everything alright, kiddo?” BJ asked, pulling off his mask.
“I’m not crazy,” the kid said, with the sort of intensely reasonable insistence BJ generally recognized as a bad sign in these sorts of cases.
“Okay,” BJ said, wondering if he’d have to call in Sidney. “You seemed concerned about my colleague. Dr. Pierce.”
“I’ve seen him,” Richie said, laconic.
BJ rolled his gloves off, and rubbed his eyes. They stung lightly, overtaxed. He wanted bacon. And eggs. With cheese. He wanted to pass out for a week. He wanted coffee that didn’t taste like mud. “You said. Look, Dr. Pierce spends most of his time here at the MASH. Unless you ran into him at the aid station, I can’t imagine you know each other.”
Richie looked at the door again, a quick, nervous flick of attention. “Have you ever seen something,” he started, and then cut off.
“Are you from Maine?” BJ asked, when the kid didn’t seem up to finishing his thought.
Richie’s eyes went wide.
BJ smiled, relieved. “So’s Dr. Pierce. Maybe you ran into each other before—” he gestured at the wooden walls of the OR, and the war beyond. “Stateside.”
“Maybe,” Richie said, warming up to the idea. “He from Warren too?”
“No,” BJ said, helping the kid off the table. “Crabapple Cove.”
Richie cocked his head, his face twisting. “What cove?”
“Crabapple,” BJ repeated. “Straight through those doors, and the fellow in the lovely crinoline skirt will set you up with a bed. You should be out of here in a few days.”
“Doctor, there’s no such place,” Richie said, pale all over again. “There is no Crabapple Cove in Maine.”
“It’s a pretty small town, I think. You might not have heard of it.”
“Sir,” Richie said, hesitating on the threshold of OR, “I think you’d better watch your back.”
“Excuse me?” BJ asked.
“Be careful,” Richie said, clarifying nothing, until he followed it up with, “Maybe find an atlas.”
BJ watched him slip into post-op, thinking of martinis and manometers, first names and Ferret Faces, Kipling and Korea.
“Richie,” he said, reaching out and catching the door. “Hang on a minute.”
///
“Okay,” BJ said, and sat back.
Richie observed him in careful silence. BJ wondered if he had been a middle child, back in the real world. If he’d ever felt he had to fight for attention. Or lie for it.
“Okay,” BJ said again. He rubbed his face, scratching at his two-days’-growth of stubble, feeling egregiously old. “Okay, okay, okay.”
Richie crossed and uncrossed his arms, dog tags jingling. “Okay?”
“Well, no,” BJ said, “objectively. Objectively this is not okay. Objectively I should be calling Dr. Freedman to give you an evaluation. I still might. Because, Richie, you understand that what you’ve just said to me could get you a section eight faster than you can say stiletto.”
“I’m stark raving sane,” Richie said, a faintly manic glint in his eyes.
BJ cast his gaze to the ceiling, and then back to the wiry kid sitting slouch-shouldered on his surgical table, one pant leg cut off at the knee.
Richie’s shoulders ratched up.“I know what I saw.”
“I believe that you saw it,” BJ said. “I don’t think you’re lying. But that doesn’t mean what you saw was real, either. It was dark. You were scared. Probably more scared than you’ve ever been before. It doesn’t take long in those kinds of conditions before your brain starts seeing shapes in the shadows.”
“I been scared before,” the kid said. “Plenty scared. But the fact is that I saw what I saw.” He stared past BJ into the middle distance, expression blurring in remembrance. “Somebody out there, in the no-man’s-land. In the forest. Watching. There one minute, gone the next. ‘Cause then the shooting started. But he looked at me, and he was standing there in all that dark… and I’m not the only one’s seen him.”
“Can you point me to anybody else who has?”
Richie shrugged. “From my outfit? I don’t know. But he’s known , alright? People talk. They say the night before you get hit, the Watcher shows up, and he just looks at you. And he’s not angry or scary or nothing. Just sad for you. And if you see him, well, you can throw in the towel. That’s it for you. I don’t know what he is. But I don’t think he’s all the way a person. You understand?”
“The Watcher,” BJ said, trying to scoff but feeling the capital letters assert themselves regardless.
Richie just stared at him, guileless.
“This is difficult for me,” BJ began, and then stopped, shaking his head. “You have to understand, I’m not the sort of person who buys into this kind of thing. I’m a scientist. A doctor. I — maybe I used to. When I was a kid, see, they really drilled it into you, the supernatural thing. Demons and ghosts, holy though the latter may be, and things that take the shape of people, and others supposedly good but so terrible to see they have to tell you ‘do not be afraid.’ I had some of that, growing up. Actually a lot of it. But,” he fixed Richie with a long look, “part of growing up is leaving the fairytales behind.”
Richie’s lips thinned. “Some people might take offense to that sort of idea.”
“Some people might,” BJ agreed. “So I usually keep it to myself. I get on with the chaplain. I go to the Christmas service, and Easter, when I’m asked. And then I go on my merry way, knowing I’ve got it sorted for myself. Maybe I go away feeling a little superior, even. Because I think I’ve got something all those folks don’t. Whatever I have inside is enough. I don’t need anybody’s words to make me whole. But then this.”
He turned, rolling his shoulder, listening to it click. “See, if there really is something out there. Something like that. Bigger than us, I mean. If that’s out there, then I have to start asking the question I’ve been avoiding since the draft board lassoed my ankles and skipped me across the Pacific.”
He turned again, finding he was shaking with barely-suppressed emotion, riding the hell-crash of thirty hours of wakefulness, of low blood sugar, of staring at his best friend covered in blood, knitting a soldier out of blood and ground meat. “Do you know what the question is, Richie?”
Richie watched him. Always watching, this kid. BJ watched him right back. See how he liked it.
“No,” Richie said at last.
“Why me?” BJ asked, the second syllable cutting to a harsh, breathless halt, dying under the weight of its own multivalent resonances: Why him? Why now? Why this? And would he ever, in the remaining decades of his life, be able to stand on Stinson Beach, his face turned westward towards the setting sun, without the remembered metallic taint of blood staining the maritime air?
Richie nodded consideringly, touching the edge of his bandage. BJ wondered if he’d been drafted, or if he’d volunteered. Wondered if there were really ever any volunteers for this sort of thing—surely there couldn’t be. Nobody could understand what they were volunteering for until the bureaucracy had swallowed them whole, and it was too late to turn tail.
“I guess I don’t know about all that,” Richie said. “I guess I always thought there was a God but he probably doesn’t care too much about me or anybody. But sometimes things happen. Sometimes you see stuff that you don’t know how to explain except that you saw them. And you trust your eyes, don’t you? You pro’ly dissected enough of them in school to trust ‘em, I mean. You know how they work. And when you see something, well, you gotta fit it into your world somehow. God, maybe, or demons. Fairies. Elves. Monsters. Whatever.”
“You’re in a war,” BJ said, miserable. “Don’t you think it’s time to grow up?”
Richie shrugged. “All I know is, if you don’t believe in something, that don’t mean it doesn’t believe in you.”
“Father Mulcahy’s already trotted that line out a few times, thanks.”
“Back to the God thing again. You sure are fixed on that. Well, it’s not what I’m talking about.” Richie slid off the table, testing his leg. “Plenty of things not God or holy lurking around out there, believing themselves true. Maybe check under your bed, make sure you haven’t gone and let something in that would’ve been better left out in the cold. Maybe check the bed next to yours, too. You don’t watch the doors, things’ll creep inside while you’re not looking. And then there they hide in plain sight. Well. What do I know.”
“And in your considered opinion,” BJ said, bitter, to the back of the kid’s head, “What would a thing like that want?”
“Guess you could ask it,” Richie said, and disappeared through the swinging doors.
///
When he stepped into the clerk’s office, Radar was already looking at him.
“No maps in here, sir,” Radar said, at the same moment BJ opened his mouth to ask for one.
BJ snapped his mouth shut, teeth clicking harshly. He pivoted one hundred and eighty degrees and march-stepped right back out of the door.
He felt unbalanced, slightly offset from his body, like his perception was lagging a half-step behind. His hands were rubbery and insensate, and he flexed them absently. The sun was fully up, now, and the ground was beginning to warm. The breeze was dusty, and faintly desiccant. The trees around the edge of camp were swaying, leaves meeting and unmeeting in a cascade of shk-shk-shk sounds. Nothing was lurking between or behind their trunks. The sky was blue. The day was clear. A pretty brunette nurse stepped out of a tent, fixing her collar.
He turned around and marched back into the clerk’s office.
“Sorry, sir,” Radar said, overtly anxious. “I didn’t mean to scare ya or nothin’. Only I didn’t want to waste your time. I forget it puts people off.”
“That’s alright,” BJ said, looking at the stack of papers on the desk. He couldn’t read them upside down. But, knowing Radar’s handwriting, he wasn’t sure he’d be able to read them right-side up, either. “Is the colonel occupied?”
Radar’s gaze went distant and unfocused. “Yes, sir, but he’ll be unoccupied in a moment, sir.”
“If only Korea’d follow his example,” BJ said, giving up on the files. He looked at Radar, who promptly looked away, growing, somehow, even more anxious. He pressed his lips together, a question surfacing half-formed in the back of his mind. “I suppose you know—”
“Not really, sir,” Radar interrupted, turning to a pile of gridded forms. “He got here a little before I did. And me being an enlisted man and all, and him an officer, well I didn’t know too much about him until Trapper John came around.”
“And then—”
“Well, he cheered him up, I think.”
“Who cheered who up?” BJ asked, leaning in.
“Each of ‘em,” Radar clarified. “Trapper needed somebody would take his mind off of it all, and Hawkeye needed somebody would take his mind off of taking everybody’s minds off of it.”
“And then—”
“He left, sir, yes. Hawkeye was real broken up about that, but you was there for that part.”
“I don’t suppose you’d let me carry on my half of this conversation out loud?”
Radar shrugged. “It just saves time is all, sir. You think a lot quicker than you talk. And a lot more direct.” He hesitated, and then gave BJ a brief, incisive glance. “And if it’s not too presumptative of me to say I wonder if you really want to know the answer to that question you have knocking around up there.”
BJ exhaled, taking a hard, involuntary step backwards, identifying the red-static feeling eating him from the inside out as fear only after his heels bumped the baseboard behind him.
“Oh,” Radar said, apologetic. “I didn’t mean that one, sir.”
“Something’s off,” BJ said, driving forward and pushing his index finger hard into the splintering wood of the clerk’s desk. He needed to sleep. He needed to eat. He needed, just once since he’d been drafted, absolutely anything at all to resolve into something that made sense. “And I can’t go on pretending like it’s not.”
Radar went back to shuffling papers. “That’s your choice to make, sir. The colonel’s free, now, anyway.”
BJ edged around him, suddenly wary of having his back to the kid. So what if he had a foot and fifty pounds on him. Something was—happening. Something in the camp, that maybe always was happening, but he’d never noticed. Or had tried not to notice. Could you fight a person who knew what punch you were going to throw before you did?
“Come in,” Potter said, dry, as BJ shouldered through the doors and into his office.
“Map,” BJ said, having apparently lost all capacity for communication somewhere in the last three feet.
“Of?” Potter asked, lighting up a cigar, staring at BJ expectantly as blue smoke began to curl out of his mouth.
BJ jittered forward a step, abruptly frantic. “A map. A map, give me a map, I need a map.”
Potter exhaled, smoke twisting and disappearing into the slant of sun cutting through the room. He threw open the drawer under his desk and pulled out a heavily pencil-marked aerial layout of in-progress Uijeongbu-area combat operations.
“No,” BJ said, frenetic. “United States. I need a map, an atlas, a goddamn travel brochure, anything. Anything. Please.”
“Everything alright, son?” Potter asked, looking him over. He was squinting, his glasses folded up and hooked into his breast pocket.
“Map,” BJ begged, approaching panic.
Potter nodded, and hefted an atlas onto the desk, slamming it down over top of the war.
BJ turned it on the desk. The map below crinkled and folded, Uijeongbu suddenly connected to the center of Incheon through a wrinkle in space, hundreds of tanks and horses and eighteen-year-olds elided in the crunch. He flipped frantically to the fold-out map of Maine, dragging his finger along the yellow-blue boundary marking the coastline.
Cutler. Machiasport. Roque Bluffs. Jonesboro. Jones port . Fucking—Sealand? There were so many little towns.
“Something I can help you find?” Potter asked.
“Crabapple Cove,” BJ said, following the curve of the bay up to Bangor, and then back down to Belfast. “All I know is that it’s supposed to be coastal.”
“Coastal,” Potter repeated. “That doesn’t mean a thing.”
BJ stopped, his finger blotting out the sun over the town of Rockland. “What?”
Potter took a pull off his cigar. “Well,” he said, through a smoky exhalation, “There’s no such thing as a coast.”
“There is,” BJ said. “I’ve been there. I’ve been to many theres. I used to live in California. It was a staple feature.”
“It’s a man-made concept. A result of cartographic generalization.”
“Cartographic generalization,” BJ said. He glanced down, skimming his fingers over Bristol and Boothbay.
“Look at it this way,” Potter said, while BJ scanned the map. Sebasco. Bath. West Bath. “How would you define coastal?”
“Something on the coast,” BJ said distractedly. Harpswell. Brunswick. “You know. Where land meets sea.”
“Then none of those towns are coastal,” Potter said, tapping the unlit end of his cigar over Freeport. A few flakes of powdery ash disappeared into the sea. “They aren’t on the boundary. They’re solidly on dry land.”
“That’s too literalist,” BJ said. “There are towns that are coastal, and towns that are not. Proximity to the coast is measurable.”
Potter shook his head. “It’s all generalization. The whole of Maine is coastal, compared to Iowa.”
“But there are coasts,” BJ said. “I’ve been.”
“Sure,” Potter said. “I believe you’ve been to a place where land stops and water starts. But you haven’t been to a coast. There are no coasts.”
BJ finally looked up at him, marking his place over Scarborough. “I don’t understand what you’re trying to tell me.”
“Landmasses have features at every scale,” Potter said. “And they’re always changing. They’re fractal. The smaller you go, the more detail there is to measure. You either have to generalize, and take your best guess at the shape of the thing without ever really knowing, or you measure until you’ve got a coast that’s infinitely long. How do you decide where the edge is, when the waves come in and out all the time? Can you continuously measure where there is, and is not, water, at any given moment?”
“No,” BJ said, looking with despair at the town of Kittery, smack up against the southern border of Maine. “You have to generalize. Or you’d never get anything that meant anything.”
“So,” Potter said. “We’re in agreement. There’s no such thing as a coast.”
“It seemed so real,” BJ said, closing his eyes against a remembered salty breeze, swaying against a bout of physical exhaustion that threatened to pull him to the dusty wooden floor of the office.
“Plenty of things do,” Potter said.
“If there’s no coast, then nothing can be coastal.” BJ skimmed back up over the map. “Coastal is just a friendly lie we made up to help us sort out the unbearable proximity of infinity.”
“‘Attaboy,” Potter said, thumping him kindly on the shoulder. “You don’t look so hot, if you don’t mind me saying. Maybe you ought to go have some toast and a lie-down.”
“Yessir,” BJ said, touching the nonexistent coast of Maine where Crabapple Cove wasn’t.
///
“Elfshot?” Hawkeye asked with polite interest, when BJ stumbled into the mess, an hour later than he said he’d be.
An electric thrill of paranoia rolled up BJ’s back. “What?”
“Elfshot,” Hawkeye said again. “That kid. Private Rich. You know. Invisible injuries from invisible elves shooting invisible arrows.” He gestured vaguely towards his head, and whistled. He looked tired. He needed a shave.
BJ stared down into his oatmeal, congealed solidly on the tray Hawkeye had saved for him. The sun was high and already hot, at the exact angle it had been when he’d entered the OR twenty-four hours previously. “What day is it?”
Hawkeye checked his wrist for a nonexistent watch. “It’s half-past police action, but personally I like to round up and call it war o’clock. For clarity’s sake.”
“I mean what’s the date,” BJ said. “What is today’s date?”
Hawkeye sighed philosophically, letting a forkful of powdered eggs drop back to his tray. “I don’t know. The food is from nineteen forty-three. The kids aren’t much older. I spent the last twenty four hours in a cramped, noisy room, sewing my gloves into patients. How’s anybody supposed to keep the day straight, let alone the year?” He looked back at his eggs. BJ figured they had to be lukewarm and entirely inedible. He’d probably been picking at them for the last hour. “Anyway, are we calling Sidney for the kid or aren’t we?”
“How long have I been here?” BJ asked.
“Are you feeling okay?” Hawkeye countered—no, asked. They weren’t arguing.
“Hawkeye, what’s the year?” BJ asked.
Hawkeye paused a beat too long. “Nineteen fifty-one,” he said at last.
BJ’s pulse pounded hard, hard enough it utterly missed the next beat, and he shot to his feet, feeling like he’d had a bucket of ice water poured over his head.
“BJ?” Hawkeye asked. “Is something wrong?”
“That isn’t possible,” BJ informed him, working to level his voice, trying to sound matter-of-fact or flat or even upset, anything besides what he was, which was terrified. “I was drafted in nineteen fifty-two.”
He turned and pushed through the doors of the mess, feeling eighty percent insane, ten percent ridiculous, five percent concerned he’d just ruined the most meaningful friendship of his life, two-point-five percent like he should be checking Hawk for a skull fracture, and the remaining two-point-five like the scales had at long last fallen from his eyes.
“Beej,” Hawkeye called, belatedly getting up to follow him.
BJ quickened his pace. He kicked into the Swamp, the door rebounding off the inside of the tent. His feet were killing him. He caught the faint, metallic scent of blood, and stopped short, inspecting his hands, certain somehow that he’d missed something when he’d scrubbed out of the OR.
Nothing. His hands were pale, and clean, and badly chapped from repeated washing.
“Therein the patient must minister to himself,” he muttered to nobody, and then immediately ripped open his storage trunk, sending a martini glass to the ground, where it cracked and split on impact.
Hawkeye burst into the tent behind him, as though the sound of shattering glass had spawned him. “BJ, will you please calm down and talk to me?”
BJ held up a hand, digging through the piles and piles of envelopes addressed to him from Mill Valley. He grabbed one at random and shook the contents out, scanning the letter. Only—he couldn’t read it. There were words on the page, he was sure of it, but they seemed senseless, nothing more than an illegible cursive scrawl. He couldn’t make out a date.
He ripped open another letter. And then another. And then another. A tight, meaningless collection of word-shapes covered each and every page. They looked like letters in every way that mattered, but they weren’t. They were just arrangements of words. And none he even particularly liked.
“BJ,” Hawkeye said, hesitating by the door. He looked scared, like BJ was being unreasonable. Like BJ was the unperson between the two of them. Unacceptable.
BJ pushed past him and wrenched Hawkeye’s storage trunk open. He grabbed the first magazine he saw, and then quickly flung it aside, blushing despite himself, in favor of the newspaper beneath it. The Crabapple Cove Courier .
“Desperate for some new reading material?” Hawkeye hazarded, still pressed up against the Swamp’s door, like he thought BJ might snap and lunge for his throat. Like he was the dangerous one.
“Don’t you,” BJ asked, rapidly scanning the Courier , “ever shut up?”
Hawkeye watched him in silence, hands out, placating.
Upcoming State Planning Meeting Agenda Announced, said the Courier’s front page. Public Hearings and Agenda Highlights: A public hearing will be held to consider an amendment to Section 24-4…
BJ flipped the paper over.
Representatives Urge State Leaders to Finish Paving Roadway
Local business and community leaders are urging state officials to utilize federal funds to finish the long-promised connecting road between…
BJ opened the paper to the middle.
Annual Grower’s Gala Shows Purpose, Progress
The Maine Farm Bureau Foundation held its sixth annual Grower’s Gala this month during the Foundation’s annual convention. The evening included dinner, a live auction, and a raffle…
BJ threw the paper down, pressing the backs of his hands into his eyes. It was a normal small-town newspaper. Completely banal. So boring he could cry.
“BJ,” Hawkeye said, inching closer. “What’s wrong? And don’t tell me nothing. I won’t fall for that grit-teeth I’m-just-fine-Hawk machismo thing you do whenever you don’t want to ask for help.”
“Stay away from me,” BJ said, halfhearted.
Hawkeye froze instantly, his hands going higher, framing his head. “I think maybe you should lay down. Have a nap. I can cover your shift in post-op.”
The Courier stared up from the bed. A little column in the corner declared that the week’s forecast was cool and clear, with highs in the mid-fifties.
BJ stared right back at it, failing to suppress a sudden manic grin.
Hawkeye shifted in his periphery. “BJ?”
“The forecast,” he choked out, already breathless from laughing. “It’s nowhere. It doesn’t exist. But of course it has weather anyway. Wherever it would be, if it was, would have weather. Wouldn’t it? So it has weather. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be, and, of course, it isn’t—but even so, wherever it is has got to have weather, whether it’s the weather or not. So you know where it isn’t. And wherever it isn’t is where it is. Or would be.”
“Say that five times fast,” Hawkeye said lightly, even as his gaze went flinty.
Ah, BJ thought. There you are. And here I am.
Hawkeye slowly lowered his hands.
BJ watched him.
“Is there something you’d like to ask me?” Hawkeye asked at last, laying the words down like a man trying his best to set a brimming-full porcelain tea cup on the wing of a moving fighter jet.
“Yes,” BJ said. “I think there is.”
The ambient noise of the camp continued on in the background, filling the silence of the tent with a certain social warmth. The hollow, buoyant thwop of a volleyball making contact with skin came before a soft, collective cheer. The wind was warm and dry and thick with dust, bringing a situationally inappropriate sense-memory of playground games of kickball. Hawkeye was looking particularly disarmed, tired and sallow and thin in his khaki everythings.
“Are you sure?” Hawkeye asked, looking between BJ and the Courier .
When BJ was twelve, his family had taken a car trip into Arizona. On the way they’d stopped at Death Valley National Monument. It was the most alien landscape he’d ever seen; the rolling white dunes were stark and blindingly bright against the empty blue sky, barren stretches interrupted by lush, circular bursts of wildgrass and scrub. Farther on the sand turned to harsh, flat rock, and then to salt flats, the only water for miles and miles so brackish it was useless to anything alive. There were signs all along the road reading Last Stop For Ninety Miles Ahead , with illustrations of cars stranded on the sides of the road, bright, single spots of saturation against the broiling inhospitable desert.
BJ had watched the signs pass carefully, absorbing the drawings with empiric fascination: the straw-haired children with comically exaggerated frowns, the wife fanning herself in the passenger seat, the husband holding his thumb out towards an empty highway. Always Be Prepared , read the signs. Last Stop . And Turn Back Now. And when they had driven past the tiny gas station without so much as slowing, BJ spent the next ninety miles scoring sharp moon-shaped grooves into the vinyl car seat with his nails.
Meaning, of course, that BJ knew a last chance when he saw it. But final stops or no, one always had to brave the highway eventually. Or else you’d never get home.
Why? BJ didn’t ask. Nor did he ask What are you? or How long have we been at this or even if we ever make it out of here, could I bear to see you again? Will I ever be able to think of you and not in the next moment remember a kid, flayed open and filled with metal, slipping away underneath my scalpel? Is what we have permanently colored by the place in which we found it?
Instead he let out a soft, controlled breath, and said, “There is no Crabapple Cove.”
Hawkeye inclined his head. “That’s not a question.”
“No.”
“No.”
“No what?” BJ asked. “No, it’s not a question, or—”
“The newspaper’s right there,” Hawkeye said, indicating the bed. “You tell me.”
“Well, sure, it looks real enough,” BJ said. “But I’ve learned that doesn’t mean much.”
“Oh, yeah?”
“Yeah,” BJ said. “Had a great talk with Potter. Found out there’s no such thing as a coast.”
“That must have been quite a shock,” Hawkeye said. “Being from California and all.”
“Did you know that Mill Valley is just about the farthest away you can get from Maine in the continental United States?” BJ asked.
“Is that so?” Hawkeye took a tentative step closer. BJ cut his hand through the air, an aggressive hard-stop motion that sent Hawkeye rocking back on his heels.
“It is.” BJ turned around and scuffed a few shards of broken martini glass into a tighter alignment with the edge of his shoe. “You’d think, with Crabapple Cove being made up and all, that you’d planned it somehow. But then again, everybody here knew you were from Maine long before I got here. So then I started wondering, you know, if maybe I was the made-up one. How convenient, for me to show up. The perfect mirror. Light to your dark. Tropical to your Nor’easter. A straight reflection right over the middle of the country. Exact symmetry.”
“Not convenient. Coincidence,” Hawkeye said, expression softening. “Or fate. You’re you. That’s the truth.”
“And Crabapple Cove?”
Hawkeye stepped around him, raising his hands briefly, telegraphing his intent to sit on his cot. BJ nodded, and watched him pick around the mess he’d made of the floor.
“So,” Hawkeye began at last. “Crabapple Cove. Is it real?” He bobbed his head equivocatingly. “What is ‘real,’ anyway?”
BJ stepped down on a convex round of glass, feeling it flatten beneath his ratty Converse. The gritty crunch of it was not as satisfying as he’d hoped.
“Okay,” Hawkeye said, picking up the newspaper. “Not in the mood for thought experiments, I guess.”
“It’s not an experiment,” BJ said, twisting the ball of his foot, grinding the glass into powder. “It’s my life, you son of a bitch.”
Hawkeye looked up at him sharply, torquing into belated anger. He threw the newspaper down.
“Don’t do that,” BJ said, though he felt his posture change automatically in response, shifting his weight forward, ready to bolt or throw a punch, if he had to. He’d never been a violent person. Something had changed. He’d been changed. Who had changed him? And why? “What the hell is wrong with you? Why do you have to—?”
“I’m sorry,” Hawk said, his brows raised, almost surprised except for the upticked corners of his mouth, a sort of vindictive amusement maybe. “I don’t want this, you know. It’s just how it happened. I’m not keeping you here. And it’s not like I brought you here. I didn’t bring you here. The stochastic nature of the universe—statistical cruelty, God, the Army, bad luck or karma, whatever—that brought you here. And then here you found me.”
“You do something,” BJ said, not at all certain but feeling it true in his gut. “Something about you pulls. What do you do?”
“What do I do?” Hawkeye threw his arms wide. “I’m a goddamn doctor! ‘I will remember that I remain a member of society, with special obligations to all my fellow human beings, those sound of mind and body as well as the infirm.’” He stood up under the force of his own anger. “Out here that’s translating to collecting very sane people and doing my level best to keep them that way.”
“Collect?” BJ said. “Collect? Keep? Like some freakish glass menagerie? What gives you the authority to do a thing like that?”
Hawk half-smiled, holding his hand up, looking into nothing, the picture of rhetorical posturing. “‘Yes, I have tricks in my pocket, I have things up my sleeve. But I am the opposite of a stage magician. He gives you illusion that has the appearance of truth. I give you truth in the pleasant disguise of illusion.’” He dropped his hand and frowned. “Or do I mean that in reverse?”
“Stop quoting. Answer the question,” BJ said.
Hawk ignored him. “Reversed or not, I guess it just depends which side of the mirror you’re standing on.”
“What’s your name?” BJ asked.
“Hawkeye,” Hawkeye said.
“No. What’s your real name?”
“What’s yours?”
“BJ Hunnicutt,” BJ said. “What is your real name?”
“Benjamin Franklin Pierce,” Hawkeye said.
“You expect me to believe that?” BJ asked.
“You expect me to believe BJ is your real name?”
He glared at Hawkeye, who only raised an eyebrow in response.
“You don’t know that it’s not,” BJ said. “My real name. You don’t know that it’s not.”
“Don’t I?” Hawkeye said. “The problem, dear BJ, is that I do know. I know very well.”
“Where are we?” BJ snapped.
“Korea,” Hawk said, abruptly tired. “It’s always been Korea.”
“Why?”
“There’s a war on. Or haven’t you been reading the news?” Hawkeye sat back on his cot. “Remind me what it is that we’re arguing about. I’ve lost the plot.”
“What it is that you are,” BJ said vehemently. “I didn’t know. Not at first. I admired you. But I see you now.”
“What is it you’re implying?” Hawkeye said, snapping from exhaustion to cold disdain.
“I’m saying,” BJ said, picking up his foot, glass shards sticking into the bottom of his shoe, “that I see you.”
“And?”
“What do you mean, and?”
“And what?” Hawkeye asked. “So? You see me. Congratulations. Welcome. And I’m sorry. There’s nothing for me to be except apologetic. And I am. I’m sorry. I apologize, genuinely, from the bottom of my heart, with all the honesty I can bring to bear. Does that make you happy? What now, BJ? What’s the point? What does it change?”
“Apologetic?” BJ asked, shaking his head. “Apologetic? For what? What do you think I’m talking about? What are you talking about?”
“What are you talking about?” Hawkeye countered.
“You first.”
Hawkeye grit his teeth, looked away, and opened his arms, inviting—something.
“What?” BJ asked.
“Come on,” Hawkeye said. “Don’t make me say it.”
“What are you apologizing for?” BJ said, suspicious again. “Tell me. What did you do?”
“And I’m the son of a bitch?” Hawkeye asked. “Me?” His expression was sharp and raw, scalpel-like. “That just beats all. You know, you’re not exactly man of the year yourself. If we’re talking about who’s seeing who.”
“What is your problem?” BJ asked.
“No, no, no, you don’t get to look away so fast,” Hawkeye said. “So I’m a son of a bitch. And what are you?” He leaned back on his cot, crossing his ankles. “So much to admire about our Dr. Hunnicutt. Friendly. Well-read. A family man. The All-American golden boy, straight from sunny Mill Valley. Such a good person he’s a second away from flattening his bunkmate with a clean right hook to the jaw.”
BJ glanced down, surprised to find he’d been clenching his fists.
“How’s that rage feel?” Hawkeye asked, tilting his head. “Good? Clean? Like something burning away? Better be careful. Combustion is irreversible, you know. Keep on burning and who knows what’s going to be left of you.”
“What else am I supposed to be?” BJ asked. “Happy? Here? Like this?”
“No,” Hawkeye said. “Just don’t pretend like you’re above it. You’re in the mud and the hell, same as the rest of us. You’re only human.”
“And you aren’t?” BJ snapped.
“What are you even talking about?” Hawkeye said, levering a hand up into the empty air. “You think I think I’m superhuman? BJ, most days I feel privileged to consider myself above the rank of rat. I’m a son of a bitch, just like you said. A bastard. A fink. Ungrateful. A walking disaster zone. A plague-ridden flea on the golden retriever of life. Look, I grew up in a beautiful town on the seaside. My childhood was idyllic. I was raised on fresh maple candy and homemade apple cider. My life would have made a Norman Rockwell painting feel deprived. And yet. And still. Here I am, a few sandwiches short of a picnic. A couple slices shy of a loaf. For no real reason. And here I am, taking it out on you. So. Sorry. Again.”
BJ rubbed at his forehead, looking back to the Courier . He was finding it increasingly hard to stay angry. He was losing the thread of the conversation. He wanted, very badly, to lay down. “Hawk. Your mom died when you were ten.”
“I’m aware,” Hawkeye said, not meeting his eyes. “Believe it or not, that sort of stuck with me.”
“I’d hardly call that idyllic,” BJ said, steadfastly not giving in to the incredibly enticing pull of gravity, the siren song of his pillow.
Hawkeye waved him off. “That’s not what I’m talking about. I’m talking about—There are certain ways for people to be, you understand. And I’m not, and I’ve never known why. And now you see it. And I’m sorry it took so long. And I’m sorry you had to see it at all.”
“Jesus,” BJ said, getting it abruptly. “Oh, fuck, Hawk, come on. You thought—you can’t have thought I meant you being a little bit—look, you’re a doctor. I’m a doctor. We’re both friends with Sidney. Melancholia isn’t a personality flaw. It’s, you know, they’re saying it’s biological, these days. Neurochemical. It’s not something you can blame yourself for.”
“I know,” Hawkeye said, looking distinctly like somebody who didn’t. “I do. I know. But knowing and believing. Those aren’t always the same.”
BJ’s gaze snapped back to the Courier .
They sat in stilted silence. “I’m sorry I called you a son of a bitch,” BJ offered eventually.
Hawkeye leaned forward conspiratorially. “Well, I’m sorry I implied you weren’t an All-American golden boy.” He paused, and then kicked BJ’s ankle, scooting his foot away from the pulverized martini glass. “Now, do you want to tell me why you were losing it over my newspaper?”
BJ closed his eyes, dropping his head into his hands. “I don’t think I can explain it.”
“Try me.”
BJ looked up at him, pressing his palm against his mouth. Hawkeye looked like he always did. Not otherworldly. Not fae, or elven, or even monstrous. Just tired, and kind, and a little bit sad.
“You got the year wrong,” BJ said.
Hawkeye squinted. “Nineteen fifty-one? BJ, that was a bad joke. I was trying to make you laugh. Though I can see now it clearly didn’t work.”
“And the kid. Richie. He had some ideas about—there’s some fairytale going around, and he knew your face.” BJ winced. Something about saying it out loud made it feel silly, superstitious, like he was grasping at shadows. “And then I mentioned you were from Crabapple Cove. And he said ‘where.’”
“He from Maine?” Hawkeye asked.
“Yeah. Said he’d never heard of it. So.”
“So?”
“I looked up Crabapple Cove in the atlas,” BJ confessed in a rush.
Hawkeye’s expression was inscrutable.
“And you know what I found?” BJ asked.
“Nothing,” Hawkeye said, immediate and offhand, like it was obvious.
BJ nodded.
“And then what?”
“And then… I don’t know. Something’s been off-balance since I got here. And somehow I got it into my head that I might not be… all real. Or that you might not be. I don’t know. It sounds insane.” BJ shook his head. “Just like everything else. It can feel real as anything and still be nothing more than mist.”
Hawkeye passed the Courier back to BJ, flicking his palm as the paper changed hands. The sting of it was solid and real.
“I don’t understand,” BJ said. “I don’t know how to know what’s real. If I can't see it. And I may never see it. What’s the point? How can I know that it’s not just—all some game? Some great big round of cosmic checkers. And I’m just a flat plastic token, getting skipped around for somebody else’s amusement.”
“If it helps,” Hawkeye said, propping his elbows on his knees, “I could tell you that Crabapple Cove is an unincorporated township. It’s not on an atlas anywhere, because, formally, it doesn’t exist.” He caught BJ’s gaze, and held it. “And yet. There’s a whole community of people there, living and loving and dying, in houses, on the beachfront, sitting in rocking chairs on their porches, making chocolate pudding pies and fixing holes in their socks and freezing half to death ‘cause they think, every year, that the Atlantic in June is going to be warm enough to swim in.”
“You could tell me that,” BJ said. “You could. You could tell me that.”
Hawkeye nodded.
“Would it be true?” BJ asked.
Hawkeye just looked at him.
“Hawk.”
Hawkeye sighed. “Would it matter? Would you ever believe me, either way?”
BJ looked down at the crushed martini glass. It glittered like so much powdered snow. Like sea foam. Like the white sand it must once have been. BJ wondered, distantly, if it had come from a coast, too.
Hawkeye silently held out his hand, palm up, bridging the space between their cots.
“I’ll see it in person someday,” BJ said. “On the other side of this all.”
Hawkeye’s hand stayed surgeon-steady in the space between them.
“We’re getting out,” BJ told him. “There is something beyond all this. There has to be. It’s real. I can’t see it, but I know it’s there.”
Hawkeye shrugged, noncommittal.
“Okay,” BJ said, reaching out and taking his hand. They shook, wrist to wrist, and he knew instantly he’d never live to see a day he wouldn’t wonder what it was he’d agreed to. “Alright.”
///
“What,” Hawkeye asked him one sweltering Korea night, a lone voice in the dark, “won’t you believe in?”
BJ stared at the ceiling of the Swamp, his eyes hopelessly straining to see through the deep midnight pitch. He wished he could tell them it was pointless to try. That there were some darknesses so complete you’d never adjust. But then that was just as pointless to imagine; the reaction was automatic, as uncontrollable as a heartbeat.
And then again. He’d seen more than his fair share of those stopped. And more than a few restarted. So what did he know, anyway?
He stayed quiet, breathing low and even. The generator hummed. Frank snored. Klinger’s heels clicked steadily as he circled the camp. The night was dark, the heat was stifling, and the operating room waited patiently for their inevitable return.
He couldn’t look over. He didn’t want to. There was no way of predicting what he’d do if he saw a pair of glowing eyes staring back. Or what he’d do if he didn’t. If they’d never been there in the first place. So he left the dark between them unbridged.
“BJ?” Hawkeye asked, hushed.
“Everything,” BJ said, and closed his eyes.