Trust? you ask. I trust you to write me wonderful letters, to tell me the truth, to try to understand what I’m talking about, to forgive my mistakes if they’re at all forgivable, to laugh when I’m funny but not to laugh at me, and to share your popcorn at the movies. I trust you to drive that meretricious sapphire Mustang as you would ride a wild horse, not because you look good in it (you’d look good even in a dump truck), but because you need a car and can appreciate it when I can’t.
Love,
Jimmy
THE MUSTANG SOMETIMES buck-jumped and sprinted, but Ann was learning the nuances of easing out the clutch. She stopped at Jimmy’s old house to give Chip a ride to school. Pixie was in the lab all day. Chip shared with Ann a brief letter he had received from Jimmy—light banter about Ludwig Wittgenstein. “Every tautology bites its own ass,” Jimmy had scrawled. “That belongs on your jumpsuit.”
“That is so goofy,” Ann said. She stared at Jimmy’s words, then almost broke into tears when she saw his Porky Pig cup on the table.
“Do you think the LSD did something to him?” Ann said now. “Did it send him on a spiral he couldn’t get out of?”
“I just don’t know.” Chip fumbled with his book bag, stuffing in a banana, a lopsided sandwich, and a whole package of pecan sandies. “Something happened to him on that trip.”
“What do you think it was?”
“It was a mistake to go to the redwoods,” Chip said. “Looming dark trees. Paranoia? Wolves?”
“I barely noticed the trees. I was busy studying bugs.”
When Chip didn’t speak, Ann asked him about Pixie, if he could imagine joining the army if it would hurt the girl he loved.
“Not if I loved her,” he said. “But I don’t.”
Chip, although intrigued by Pixie, was exasperated by her whims and non sequiturs. Sharing the rent on the house was a good arrangement, he said, and Pixie had a car, but they didn’t belong together and didn’t know how to split up.
“To tell you the truth, I’m just going to classes like I’m sleepwalking.” Chip lowered his head. “Where did Jimmy get such a bird-brained idea? Cuckoo! What kind of scene can that be—prowling around with machine guns in the Ozarks?”
Ann jingled the keys to the Mustang. “Negative capability. That’s Jimmy. Maybe he took Keats too seriously.”
FORT LOST-IN-THE-WOODS
November 7, 1967
Dear Ann,
I don’t mind telling you now that it’s long over, but that first week of basic training was hell, the worst week I ever went through. The weather, the full packs, the merciless drill sergeant, the marches. It got easier, but the drill sergeant never let up finding creative ways to humiliate us. He humiliated the draftees every way possible. He mocked those like me who joined, and he sneered at those in the national guard and reserve. He was harsh with me because I enlisted. The drill instructors are an inch from your face every morning and you wake up in terror, but fortunately they’re not allowed to touch you.
Is the army making a man of me? That old canard. I never believed it and still don’t. True manhood is something more than what you can do with your body.
I expect to get a very brief pass between basic and advanced training. Do you think you could come here? You could fly to St. Louis, then take the bus here. . . .
Love,
Jimmy
ANN LINED UP extra typing assignments so that she could buy plane tickets to St. Louis and to Kentucky for Christmas. She typed a philosophy paper on Reinhold Niebuhr, a master’s thesis on William Butler Yeats’s A Vision (claptrap and flapdoodle, Ann thought), and a wobbly treatise on Oswald Mosley. She stowed a hundred and twenty-one dollars in cash in her Freud book. She buried herself in her literary studies, as she had done in her stamp collection over a year ago. The songs she heard on the radio all applied, but not in any specific way that she could analyze. They were not words or meanings. They were just sounds. Some emotions churned in her in response to the songs, but nothing coherent—nothing she could explain—surfaced to guide her.
Chip was there, though. They checked on each other and brought each other food. Pixie was sleeping with an undergraduate history major, but she still lived with Chip. Chip didn’t mind what Pixie did. It was of no concern to him. They were just roommates. But he was crazy about her cat, Nicodemus.
FORT LEONARDWOOD
November 20, 1967
Dear Ann,
There’s a guy from Kentucky in my unit whose accent sounds a little like yours, but he’s not grammatical. He says “ain’t” and “I done eat” instead of “I ate.” He’s really proud—and unconcerned that his words might be incorrect.
Not everything here is what I thought it would be, and I confess I sometimes wish I was in my own room in Chicago, with my mother calling, “Jimmy, get up, you’re late for school.” My father writes to me now, “Dear Jim,” like I’m a grown-up. That is certainly strange. I’m not used to being Jim. Here I’m Egghead or Professor Jimmy or Shitface.
The barracks is really old, from World War II, I think. Everything is wood. Bunks, walls. There’s a wood-burning heater in the middle of one long room with bunks.
After basic, we will mostly split up and go into different kinds of advanced training—specialty engineering, electronics, motor mechanics. Typing for me!
One thing has shaken me up—I can’t quite grasp this, but the work here is so mind-numbing, so intense, that I’m no longer on a desperate philosophical quest all the time, trying to figure out everything. I’m not searching every moment for meanings, or enlightenment, or alternatives. Suddenly all those fussy philosophers seem like offstage extras, understudies. They’re hanging around in the greenroom waiting for a slim chance to take center stage. But they have to wait. Every day starts the same, with a wild jolt that hurls me into a drastic, cruel routine, and at night the light fades early and the days pass so quickly that I can’t recall if it was today or yesterday that I got your letter.
I’m freezing and trying to write this with gloves on. When the heater dies down, the chill pervades the barracks. Chicago is cold, of course, and I thought it was cold in Binghamton, but there the air is so crisp and the sky so blue that you could walk in seventeen degrees and not notice the cold. In Chicago the wind is the wind, but in Bingo the snow is insulation. Here it is the dampness in the air that is so biting. It feels coldest here.
Love,
Jimmy
Binghamton. If she is in Binghamton, then the outcome is inevitable. Can’t she stop it? She squeezes her mind to conjure California. In California, the trees do turn in autumn, subtly, and there are occasional blazes of color in unfamiliar trees. In California, it is never truly cold. It never snows in Palo Alto. California is sweet—balmy and zippy.
From the ship’s deck, Ann turns to face the setting sun, toward California.
SANJAY ALWAYS GREETED her courteously, occasionally inviting her for a meal. He did not judge Jimmy for enlisting in the army, and he offered a recurring piece of advice: when you are in the river, don’t stand still. Ann liked his smile. It was all-encompassing, as if he could accept all viewpoints. He came upstairs to watch TV when there was important news about the war. Sometimes he tried to explain Indian politics to her, and she had the impression that he was quite homesick. He had not seen his parents in two years.