How Christmas works is...
We get quiet. Quieter than we will be for the rest of the coming year. The prospect of possibility looms terrifying and the past nips close behind us, teeth sharpened by ancient grudges.
The camp is silent this morning. Normally, the PA system Drama put into place would be humming a song - at this point likely a Christmas song - but today, it's quiet but for the rain that falls gentle through the icy branches of the woods and peppers the leaves below.
Nicholas woke early, I know, and has been listening to the rainfall for hours. The idea vindicates me somehow, lost here in the endless mold of New Jersey. Good. Good for him. I hope it pattered against his thoughts and interrupted every creation of any beautiful idea he had, he fucking wants to live forever, this is what your life becomes. Months of listening to the rain on leaves, and forgetting what you were going to say.
In Maine last year, the snow was as wet as it was fitful, the sky coughing down something slick and phlegmy when the temperatures dropped low enough I worried about the animals. Matthew and I shared the top mattress of a bunk bed, his arms skinny enough it was almost pointless to depend on him for any warmth. He scoffed at my recitation of "War is over, if you want it," the look in his eyes pained as he focused on objects so distant, I could never hope to see the detail of them. Old lovers, the house he grew up in, the name of his father, the too-rapid decay of his body all items of proof on the vanishing point of the horizon that he would be chased forever or die fighting.
New Jersey is kinder, softer now in the rain. As I turn the corner near his cabin, he exits without a shirt to run to the showers, his smirk one of refused defeat. He defers to me with a soft-spoken greeting of, "Hello, Eve," and it shocks me as it always shocks me how quickly the Devil in him becomes a reticent boy.
Brad raises the flag in the center of camp clutching a cup of coffee, his eyes swollen slits surrounded by raised flesh pale and smooth. The cord on which he raises it clacks metallic against the pole, the flag catching the breeze at it's apex, gold-capped and streaked by rain. John stands beside him, his arms crossed to warm himself in the cold, and questions Brad on the Flag Code.
"Isn't it supposed to come down in the rain?" he yawns, and Brad recites the Code, from memory.
"The flag should not be displayed on days when the weather is inclement, except when an all weather flag is displayed."
John nods, his hair a dripping blonde mop.
"Yeah, and it's a brisk raising, it says. Was that brisk, do you reckon?"
"Oh, fuck you," Brad replies, and they rush back to the cafeteria for breakfast.
Matthew, and now Brad, both leave me alone in the center of camp and wondering about what it is I really think I know anyway, about solitude, and attrition. I know Bonnie's reply to me before she's even awake: "Well clearly, doctor, you've never been a thirteen-year-old girl."
As the year went on, one by one, we crawled out onto the roof, stood up with our backs straight, and jumped off. Now, in a jumble of limbs and blame for unspoken apologies, we lay and try to remember which arm belongs to which shoulder. The point of destruction might always be a sick kind of unity.
"I woke up in pieces," I tell Grady when I see him, hoping this is explanation enough for the silence, and the sarcasm, and the thoughts of an endless war. I think he's going to say something in Spanish, his skin dark enough in the half-light of his room to make his teeth flash, but he doesn't.
"War is over, if you want it," he sings low, his bare legs stretching from the bed and hitting the wood floor with dull sounds of waking. The sheets rustle as he stretches.
No comments:
Post a Comment