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When you fall free of dreams and you open your eyes, they kind of overlap on the figure sitting up at the edge of the bed. His dark, dark hair against the dim, against the soulless pattern of the décor, momentarily becomes moths. A flock of them, so thickly drawn by the light within it's now completely obscured. The orange-red light is withdrawn so deep it only gasps out from his cigarette, and the moths settle in and sleep, drowsy from the smoke. But that's the dream—and this is a new one, just as temporary. You move within the sheets and he notices, withdraws the moths and becomes human again.
1970
Nixon leans on the doorframe of the car, looking like he's acting tough. And much younger than he really is anymore. It's summer, on the edge of autumn, and winter still hardly far off. "So," he says. "Did you enjoy your stay?"
Dick settles back into the driver's seat, and glances out through the windshield. He's got a few hours ahead of him to stare through it, but the sunlight boring down on the blacktop is somehow too beautiful to turn away from. Nixon seems to notice that, and glances over his shoulder. There are kids playing in the street—stickball, fragmented baseball often interrupted by a honk or a mother's call.
"Yeah," Dick answers finally, and he looks up at his old friend. "Yeah, I did."
"Good. It was great to have you over. Although it'll take me days to mess up that guest room, it's still sad to see you go. Grace, too. You're welcome back anytime." He sees Nixon's smile, but feels something else. He doesn't let him know it. Dick reciprocates the warm expression and doesn't want to leave, but their scripts have been read and the curtains draw close soon. Nixon, who is twice as old as when they met, is not nearly that whole anymore. There are raven feathers scattered around his feet. His skin is piebald black and white, chalky, almost unreal white where the feathers are thinning. With a mixture of camaraderie, memory, and untold affection that warms Dick's blood like a hot cup of coffee, Nixon's kiss goodbye is a smile bubbling in his eyes.
"Give me a call when you get home."
"Sure thing," Dick says. "Love you."
He grins and laughs. "Love me, too."
Nixon pats the doorframe with a thrush of feathers and then Dick is off toward home.
---
You've only heard of her. She's barely a real idea to you—outrage at how her actions indelibly marked your best friend barely tempered by the knowledge she may have been justified. A faint, kind of rubbed out memory in the wake of real love. In reality, Kathy is a complete surprise. Especially when you're introduced and abruptly remember her face from a black and white photo. You extend your hand in greeting and imagine Nixon's there instead. Offering her a tiny golden hangman's knot.
It's all you can do not to stare at her twig-thin legs. Beneath dusty brown short fur wound veins and sinews run, though her joints are swollen and weakening. Trembling like a new fawn standing up in an awkward tripod. And her ears, before she can swivel them towards you twitchily listen to every whisper and knock of the room. Hardly steady on her cloven hooves.
1965
"Dick! Good to hear from you again! God, it's been too long."
"Good to hear from you, too. 29 cents a minute good."
The crackle of the telephone line doesn't do his laughter justice. "How have you been?"
"Good. How's the Riviera?"
"Beautiful. Wish you could see it." Something rustles, and he breathes heavily into the receiver. He's got a bad habit of doing that. "Grace's already a little strawberry pink on her shoulders, but so far I've been spared. France isn't quite as friendly as the first time we saw it. Not waving liberation banners and all that, but first class beats the hell out of a rattling C-47."
"You can say that again."
"Also beats the hell out of jumping out of that C-47."
Winters laughs at a joke cracked oceans away. They kid around a little longer before he remembers his first story to tell—because, don't worry, Grace's halfway through a new novel. Guy talk bores her. Tell me all about it. "You won't guess who I met last week."
---
1956
You read Glenn Miller humming on his lips from the dim flanks of the dance floor, as beautifully and painfully as someone deaf watches the bow break and glide across a cello. Suddenly, this music is old. It was never old when you heard it. Timeless, rather, but music ground on without you noticing and abruptly the croon and swoon you held dear grows more and more precious, more quaint, more rare with every year. You don't want to feel like a Glenn Miller song with him lovingly imparting "The Man With the Mandolin" to his new bride with gorgeous white and gold scales, but you are. You are an aging song, and you are a clipped bird.
---
1948
Eventually, you knew it'd come. The sporadic organ from which these living dreams spring never fails to diagnose all those around you. Just takes longer to orient if the wind blowing is softer, younger. In your arms, still sleeping, lies curled a creature that cannot yet decide its nature. An egg, though the shape within is suspended in a glow of possibility. You only hope, before the quiet of the night is broken with a cry of hunger and your wife coaxes a crying child from your arms, you do well in shaping that yet formless life.
---
1946
You catch him gasping for air in the middle of the night, and the ferocity with which his lungs clench for life frightens you. The dark glean in his eye of something trapped, chaotic, and untamable does too. A nightmare, a leftover from war no GI Bill will compensate for. He flaps wings that haven't flown for years, dripping wet, heavy, and a strain on his weary shoulders. You bear the wounds of war too, but they haven't clipped you. Not like him. Nix presses his hands, all human again, over his eyes and you complete this dance by taking the lead. You do your best drying flight feathers and faces in the dark and hum favorite swooning ballads. Hum Glenn Miller into his mouth and keep him grounded to life with your body. These nights you feel you have feathers of your own and sweet and clear music to sing.
---
1945
An officer cracks a joke and you hear him laughing and the noise echoes in the glorious cradle of mountains like a rejoicing wolf's howl. In the sunshine, he is always black. Shining, polished dark fur, feathers, or claws, but so much darker in the night. It's nice to see him this way instead, a kind of abstract beauty against a landscape too perfect to paint. Yipping in joy, if a little tipsy by now off Goering's stock, circling in victory with a throng of dark and light pack mates, overgrown pups swarming an eagle's nest. You are happy too, but dare not join in. You are still terrified of your "insight," a familiar, internal voice jokes, and terrified of the beauty and the horrors it shows you.
But you can't look away.
---
You first see Nixon's raven feathers, his sable fur, the universe-dark nature of purely him when you are ensconced in a Dutch attic, desperate for connection, worried about intelligence, and Nixon is muttering, "Well, it sounds good to me." You snap out of your trance and such blasphemous beauty flickers out of awareness, like a color you're only now recognizing. But it's not the first burst of vision. You saw a wolf, an honest-to-god, Little Red Riding Hood, big bad wolf pulling apart a human corpse as you sailed, all adrenaline and bravery, over that dike. Greedily licking red and pink flesh as it separated between his teeth, pulled off bone with a sound that would turn a dead man's stomach. You stood breathless, as that wolf, ragged, gray, and horrifying from behind, turned to look at you.
You shot him. And from then on, you kept seeing things no matter if you shot a gun or not.
1944
"Aren't you tired of typing that?"
"Tired doesn't mean not obligated," Dick counters, though he does pause to knead one side of his face with a palm. "Unfortunately, officers are expected to just be both tired and productive."
Nixon settles on the side of the desk, facing the wall with the dark window. He sighs. "Well, I'm tired of waiting. For you."
"I said, I'll be done in a moment—" Winters impatiently tucks his lower lip under his top teeth, concentrates. "More quickly if you'd let me focus. Vat's still in my footlocker, if you want it." All falls silent then. Only the clack, clack, clack of keys committing an action report to paper, ink on a roll pressed down and permanent. Winters doesn't question why suddenly Nixon isn't half-coaxing, half-encouraging him to quit typing (because he really wishes he could), but instead utilizes his silence. Until he begins half-anxiously tapping a finger on the desk, which doesn't sound like a finger at all.
Winters looks over at his hand, and closes his eyes when he doesn't see exactly that. Forces it out. Finishes the last few words, then with another, more specific clack-clack, add space for a signature and types his rank and name. It's become so quiet now, as if Nixon were only there as hallucination, when Dick rises from his seat and pulls the paper free. He lays it down to dry properly and await a pen and ink signature. Hours on the edge of a hard, wooden chair are hardly forgiving, even to an Army-whipped body. Dick glances over at Nixon, who is still staring at the window, but hardly seeing it.
"Nix?"
His friend lets his head drop a little, expelling a sigh, and turns further away from Dick. "I didn't mean the reports. I—And I didn't come here for the Vat. Although it's quite the temptation."
---
You hear thrushes singing in his nervous laughter, and a thick, rough, self-deprecating 'caw' that frightens you only half as much as it really should. You see a lifetime in his dark, gunpowder eyes when he finally faces you.
---
"I'm tired of waiting for you to see this."
Dick doesn't move as Nixon crosses the space between them and changes everything.
---
You taste whiskey on his breath, and that is all too real, as are his callused palms doing their best to comfort you, cradle your face as if porcelain that could be broken only with sin. You can't wonder anymore what will happen because of this, because you are so taken by his fear, his braveness. By how effortless it feels to kiss him here, thread fingers immediately through his dark hair, and connect so wordlessly and blindly and completely. By how difficult writing a letter home to distant loves is when Nixon loves you, Nixon is here, Nixon is definitely here.
---
Nix is gone so abruptly you cannot cry. You're still contemplating how it's possible that you are here, seeing the sunlight and listening to the murmur of the house from inside your office, corresponding with old friends, and he will never see any of that, hear any of that, nor flash you that smile, proudly puff out his oil-dark feathers, and let you love him with the slightest touch. He is so far away. You cannot even see the lamp light for all the dusty dark moths that cloud your room.
You miss him already as the moths flutter and scatter.
1995
"Happy New Year, Nix."
"Happy New Year, Dick. Great to be a whole 'nother year older, isn't it?"