“A few. Too many. They’re all like that. Teenage heartbreak and other assorted whining bullshit. I hate them.”
“Please, another one.”
He closed his eyes.
Plastic dinosaurs and a well-stocked refrigerator
Were not enough to keep you from
Falling away from me
Again
Dark rooms are not a
Solace when the
Echoes of pale green
Eyes and the pathetic
Piano song in C Major
(I think)
have made insomnia
my nightly companion instead of
you
once listened to me play
that song for a while and placed
your head on my shoulder
so how can you expect me to
forget these things when that
song drowns my senses with
you
look sometimes from across the
room I know I stare I
think I hope I
forget your eyes soon because
until I do I think my right
index finger will remain poised
over Middle C and my todays will
remain poised over yesterdays of
the perpetual autumn of
plastic dinosaurs and a well-stocked refrigerator.
Hayes found the fire intensely interesting; his gaze was riveted to the flames. He had recited line after line in what appeared to Maggie a trance state, some terrible mental denial of the present that transported him back to the shattered moment when he had placed those very words on wrinkled paper with cheap pens Bic metal points and he couldn’t couldn’t COULDN’T write fast enough or make it say enough to mean the thoughts that surged through him and the process ended too too too many times in a tragicomical adolescent rage that sent the pen through the air and the poems into the incinerator. Then he blinked his eyes and returned to normal. The fire was fascinating.
I will know him. I will see what is beneath the surface. I have to know him.
Let me in, Simon.
“Thank you.”
“For what?”
“For sharing that with me. It was beautiful. They both were.”
“They were the mindless babblings of a teenage boy who needed to get out more.”
Flynn smiled sweetly. “You’re too hard on yourself. You loved her, didn’t you?”
Hayes let the unexpected inquiry hover above the flames for quite some time before he spoke the answer that he had known all along. The answer was somehow seared now, although he could not tell if it was from the passage of time or the brief flight over the campfire.
“She was killed in the Quebec War. I found out later that she had been in the Seventh Assault Group. She never had a chance.”
“Seventh Assault? Jesus, they cleaned Montreal out for Assault Eight, my group. That was a bloody—”
Hayes visibly flinched. He had been there as well, Assault Fourteen, cleaning up after Eight had retaken the city. He had seen the blood and choked on the fires of the burning city. He had seen the remnants of Assault Seven, but never knew until later that his beloved Brigid was among the twisted wreckage and remains, the burned skulls and shattered bones that littered the blasted remnants of Montreal.
“I’m so sorry, Simon… Please, tell me more.”
“The poems can wait. I can’t remember any more right now.”
She knew he was lying, but it intrigued her nonetheless.
Who is this man? This complicated, dark man?
And what is he hiding?
“Go on, please, Simon.”
Simon graduated at the top of his class, but he did not know what to do after school. The government was collecting volunteers for the colonization of Mars, but that did not interest Simon. Anyway, he knew it would not work. Humans were not meant to leave this planet. And, as he had predicted, the colonists died in transit when a meteor the size of a soup can punctured and depressurized their vehicle. Mars would remain uninhabited, and the space program would be largely abandoned for the time being.
He was accepted at a quite prestigious local university, where he studied literature and art. He met people, he made friends, he fell in love, he made love. He lived what he thought was a good semblance of a normal college life. He tried to keep in touch with old friends. He saw things fall apart. He realized he never wanted to go home.
After he graduated from the university, he spent a summer walking across the country with nothing but two of his best friends, a guitar, quite a few cigars, and a small wad of money kept laced tightly into his left boot. He ended up in Seattle and lived the starving artist life, replete with long hair, goatee, gesso-spattered knee-holed jeans. He found some satisfaction in the “Purple” series of paintings he produced for his landlady in lieu of rent; she had had an abstract-expressionist lover in the glory days of her youth, and although he had long gone the way of the Fletcherists and she had grown more wrinkled and worn than she had been when she was an impossibly smooth-skinned nude model he portrayed descending a staircase perfect even with the small brown beauty mark that graced her supra-sternal notch and its companion that guarded her left breast, she had retained her love of the finer things in life, most notably paintings. For Simon, there were months where going out to dinner meant buying a box of macaroni-and-cheese and as a treat perhaps some ketchup to accompany it at the local supermarket and seeing a show meant watching the scarlet sun burn its way into the western horizon. The news of his mother’s nanotech overload and subsequent death did not disturb him. He knew that she would be happier that way, hopefully forever within one of her heavens.
The Quebec War came with fire and fury and the destruction of Washington, and Simon knew what he had to do. He enlisted, hoping to get placed on the front lines, retaking the cities of New England from the French, but instead, Milicom saw his untapped potential and placed him in military intelligence, medical division. His research team helped to devise a new vaccine for cobalt radiation sickness, a vaccine that saved thousands of American troops in the Adirondack campaign. When the war took a turn for the worse he had finally been sent to the front lines as a medic with the Fourteenth Assault group in Ontario, retaking Brockville, Kingston, and Ottawa from the French. The only time he had actually set foot into Quebec was during the Montreal cleanup operation after the war. There had been so very few wounded, so many dead. His medical training was quite useless when day by day he was simply required to help dig the mass graves outside of the city that the countless war dead were dumped into.
The war was over, and Simon found the restlessness crawling back into his mind. He tried to write, but everything sounded somehow empty. His earlier penchant for poetry was replaced with a disdain for the medium, and he wrote several reactionary poems of a distinctly DaDa nature that amused his friends but only fueled his angst.
