!I uploaded two chapters today!
Make sure to read "Chapter 24: More Juxtapositions" after reading this one.
irosokuyammamato: Thanks for the suggestion. Not gonna lie, I forget some of food, and economic aspects of war. I'm definitely going to be sprinkling more of it in!
An Eldian's Journal
Wartime Shenanigans
Chapter 23: Juxtapositions
In the middle of K the street-dweller's music, a new sound intermingled with the gravelly voice's lyrics. It was the sound of crows selling their death warrants; they signed the death certificates in the devils' ears. K's last chord fizzled out with all the extra sounds around, for it simply couldn't put up a fight. So many sounds were around that they could have been scooped out of the air into multilayered sheets.
I stood up immediately.
K didn't stand up.
"Mr. K get up! What are you doing?!"
Instead of responding, he rested the guitar on the sidewalk.
The surprise in my response died when I remembered that K had an intriguing stance on his mortality—he considered himself dead. It was a concept I still didn't understand around that time.
"H, take the guitar. When you get into your basement, play music for all the people that hide there." He wheezed. "That's what makes this hell that much more bearable."
K's passing of the guitar to me felt like a succession of an ancient relic given from mentor to people were frantic the most, they needed to be sliced by the shining edges of talent and melodies.
The words themselves reminded me of my mama's. She, too, spoke a similar line a few weeks before then.
I replied, "You can play the music, Mr. K. Why does it have to be me?"
"No one respects me...they'll just think I'm an annoying old man." He raised his head. "Be an annoying young boy. That's what people expect of you anyway."
Did I see a smile on that face? No, I think it was just my imagination.
"Ok, Mr. K. I'll play the music." I grabbed K's bony wrists, and his eyebrows narrowed. "But you're going to be listening."
I dragged the bag of bones along with me and grabbed the guitar gently by the neck. "Heinrich! What are you doing?! This hurts!"
Dead people aren't supposed to hurt, should they?
I hoped that I wouldn't dislocate K's retired joints from the pulling. I guess Viktor's brutal ways were rubbing off on me.
"Fine-Fine! I'll come with you." I let go of his wrist. He then put his hands on the ground and raised himself up. Every joint creaked.
A shiver went through my body.
It wasn't from the sirens.
Mr. K unfolded himself vertically into a lumbering man of 6 ft 4 inches—two inches shy of being a foot taller than me. He seemed taller than that, for his mysterious existence added a few inches. He appeared to be a wise tree that ached and moaned from all the bugs and parasites that pecked on him his entire life.
It was the first time I had seen him stand up, and I could see why. Carrying a frame like that must have expended a lot of energy. People seemed to always be looking down on him when he could look down on everyone else in reality.
The scent of irony was more potent than the premonition of death by bombing.
Staying up appeared to be a struggle for K, so I told him to rest his hand on my shoulder. When he did, I felt the hollowness of his twig fingers, for they carried the denseness of mystery.
As we walked, everyone buzzed around us for their lives. The cattle split up and visited different homes as shelters—none of them took instruments.
When we arrived at my home, mama and papa were at the door shuffling people indoors. There appeared to be fewer people compared to the bomb warning right before the declaration of war. I guess that was due to the arguments we had in there.
And of course, can't forget the usual customers.
"Hey Heinrich."
"Heya Ricky."
Before the siblings and my parents walked in, I watched as all four devils looked up at the aching tree that relied on me to stand. Half of them squeezed their noses shut with their fingers.
Mama spoke through her pinched nose. What came out was a voice that was hard to take seriously. "Heinrich, who the hell is this?!"
"No one let him stay in their basements last time around so I thought we could help him."
Mama let out a sigh.
I then turned around to see more of the usual customers: the cabbage man, the Grinch, and the son who reeked shell shock.
Mama let out an even bigger sigh.
"I don't want to deal with this anymore, just get in."
But of course, this was Rosa Steiner, after all, my mama. She had to make a remark when The Grinch entered. "Bitch". The Grinch replied with the typical response that pertains to female genitalia.
When we all got down to the basement, I looked around to see about 15 people, including the 8 devils you all should now be somewhat familiar seemed to be a juxtaposition in the whole cast of characters. A juxtaposition in their ideologies as well.
The bomb threat was a spider. It gathered us all together on a cold, evil web that was a basement.
The shelter was filled with a shy cold but a tad more outgoing than when the war was first declared. The autumn months were in full swing, and winter looked around the corner timidly like a bullied child.
As everyone sat down in their spots, their eyes stayed glued on K the street-dweller. Maybe they thought that space was wasted on him and could have been used on someone who actually contributed to society.
The Grinch's eyes were trapped open, and her body slumped over. Next to her was the cabbage man without a complaint in his mouth for once. In the corner was a stranger whispering to herself and another stranger had children velcroed to their legs.
The Dassler siblings were huddled next to me. Viktor chirped with his typical idiotic grin as he sat down. "This is great, isn't it Heinrich?"
I spilled some sarcasm. "It's amazing. I wish we could do this every day."
My parents sat across from me on the side of the basement, and K sat near a pile of moldy wooden planks; one could debate that he was moldier than them. It was far from luxury, but then again, he was accustomed to those kinds of situations. I caught him staring at the ceiling—I guess he didn't see many of those often.
I returned to my conversation with Viktor. "I saw that headline earlier today. 10,000,000 signed roll. I wonder when they will actually be deployed."
Viktor: "It's been a little while since the declaration of war. They should be deployed in a few weeks."
"I don't think they'll try to draft us anymore. They seem to have enough people already."
"Enough for now maybe. They may take us later when those 10,000,000 applications become 10,000,000 deaths. I think a lot of them applied voluntarily as well."
I thought back to what Falco told me. Even if 25+-year-old adults would be drafted first, I thought I would still be chosen at some point. Possibly in the following year. It was basically delaying the inevitable.
When I mentioned this, an idea flickered in the back of my mind.
"Viktor, do you think we can become war medics?"
"You want to be a war medic?"
"Yeah, I'm sure they'll draft us anyway when we become 17. So, if we join now as medics maybe they won't make us fight on the battlefield."
Mama and papa snarled at me from across the room. I reflexively threw out: "I'm just joking."
I was only half-joking.
I didn't want to deal with touching guns again. At least if I became a war medic early on, I would be handling morphine and wraps rather than the compact mechanisms of destruction. The issue was I didn't know the process to become a medic.
Viktor gritted his teeth. "These war regulations confuse me so much, Heinrich. We are young enough that we can't get drafted. But old enough that we can still be useful. I don't know what we can or can't do...or even what they'll do with us."
Viktor was sure that we would get drafted a few weeks before then, but he seemed to be growing more and more unsure about it all.
When I looked up from my feet, I managed to catch the cabbage man eyeing me as a rotten vegetable again. His influence in my life was growing more and more irrelevant. Either way, I should have known better than to suggest ever wanting to do anything with a war in his presence.
I heard a growl.
Not from the cabbage man.
But from a specific cigarette wielder's stomach.
Lina: "Sorry about that. I barely had anything to eat this morning."
"That's because you barely cook anything," Viktor retorted.
"That's because you barely buy any vegetables."
"It's not my fault the market is out of everything. The government is rationing now!"
"Who told you that?"
"It was on today's paper wasn't it, Heinrich?"
In all this pathetic clamoring, I realized no one bothered to point out that I had brought a guitar. Were these people so stuck in their heads that they couldn't even see that?Even my parents?
Dick the cabbage man came into the squabbles, "Heinrich, how can you say you want to be a war medic after all the stuff I told you?!"
The Grinch turned off her grinch exterior and showed some genuine care towards me. "How dare you say that, Heinrich? Can't you see our son? Do you want to end up like him?"
Papa: "Don't talk to my son like that!"
I felt claustrophobic in the sense that all the characters from this journal were in one place at once. They had their own struggles, and they shoved their words in my face without my permission. It was noise-noise like feedback on a radio that couldn't catch a signal. So many small plot lines collided into a fire for a while, and I couldn't follow it all. I couldn't think about what place each devil had in my life then, good or bad. It was like a faulty chord with notes that didn't belong together.
Is this what hungry devils do all the time? I thought.
No. They do it when they're satiated as well.
I wondered whether those devils deserved to die, for they all sinned in their own unique ways and to different degrees. Their actions were unique fingerprints: Viktor's screwed-up ideas on pain and perversion in fighting, Lina's consistent need to fill the air with grey, the cabbage man's indecency, etc.
I didn't let those thoughts seduce me.
To disrupt the noise, I took up K's guitar—the sword to cut the tension.
K's eyes landed on me. He sat simply like he always used to do, and for a moment, I thought he was nodding in encouragement. But that must have been my imagination. He didn't come off as the type of man to display affection anyway.
I took the guitar and held onto it, embracing the untold stories in the wood and metal. Each dent or scratch had character. My turn was to make a "mark" on the instrument with my very own story attached.
I strummed an open chord without pressing any strings. Its sound was contained. The strings vibrated freely, yet some miscellaneous noises came over and muted it with its fingers despite this. A rather unfriendly pack of fingers.
I looked up from the instrument in hopes of seeing this journal's characters focused and curious on me. But I should have known better. These were the characters of Section F; they kept arguing among themselves. The strangers watched as victims of this verbal slaughter.
I strummed again, and there was still no reaction from the arguing devils.
"Dammit." I cursed under my breath and put the guitar aside. There was nothing to stop devils from being devils. I then looked at K. He sat in the corner all by himself, kept company only by the moldy wood. He watched me like the owl he was, but there were no answers to my predicament written on his gaze.
What was I supposed to do?
I picked up the guitar and tried strumming a more complicated chord, but the notes tripped over each other once again. My fingers weren't as calloused as they once used to be, so the discomfort of metal strings digging at my left hand's fingers exponentiated my frustration.
The heat of embarrassment pricked the hair on my scalp and soon plunged the nerves through the conflicted railroads of my body. The antagonist of my performance transformed from the rude audience into the very chemicals that took pleasure in being unpleasant passengers.
I looked up to see if anyone had noticed my failure in playing, but no, they were still arguing. I was, indeed, my worst critic.
"Screw it."
I took a deep breath. I realized that even if I couldn't lessen the stress the devils were feeling, I could at least alleviate the stress of having to be around them.
From the back closet of my mind, I unearthed an old song that my mama had taught me in the years prior. It's a soothing song with a healthy spoonful of calmness and a dash of sadness. I closed the closet and let muscle memory take over. All I needed was the vocal accompaniment.
I strummed the first chord. It was salty for the fingers tripped, but it grew sweeter as I kept strumming. I paid attention to the lackluster dancing of the lines of melodies in the dusk of my closed eyelids.
With each second that passed, the fingers grew in proficiency, and the lines of melodies grew mature and less stagnant. My strumming finger reignited the relationship it once had but with a wiser set of six strings.
My mind drifted away a few feet from the argument as my body stayed on the same patch of wooden planks. It grew encapsulated in the production of music as I escaped into the peaceful realm of melodies.
"Shhh." The realm I had entered was disturbed by one of the strangers, for they were trying to silence something. I thought it was me at first, but then I noticed the direction of the shushing. It was towards the argumentative devils—the hateful eight.
"I want to listen to the song." The stranger continued; the children by her legs were curious as well.
Music requires the ears and attention of others to be enjoyed. Arguing can make that quite tricky. I guess all it takes is one person to want to actually listen, and they can get everyone else to quiet down.
"Heinrich, where'd you get that guitar?" Mama finally asked.
I drifted out of my peaceful realm and back into the dank basement. My fingers kept at their duties, and the chorus came around. I expected papa to sing the vocal accompaniment of the song along with mama—it was one of her favorite songs. Instead, a certain cabbage man hummed along.
***AN IRONY***
The one who broke my guitar was the one enjoying me play one the most.
When a kid cried, he immediately shushed it and returned to his out-of-character humming.
Occasionally, I would look up and take a glimpse at the people's faces. I wasn't checking for devil horns and teeth but rather what expressions they were making. While Lina's expressionless face twinkled in the spotty, yellow ceiling light, mama's face melted into a smile with The Grinch lightly smirking with her cardboard lips.
As for K, he was still a skull with a beard as usual. But he must have been a happy skull even if he didn't show it.
Any moment, the ground could have shaken, but instead, we Eldians made music. We embraced the illusions of peace despite the beginnings of famine and economic turbulence.
Even when the siren turned off, and one of the strangers pointed it out, the cabbage man went "shhh" again, and mama even supported it with a "shut up."
XXX
A siren went off three days later. I went in with the expectation of a similar scenario. We all went downstairs in hopes of hearing the guitar again.
Everyone sat down in their usual places. Everyone but one of the guitar strings for when I went to strum it, it came off.
It must have lasted so long under K's care, for he used it so gently and respectfully before. And then there was me: I used it for one day, and I broke a part of it.