I'm here and waiting to be excited about something. That's my goal but nothing fits. It's only isolation chambers dangling real life body parts outside the foggy cylinder. My eyes are choppy now from beer, but normally that's just from the state of things. Who needs me (us), some lowly Average telling you about the government or big business or the destruction of nature or any other million odd things that rust the soul. We all know it and it depresses us, either unconsciously or consciously. Ideas of giving up are reaching a comfortable temperature.
I wake and head to work, on a Saturday, it'll be good to collect some overtime, for doing nothing but sitting in a state truck and babysitting some construction workers, making sure they don't stray into the water, into a 50,000-dollar fine for squashing one of the three endangered fish species that surfed their way over dams and diversions into the dead portions of the river. We poisoned the water four months ago, if the track-hoe operators or foremen know, ignorance decides. It was written in the local and state papers.
I've let go of people so often that I feel like a dangly piece of loose spaghetti, brought to a rolling boil in a pot and left to find a luke-warm blah. You get hurt three or four times by distance, space, or misunderstandings and indifference is embraced. This girl, fuck… like a drunkard fishing in a stocked pond, I reach for her repeatedly deliberate, a thousand miles away I call a little pathetic like, "babe, let's fucking BE together." We could be so happy, comparatively. Compared to this basement of things. My old intellectual college buddy too, as I've rotated around him, from vagabond job to vagabond job, thinking landscape and exploration was the key –learning it was only the key to a lonely isolated confusion, a feeling of: THIS man is an island. I call him and it's blank poetry in response. Rural Colorado to intellectual progressive northeast college city and I want his approval, but it's only vague, ambiguous musings about him wanting to buy a house and grow roots. He's unemployed.
Fucking anyways, I try to reel in these folk, along with a couple others who are reductions of these, and break my line… or feel a strong restraint… or simply shrug and look down and trod off, toeing the dull earth with a dragging mountain boot. It's easy to give up.
*
Our guns are impressive. They have the ability to suck the internal organs from an exit wound. Like horseshoes, a miss up to a meter away has the capacity to remove the skin from the target.
I've been able to stop thinking here. I would have never thought that'd have been a good thing.
I'm one of the smartest here and they know it. I can tell they're testing me, seeing if I'll join the cause or defunct into some behind the scene harbinger of demise. Motions. I'm just moving through motions. It's amazing, never would have thought I'd have been here. It's an experience. Hemingway sort of did it. It's great in it's own deranged, sadistic way. I carry a camera and a notebook, write and take pictures a lot. I have good friends. We're brothers. And we have purpose, a profound sense of purpose that eclipses everything else. That's the only reason I'm here, in retrospect, finding it, fucking… silly little abstract thing like purpose. But I couldn't find it in civilian life and needed this nonsense. It is nonsense but it is the strongest illusion I can find.
To grab a metaphor from my old-life: It's like free-climbing, on-sighting, the hardest climbing routes, period. In the most asinine Alaskan conditions. Every instant in fear for your life, plunging to a near-pointless death. No purpose for attempting the ascend besides the attempt itself and the ability the attempt has at white-washing the insides of the skull for some primal, animalistic feelings of intimacy with life: the elements. Fucking wind and earth and feelings. Feeling fucking feelings. God fucking shit… 'The shit we do,' my climbing buddy used to muse.
We're here and it doesn't matter what we're doing. That's profound. We're here and it doesn't matter what we're doing. We're here.
Surrounding a hospital. From the air they dropped bomb after bomb in attempt to rouse all but the males form the city walls to leave in awe and respect. It's three days after the air campaign. And like a lawyer covering his back, we dropped word, literally notes proclaiming our intentions of destroying this city (to save it).
They've holed up here. In the hospital; they're primitive but even a fist can be deadly. They have some powerful weapons, rockets and what not and we hide behind walls. Even in the most dense urban areas there is still too much space. It's actually the worst type of environment to be engaged in. If it was all flats we'd have our tanks and play cards as we won the engagement. If it was even denser we'd slip between buildings and through windows. But, this is open parking lots and stretches of brown earth. An inevitable charge is needed to move inside, like the North needing to charge the South across idyllic Virginia meadows.
Ah. But this is where it is. The heart inflates and the stomach grits the teeth and the brain gives everything this immaculate sharpness. Space is intense and almost infinite. Solids too have this space, inside the knife-like edges of everything from broken concrete to pillows, if there were such frivolities.
*
They're in the windows and behind the few remaining buildings blocking our route. My back's against a building. The whiz of bullets, the distant clapping of discharges, and the popping, as concrete flakes off in sheets is the song. There's three with me. All backs against the building. Four on a perpendicular building, one with a scope, searching windows, dozens of other clusters like us all encroaching this strategic hospital.
We put our heads down and point our guns out. In control, I run forward to the backside of another building and they follow the shield of my body. A dull thud followed by two others and we're all panting against the next building, 50 feet of protection behind the walls and the interior of the relic, safety. Hearts commanding everything with the deafening pounding. I have a deranged smile on my face and they see this. They've even started joking about it in the cafeteria. Mention of it brings it out.
The rest are behind us. The flash of guns firing at and around us scraps tiny stars into the retina. Better not to look at the Calvary.
They don't have to all be in the hospital. Likely there's many out here defending the perimeter as we inevitably encroach. We move on as a rocket crashes into an apartment building and topples the heavy elements. My jaw clicks as it jumps out of its socket, a nasty habit I picked up that's inviting, day by day, lock-jaw. Already the range of my jaw has lessened. It's hard to bite an apple.
Heads down, again we trod heavily forward, blasts over our shoulders, behind a car and another group stations up behind the building we were just at. Over broken glass, kicking sand, cars burning, noxious smoke rising in the suffocating 90 degree heat. Veering left they follow. Behind another car, shots blasting randomly to ensure chaos. Others follow and we're moving. Moving. I fire ahead at nothing and the two behind fire as well. A stupid smile wells up and we move.
It's large and drab and pointless ahead of us, the hospital, rising in all 16 floors of its rebel hide-out capacity. The front door is smashed to a jagged image and we're against the walls, more line-up with us as they negotiate the environment. Wordless signals and we swing in, from opposite sides of the two glass-shard doors. Heavily, they burst open and we look down our weapons. Pop pop. The two of us fire at nothing and I smirk. A corpse, freshly plugged, lays in the hallway and I step over it. The walls casting eerie, electricity-less, beams of light from outside, through the walls blasted to Swiss-cheese.
Past a vestibule once used to welcome patients, through an open corridor where dying palms grow in large marble boxes. We fan out and secure the room. Arms jut out and it's a nod and two follow me. Toward the foreign language describing a bathroom. We move. It's clear and we pop in doors, look down our weapons and move on. They're in here. Somewhere.
With heavy boots and the clatter of metal we announce ourselves. My heart is threatening to rip my jacket, my finger ready and waiting. The eyes see in crisp brilliance. Backs against the last door of the hallway and we hesitate, look both ways as if a car might come, then face the door and kick it open and step inside.
They're waiting and pop pop, Surgical and turn, pop pop. Silence. Steady side-stepping the remaining hidden corners past the toilets and one more with wide petrified eyes, pop pop and that's it. A primal scream and a bullet rips form the gun and into the skull, puncturing the tile floor and splashing blood in a wide circle. The walls and my pants now with the red Pollack spray. Silence and panting, another scream. The brain demands oxygen. The blood flushes endorphins. I turn from the corpse and nod to the two; we turn and head back to the entrance to secure another floor
