8The Heart of War
Only through pain do we verify life. The mythological phoenix embodies this natural principle in its truest form. In order to be reborn, he travels into the depths of hell. And man feels compelled to follow him.
"Oh, I love him!" cries the little angel, clutching the stuffed bear in purple corduroy overalls. "I love him! I love him!" The window in her room has been flung open, and the white curtains curl in the night air. The full moon bathes her fragile body in white ambience; she is barefoot, her heart open to the night. Like a China doll, with small red lips and bright eyes, she cries tiny tears of joy and reverence. Her little heart swells and the bear falls from her hands. The wind fingers her frilled nightgown as she stands on tip-toe and reaches toward the distant stars. She prays to God, clasping her hands together and weeping with happiness. "I love him, God... I want to be just like him!"
Her wish flickers in the night like an oil lamp's fire. The silence absorbs her words into itself, and a siren like the wail of a crying woman answers her. She retrieves her bear and sits on the carpeted floor next to the window, where she holds it before her face and smiles at its pearly eyes shimmering with starlight. "Teddy, I want to be a man just like him. I want to be strong just like him." She nuzzles the bear. "I'm going to be just like Daddy someday..."
The dawn finds her asleep on the floor, the bear dangling limply from her opened hands.
Now the little angel is grown, and she is crouching in a ditch with her wireless radio tucked in her ear, her helmet pushed low over her smoldering eyes, a burning cigarette in one hand and her fizzling lighter in the other. The rain streaks her grimy sweat down her forehead like muddy streams. She feels like a man, and her hands are shaking, a clear sign that the rest of her blood has yet to gush from her wounds. Her vision blurs as she flips the lighter shut and tucks it into her pocket. Again, her gaze falls upon the severed end of her right leg. The flight back from the field was not without its obstacles. She ought to tie a tourniquet...
The dead body of her comrade-in-arms lies crumpled nearby. Someone has folded his hands across his chest, hiding the holes above his heart. She shuts her eyes to disguise the sight and curses to make sure that words still exist, and that mankind has not abandoned every civility. She tries to cry then, but the ache in her soul and the pain of her body and the angry rain stop her. Now is not the time to plead for Mommy. Now is the time to honor Daddy.
Her stomach turns and she leans over and vomits.
Like a man, I am, she thinks. The rancid smell of corpses and the lingering poisonous gas in the air choke her, and she coughs up her last meal, the stale bread and coffee she shared with her brothers. She flicks her cigarette away and does not wait to see it vanish in the sludge.
Her gun leans against the side of the ditch like a casual onlooker, but she can't remember how to fire it. Her eyes wander from her weapon back to the spew she's still sputtering, and then they settle on her brother, dead with a twisted back and his mouth agape. Her other brothers, having escaped the torrential hail of bullets and leapt back home without triggering the cunning land mines, have died asphyxiated within the labyrinth of ditches and tunnels. As she vomits and shifts her weight, she realizes that she will die from all three causes. Between her ribs, she feels the sharp metal invader.
She once read that the Japanese would bite their tongues off to commit suicide and preserve their honor. Perhaps she should just sleep with her brothers, too. She sets her teeth against her tongue and half-heartedly grinds them against it.
What a man I am, she thinks, abandoning that path and reaching for the gun she can no longer aim or fire. A coward...
Her fingers glide along the metal surface of the weapon, and then she collapses in the rain and forgets the swatting of the helicopter blades and the blasting gunfire that rattles her bones.
Time has passed, and the wonderful dream has ended. The little angel opens her eyes and stretches out her hands. Mommy is standing in the doorway, gaunt and bedraggled from a night of tearing through her hair while tearing through the address book and calling the names she could not name. Mommy stares at her little angel, and she picks up the framed picture of Daddy that the little angel kissed goodnight so many times; Mommy removes it from the dresser and stares at Daddy until her eyes vanish in an overflow of tears. She tells the little angel that Daddy is a hero. Then she lets the picture slip from her fingers and drop to the floor. The carpet saves the glass frame, and Mommy stares at its intactness.
The little angel begins to stir and straighten her nightgown. Today is the day of black dresses. Today is the day of saying goodbye.
Mommy finally bends down and scoops up the frame. She sets it on the dresser and leads the little angel to the bathroom so she can scrub her face clean and brush her hair.
That night, when the moon slips into the room again, the photograph is gone.
Now someone is grasping her fingers and holding them tight. She awakens to an unfamiliar whiteness, and the little angel is little no more. She recognizes a stranger standing over her bed. He does not smile at her; his face contracts and tears seep from his eyes like water from bloated earth. She knows that he has sorry news for her, and she knows this because his nametag introduces him as a doctor, and a doctor never stays by the side of a patient on her way to getting well. He lingers by the side of a patient on her way to heaven.
So the poison has eaten into me, she thinks as he mouths words to humor her deaf ears. She knows the underlying meaning in his eyes. The poison that trickled into her lungs is killing her, and the poison that stained her hands, and the poison that ate her soul, and the poison that she gave for the sake of honor.
I should have bitten off my tongue and died within the heart of war.
But I'm a coward. I'm not a man. I want to be, though. I want to be!
She gazes at the doctor as he warbles on, and she remembers a distant bear that she clutched to her chest when she promised herself to be like Daddy.
But I'm not a man. I'm a girl... But I wanted to be a soldier, too!
When she was eight years old, the little angel took her mother's hand and wiped the tears she had spilled onto it as she looked at the marble tombstone and the fresh earth. The rain had stained the flag with dirt and turned the pure white a smoker's yellow; it drooped above the grave. The colors seemed ready to run into the soil and wind their way through earthy veins to the empty coffin. The little angel knew Daddy had flown his plane up to the gates of heaven just like a soldier was supposed to.
"Mommy," she said, stroking her mother's aged fingers. "I want to be a hero just like Daddy..."
Her mother cried out and hugged to her bosom the little angel in the black dress, because she knew that Daddy had been denied the chance to be a real hero the moment they drafted him and sent him into the sky in a bird destined to die in a blaze of fire.
"So, doctor," the patient in the ward said, interrupting his speech about blood loss and toxicity, "if it isn't too much to ask..."
He gripped her hand, pale and blue with the network of her veins, and motioned for her to continue. Anything for the dying.
"If I haven't been too much of a coward..."
"Of course not - you're a hero - "
But she continued to mumble on as if she had never heard. Her seared eyelids closed over her black eyes as her voice tapered off. "I don't really care about the medals, doctor. Just bury me like they buried my dad. Bury me like a soldier, too..."
The phoenix may rise from his grave to renew his melancholic existence, but man finds himself unable to turn back, forever wandering the darkness.