Dreams, a m*a*s*h fanfic

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warning for a sucker-punch ending.

i tried to keep the flashbacks from becoming too confusing, but the timeline is supposed to be somewhat disorienting :)

Ever wonder how, after the blood and dust and insanity of Korea, Hawkeye will manage to slide back into the skin of Benjamin Franklin Pierce?

If he missed Crabapple Cove during the war, just think of how he'll miss it when he returns and realizes he always will. Crabapple Cove has changed a little bit, but, and more importantly, he's changed a lot. And where you are isn't quite so important as where you think you are, just like what happens to people hardly has as much an effect as what they think happened to them. Perception, not events and not people nor places nor things, have any significance other than what you attach to them.

Trapper will haunt him, and BJ will haunt him. The wounded will haunt him, eyes fixed, pupils dilated. The blood on his hands will haunt him, and the lurid white-hot glare of the OR lights with bombs erupting outside like the Fourth of July every night. Maybe he'll try to shake them off, these ghosts from the prime of his life - if you can call it that, call what they did out there living although it does bear a resemblance (respiratory functions, pulse, the whole nine yards). Then again, maybe those ghosts are all he's got left. Maybe he's too dried up and desiccated now to take root again, to start life again. To learn to cry again. The tears must be in there somewhere, an unborn litter which keeps becoming re-absorbed into the womb it isn't ready to be born, not quite yet.

Oh, he'll write, a few crumpled, haphazard greetings scrawled in the midst of a drunken night when he's feckless and furious and attempting to ignore the pain. Attempting to drown it out and anesthetize himself, or to euthanize himself – whichever. They're never mailed, of course. And the letter or two that is sent off towards Boston or Mill Valley, California… well those letters are stiff, oddly formal, disjointed and altogether un-Hawkeye. Because, really, Hawkeye pierce, MD - manic depressive, he laughed once, self admittedly lewd and licentious, vivacious, magnanimous, righteous and yet ultimately fallible, insidious libertine extraordinaire, the crackerjack doctor, hedonistic nurse-harrier, practical joker and above all best friend – he was born in Korea and remains there. Straggling through the tumbleweed plagued by echoes and after images of horror. And things are as simple as that.

"We are threatened with suffering from three directions: from our own body, which is doomed to decay and dissolution and which cannot even do without pain and anxiety as warning signals; from the external world, which may rage against us with overwhelming and merciless forces of destruction; and finally from our relations to other men. The suffering which comes from this last source is perhaps more painful than any other." Sigmund Freud

(In many cases the narrator's unreliability is never fully revealed but only hinted at, leaving the reader to wonder how much the narrator should be trusted and how the story should be interpreted.)

A cold day in December and I'm sitting here alone, perched on the end of my bed. I'm not trusting myself to leave this room until I'm certain I have a hold on things, because once in the odd while I experience inexplicable urges to do some things which, to phrase this delicately, I'd rather I didn't. No need to hasten myself along towards an end I'll meet eventually, sooner or later. I'd just as soon have it be later, although by now I'm beginning to wonder why it matters. In all likelihood it doesn't.

Rather than the inexplicable peace I'd always felt as a kid, awed by the spectacle of dripping icicles and frosted leaves, I feel alien and edgy, cagey. I came home to a foreign land. I feel as though I should be gone, but I have no place to go.

It isn't easy being madly in love with two people, unable to let either one go. For better or worse, circumstances are making the decision for me. BJ isn't mine. He never was, other than for those fleeting, few moments in the Swamp – moments which we, by all rights, never should have had. Moments we are supposed to forget. Well, I can't forget them. I never will. I won't.

And so because I love BJ, I have no other choice but to stay out of his life. He, unlike me, has a functional life. Wife and kid, modest white picket fence. He has a life which doesn't include me, except perhaps as a friend. Friends, you see, is something I'm not naïve enough to hope we can ever be, not without treading a delicate high wire that's too easy to fall from, walking a fine line it's tempting to step past, a thin boundary that's simple to cross.

I've heard the saying "life is nothing but a crap shoot" ever since I was a child. If indeed I ever stopped being one. Suffice it to say I've heard the expression from time immemorial. Dad used to say it. My professors all said it. I've never been good at craps … it's just not my game, and if there's any truth in that saying, well, then I've had the worst luck imaginable. Until the day I chased Trapper to Kimpo. It was a risk, a toss of the dice. I lost that bet. Trapper was gone. But I decided to gamble again. And BJ was the luckiest roll I ever made.

Then again, that's neither here nor there, not anymore. Rising after a moment's pause, I make my way over to my window – still shuttered tightly – and peer through a slit between two dusty venetian blinds. There's only a meager inch of snow that's fallen, but it's enough to disguise any irregularities of the land and transform the landscape into soft, abstract curves. Sunlight glints harshly off its dazzling surface, yet under the trees a few shadows endeavor to grow, unfurling murky, purplish blue tendrils.

And I run through last night's conversation in my mind.

You're not telling me everything.

How can I? It's bad enough that one of us has to remember these things.

He tries to say something reassuring, anything that will make us father and son again. I need a landline, and he tries to provide it when we both know he can't anymore.

Caring about other people. It's how you get hurt. Ironically, it's also how you get well. It took a long time for me to get used to him. To see him in Trapper's bed; his clothes hanging on Trapper's hook in pre-OP; his fingers wrapped around Trapper's martini glass.

Then, more quickly than expected, the ghost of Trapper disappears and BJ is truly here. Yet, no matter how close we get, no matter how far I fall in love, I can never forget the friend who was here first.

The one who went home.

I don't want him bolting, because there's no way I'll be able to track him down. Reaching over, I put a hand over his on the bedspread lightly.

Trapper could take a little instability, could make it on unsteady ground, but BJ – he needs semantics, needs that sense of shelter because without it he's in a foreign world, useless, without comprehension. BJ, he doesn't realize that sometimes there's nothing to understand.

There isn't a coda for everything, no reason for it all, and although he never admits as such I know he clings to it, needs that subconscious hope that there's some grand plan, a great design he can't fathom.

When all this is over, he'll go home and make light of it, find a way to 'get over it' as he's so fond of saying, and because hindsight is always 20/20 he'll tell himself look, there were the signs, the little twists I could never have foreseen which convened to create this miracle – oh, he'll find a miracle somewhere, and credit it to the war and not his own dedication, I know that. He needs to chalk good things up to circumstance, because if he doesn't, then what good is there in these situations? Where else do you hang your grief, and what small consolations do you have to tell yourself? The obvious answer is that there are none, but that's not particularly inspiring, not at all. Where's the harm in believing, in deluding yourself into believing, that things culminate essentially in good?

I think, where's the harm, it can't hurt him, and I'm almost a little bit jealous.
After all, he's found a way to cope with this and smile, really smile, when he thinks of Peg and Erin. I alone am steadfastly facing the grim reality that this is hell, unnecessary and terrible because the people who caused it don't feel it, and the people who feel it can't stop it. We are pawns in this screwed up nightmare, powerless and hopeless and depending on denial to survive. I'm the only one admitting it. Frank hides behind blind patriotism and brainwashed army regulations, Radar's too innocent to accept the rottenness in people, Mulcahy, he's an odd one – just where does he fall, I wonder? He and Margaret, Margaret who's showing signs of humanity beneath all her army brat façade, they are enigmas. But I know BJ better than he knows himself, and I know his castles in the sky have nothing to hold them up. God, I don't want to be the one to make them fall, don't want them to fall - hell, I wish BJ could build palaces of white-picket-fenced dreams in the clouds that will never crumble. But they will, and he'll only be hurt the more by it. I wish I could lie to myself and BJ, say things will be okay and believe it. I don't because they won't, and they never will be.

"No," the single word rattles hollowly from my throat, stabs through me like broken glass as I shove my friend, forcing him away this time. "I don't want to do this." My stomach clenches and I almost retch as the blatant lie slides from my lips. "We can't do this, Beej. I can't. I won't."

I try to sound convincing, but it's difficult. The series of untruths rolling off my tongue are making me gag on each word I say. I stand, averting my eyes - BJ can always read my eyes - and fix myself a drink.

"After everything? The touches, the glances, the slick double talk and thinly veiled sexual innuendos you've been throwing in my direction every chance you've had?" BJ's words are clipped and quick, tremulous.

I don't want to lie to him again - not to him. I can only shrug. In response to my non-response, BJ slants away from me, rakes his knuckles across his eyes. When he finally speaks, his voice is quiet - filled with sadness.

"God, that's it."

"Beej," I begin, but he cuts me off.

"No, don't say anything. I think I figured things out," he wipes his palms across his eyes and raises them to meet mine. "I'm not him."

"Him?" I try to make myself sound as if I'm confused, but I know who BJ means by 'him', and that he knows it too.

"Trapper. It's because I'm not Trapper, isn't it?" His words drip with jealousy.

"No." I snap too quickly, too harshly, and backtrack. There's a dull ache beginning to pulse at my temples. I place my fingertips on both sides of my head and try to massage away the pain. "No … and yes."

"Well, that answer certainly makes me feel better," he says sharply.

"I'm sorry." I swing my legs over the side of my bed and sit. "I guess I should be more clear."

"I'd say so." He drags himself over to his cot and drops down onto it.

"Pour me another, I say."

BJ glances over at me, skeptically. "I don't think we need another."

"You're right." And I sigh; "You don't need another, BJ. I need several."

Where, really, where to begin? I'm so afraid of making a mistake and doing more harm than good that I'm terrified to try at all. I miss Trapper, miss him like hell, but with BJ sitting across the tent I need to get my mind out of this rut and focus on what's really happening – I need to be there for him.

Then I realize, a bit shamefacedly, that I'm not in Korea. It's not nineteen fifty-one, or –two, or –three. The war is over. Neither Trapper nor BJ are remotely near, because this is not the 4077th.

It is widely speculated that my perception of the space time continuum is utterly fucked. Dad recommended, as delicately as he could, that as an emotional person tending towards extreme depression I should get myself 'professional help.' I spend much too much time wrapped up in my own mind, I know. Keep finding myself lost in shades of grey – or rather green – meandering through memories. Sporadically drifting in and out of delusions, you see, is not considered healthy.

Sometimes, with an odd feeling of detachment, I try to objectively evaluate trapper and I. I think about those years as though I were making a film. It begins with two people, deconstructs them limb by limb – their emotions for one another, their situation, their dreams, their mutual touches, kisses, mental images of each other. By the end, I'm asking rhetorically Ain't it good to be alive? Then, of course, the sucker-punch. Toss it in at the end. Audiences love that, I've heard. Can never let them get complacent with such happy endings.

Make them happy, then throw a mountain on them. Get them over that, throw another mountain on them. Such is life.

Perfect world, until you're drafted. Perfectly horrible war, until you find someone to take away the pain. War takes away your someone, sends in a replacement, and – somehow, you two just end up becoming best friends. More than that, even. Then, when you're all no longer needed, you all diverge to go your separate ways. Circumstances have changed. With a new setting comes a new relationship, a formal one, an appropriate and cordial one. Controlled, constrained, even over the phone. I spoke once to BJ. I cried, afterwards. I have a feeling he did too.

"No." As if he was convincing himself. "You're just, we're…" There is no answer, and we both know it.

"What does Peg say?"

"She thinks," and this is bitter, "that if I don't say something, it means twice as much as if I do. We fight about it a lot."

"Uh huh."

"It's not what I thought it'd be."

But really, BJ, what had you thought it would be?

My mind produces instead the image of a guilt-ridden married man, sitting with slumped shoulders, nursing a headache and praying that his wife will forgive him for his lapse in judgment during war time.

Well, Lapse in Judgment, you better clean things up, my conscience pokes at me.

It was the truth when he spelled out Goodbye on the ground, the truth when we admitted we may never see each other again. I thought at the time it was some surreal nightmare. Even as I turned towards the chopper, even as I caught my last glimpse of BJ and that stupid yellow bike of his, none of it was real. Funny thing about the war; it wiped out all your past, and your future, too. The war trapped you in its prism of horror, with nights and days hopelessly mixed up, living to the tune of shellfire in the distance. Conditioned bursts of adrenaline flooded your veins at the sound of screeching ambulances and helicopter blades. It seemed, after a while, that there had never been anything before this war and could be nothing afterwards. Life became only an endless hazy string of days stretching towards some obscure horizon.

Coming home was the turning point at which my life did not turn. the time was ripe for me to reclaim my life, I suppose, and yet the hilarity of this all is that now I'm home in flesh and blood, I'm really in Korea – while all that time in Korea, my mind was over here. It is hard not to appreciate the irony, even when it makes my life hell. Particularly then.

Don't get too far ahead of yourself, take things slow and day by day by day, Dad tells me. Live in the moment. He says the army's taken me away for long enough, and it's high time I come back. I try not to live in the past. Just not very hard.

I blink my eyes and the moment is over. What's it matter anyway?

I blink a lot. Here it comes, it's coming, and – blink – and there it goes, it's going, it's another moment gone. I guess another day has passed. They tend to, you know. Pass. Slowly. Painfully.

Dad's exhausted these days; the cold is really setting in, and winter has only just begun. Those frigid nights will sink their teeth deeper before the season is ready to go. He has a terrible time sleeping; can't snatch more than a few hours each night. I'm envious, though I don't say as much. I pass my nights in much the same fashion as I do my days. A lot of blinking.

When I dream of Trapper, it's a jarring albeit welcome escape from my frequent nightmares. Sun-soaked, bright, and all too fleeting—a perfect contrast. But they all run together and by the morning they do not make sense—like so many things about Trapper, like so many things about our time together and this time apart.

They almost inspire me to send another letter, or pick up the phone and dial the number. But what we could have now would never be the same, and I don't want to risk replacing my perfect memories with this new reality in which we are

Strange. I'm happier in these dreams than in the waking world most days. Yet they're somehow more haunting, disquieting…more troubling than any war nightmare.

I've heard it said beggars can't be choosers, but if I get any sleep at all tonight I hope I'm lucky enough for a war nightmare. If sleeping means a dream of Trapper, I'd rather not.

Copious gin helps, though I haven't been granted permission to reassemble the still. I miss her sorely, my giver of life in liquid form. Sleeping pills have been recommended, and everyone says I'm mad not to take advantage of them. I understand their confusion. After all, it stands to reason that any borderline deranged insomniac would jump at the chance of a magic bullet, a miraculous pill.

I don't want them near me.

The problem is not that I can't sleep; rather, I don't want to. I won't. Every moment I attempt to rest, a panicked, frenzied desperation seizes my chest. Fragmented memories, incessant, unrelenting: lips on mine. His. Chapped, bitten. Tongue, warm. Wet. His. Kissing. Surreal. I'm lucky this night, for my dreams are mercifully Trapper- and BJ- free.

I'm pushing through to the stretcher, set on two sawhorses, which serves as an operating table – hearing my breath rasping in my throat against the acrid, smothering smoke hanging in the air. I can't see for a moment and have to grope my way, eyes watering, then the smoke clears and I can make out the crumbled walls, the aid station choked with caved in debris. Coughing, I scrub up as best I can in the basin and turn towards the patient. My stomach turns over. I think I feel someone's hand on my arm, but my body is deadened from the shock, mind sedated even as my vision becomes clear in the chaotic, hellish room. Arms splayed out as though he's been flung like some discarded rag doll, the soldier's eyes are open, dulled already from the bits of smoke and dust that have begun to settle in them. The lower half of his face is gone, and in the dimness I can see the bright red blood, wet and slick, shining with a light of its own making, as it covers the front of his uniform – already beginning to coagulate and turn darker in the folds and crevices of the fabric. I can not move, and I feel a vast emptiness inside myself, and then that hollow void slowly, agonizingly, begins to fill with a throbbing ache, a pain so intense and deep that I know I will never be able to stand it, and I drop to my knees as this ruined soldier, this man, looks back at me with sightless eyes.

Maybe, I think, maybe, the human soul can bear anything. I thought meatball surgery was a bad deal; I'm awed by those surgeons with their stoicism, their calm, their ability to cry once and then move on dry-eyed. I'm a little frightened. Is this what happens, is this what people become when they have no other choice?

My own sharp anger burns, and watching – this, this slaughtering – I want to lash out, to stop this. The acrid smoke, the harsh, sulfurous reek of ammunition in my clothes and on my body, is nauseating, foul. I wonder whether that soldier has a family waiting up for him, staring at his picture on their mantle and praying. So many miseries to contend with. I try to blank my mind, but of course it's futile.

Battalion aid, now that's hell. That's where you bite your lip and operate, without thought, without expression, and you offer god anything he wants if it will keep these men alive.

Scuttling over the dusty roads in that damn rattling jeep, I press the gas and try to calm myself as the car vibrates with speed. I glance down, for a moment, at my dog tags. I'd accepted the standard procedure as ritual suicide; one set for identification of your cadaver, one set to send back home, but I think about that man's dog tags, and who'll receive them in the mail. My own dog tags jangle as I rumble over a rock, glinting in the sun, and I have to turn my eyes away. Or soon I'll be breaking down.

Somehow I manage to make it back to the 4077th without swerving off the road, although I'm not lucky enough to miss dinner. Sit next to trapper in the mess tent, and we joke. Ridicule the food, the crappy socks they give us, MacArthur, anything. Everything. Laugh at it, even if it's not funny. Especially if it's not funny. It's the only way I've found to open my mouth without screaming. I don't break down; can't afford to.

No, I hardly ever broke down.

Suppose I'm making up for it now.

These impetuous, snap decisions that I make. Driving to Boston. Oh, dad thinks I'm taking a dive off the deep end.

I can't stand to hear BJ's voice on the telephone again – terrified by the thought, or of what my reaction would be, I'm not sure. Most likely both – I don't know what's possessing me, believing I'm up to seeing trapper. I'm not ready to face BJ, not yet. Too fresh, too raw, too vivid. Too excruciating.

My god, but it's harder still to think of Trapper. Incredibly hard. I used to cry a lot; I still curse and yell and act as if the world has somehow turned its back on me, or owes me something for my grief. Even now, I'm selfish. I miss trapper like hell.

And I'll never get him back.

Crushes. Love. Affection. Devotion. Unrequited? I scowl at the time lost, at my own ridiculousness, at the high cost of caring. Dreams burn, and they glitter. A disseminate shimmer, variegated hues of a megalopolis. I scorn my own absurdity, these pestilent thoughts more abstract than I've known them to be. I wonder what it's a harbinger of, this sudden turn towards introspection. Never was my forte, self-evaluation. I'm no Frank, eternally able to turn the mirror away from himself and disregard his own flaws, but honest assessment of my own character has never been my strongest skill.

Wouldn't it be nice if life were really like a road, the way people suggest it is in metaphors all the time? Roads are labeled – Stop here, Yield there, the speed limit is this. Life has no cautionary signs, no limits posted when you're about to go too fast, limits to prevent you from swerving out of control. My mind fishtails.

There is no blazing octagonal warning that objects may come hurtling at you when you least expect it. There is no warning that if you do not slow down you will regret it, if you survive to. There are no blinking lights to warn you of slippery ground and unstable promises. I wish there were.

Once the patina of promises is rubbed away – reality is abrasive – nothing looks quite so lush, so idyllic anymore. Illusions, delusions, fantasies can't persevere. They are insubstantial and liable to collapse under the least bit of pressure when you need their protection most. Better to rough it for a while. Develop calluses which will help you in the end, rather than preserving in innocence and virtue which serves no end. Better to get a taste of the harshness, the cruelty, and let it drive you that much harder not to flounder. There are sharks in these waters which will all too gladly gobble you up.

It was only the first week at the 4077th. Home was still fresh enough in our memories for Korea to be strange. And drinking was as of yet a pleasantry, not an anesthetic.

"Buy you a drink, sailor?" Trapper's insultingly cocksure smile, as smug as the Cheshire cat after taking one look at my face, makes me indignant and a little bit nervous. Even as I laugh and shake my head no, Trapper puts the scotch down in front of my face with an expression that brooks no argument.

"What do you want from me?"

Trapper is impervious to my annoyance. "Do you really have to ask?"

Even as I feign insult, I can't admit it's a little bit thrilling. We spend the night scheming against Frank and exchanging quips and rude witticisms.

That night as I lay awake in our tent, before we christened it the Swamp, I cast a few glances over at Trapper in his bunk. Then I sat up and turned on the light above my bed, reached for a piece of stationary Dad gave me to take, and I wrote myself a note.

Dear Hawkeye,

It would be a good idea to ask. I realize that you do not take yourself seriously, writing like this on scrap paper and pretending it's a journal, but every man has a story if you have the courage to listen. Next time you are alone with him – next time you have the opportunity – please take it. This is a man you understand by instinct; it's time to find out why.

Sincerely,

Yourself

I was resolved, but I am ever a coward.

I never went to Trapper. He came to me, and I certainly agreed, but I never made the right move where it counted. It was so easy to just be, to skip saying the words we didn't need. I wish we had. I wonder now if I'd missed something, if I had it wrong the whole time. I need to stop thinking.

Much easier to drink, you know. Drinking beats thinking. I'm a doctor; I can self-medicate, and thereby prescribe myself plenty of swill. Ether, morphine – anything you've got, bartender. No discerning palette here; the army's seen to that, what with their waging biological warfare on us – surgeons, on a mission of mercy! – via the mess tent and its purported food. I think in broken lines and my sentences link together in a string of non sequiturs. Please, just slosh some formaldehyde into a martini glass, toss in an olive. Lighter fluid, rotgut acid, I'm not choosy.

Dad put a stop to that.

Not that I would've done anything different, if it had been a friend of mine. Then again, I'm no friend of mine. I hardly know myself, by now, and I'm long past caring much about my own sordid existence. There isn't much to it. I do what little I can in the operating room, and once I've left it I'm little more than a gin drinking, poker playing train wreck. Derailed - now there's a fitting adjective. Sometimes I'm on the verge of hysteria. Others, I'm stupefied in apathy. When I'd gone to Korea I had been too young to see. Now I feel too old to fight. I can't quite wrap my mind around it, this squalid world, and if in my life I've ever gotten close you can be sure I ran as fast as I could, the moment I realized it. I'm irrationally petrified to acknowledge the atrocities people commit, because by now if nothing else I've learned there are some things I can't change. Doesn't mean I'll stop deposing and despising them; only that I'm afraid to understand, afraid that by realizing what convenes in their warped minds I'll somehow catch the disease. Utterly ridiculous. Pathetic.

I can see a washed out moon through the fog ahead. It makes me think of other moons, all the other pathetic moons I've seen. I think of the mountains at night in Kora,of their imposing silhouettes, and the dull slate sky. I can still see Trapper smiling gently at me before returning to scrutinizing the firmament. I follow his gaze, but see nothing.

"What are you looking at?"

"The moon."

I take another look. Sure enough, the pale crescent I'd noticed earlier has risen higher. It's all but invisible against the encroaching light. "Not much of a moon."

"Nope."

I pause, but can't help it: "So why are you watching it?"

Trap shrugs. "It's all the moon we have left."

I'm not sure what to think or say, so I don't. I'm there with him, and it's enough.

Where is he now when I need him?

I look in the rearview mirror - what the hell happened to me? I knew this would happen. I was just hoping not today.

I've developed the fruitless habit of pretending someone else can come and save me from myself. I know it's useless. It was always agreed-- you get the chance to leave, you just don't look back. That's the rule in war and in prison too. Any place they trap you, lock you up with disgusting food, and throw away the key. Like summer camp. If you get to go home early, you never question why. But even Sydney's called me at least once. More than once, actually, since he's living near by, relatively. Portland's a stones throw away. Talked about a visit. I smiled, bitter, and asked if it was a professional visit. Sydney didn't smile back. I could hear in his voice over the phone.

Spoke to him in person, briefly, at a conference several weeks ago. He is, like my dad, healthily concerned. Still, I won't be helped. There's nothing for it; I don't give a damn.

I keep driving. I forget where I am, or rather, where I am not.

When Trapper's in his drink, I can never help myself. Some men wear their intoxication well, with nothing but the shine in their eyes to tip you off; Trapper's eyes shine, but they shine large – a darker brown than they normally are, red-rimmed and unfocused. His stare – his glance is unusually sharp when he's sober. He doesn't look at people often or long because he has the unfortunate talent of looking right through them, and he's polite enough to keep it to himself as he can. When he's drunk, all dark eyes and wandering words, he keeps and holds your gaze, but you get the distinct impression that he isn't looking at you at all. If I weren't so used to it, it'd be unsettling

I'm still quite sober, though not by design. I had to leave our monthly poker get-together to tend someone in post-op. I'm only out of my mind with exhaustion, which is more than I can say for Trapper. He couldn't even walk himself to the latrine to puke.

But he turns to me and there's something in the twist of his smile that holds me still. I'm trapped between a rock and a hard place, because a wall is a wall, whether figurative, or literal, physical or emotional: trapped between trapper and cheap aluminum siding, both equally impassable, both equally unyielding. Trapped between two walls, and one is closing in.

I start twisting away, but find myself leaning toward towards him and recoiling all at once - "It's not that I don't want to," I choke out, "Trapper, you have no idea."

The black look he lowers at me says something along the lines of I wouldn't be so sure. "So what, then? Why?"

"It's just," I whisper, "You're – you, you have a – "

A family, and you belong to them, not me – He can probably hear my thoughts, can see the words I'm afraid to let leave my lips. "You're married trap," I say at last, "because you're married."

I don't know how he reacts – I'm too busy pressing the heels of my palms into my eyes, too busy trying not to see. I know how pathetic I am. I won't face it in myself, and I don't want to have to face it in his eyes.

"Now, of all times (of all times!), for you to sprout a conscience," Trapper says bitterly, "just isn't right. People like you shouldn't have them."

"People like me?" I peer between my fingers. "And what people are those?"

Roughly, Trapper grips my shoulder and holds me still. I think he's afraid I'll run. Trapper's not one to wear his heart on his sleeve, but he is now. Maybe he's suspecting that his face is falling open despite all his efforts.

The propinquity is terrifying, in a wonderful sort of way.

And later that night, all I do is smile. Occasionally, I wonder why I am not wondering, Oh, god, what have I done?

Does Trapper think of me? Why hasn't he ever called, or sent a letter? Even a lousy note? I imagine what his life is like now. It's late at night. After waking up for the fourth time, he slips out of bed as quietly as he can. Louise doesn't stir. A click as the knob turns, and the door swings out with little protest. For a moment Trapper stands at the threshold, casting a backward glance at his wife. With the drapes pulled shut, there is only the alarm clock and its phosphorescent numbers to illuminate the room, all soft shapes painted by the diffuse light. Limned in a bluish glow, Louise sleeps soundly, unaware.

Trapper steals out of the room, the creak of a floorboard freezing him immobile for a second - but the moment passes, and he goes on. Guiltily rummages through a kitchen drawer in search of a pen, and picks up the notepad Louise keeps by the phone. Having to suffice with a pencil, he pads softly into the foyer, turns on the porch light, and pushes open the screen door (she always leaves it unlocked in the summer, says they live in a quiet enough neighborhood).

Dear Hawkeye.

No. Trapper chews his lip and stabs the paper rather roughly with the eraser, perplexed. It's been years. Years. He's never forgiven himself for being too busy plastered to leave a damn note, just a few lousy words - Got all my points. Heading home. God, Hawk, I'll miss you. I'm sorry. How hard would that have been? Now the war's over. It's been over. And he hasn't gone to a damn reunion, not a single one. Trapper erases harder, almost vicious, until the pencil's end pokes through the paper.

Damnit. Too little, too late. How can he ever explain it away?

Resigned - he owes Hawkeye more than this, but this at the very least - Trapper puts the despair from his mind and focuses on something, anything, to say. Hey, Hawk. know I've been a complete asshole, but I couldn't say goodbye. Couldn't admit it was really happening, couldn't stop hoping that maybe I was only delusional. Culdn't leave you.

Hah. Honestly, Trapper, cut the agonizing and spit it out. How about, 'Hawkeye, I hate myself. I hate myself, because I love you. Because I can't stop, and can't wish I could. I hurt you. I hate that you gave me the power to hurt you, hate that I couldn't stop, and that you didn't stop me. And for all that, I never even let you know.

So what the hell I do now? I don't know. Other than tell you, in some way, that I –

Trapper swears softly, a muttered oath that hardly satisfies him. What he wants to do is scream, is hate himself enough that he'll feel as though he's done penance for hurting Hawkeye. He knows Hawkeye is hurting, knows that Hawkeye's going to act like a lost child because that's what he is - childish, petty, but also child-like, innocent. Oh, Trapper knows Hawkeye isn't conventional innocence, but he's the paradigm of good intentions even if they sometimes don't succeed. He cares, and in return the world seems determined to cut him down.

Hawkeye, I can't make it up to you, can't even be sure it means to you what it means to me. (Except that's meant, now, meant, past tense. There is nothing to mean anymore. This is all a study of history, with hindsight's 20/20 vision.) Can't be sure it meant to you what it meant to me. That's a lie, a brutal lie, the lowest of low blows. Of course it did. If Hawkeye hadn't felt the same, he never would have. Trapper knows it. Hawkeye's only a fool when it comes to his heart, and if loving Trapper wasn't as foolish a thing as anyone can possibly do, then what is? Hawkeye's far from faithless. And Trapper let him down.

I won't ask what I can do, because there's nothing I can. I screwed up. It's over, it's done. But Hawkeye, I still love you.

Damn. Trapper's hand shakes, the pencil point snaps, an ugly smear of graphite across the abused page.

It's too much, too much. He's gotta get some fresh air, Trapper thinks, the night air suddenly stifling and lodged in his throat - or is that bile? Can't, can't move on, because even as he folds his wife in his arms, as he dips her and she leans back, eyes on his, trusting him not to fall, he's remembering another body pressed against his. Remembering rougher, more ruthless lips against his own. He remembers other nights, waltzing to the music of artillery shells under olive drab sheets, even as he sleeps alongside Louise on their smooth blue bedspread.

Although he had never deliberately searched out an affair, he knew one day something like that might happen. When it did, it had been a watershed. It was something he would probably never repeat again, so in a sense, he'd lost something – lost the potential to experience anything so extraordinarily cathartic again. And he wishes he were in Korea, despite all the horror, despite all the pain, because there he had someone to love.

Or maybe I'm projecting my own emotions too much into this. Trapper has someone to love here, just like BJ. Does it make me a wretched human being to hope Louise's love, and his girls, are somehow not enough? Maybe they're fighting. He's away on a business trip. Louise's voice escalates shrilly, and Trapper holds the receiver several inches from his ear. "All you do is leave for medical conferences," she cries, "and it's like I don't even exist anymore."

"What the hell are you mad at me for? All I'm doing is trying to make it work," he retorts, face tight. "Tell me what to do to make this work."

"Work! Exactly, that's all this is, what this relationship's become is work." She's right. Trapper says nothing, leans his head back against the wall and bites his lip, listening. "This marriage is nothing but work. And that's why we're screwed up now." And how can he reply to that?

There's a montage – there's Trapper catching a flight home,embracing his wife at the airport. Trapper in the auditorium crowd, face beaming as he watches his daughters in the school play. Trapper alone at some unnamed bar, on to his fifth scotch. Trapper and Louise alone on the back porch, trying to pick up the peices. They hug, they kiss. Trapper vowing never to take his family for granted again.

Still Trapper can't help but wish Hawk was here, can't help wanting him and needing him and longing for him so desperately that he almost hates him, almost.

You've left Hawkeye. left him, and those two words – left him – rub that wound raw, but Trapper needs it, need that wound to stay open and fester, because it keeps Hawkeye that much closer, his memory that much sharper. The thought of what he's going through, and knowing he could have eased it, is enough to make Trapper loathe himself.

Other than hating himself, though, there isn't much Trapper can do. He's left Hawkeye, and if his own wretchedness is anything to go by, Hawkeye's in a sorry state. Nice one, Trapper. He's at fault; he – the best friend, the lover – he did nothing, left him hurting. And he can't love that away from a distance. Can't kiss it and make it better.

Kissing, maybe, is something I've done a fair bit of since coming back, and before I came back, too. None of it, not while I was in Korea, helped me forget where I was. And none of it, now that I'm back in Crabapple Cove, helps me remember I'm home. It doesn't seem much like a home, though, a sanctuary. I've got no roots, no ground beneath me. I am free floating, disembodied. Emotionally disfigured, most likely.

I keep driving.

Time passes. Even when it seems impossible. Even when each tick of the second hand aches like the pulse of blood behind a bruise. It passes unevenly, in strange lurches and dragging lulls, but pass it does. Even for me.

I must've been driving for a good twelve hours by now. This highway is long, but I've been on longer. I've taken to counting headlights as a form of meager entertainment. The short white dashes in the center of the road swoop up at me, slowly advancing, then suddenly rushing at me as the car drives by. Incredible. It's probably not so intelligent, watching the line in the road rather than focusing on the surrounding cars, but what does it matter? Maybe I'll get lucky. Maybe I'll crash; it's been known to happen. Chance favors the prepared, and I'm certainly affording myself plentiful opportunities for disaster. I have this down to a science: inebriated, miserable, possibly manic but positively dissolute, disconsolate. Reckless to a fault.

The thickness of night here, without the pollution city lights' omnipresent haze, is soothing. Balm for my frenetic state of mind, as it were. The unending monotony, the vastness of the horizon before me, expanses of rural fields unrolling on either side – I feel like an ant crawling along some thread of a path, tiny, infinitesimal, insignificant. Inevitably, my mind meanders off. Occasionally I think of things so utterly dumb they are damn near genius. Tonight seems to be one of those moments where my thoughts are only utterly dumb. No genius this time, and only the worn out scenes my mind replays when it has nothing else to do but be sadistic.

The habit began as an innocuous, if irrational, fear of forgetting. I'd ransack my memories each night, dredging up any recollections I could, thumbing through my store of anecdotes to relive Korea – the good times, mind you – hoping that, with use, their impressions might stay crisp. Some mornings I wake up clutching my blankets, frigid, with an unidentifiable and excruciating sense of loss. As though some specter's visited me in the night, slinking away with a stolen fragment of my soul, leaving me to discover my bereavement the next day.

I'm no good at keeping tabs on my thoughts; they run amok, do as they will, and I only observe them with detached bemusement. My thoughts slip into Trapper's life as I drive. As though I were watching a film. He's remembering Korea tonight. Remembering nights when, a little vicious, Trapper matched Hawkeye tit for tat and pressed closer, held him tighter, more secure, all the better to keep him from slipping away. I need you here, he wants to say, but his mouth is dryer than dust and his throat sore, swollen. Trapper slants his lips over Hawkeye's, hardly a millimeter between them, and hovers, plaintive. Waiting. (You've got me stealing your love because you never give it).

You'd think, he muses, you'd think I was asking Hawk to jump off a cliff.

It's not as though they haven't been here before. It's not as though, taking stock in the supply tent, Hawkeye hasn't pulled trapper away from the shelves of sulfa and into the inky shadows for the occasional complicit grope; not as though they haven't stumbled into the swamp after ten too many rounds at Rosie's and wound up stumbling into the same cot; not as though, on R&R in Tokyo, they haven't sometimes forgotten to make it to the geisha houses. Frenetic - proscribed and all the more alluring for it – frenzied kissing, curled around each other in the sanctity of some tawdry motel room.

Hah, the punch line – here it comes – Hawkeye, crumbling, whispers, I believe in the sanctity of marriage, Trapper, I believe in what it represents. Oh no, you don't, Trapper thinks – don't pull virtue into this, because I'm not in the mood to argue ethics. Trapper chokes, Goddamnit, just tell yourself it's only sex if that's what you want. If you can drink a nurse pretty when you need a warm body, lie for tonight and pretend this means nothing.

I've been looking back to find where I went wrong. Or rather, right. Wrong place, wrong time, wrong motives – everything I could have possibly done wrong, I did. And all for purely selfish reasons, disgustingly selfish. I abhor me, because I knew better and still made the choices I did, deliberately. So how did this occur? How is it possible that, for all my attempted precautions, things veered so horribly off course? It was planned to be little more than flat-out impersonal, physical lust. Two less lonely people on a cold night. Love was not in the script. Those were never my intentions; I'm not that cruel. There's no room for love in this script. The circumstances aren't able to accommodate it.

Now come one, come all, to this tragic affair.

Now I was wondering Oh, God, what have I done? I remember those hours of disgust, of pacing fervently through the tent, sick to my stomach. I wanted, needed Trapper so I dragged BJ into this mess – and he knew – and how could he not hate me?

We pretended I was only upset about the war.

Give yourself a break, BJ would tell me, the horrors of war find everyone, somewhere. Hah, I'd laugh. Horrors of war? War is a horror, it's the horror. And don't tell me to give myself a break. I've given myself too many; I think I'm broken.

No, he'd retort, not broken. Wounded, maybe, but not beyond repair. I had a rebuttal for that, too – his 'you're not wounded beyond repair' argument – but I'd reserve it for later. "Ah, but there you see, my wound is me, Beej. My wound is me, not being able to forgive people for doing this, not being able to forgive myself for not doing enough. I get so angry and I can't stop myself. I'm my own wound." I sat on his bed, and ran a hand through my hair. "And I'm your wound, too."

"You're not."

"I am."

"You aren't. You're a symptom, maybe. And also the cure."

Even now I can't stop thinking about the expression on BJ's face as he said that, lost and afraid and yet resolved. As though he were facing something larger than himself, something too grand to comprehend, and accepting its inevitability with more grace than I've ever possessed. I don't know how he did it.

I failed to anticipate inclement weather, of course, and so here it is. My own personal rainclouds, they follow me everywhere. A thin film of water slicks the pavement, treacherous for all its apparent insubstantiality; the car skids and swerves. Suddenly I'm veering off the road, the crunch of tires over unsteady gravel serving to remind me that risks are hidden behind every door – furtively, certainly, but their discretion is seldom in vain. My rendezvouses veer into love, my life veers off course, and my car follows suit. When risks choose to cease lurking and invite you, openly, to engage in catastrophe – well, it's a selective honor. Christ knows I've been fishing for chances since setting foot stateside, once the implications of my situation permeated the ecstatic fog. Pity serendipity never took the bait.

The plan which came upon me in my sleep and compelled me to embark on this soul-searching quest, well, it had seemed brilliant at the time. Grab cash, get in car, drive to Boston. I'll have to wing it from there.

I'm frightened, absolutely petrified to see trapper. I don't even know if I can find his house. I'm not altogether positive what I plan on saying, either, other than a tentative 'hello.' I can always turn back. I'm sure I could squeeze in an illegal u-turn somewhere. The thought of a last-resort backup is consoling, the choice to opt out and be the coward I am. Still, I continue. It's a lonely road, streetlamps bleeding light that splashes the asphalt like oil on water, muzzy red taillights and flickering blinkers. The hypnotic and low, smooth rumble of tires over pavement and a mildly invigorating rush of wind roaring through my open window. I'm freezing, but I don't really mind. It's a sensation, and as such preferable to numbness.

The thought of what trapper will say scares me witless.

The fact that I still love him scares me more.

At this point, I muse with the slightest smile of satisfaction, it doesn't matter whether I'm too lost; I'll never wind my way out of my memories and back into everyday life, never acclimate myself to the eerie lethargy of these halcyon days. I'm afraid my intellect is losing its caliber. I'm denigrating, there's no doubt about it. Hardly a coherent thought in my head. Hardly a thing in my head at all, save some lingering hot air.

Everything is surreal, or perhaps too real. I can't really grasp it, can't seem to cope. Too much love, I've heard it said, too much love will kill you. Oh, those were the days I'd volley back with some salacious smirk and quip it'd be a nice death. I've always been impetuous. But there's no making sense of this. Every way I go, I'm bound to lose. I suppose I'm the victim of my crime, then, guilty as charged. Too much love will kill you just as sure as none at all. Is there anything in this world that won't turn toxic on you?

I think my soul is curled at the edges, charred in the corners, peeling and blistered. There's denial spackling over all the holes in my logic that I'm sick of looking at, the gaps in my mind and the missing pieces, insecurities wallpapered over with yarns and tall tales I've told so many times they've begun ossifying into truth. The filler in the crevices is now falling out; the cracks lie exposed in my crushed, crumbling façade. Overlaying it all, spreading its fuzzy polyps in the rubble, is a blackish green fungus that reeks of pain. Disembodied, free-floating, I'm content to watch my own decay. I was aware from the onset that nothing good could ever come of – what I had with Trapper, and BJ. I just never cared. Now, it's catching up. You can't cheat fate.

No one gets out of here alive, ha ha. Hah. And that's fine with me. It's all cheapened, anyway. Tawdry like plastic costume jewelry in place of intricate wrought designs, these crude blockish motifs, broken semaphore; tarnished, each and every clear surface is sullied with smoke and ash and the foul malodorous taint of putrification. An arabesque of despair, intertwined mantras of hopelessness that feed and form eachother. Cobweb curtains I embroider with rhetoric, everything I say is more for the love of the pretty words than what they're meant to convey. I wrap myself in sentences that double back on themselves and delve into such detail that they skirt the point. I play games.

I'm repeating myself, constantly. More than a recurring theme, now, this is me reiterating myself because I've got no new material. Same old show, same used up jokes and tired clichés. I'm too exhausted to care much, a pity because back in the day my pride was that repertoire of humor now so piteously depleted. I suppose I just don't have it in me any more, to be funny.

A glowing billboard at the roadside proclaims I'm nearing a Motel 6. We leave the light on, it says. The sign is bright and cataclysmic, devastating in its flat colors that seem so shrill and overbearing. Loud, bold, thick and vivid. I have a good five hours left to drive, which isn't much, so I forego the rest stop and continue.

I realize I've taken a wrong turn. I feel disgusting. All these interminable hours spent driving into nowhere. But if I've withstood those goddamn endless OR sessions, I can withstand driving more than sixteen hours straight. What else can I do?

Catharsis, as I've heard some people refer to it – I'm not entirely sure I buy into that, but I'll try anything that might resolve me of this clawing monster of remorse. I need an emotional exorcism.

I take a breath and am surprised to find that it shudders out of my body. I'd thought I would have better control over myself by now.

Before Korea, when something went wrong I used to tell myself there was a reason for it. I can't do that anymore, because there is no reason. There's no excuse for all those deaths.

I used to think I knew something about life – that the world was mostly fair, that there's a point to what I do, that there's at least something that matters.

And I'd wonder sometimes what's the use of winning the battle if you can't stop the war, and how can I feel like I accomplished something saving one kid's life when I know five others died? The answer, of course, was that it made a hell of a difference to that one kid. And that mattered to me, that really mattered to me. Because if that didn't matter, what did?

Except sometimes that one kid didn't make it. Not my fault, not Klinger's who prepped him or Margaret who closed or Radar's who smuggled him candy. Not anyone's. The war does what it will. What happens, happens.

Five others died, and it didn't make a difference to that one kid, and nothing else mattered. Not even me. At least in Korea I could try to stop the dying. At least the times I failed the soldiers knew they died for something. For someone.

I have nothing to live for and no one left worth dying for.

I want to be with Trapper. I have got to believe that I can be.

I hit an intersection and wait while the bus ahead of me makes a left.

I shouldn't barge back in on his life. I'm afraid I won't be able to convince myself to do the right thing.

The light turns red and I idle. I drum my fingers on the steering wheel.

And what's right? The decent thing to do is let trapper be. Just like I have to let BJ be. Not to impose on his life. Not to barge in because I'm jealous.

I wait. I fret.

When the light turns green I stomp on the gas, and my car lurches forward. I need to convince myself I shouldn't be doing this.

But shouldn't I be?

After everything we've been through, more pain and loss and love and desperation than anyone could bear, hadn't we become two halves of the same whole? And hadn't I at least earned the right to hear from him? To know how he was? To know if it was just me, or whether he –

Sign at the side of the road announces the speed limit has increased to sixty-five. I do seventy.

Maybe my problem is that I could never take a hint. That Hawkeye, incorrigible. Could charm the skin off a snake with that wit. Always gets his way. Maybe I can't accept that trapper can be happy without me. Maybe I'm so desperate that I've resorted to projecting my own needs onto others. I know BJ will never really get over what we had. He might return to normality with peg, but now-BJ will never stop feeling the loss of what then-BJ never had. Maybe Trapper's been able to fill up his life with something.

God knows I haven't.

But should I have to? After finding the only answer I needed, should I have to go looking for another one?

The night drags on. These twisting roads seem to double back on themselves, and I pull over to the shoulder and turn on the maplight. It takes some rummaging, but I locate my map in the glove compartment and unfold it. Under the yellow glaze, the tangled lines – blue, red, black, highways and interstates – seem to writhe on the page. I must be more tired than I'd thought. It's incredibly hard to focus, but I think I've found my route.

I drive on.

iBoston is not what I had expected. It's a cheerless town, grey and shuttered in. Or it may just be me.

The air has a bite, so I shove my hands further into my pockets and think of warm things. Coffee. Fire. I ring the bell one more time, and after a pause fish the address out of my pocket to read one more time. The paper is creased and soft from being handled. Trapper's lawn has gone to seed. I wonder about that. I stare at the dull, depressing grass that is neither green nor brown, but instead at that stage just in between that manages to achieve the most nauseating shade of yellow imaginable. A perfect day, and dense, thick fog coats it all, makes the air damp and cold and depressing.

"How- what – why're you here?"

He knows, though. I grin blindingly, of course he knows, and I know I don't need to explain. We never have. but I still can't bring myself to say the words that will make me into the person I know I am, the words that sound so much worse than what they say – I know you've never sent a letter or even called but I need you and I'm exhausted and I don't know where else to go, I don't want to say you have to still care about me because I still care about you, I never stopped -

'Come on now, is it so difficult?' Trapper says, and his face isn't closing itself off to me repulsed by my need and his face isn't twisted with the love that's tearing me but his smile is simple the way it always has been, warm and ironic and the most beautiful thing I've ever seen.

Jesus, Trapper. 'I've missed you so much,' I whisper, lamely. He knows I couldn't say anything more true.

'I know. Come inside,' and I do, and he slings an arm over my shoulder as though we've never been apart. We step into the foyer, and he yells up the stairs for his wife. 'Louise! Come down, an old buddy's dropped by. Louise! Hurry up, will it? It's Hawkeye.' And I've never been happier –/i

The road is slippery, and the car swerves off.

It appears in the papers the next day. Benjamin Franklin 'Hawkeye' Pierce.

Asleep at the wheel.