by Kris Vågen

Warning: Mature content.

1971.

This is a downtown bar, the used-to-be downtown, shadowed by the apartments across the street and the stale smoke in its own air, and the people are silent. Already know where they're headed and can see it through the bottom of their glasses.

No sound. The bell going tinktink at the door when it opens and slides shut, a gush of wet acid winter. It doesn't snow. It rains. And it sloshes down from the overhangs and crashes like waterfalls on the cement.

Door opens and shuts and the tender looks up from his till, and it's the guy that was here yesterday, the one that couldn't pay and can't pay again. And hey, fella, you don't look so hot.

Don't look so hot. It's like a code, says the guy, and his dog tags say he's 22 but he looks about thirty, wet-eyed and gaunt and pale and shit, man, you can't hang around here. Get the hell out. We don't want no crackhead junkies round this place.

Just give me one drink, says the kid.

Fuck you, get out, you trash, G.I. cocksucker. Get the fuck out.

Vincent Sy presses his palms against the edge of the counter and pushes back from the bar, about as quick as he'd sat down. He sways, pitches forward, and staggers. Mutters something, and crashes into the door with his side. They swing out to toss him into the rain.

No-good punk, the bartender says as the door swings shut. Goddamn G.I.s brought a fuckin' gook back with 'em.

Vincent Sy is laughing till he gets to the alleyway, eyes burning, images splitting and resplitting in front of him. Falls in the gush of the alley storm drain, under the cascade of a dirty apartment slant, squints up at the stabbing lines of rain while he wheezes and breathes and thinks he smells gasoline. Thinks he feels those holes reopening through his back, charlie's bullets stabbed through his shoulder and his lungs, the way his blood churned pink in the mud while Smokes and Arley got gunned down, and all them screaming like the sound went on forever.

Fuck you. Fuck you.

Sy cries, shaking quietly first then violently, scraping and digging at his arms. Convulsing, sobbing in fits and dragging his nails down his skin until it blossoms red, so rank and burning and it feels like there's poison in his throat, or bile, and he can't even think of when that knife came out of that pocket and he tested the edge on his arm to feel something real, and then it wasn't testing.

He howls into the rain, vision swirling and going black in a pulse and fuck you, fuck you all, do you know how many of my friends are rotting in some gook trash heap now? Do you know what it is to see your best buddy with his face carved off with a machete while you sit and fucking watch, and then get told, good job son, now gear up, we're dropping you somewhere else where the shit's stacked even higher. And you sure you don't speak gook, son? Say, why you here, boy?

Fuck it. Fuck it all. You motherfuckers just go right to hell.

He jerks in spasms, shudders, clutches at his shoulders and can't even cry anymore, just moan animal and terrified and unanswered, slashed wrists gushing stark blood that froths pink in the storm drain.

There's a guy there watching.

Hey. Hey you got a problem mister?

The guy's wrapped up for Siberia; gloves and scarf and a hat under his hood. Most Sy can see is the eyes, all pale, that second-long lightning blue.

What the fuck you looking at? Go the fuck away.

The guy says something but Sy can't hear it, comes out cotton, sliding back and forth in sounds, backwards and sideways. He's holding out a hand.

Let's get you a drink, the man says.

They don't go to the bar. They go to the hotel across the main street, neon sign crying like a dying insect as it flashes on and off, and the guy in the soviet coat hauls Vincent's ass up eight flights to a tin can room and a cot. He drops him by the door. He heats some water.

While it boils, he takes off the hat, the hood, the gloves and duster. He strips off the coat and leaves it hanging like a bearskin from the door hook. Takes some gauze from the bathroom cabinet.

His hands are sandy Californian and his face looks like it's been torn apart twice, and he washes the blood off Sy's wrists, wraps them and says, "You chuck life like a Christmas tree."

"I'm an atheist," Sy mumbles, head slumped on his shoulder.

The man reads the name off his tags and peels the kid's eyes open to see if they dilate. "You're an idiot."

He's old, maybe 40s, 50s. Old enough to be his dad.

He puts a cigarette to his dried mouth and lights it. Takes the first puff and eases it between Vincent's lips for him to drag, there we go, atta boy.

"You a soldier, mister?" Sy asks him from the floor, while the guy washes his hands and heats soup this time, from a battered old can.

"What makes you say that?"

The rain thunders down onto the window sill, a solid sheet from the roof up over their heads. The window's fogged up like dotted frost.

The guy might've been here for a few days or a few weeks. Kind of hard to tell. Just some anonymous dirty old hotel room. Kind you weren't supposed to bring friends up to in case it brought the floor down. Not that you'd wanna try it.

He's got an M-16 leaned against the dinner table. An old torn photograph of LBJ tacked above the bathroom mirror. Books stacked by his cot, Eliot, Marx, government factfiles, stacks of notes in yellow curling paper, all neat, like he was gonna pick up and move them any second.

He glances out the window down at the street every few minutes, like he's watching for lights.

"You smell like one," Vincent says.

The guy laughs.

They fuck on the floorboards. Vincent's skin crawls and shivers against the cold rough wood and he arches like a girl in the guy's hands, comes fitfully in torn half-pleasure-pain. But when it's done and things are quiet, he doesn't feel so much like fading.

The guy isn't so much scarred as a patched-together Frankenstein, no fat on him, just wiry muscle, and he thumbs the old bullet holes in Vincent's chest saying, do you believe in war?

"War used to be pure," Sy says.

"I don't think so. I think our memories just get worse."

The guy traces words across the kid's stomach and they blush on his skin a moment, and Vincent thinks in flashes of guns and darkness and the rains. The empty village so miraculously clear, paradise in the middle of hell, with a calling card carved out of the mud, inked in charlie's blood.

It makes sense and he doesn't know why.

I finally found you.

"How long have you been doing this?" Vincent asks.

"For me, ten years."

"Then you're the guy that saved me."

Not the alley. The alley is shit. The alley is already too late. By then things have already been in motion. But then, in the jungle, with the words spelled out in the mud, that was the one time Sy could remember being alive.

Kilroy was there.

The sirens are closer. The guy gets up and dresses. He takes the handgun from by the sink and leaves the M-16 where it is.

"Get better," the old man says. Locks and loads, solid thick sound, black velvet metal in his California hands. "You're a soldier."

"I thought you said there aren't any soldiers."

"You gotta find them.

"Normally," he says, "I'd do better. But there's nothing that can help it now." So please just play the role.

That day, the newspapers say, Vincent Sy was found dead of overdose and bloodloss in a bar alleyway.

It doesn't say anything about the gunfire at the Bravo Hotel. Or about the junior senator killed uptown a few hours before. That won't be for days, until they were sure of the lie they wanted to tell. But Sy, he's easy. You see a lot of that with soldiers. No one's going to ask.

On paper, Vincent Sy is dead.

On the street, James J. Kilroy bleeds his brains out in the rain. No one is going to know, even if they saw. Because it was just a crazy old man in a soviet coat, and James Kilroy was in a tin can hotel room nine stories up, asleep with shallow little breaths.

He will dream, and wake up hungry, and after a couple tries he will climb up off the floor and the heap of blankets and go check the cabinet. There'll be one can of soup left. Brown sludge. He'll heat it on the stove and then use the fire to melt his dogtags down to a hunk of metal.

The cuts on his wrists will look better than they did a few hours before. He'll see that the blade didn't actually go as deep as he thought. His arms will be bruised and mottled and perforated, split skin curling and hardening in swollen eyeslits across his pale veins, but he'll be alive.

Over on the table, the phone will ring.

"Kilroy," he will say.

"Confirmed."

And then the line will go dead.