Free There's a Man With a Gun Over There by R. M. Ryan Page A

foreign to me. I lay there that day, rubbing my genitals, and then began masturbating with a furious energy and suddenly was looking up through my tightly closed eyes at the heavens and in a hole between the clouds I could see the faces of the dead I knew—two of my four grandparents and my father. They stared at me, as if they’d opened up a manhole cover in the streets of heaven and now looked down at the subterranean world of the earth below and into the house at 863 East Memorial Drive, where I lay rubbing my cock.
    I was so surprised that my left hand stopped its flurried up and down stroking. I let go, and my erect penis waved back and forth as if greeting them.
    â€œDamn,” I said aloud, embarrassed, like a kid who’s been caught. Then I got annoyed. I wasn’t going to give up this therapeutic pleasure.
    After a moment, I looked up at them in my dream.
    â€œGet used to it,” I said. “Just go on and get used to it. You’re going to see this every day I’m alive.”
    The little halo of their faces vanished.

21.
    I n the fall of 1965, I went back to college covered by the gauzy folds of my grief. Jenny and I went on dates and held hands as we walked around campus, but I felt as though I was an actor in the staged version of Rick Ryan, reading someone else’s lines. Only when Jenny sang some of the folk songs with the anguish of their terrible solitude did the inmost core of my soul reply.
    Four strong winds that blow lonely . . .
    I’ll look for you if I’m ever back this way.
    â€œWhat ever happened to Eurydice? Who remembers Eurydice?” a professor asked in one of my English literature classes. “The precious stone of her life lost, tumbling down and down. Lost. Irretrievably lost.”

    One strange little bright spot that fall was the Student Talent Show. My God, were we ever so innocent that we put on a talent show? Is it possible, living as we did in the eddying streams of irony, that we could take a skinny white boy with an unbuttoned button-down shirt singing “Ol’ Man River” seriously? Or how about the pale girl singing “The hills are alive with the sound of music,” her fingers grappling with the air in front of her as if she were turning knobs the audience couldn’t see. Or maybe this was the beginning of irony—as we recognized how talentless most of us really were, maybe this was the moment when we decided to make fun of everything. Maybe this was the moment when irony became the only value.
    But here came this mop-headed boy, his hair dark brown and his grin infectious, playing the Herb Alpert and the Tijuana Brass song, “The Lonely Bull,” bending into the notes as if looking for the air of his music in every nook of his body. What pleasure he got from our applause and look at how he spun the trumpet like a six-shooter and then blew across the mouthpiece. A gunfighter, finishing up after shooting. Grimes Poznik, the new gun in town.

22.
    B y the end of 1965, there were 184,000 American troops in Vietnam, and men were being drafted at the rate of 40,000 a month. But I didn’t know any of that then. I don’t think I was paying attention.
    I don’t think I’d recovered yet from the death of my father—maybe, in fact, I’ve never recovered. I remember walking around in a haze most of the time, only half hearing what my professors and my friends said.

    Somewhere in that haze I heard myself asking Jenny to marry me. I thought she could save me from the iron loneliness of my life.
    It was a sweet dream, our getting married was. We planned the date for the end of 1967, when, we were sure, the war in Vietnam would be over and the future would be filled with radiant possibilities.

    â€œAre you kidding?” Steve Unger said. “The war’s never going to end. It’s getting more dangerous every day. I’m quitting school now so they can draft me. It’ll be worse than