BJ fumbled, trying to find the lamp before his eyes adjusted and he saw Hawkeye with fatal clarity. Hawkeye intercepted his hand.
"What're you doing?" asked BJ shakily.
"You'll knock something over," said Hawkeye. "And if you want to break something, we should at least go over to Frank's side."
"No, I mean, what are we -- why are the lights out?"
"Potter said goodnight. I don't know about you, but I don't want him scolding me for leaving the light on." A smile softened his voice. "You don't like the dark?"
But it wasn't like that at all. He was under Hawkeye's arm, and it wasn't the childhood darkness it had once been, back when he sat in his bedroom, down the long hall where shadows stood and walked into the night, where he sometimes caught echoes of his parents' voices, distorted and distant. He could feel the blankets where he'd tangled himself into them; and then, later, he would be in the bedroom of their first apartment, Peg draped smoothly over him, his back wedged against the headboard, don't let go, for God's sake, don't let go. And now, when he knew he was slipping back, Korea and his two-month life eroding beneath him, he leaned harder into the circle of Hawkeye's arm and tried to stay there, in the comfortable dark, in Hawkeye's breath.
"It's not that," replied BJ. "It was just - unexpected."
"It threw you," said Hawkeye. "Wasn't that how you put it, earlier?"
"Most of Korea has thrown me, Hawk," said BJ carefully. "It's not that you -- or George -- did anything."
(Of course, life is full of things that take you by the throat; BJ knew, knew how people passed through your life like the flare of a candle, and that was why he had to be certain that Peg was right. Slowly, slowly, every movement precise, so that one night, in an abandoned lot where the forsythia teased up over the rotting wooden slats of the fence, he held her loosely in the hollow between his shoulders and showed her how to hit a line drive. She was still an odd mixture of curves and edges, unfamiliar, but he knew this scene, its unlit anonymity, and he had thought of what to do, and when Peg turned her head a little and kissed him, he kissed her back and thought, This is how it's done.
Funny thing, then: ten years later, in red light and drifting smoke, it was someone else's arm on his back when he leaned over and retched into the grass. And when that somehow not-strange voice told him, almost soundlessly, that it would be all right, he looked up and was burned clear through by the sun, by that face with its gray pain and sympathy and desperation, and it was as though he had all at once been emptied of all that had gone before.
And the bat connected -- straight out over left field.)
They were still touching on the bed, but Hawkeye let BJ's hand drop and sat silently. BJ, feeling the void open up beside him, knew Hawkeye had gone away - maybe into the creases George had left, where BJ could not go. Hawkeye and George had nothing to hold them in their skins; it was painless to step out of time, because who would notice? Daniel Pierce, knowing only the unbroken memory of Hawkeye, like the portrait of Maddoc and her ambiguous smile on the piano? A young, smooth-faced soldier, glancing back and noticing with vague interest the gap in the line behind him? Day by day, as Peg receded behind the high window where the glass blurred like steam, BJ found he could follow Hawkeye a little farther into the close darkness of that place.
"You asked me," said Hawkeye casually, after a long time. His voice was low and indistinct, phantasmal; like Mother and Father down the labyrinthine hall, a sound from another world.
"What?" BJ tried to look at him.
(George crouches under the hanging folds of a blanket canopy, flipping the deck with a smooth movement of his wrist. The bleeding illumination of the lantern: whose face will turn up?)
"You asked me," repeated Hawkeye.
"What?"
"You just said that George and I didn't do anything. But before, you asked if I'd ever - done something. What George did. Does."
(Past or present, does anyone know? Can the dateline do that, can it divide you up that neatly, Peg here on one side, and -- oh, God, only Hawkeye on the other, in that nebulous time between dark and dawn?)
"And you never answered," said BJ.
"No." Hawkeye laughed, a harsh, jangling noise, half in and half out of his body, as though he lingered on the threshold, waiting to see if it was worth coming back to. "Because you said you didn't think about it. And, you know, I wouldn't want to ask you to be impetuous or anything."
"You think about different things during the night," said BJ, and then he paused. "No, that's not what I mean. You admit to thinking about different things during the night."
"It's always night here, Beej," confided Hawkeye. "God, you never wake up." His tone was hypnotic, like Peg's bike wheel on the grass, the spokes flashing by. Here goes sobriety; here goes sanity; here goes--
"You still haven't answered, Hawk."
"When was the last time you answered a letter from Peg?"
"Monday," replied BJ guardedly. "What does that--"
"No, I mean really answered. When was the last time you wrote home and said, Hi, Peg, today I played shrapnel hide-and-seek in some eighteen-year-old boy's gut, today I found someone else's bone fragment driven into the leg of a soldier, today I stitched up a Korean kid who made the mistake of playing in what passes for her back yard, and then I came home and lost thirty bucks in a poker game and drank myself stupid and tormented Frank Burns with my depraved bunkmate?" BJ was silent. "Does anybody know about that, BJ? I mean, does anyone know who you are here? And I - " He reached out and grasped BJ's shoulder, hard, like an anchor to the last vestiges of himself. "Dammit, BJ, I have no one to answer to here, and I might not be able to--"
"She wouldn't understand," said BJ musingly. "I would tell her, but she wouldn't understand."
(She's back behind the glass, distorted beyond all recognition. If she looked through at him, would she even know this person who works BJ's mouth and moves with BJ's oblivious smoothness and loves something that should not be BJ's?)
Hawkeye held his shoulder, and BJ stayed quite still, even as it began to hurt. In time, Hawkeye was calm again and could remove his hand, shuddering slightly with the effort. Only a brief contact, really, but one that flooded BJ with strangeness. Strange, because it was strange, as Hawkeye was strange, like shifting shadow; and foreign, that blunt, clumsy word people used for Korea and all the places where they never expected to end up -- it was utterly alien, the way Hawkeye touched BJ, as no one had touched or would touch him again. And yet, underneath the unmapped territory of Hawkeye's skin, BJ found a pulse that was somehow familiar, and he knew what Hawkeye would say before he heard:
"I'm sorry. What you say to Peg is none of my business."
"It isn't," BJ agreed. "She has nothing to do with here. With us, here. But neither did my question, so...." He shrugged. "I'm sorry, too." A beat, and he made as if to rise, feeling for the light. "I'm just going to turn this on."
"No," said Hawkeye quietly, and BJ hesitated. "No," repeated Hawkeye more clearly. "Leave it off, wouldja, Beej? I'd rather not look at this place any more than I have to."
"But I can't see," BJ said, mock-plaintively.
"Isn't that the point?" asked Hawkeye, his voice, for a moment, nearly unrecognizable.
BJ trembled and stood, his hands at his side, his ears ringing with dead sound
(Echoes down the hall; echoes of Peg through the thin wall, singing "Hush, Little Baby" in the low tone she used in the dark -- and if that diamond ring don't shine brightly enough on Korean nights, well, we'll find something else; echoes in the gypsy's voice, except you can't call them echoes, can you, if they haven't yet been made into sound: you will meet a stranger you already know.)
"I can't get back to my bed without the lamp," BJ explained.
And Hawkeye, sifting coolly back into himself, full, open, said, "So stay here."
Maybe he should have been holding his breath, should have felt poised on the knife's edge between the bright, airy world of his San Francisco home and the endless, open pit of Korea. If he closed his eyes, BJ could imagine other men, faces of patients, of soldiers and young boys, peering over into that darkness-- the soil of this country was the blood of fighting men, American and Korean and Chinese and tribesmen way, far back past memory. Because as long as humans were alive, they fought, and as long as they fought, someone came, took the doctor's hand in theirs and begged them, begged them, to take the pain away.
"I don't even have a prescription for myself!" BJ thought with a sort of wild calmness, because that knife's edge just wasn't there. Far away, like a dream or a shadow thrown by the moon, he could see Peg's shadow, a gentle curtain over Erin's crib. That first day in Korea, with the rush from the propellers, the dull hum of the bar, and the casual insanity of a man who'd looked like his heart had just been broken-- well, BJ Hunnicutt, the decision has already been made.
(You knew it when he bought you a drink at Rosie's, when he ushered you into the tent like a bellhop gone mad. A touch to your hand, your hip, your shoulder, an anchor to the earth, because even Koreans believe you can lose your soul.)
"I'll stay," BJ said, turning the phrase over. So easy and so hard; a natural conclusion that cut and remade and adapted him to the sprawling monster of war; evolution. Hawkeye's touch was delicate against BJ's cheeks, finding the other man's mouth without sight. Long fingers, those, and talented-- a pianist of the human body, juggler of cards. And because he knew Hawkeye would not take this thing without permission, BJ craned his neck and brought their lips together, hands furrowing into silky black hair. Later, he would remember Hawkeye's voice next to his ear, soft, urgent, saying the craziest things
(Hawkeye always says the craziest things, talks the craziest shit-- the truth, plain, unapologetic, and the fact the army won't let us have that truth makes it beautiful and rare.
Crazy shit. Crazy.)
but for now the world was being stripped away, color by color and line by line, until BJ buried his face in Hawkeye's shoulder and Korea was a place he'd left behind.
He dreamed that a map of the world was burning, color-coded countries and borders all aflame. Time was too much for him-- he was breathless but he couldn't stop, and somewhere in the charred remains of that pale atlas, it was raining and the mud was as thick as the blood on soldiers' boots. Another breathing, war-torn country, somewhere, devouring lives and faces. BJ could see a nurse, harried and cloaked in the sky's salt water tears, moving from stretcher to stretcher. The carnage was the same awake as it was asleep-- that old terminal lead poisoning, or land mines, or a bayonet, nine thousand and fifty one ways to mutilate the human body; some new ones, too-- gas, flickering chemicals. Someone lifted a light, catching raindrops into gold; the nurse turned, soft brown hair plastered against her pale cheeks, eyes hard and panicked and hurting.
The nurse was Erin-- BJ knew that somehow, saw the lines of his baby girl in the woman clad by soaked army greens. The blood on her innocent hands was the same as the blood on his own; the blood of children, because no one would stop fighting long enough to look around.
Waking in Hawkeye's arms was strange. A surreal experience, made more so by the comfortable feeling of the body curled up against his. Raising his head, BJ felt the decadence of their carelessness-- it was late, and the Swamp was empty save the two of them, but possibility hung rancid in the air.
"I'm one of them," BJ startled himself by speaking, soft as it was. The enemy, hiding in Frank's bunk, one of those amongst the freckle-faced troops. In the dim light of the flood lamps, he saw the child Hawkeye eased into when he was asleep. The older man was clutching BJ's dog tags in one fine, expressive hand... brother, friend, lover, fellow "one of them," and a dozen other endearments there weren't words for yet. Carefully, BJ disentangled himself, feeling keenly each place where his own body touched Hawkeye's, a new awareness, an extension of self.
"Where you goin'?" the other doctor mumbled, half into BJ's hand and half into the pillow.
"To my own bed." BJ felt ridiculous pressing a kiss against Hawkeye's forehead, but the gesture could not be held back. "It's safer."
"Safer, more lonely, farther," Hawkeye grumbled. "More colder, too."
"Half asleep, you're a grammar teacher's nightmare, you know that?" BJ cracked quietly, his own dreams shifting beneath his skin.
(It's the truth, you know-- the bed is colder, and it's not even safer because you might roll over, might displace your soul, and who will hold onto you then? And if you wake up, with the image of your baby daughter's bloodstained face so vivid like a gunshot in your mind, well... who will be there? Will you tell me? Who?)
It was almost funny-- BJ almost started laughing-- but he hoped with a hope tinged green by jealous, red by anger and hue upon hue with sorrow and love and understanding, that Peg had someone to hold onto her, too.
(Everybody needs somebody.
Some body. My body, your body, the body is sacred.
Well, so is marriage, but, hell, war's been blow'n' the human husk into giblets for ages. Who's to say it hasn't been doing the same for that other, oh-so-sacred institution.
I do love you, Peg. And because I love you, I want you to be loved, and, God help me, I want to be loved too.)
In the quiet of the compound, Hawkeye's warmth was easily conjured, relaxing BJ into sleep. His last thought was of George, who would-- thanks to Frank-- probably soon be shipped like so much cured meat
(just another trigger finger, sir!)
back to the front lines. George, who marched amongst those all-American boys, defined by the masses because of who, and why, and how. The so-called enemy, flipping over tarot cards with all the languid carelessness of fate. Someone's brother, father, friend, or lover, following the foretold stranger out into the darkness that was Korea, that would be Vietnam, Iraq, Afghanistan....
Would be.
Come up closer to the fire, soldier, and have a drink.
We're all strangers, here.