When I asked my dad what he thought of right before leaving for Vietnam that summer at age nineteen, he told me that he was looking forward to killing some gooks. And I suppose this was a natural reaction for this time, and natural as any, for my dad was a man of his time. And I am too, even though I don’t like to admit it, but ultimately I will.
My dad was still in the early dating stages with my mom that summer. So he left her, like all the girlfriends and wives who stayed behind, who would spend a good majority of their time talking about the men and when they would return home. My parents weren’t protesters- you wouldn’t have found them marching on Washington or turning into hippies. After all, they were parents, not protesters. Hippies didn’t get sent to Vietnam, nor willingly go. And they also didn’t hang around their small Minnesota town, the place they knew everything from, working as a legal secretary or other odd jobs, the way my mom did. My parents were apart, and all that separated them was time. Time meant more than distance. It wasn’t the distance that worried the women back home, it was the time. Time between each news program, time between each letter sent, time that would eventually call the whole thing quits if too much of it was demanded. A person can only give up so much of his time.
That’s why it was no surprise to me when I learned about time in space, and how it was a physical thing- something that could bend and be bent, something that looped around and could coil your whole perspective. Time was not something I wanted to mess with, because it was just like radiation. After being exposed to too much of it, you would eventually die.
But for my dad, this might very well had happened much sooner. Death, that is. It might not be time that killed him, but a bullet to the head. Those that get killed by time are considered lucky. They are old and have lived a long life. But many of the men in his platoon died from a bullet to the head, or chest, or neck. But obviously that didn’t happen to my dad, or else I wouldn’t be here. Time was everywhere- it saturated me down to my very cell, it enveloped every occasion. There was no way of getting around considering it. It always came first, for if you didn’t have it, then you couldn’t do whatever it was you wanted. With lots of it came freedom, but with too much exposure, came death.
Much later, in college, I would learn about apoptosis, or programmed cell death. Basically, what happens is that cells deprived of certain appropriate signals undergo a self- suicide called apoptosis. This is why humans have fingers and not fins. In the womb, our fingers are together, buds at first, and then as we age, they become more fin-like. But it is through this process known as apoptosis, or cell-suicide, how we are born with fingers finally when we puncture through. I looked at both my hands, and let the fingers spread themselves far from one another. Where was that skin that once existed, now? How could we be asked not to kill if our own bodies are programmed to do it for us? Right down to the cells between our fingers and toes, we were dead.
And my dad was gone, a single digit removed from the hand. The hand was my mom, now absent a finger, from her now, incomplete hand. Should he not come back, there would always be something missing from her. Was this separation, right down between our individual fingers and toes due solely to death alone? Death parts us, right down to our digits.
In Vietnam, there were many snipers. Snipers who kept to themselves, waiting solitary to aim at what lives under the skin- the heart, liver, lungs. A man runs past and is shot. Blood squirts from his neck like a hand over a hose, a chunk of his skull flies off into the fodder and field. Knives are held in the fist, blades in the hand, and a gun is fired from the wrist, a bullet under the skin gets buried in bone. And my dad is there, watching this. He is still intact, but a victim of time. This time. Will he find cover quick enough? Can he dash across some abandoned field and not get caught? How long will it take him to run from point a to b?
And I, just like everyone else, am victim to this thing called time. My time. I know only what it presents to me, and cannot know what has occurred too much before it. My likes and interests reflect it. Time is my mirror- it shows my age with each approaching wrinkle and worry, it brings me a second set of thoughts. Time saves me from obsession, saves me from bad ideas that get created first. It sorts my memories into a priority, it makes things that at first seemed so bad, to not seem that bad at all.
I wanted to descend into something useful. I wished I had something that made me different. But my friends were all a part of this same time, and my dad- a different one all together. His time had shown him a lot more, and although I was eager to learn more about his and other people’s times, there was only so much I could gather from second-hand experience. I wish I could have transported myself there, in Vietnam, right beside him. There to aid him and hand over whatever he needed. The bullets would not graze me because this would be my time, my made up time, left at the whim of my imagination.
But when my dad finally returned home to my mom, he had lost two of his fingers on his right hand. And all that mattered is that my mom retrieved her missing finger- him, and could live her life with a complete hand. My dad, however, could not. From then on, whenever we went to restaurants as a family, he had to sit facing outward, and against the wall, never with his back to anyone else. His back always had to be against a wall and his eyes facing out. He would lift his glass of water with his unaffected left hand, and had grown used to knowing how to maneuver things with just three fingers on his right. When I asked if in the end it all was worth it, he replied with nothing. It was part of the past, his past, and the past was only there to be remembered. The only proof of having lived is in the mind itself, and as proof he offered that the few men he loved in his platoon who died, now lived on only in his mind, and no where else. He said that those part of the present that do not swell into the familiar past, get lost. Anything not remembered is as good as not having happened at all. After all, what becomes of the present, now fleeting and gone if the past is not there to give it structure, and grandly design it into our motives and memories that in the mind combine, solidify and become like rock in the brain, crystallized and permanent, an ice unable to melt regardless how high the temperature or for how long exposed?
Sometimes the soldiers would have to pile the bodies into one heap, and there they would see all the extremities that do not attach anyone to the idea of a person. A foot overtop of the mound, a fist closed on nothing, a back of a nameless head, belonging to yet another casualty. And my dad was proud, setting those bodies on fire, the stench of burnt flesh was enough to send a man to his own grave. The bodies were indistinguishable, and had grown into becoming all too familiar. That night he would play cards with some men in his troop, waiting there for their next assignment, times and times away from their wives. They were developing their own times, just as their wives were developing theirs. And if too much of one time did not agree with another, that would be enough to kill anything in between.
My hands have grown as I’ve aged. They’re no longer soft and small as they once were when I was a baby. They show the experiences of people in the way they look, in how they move. A pair of hands could alter with an expression. A little anger could make them fist. They say a woman’s age is shown the greatest through her hands. My mom always had the nicest hands, and from the looks of them, she was always young. Her fingers were long and thin, and as a boy I would put my hand up to hers, that seemed so much larger than any part of my young self, and her hands would engulf mine. Where had the dead skin between her fingers disappeared to? Was a part of my mom still floating inside her mother? Was a part of me still inside her?
My parents didn’t have the greatest marriage, and as proof, they fought a lot. Dad would disappear for hours at a time, walking on our farm, tending our cats, thinking about his time. And my mom, in her own way, would do the same. I didn’t know then that when my mom would eventually die, my dad would remarry a woman I didn’t like in less than a year, and that then my mom would only exist in parts of my mind, and in some old pictures I had of her. That, for sure would be something to transport me to another time. The pictures, that is. They would take me there. And how I so much wanted to imagine this other time. Not a lot of people I know do that. Many are content with being stuck inside their own time, like ships in bottles, unable to be freed unless the time can somehow be cracked and split in two. But no one has been able to do this. The best we have is to imagine what it would be like to be that small boat, still stuck inside the bottle, but lapping the gray waves of the sea in delight. Those who could see past the glass are better for it, I think. But many don’t want to see past it because they’re afraid at what they’ll see, or what they won’t. But I have always taken pride in my attempt to see past it, to imagine myself lapping the waves of some far-off sea, the salt fusing to my skin, setting itself there into a fixed position, a permanent item existing to become part of my memory. But is it really a memory if all I did was imagine it? Can a fantasy be a fantasy as well as memory? I’d break the bottle this time, and have something great to show for it. I didn’t know the answers to these things. All I could account for was myself, and the hands I had inherited from my mom- (the long and thin fingers) that so willingly pressed through the waves, finger by finger cupped together to make imaginary fins.
The whole of me is always changing. Right now as I swim, cells are being shed into the surf, and when I get out, I will not be completely the same as I was before having gone in. There will be less of me, but a part of me will have gained. Ask me what I’d say? Mom, dad- the ship is out and it’s here to stay.
