Free Fatal Light by Richard Currey

afraid to ask what kind of soldier, where, with what loyalties, and I turned away, ashamed to be standing in her world, one more uninvited cowboy in town to kill her brother, and his brothers, and their brothers. Cowboys yelling like a drunken Saturday night, house of cards in free fall, breaking down and turned
loose. I did not know how much the girl knew about these things. I was not going to ask.
    Â 
    Sleep ceased to be rest, was never an escape. Dreams careened, haunted, collided, and I was always forced to look: the double amputees, incinerated faces with lips burned off and teeth locked in satanic grins, bodies in decay and distended with gas, fingers and noses and ears rat-gnawed, the ones floating face down in paddies pulled out after days with tongues and eyeballs protruding from macerated skulls and their gunshot wounds looking so innocent, so simple. On the road out of a northern ville I saw a dog eating the body of a man. The man had been shot in the head, eviscerated, tossed aside. The dog pulled at a dirty loop of intestine, one paw braced against the opened belly. The passing scene on any ordinary day.

6
    The medic who took care of me was talking, changing my sheets as I sat in a chair beside the bed.
    â€œYou know,” he said, “for years they had no idea what the hell malaria was. You ever hear that story? Walter Reed in Panama, all that shit. Wasn’t that where he was? Somewhere down there. Now you, you’ve got one hell of a case. You know you had a fever up to a hundred and six? Christ, you’re lucky you didn’t have convulsions. You’ve been talking, though. God, you’ve been telling some stories, know what I mean? Well, the fever’ll do that. Swells your brain. No, really, I got a theory. It’s like LSD or something, swells your brain, you don’t know who the hell you are... . Hey, you rest easy now, docs’ll be around in a while. They been real interested in you. I think they wanna write an article on you for one of the medical journals. Something about your fever being the highest they ever saw.”
    â€œI killed a man in his own house.”
    â€œYou call those things houses? Shit, those ain’t more than shacks.”
    â€œPeople live there. Spend their whole lives there. Raise their families there.”

    â€œThat’s their problem.”
    â€œHis head was nothing but eyeballs and brains. I did what I thought I had to do... . I couldn’t see a thing.”
    â€œBetter safe than sorry.”
    â€œHe was unarmed. He could’ve just said something... thrown himself on the ground, I don’t know... .”
    â€œBetter not to take chances. I mean, shit, we’re fighting a fucking war here.”

7
    The fever breaking ground, scattering, losing its grip and I was up at night in the hospital corridor shuffling toward a core of blue light in my patient’s garb, standard military issue: SLIPPERS, HOSPITAL, ONE PAIR; ROBE, MAN’S TERRY CLOTH, HOSPITAL, ONE. In the heat of the disease I had seen a place where the past and the future were one, cleaved together like lovers rolling, turning, wide-eyed on a bed as flat as the sky. I didn’t know if I was falling or levitating, and I wanted an escape to the safety of the present, clear of the terror of what had happened and could never change and sat like a leering man in a chair, gazing at me with a head full of regret and cynical wonder. From the hospital window the earth was a groaning body on its side, a face as empty of feeling as the heart of time itself, and I found myself preoccupied with the smell of the ocean in distant gulfs, the light on summer mornings along coastlines. Trade winds of the nervous system, the blind chemistry of need. Out there it was the dance of angels, the sweet dance of life itself where a man who was both too old and too young could reclaim a world as far ahead as he could see. If he could live long enough to get