Review, please, if you so wish to. This is my final chapter of this
story, and it has taken more than you can imagine out of me to write it,
seeing as how, though it may not be apparent, much of it is autobiographical
and has been written during a rough period for me. I hope you have
enjoyed it. Rest assured, my next story will be much lighter in tone
and subject matter, this story having exorcised many of my demons, in a sense. In any case, please review. I'd very much like to 'go out with
a bang', as they say. :)
Not mine.
Please enjoy.
Ta.
Moose
Closure, chapter 7
"Uh, surprise?"
"You know it's not. And you look like hell."
"Well I missed you too, Beej."
B.J. stares, his mind unable to comprehend what is standing plainly in front of him. The 'who' is simple: Benjamin Franklin Pierce-
'" What am I? I'm invincible, a crackerjack doctor, the miracle with ten fingers, a licensed skirt-lifter and bed-warmer, heartthrob extraordinaire, a dedicated pacifist..."
"I'm serious." There it was.
- but... but the human being leaning against the doorjamb is nothing short of a skeleton, brittle-boned, a manic mop of wildly unkempt gray hair visible from under the battered cowboy hat, waxy skin stretched over the malnourished knots of muscle in his arms and the protruding cavern of his chest, like over the hollow cavity of a drum... wasted and loose, as though it were merely a poorly fitted jacket thrown on in a hurry...pooling in the bends of his joints, throwing his obvious illness into sharp relief...what is this? A joke?"
(a living breathing mass of psychological double-talk that I sometimes wish I'd never met but ultimately can't imagine ever having been without...)
It has to be a joke, that the beggar with the demented silhouette is the same being as the prince of the long shadow that he remembers; draped over the still to give the utmost illusion of sheer, flippant, devil-may-care vitality (survival instinct) that he still dreams of in the most pleasant hours and chokes over in the most petrifying silences.
"I know you didn't get a letter, but rubbing your eyes into oblivion isn't going to make anything but dots appear, you know."
B.J. slowed his movements, head in hands, body quaking with every halting breath.
But there it is, he can see it now: life. Out of the sunken pits of Hawkeye's eyes flashes a spark of the old fire; a faint stirring of the past refusing to be smoldered, as though upon seeing B.J., in his Mill Valley, picket-fenced, daughter-and-wife-and-paying-job home, he suddenly recalls all the things in the world that still need to be laughed at.
B.J.'s stomach gave a sick lurch as the air suddenly froze.
In an instant B.J.'s eyes phase into focus and he trembles, a jolt of electric embarrassment shooting through his body as their eyes meet and B.J. is caught staring. Hawkeye watches him with a bitterly amused smirk which may be a grimace, hovering between brutal disappointment and impish insolence.
"You haven't been taking care of yourself."
"Well." Hawkeye sounds bored by the concern. Aren't you smart, he seems to mock.
"Hawk, you of all people..."
"Mmm?" he asks tightly with a dangerous tilt of his head.
"You, as a DOCTOR-"
"Christ, Beej... I'm only a doctor when I'm healing people... when I have the CAPACITY to heal. The rest of the time, I'm... well, CHRIST, LOOK at me!" he spits.
"Like what you see?" he asks, throwing his arms outwards and turning in a slow circle.
"Like what you see?" he asks, tugging hard at his shirt.
"Like what you see?" he asks, rubbing violently at his head, hair coming out in clumps between his fingers, eyes blazing with anger or tears.
"Like what you see?" he asks, wishing he could wonder about his friend's cold and frightened silence, but he can't because he knows only too well the reason for it. He feels it every day.
"Hawk... Hawkeye... stop!" and B.J. grabs Hawkeye's arms, the feeble limbs putting up little protest. He stares into the blindingly blue child-eyes of the fighting man he remembers and chokes. "Hawkeye, good god, I missed you." And Hawkeye is surrounded by the dizzying warmth of B.J.-
the spastic fluttering of his heart against his chest, swaying back and forth, standing, until Hawkeye's arms jerkily wound around B.J. and held him tightly, returning the embrace, fisting in his clothing
- and one of them, either of them, perhaps the both of them, takes the one step to close that slight distance between them where the warmth resonates, pulling the lengths of their bodies together, shoulder to shoulder, chest to chest, hip pressed tightly to hip, and they can feel the embrace shift a gear into intense intimacy. A knot twists in B.J.'s stomach and his breath burns in his lungs. Either of them, perhaps the both of them, or perhaps solely Hawkeye, pulls away, perhaps with slightly more speed and force than necessary. B.J.'s knot twists tighter. He puts an arm around Hawkeye's shoulders and leads him inside, shutting the door behind them.
....................
"Time."
Hawkeye slouches, glass of water in his hand, swirling it about, seemingly hypnotized by the tornado he has created. B.J. watches and thinks how strange it is, having this aged man sitting across from him and knowing that it is this aged man whom he loves, and knowing that he himself is an aged man, though neither of them are old... but they are aged, the both of them. And war-aged Hawkeye, in his rickety, delicate frame of bones and flesh that his spirit has yet to transcend, has just looked away from the fractured lights spinning in the turbulent waters of his glass and said the word 'time'.
"What?" asks B.J., eyes tearing away from his friend's army-booted feet, wondering as to the relevance of 'time' as well as why he didn't ask Hawkeye to take off his boots at the door.
"Time..." Hawkeye seems to be chewing the word around in his mouth, unable to discern whether it is salty or sour, discounting sweet without a moment's thought.
"Yes?"
"Time... it doesn't heal a broken heart... it just scabs it over."
"And why is this heart broken?" B.J. is puppeteered into asking, and thinks he should know the answer to his own question, but he refuses to acknowledge any possibilities of...
"Beats the crap outta me, Beej," and he downed his water in a gulp, his joints cracking.
"Don't do this now..."
"Well, come on! If ignorance is no excuse, what good is it?"
"Then where did you ever deem yourself worthy enough to mock them all, the generals, Frank, the... the..." At a loss for words, B.J. is close to jumping out of his chair and throttling him. Love will do that to a person.
"Look, I've given up. Who cares about any of that. At least," he sets down his glass with heavy finality and looks away, a habit he has when he is in the wrong, "at least, after one more year, we probably won't ever see each other again and all will be forgotten... what's more," he continues, picking up steam, "I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the sort of person I preach to." He sets his jaw, eyes gazing bitterly at the Hunnicutt family portrait wall.
Wedding, baby, one-year old, two-year old, frightened grin at the airport before, haggard smile at the airport three years later, three-year old, four-year old, the happy couple...
"... at least, after one more year, we probably won't ever see each other again and all will be forgotten..."
"Now that's just selfish." But at least it is Hawkeye, thinks B.J.
Hawkeye exhales loudly, a wheezing sigh. "Wow, this is even more fun that premeditated hit and run with locomotives."
"No kidding. Someday we're going to look back on this and plow into a parked car." B.J.'s joke, like all of the others that have been regurgitated over the years, falls flat in the stifling silence of the room.
The clock ticks, the noise reverberating in the silence.
B.J. cannot help but think that if this were another time and place, they would have laughed, and Hawkeye, instead of gritting his teeth at an invisible pain, would have been rhythmically throwing cards into a bedpan in an attempt to dull the tangible pain flown in chopper after chopper after chopper after chopper after...
And if this were another time and place, B.J. would have made a pun and poured them both a drink, and they would wince as it burned all the way down, and they would snicker at each other's respective grimaces, and maybe fill Frank's slippers with yet another condiment or plot to antagonize Charles and then steel themselves for some good-natured suffering when Charles would get them back in his usual high-handed manner or-
"-ish?"
B.J. shook his head, and Hawkeye repeats, "Do you really think I'm selfish?"
"Yes," replies B.J., as though he has been waiting for that exact moment, that exact question, for all those years.
"Yes," replies B.J., "but you call it love."
"Um," says Hawkeye, "oh." And his child-eyes cloud over with confusion, but B.J. says no more, for he knows that Ignorance is no excuse.
The clock ticks on.
A muffled sliding and shifting drifts through the floorboards.
"She's waking up."
"I can leave, if you don't want her to know about me."
B.J. smiles, unable to meet Hawkeye's gaze, unsure of whether or not he's blushing, and wondering whether or not he really wants his daughter to see... this.
"My little girl. She's five now, you know."
"I know."
There was an awkward pause, a silence that threatened to strangle them both, already stealing their words away.
"She knows you, Hawk," B.J. looks at his babygirl's portrait on the wall, " You're her knight in shining armor." He unconsciously twists his wedding band.
"Well, I always DID have a way with the ladies." Neither of them seem to be hearing the other, their words swallowed by the shadows of things unsaid.
"She loves you. I think she dreams of you sweeping her off her feet. She asks about you every night, Hawk." And B.J. wonders whether he is still talking about his little girl. "What am I supposed to tell her now? That her hero is killing himself? Huh?"
"Does it matter? She's young. I'm only a story to her. She will live."
"But you wont." Hovering between fact and uncertainty.
"You have other friends. And your daughter will have other loves, real ones, not liars."
He stands.
"Where's the kitchen?"
"You can have mine."
Hawkeye pops the pill, swallowing the last of B.J.'s water before passing the glass back.
"That one's for you, Beej, since you love me ever so damned much."
B.J. jerks, glass slipping from his fingertips and crashing to the carpet. It refuses to shatter, the crack now running along the side barely noticeable.
Hawkeye laughs and B.J. shivers.
"Beej," coughs Hawkeye, choking on his own breath.
B.J. wants to run, but he stays. The moment will pass, nothing is different, the moment will pass, nothing is different...
"Hey, I mean, what's the point? Why stay? I just don't understand why you want to talk to me... to what end? I'm going to DIE, Beej. I'm ALREADY dead... why waste your time? It just seems to futile, so frustrating, dammit!"
B.J. grits his teeth, his untraceable anger returning to him.
"It is so inCREdibly frustrating, " voice unerringly level in a classic show of passive aggressive furious neutrality, "but not because of what you say, whatever the hell that means, but because of me, of how I see you... what happened to you... to me..."
"Will I ever understand what that means?"
"I don't know... I don't know if I WANT you to know."
"Try now. Dammit Beej, I think I have a RIGHT to know. How do you see things?"
"No."
"Listen, Hunnicutt-"
B.J. lets out a bark of angry laughter.
"Listen, B.J., how do you see things?" Hawkeye jumps to his feet, only for his legs to give out under him. Springing to his aid, B.J. puts a hand under each armpit and hoists his friend to his feet again, with a whisper:
"Goddamnit Hawk, I fucking love you is how I see things."
A beat.
A breath.
"Fuck you, " he states.
"Fuck you, B.J.," he wheezes.
"What?"
"Fuck you!" he spits.
"Hawk, Erin's awake..."
"Listen, Hunnicutt, don't play family man with me now... you have... no right."
He begins to pace.
"NO right... all these years... and now you want... you want me to... to... after these years and I thought I was the liar." He turns to B.J.
"How DARE you. How. Dare. You. Why not? Why not then? Why couldn't you have come to me before, when I was NEW, why now, when I am THIS? B.J., I don't want to cry... don't make me cry... don't... don't you touch me!"
"I didn't think it could be. Hawk, I'm a slow learner. I didn't think that this could be... that I could be..."
Hawkeye isn't listening.
"Don't you move me to pity... don't make me cry for you. I won't give you the satisfaction."
"So you'll die instead?"
B.J. sighs.
"God, I'm so sorry, Hawkeye. Accept my apologies. Or don't. But... I do. I do love you."
Hawkeye, leaning on the wall, shoots him a glare, venomous tears pooling in the corners of his eyes, chest heaving.
"We can't." Like a child.
"No... no?"
"No. I won't."
"But if we did..."
"Which we won't, dammit."
"... of course, which we won't.... but if we did, would you be able to live with your conscience, Hawk?"
Hawkeye, still leaning, cracks a tight, tired smile, tracing the frame of a family photo with his finger. Turning to B.J. still grinning softly to himself, Hawkeye speaks.
"I live alone. It's you, " he continues with a broad sweep of his arm towards the portrait wall, "who lives with his conscience."
B.J. recoils as though hit, Hawkeye's verbal slap snapping him back to reality like a bucket of cold water in the face. The facts of the situation sting. He, a married man with a child, loves a man like he loved his wife... or loved a man like he loves his wife... or B.J. prefers not to dwell on the details. And this man, this man-child, this stubborn, opinionated, brilliant, blind, beautiful lost man, he has sequestered himself in a world in which he needs nobody, wants nobody; no friends to share his secrets with, no family to share the burden with- for he believes himself old enough to handle himself, though he ought to have learned from the war that age has no bearing in the grand scheme of things- no lover to bring to his special place, the place where he buries his thoughts...
But then, why should he love? Where is the trust? When the book tells him that he is alive while the mirror plainly shows a corpse, why should he trust the book (post traumatic stress... depression... loneliness...) and its jargonistic babble? What does a live author know about writing a book to a dead man? And why should a dead man,, especially the dead man called Hawkeye Pierce, listen to the other book that says that if a man lies with another man as he does with a woman he is a sinner... the same book that glorifies love?
Why love? Why follow the trend of infatuation and feelings and heartbreak when you were born to be a rule-breaker?
There is a mystery about love, something even I can't try to doll up into a wholesome pretty picture, mostly because love is the ugliest thing I know of. It is incomprehensible, illogical, selfish, senseless, a royal pain in the caboose, and unspeakably hideous. Or terrifying. No one can explain it, why two people who are so different, as people are, can reach a level of psychological FULLNESS and completion so as to want to spend the rest of their lives together. No, no wait, love is beautiful, but people who say they are in love are wicked. Not bible wicked, but selfish, senseless idiots. Two people in love with each other shouldn't have to speak or have sex or touch, but just BE. Sure, sex is intoxicating and gives you a high that makes you feel on top of the world, even if that world is a stinking wet hole in South Korea, but you and I both know, as doctors, that it's just chemicals, a physical reaction to a physical action... what am I getting at?
I will never love anyone who has had sex with me.
No, no, that's not it; true, but not it. This is it (in more than one way, huh?):
Just as you can't verbalize a goodbye, I'll never be able to say I love you, B.J.
And now I'm running. Read that.
"Hawk, I'm sorry about all that before..."
"It's fine, Beej," he says, lowering himself painfully into his chair, spreading his limbs in a weary sprawl, "desperate times call for desperate shots."
"Still..."
Hawkeye prompts him with a raised eyebrow.
"Still, I... I'd like to kiss you, Hawk."
"Yes. I know."
B.J. can hear the unspoken 'me too'.
"But...?"
"But don't. You know it's not what you need, and don't laugh at the hypocrite."
B.J. smiles at that.
"Sorry Hawk, it's just, then you might have a legitimate reason to hate me, which would make things that much easier." He rubs a hand tiredly over his stubble. He doesn't shave as religiously as Peg remembered, and he makes sure to keep it that way.
"I don't think I want to hate you, Beej."
"I think I want you to hate me which is selfish and cruel on MY part."
"Why, though?" His eyes are wide and worried and afraid.
"Because it might make it that much easier for me to try not to love you, you simp." But B.J. knows that it wouldn't solve a thing... not a damned thing.
"But I won't hate you... especially not if you want me to. I'm too much of a stubborn little kid for that." And the glint in his eye says that he knows that B.J. knows... that B.J. knows more than Hawkeye knows, and Hawkeye thinks that if he himself can die without knowledge of his own shortcomings, he will not die an unhappy man. And he also knows that B.J. knows better than that. Which B.J. knows.
"I love you, Hawkeye," says B.J.
Hawkeye meets B.J.'s eyes with a wry grin.
And B.J. knows Hawkeye loves him too, and for B.J., that is enough.
....................
"Will you be in town much longer?" B.J. asks, eyes staring past Hawkeye, who is leaning in the doorway, hat in hand, to the sidewalks, where the lamps cast their thin shadows in the subdued evening sun and the children are running inside to wash up for dinner.
"I can't make any promises, Beej, you know that." I can't make any promises, for death waits for no man, especially not for doctors.
"I know that." B.J. is sick of knowing.
"Oh, c'mere." They hug, B.J. breathing in great gulps of Hawkeye's scent, trying to memorize it, to box it up and keep it to himself for a time when there will no longer be the driving hope of 'maybe I'll see him again'. Hawkeye smells like medicine, the sickly, powdery smell of disinfectant and hospital, and B.J. nearly gags at it (the odor or the irony?), but he cherishes it all the same, his poison and his antidote.
And tears paint their way down B.J.'s face, and he presses their cheeks together so that Hawkeye can share B.J.'s tears without crying himself.
Their chests rub against each other with their unsynchronized breathing, and they touch each other's faces, and Hawkeye kisses B.J.'s cheek, the both of them coming to rest their heads on each other's shoulders.
They breathe together.
"Daddy?"
And they spring apart, and Erin, barefoot in pink corduroy, watches her father with curious eyes, blue eyes, piercing and childlike, and B.J.'s breath catches in his throat.
Hawkeye is watching him out of his daughter's eyes, his babygirl's blue eyes, his Hawkeye's blue eyes gazing at him out of her curl-framed face.
And Erin turns her head to stare at the strange man who had been touching her father like mommy does -like daddy touches Erin herself- who had been hugging him. And although she has never seen a photo, she knows. She knows this man; she would know him if she saw him anywhere, no matter how old. She has been waiting for him for years now.
She races over and throws her arms around his legs.
And as she clings to him, she says one word: "Goodbye."
And Hawkeye steps out of her embrace, and, placing his worn cowboy hat, still reeking faintly of gin, on his head, he tugs it respectfully, bowing his head.
"Goodbye, Hawk," says B.J.
Hawkeye smiles, and, limping ever so slightly, his knees bothering him, he picks his way over the toys and shoes and umbrellas strewn about in the doorway, and steps out into the dusky evening. They follow him outside and Hawkeye slowly descends the stairs. B.J and Erin stand at the iron railing as they watch him go down.
A sudden gust of wind blows his old hat off his head, but he keeps on walking, tugging his thin jacket tightly around his figure. A tremor runs down B.J.'s spine, and he thinks, There goes loneliness applauding itself all the way down the street.
Erin tugs at his pant leg, and he tears himself away from Hawkeye to look down into those deep blue eyes.
"That him?"
"That's him, sweetie." And B.J. smiles wistfully, his tears cooling in the late-summer breeze.
"He ain't much, ain't he, Daddy?"
B.J. chuckles quietly, turning his eyes back to the retreating figure with the spidery shadow.
"Oh, I'm not so sure," says B.J.
And, as if on cue, Hawkeye pauses under a street light, as though illuminated by a spotlight that nobody but him can see, and springs high into the air, ignoring the pain, and clicks his heels, the waning sunlight surrounding his silhouette like a wreath of fire.
He steps carefully around a dented garbage can and some gardening tools, and crosses the street, stopping once again in the warmth of the setting sun, his shoes sounding against the concrete as he jumps and clicks his heels a second time. No regrets.
Erin hugs B.J.'s legs as she did His, and he bends to pick her up, the sun turning her hair golden, and she traces the tear tracks on her father's cheeks, her hand warm and alive, and B.J. thinks to himself: may this love extend itself forever.
At the end of the street, Hawkeye clicks his heels one more time, and is gone.
....................
"Suture. Come on, nurse, suture!"
"Easy Frank... don't take him seriously, nurses, -ah! Put some pressure on that bleeder there, will you!?- he's always like this the night of the full moon."
"That was last night, Hawk," B.J. set up the proverbial board.
"Oh yeah, well then, I guess this must be the final result. Congratulations, Frank, you're an animal. Hey, Colonel, can we shoot him and put him out of our misery? We promise we'll be humane about it." Didn't even pause for a second to look up from his work, keeping his eyes trained on the open wound in front of him.
"Pierce! Colonel, did you hea-"
"MORE CHOPPERS!" The phrase to silence all.
"They can't do this to us. It's been thirty-one hours!"
"They can, Pierce, they will, and it may be thirty-one hours more, so button up and buckle down." Nobody ever looked up from their work, perhaps to blind themselves to the number of wounded still left to be treated, perhaps to blind themselves to the reality of their situation.
A crash of shattering glass.
"Damn it, Beej, this is going even worse that I dreaded."
"You should have dreaded more."
"Mmhm... nurse, a new mask? I may have his guts in my boots but unless we want my upchuck in his innards, I suggest getting his blood out of my mouth. And can somebody close for me? Bigolow, can you close for me? Kellye? Margaret? Come on, somebody close for me!" Hawkeye scanned the room, wide-eyed, for somebody, anybody, to save him time and save another a life and save him the pain of realizing where he was and what he was forced to be doing. " Can anybody give me some damned closure here?"
"Ah, but can you ever really have closure for something that will never end?" asked B.J., with a distracted glance towards the anesthesiologist.
Hawkeye didn't answer, grabbing a cloth instead and wiping the blood off his face where it had seeped through the mask.
"Next... come on, move it!"
And, shaking his head, he gingerly snapped on a new pair of gloves.
Fin
Not mine.
Please enjoy.
Ta.
Moose
Closure, chapter 7
"Uh, surprise?"
"You know it's not. And you look like hell."
"Well I missed you too, Beej."
B.J. stares, his mind unable to comprehend what is standing plainly in front of him. The 'who' is simple: Benjamin Franklin Pierce-
'" What am I? I'm invincible, a crackerjack doctor, the miracle with ten fingers, a licensed skirt-lifter and bed-warmer, heartthrob extraordinaire, a dedicated pacifist..."
"I'm serious." There it was.
- but... but the human being leaning against the doorjamb is nothing short of a skeleton, brittle-boned, a manic mop of wildly unkempt gray hair visible from under the battered cowboy hat, waxy skin stretched over the malnourished knots of muscle in his arms and the protruding cavern of his chest, like over the hollow cavity of a drum... wasted and loose, as though it were merely a poorly fitted jacket thrown on in a hurry...pooling in the bends of his joints, throwing his obvious illness into sharp relief...what is this? A joke?"
(a living breathing mass of psychological double-talk that I sometimes wish I'd never met but ultimately can't imagine ever having been without...)
It has to be a joke, that the beggar with the demented silhouette is the same being as the prince of the long shadow that he remembers; draped over the still to give the utmost illusion of sheer, flippant, devil-may-care vitality (survival instinct) that he still dreams of in the most pleasant hours and chokes over in the most petrifying silences.
"I know you didn't get a letter, but rubbing your eyes into oblivion isn't going to make anything but dots appear, you know."
B.J. slowed his movements, head in hands, body quaking with every halting breath.
But there it is, he can see it now: life. Out of the sunken pits of Hawkeye's eyes flashes a spark of the old fire; a faint stirring of the past refusing to be smoldered, as though upon seeing B.J., in his Mill Valley, picket-fenced, daughter-and-wife-and-paying-job home, he suddenly recalls all the things in the world that still need to be laughed at.
B.J.'s stomach gave a sick lurch as the air suddenly froze.
In an instant B.J.'s eyes phase into focus and he trembles, a jolt of electric embarrassment shooting through his body as their eyes meet and B.J. is caught staring. Hawkeye watches him with a bitterly amused smirk which may be a grimace, hovering between brutal disappointment and impish insolence.
"You haven't been taking care of yourself."
"Well." Hawkeye sounds bored by the concern. Aren't you smart, he seems to mock.
"Hawk, you of all people..."
"Mmm?" he asks tightly with a dangerous tilt of his head.
"You, as a DOCTOR-"
"Christ, Beej... I'm only a doctor when I'm healing people... when I have the CAPACITY to heal. The rest of the time, I'm... well, CHRIST, LOOK at me!" he spits.
"Like what you see?" he asks, throwing his arms outwards and turning in a slow circle.
"Like what you see?" he asks, tugging hard at his shirt.
"Like what you see?" he asks, rubbing violently at his head, hair coming out in clumps between his fingers, eyes blazing with anger or tears.
"Like what you see?" he asks, wishing he could wonder about his friend's cold and frightened silence, but he can't because he knows only too well the reason for it. He feels it every day.
"Hawk... Hawkeye... stop!" and B.J. grabs Hawkeye's arms, the feeble limbs putting up little protest. He stares into the blindingly blue child-eyes of the fighting man he remembers and chokes. "Hawkeye, good god, I missed you." And Hawkeye is surrounded by the dizzying warmth of B.J.-
the spastic fluttering of his heart against his chest, swaying back and forth, standing, until Hawkeye's arms jerkily wound around B.J. and held him tightly, returning the embrace, fisting in his clothing
- and one of them, either of them, perhaps the both of them, takes the one step to close that slight distance between them where the warmth resonates, pulling the lengths of their bodies together, shoulder to shoulder, chest to chest, hip pressed tightly to hip, and they can feel the embrace shift a gear into intense intimacy. A knot twists in B.J.'s stomach and his breath burns in his lungs. Either of them, perhaps the both of them, or perhaps solely Hawkeye, pulls away, perhaps with slightly more speed and force than necessary. B.J.'s knot twists tighter. He puts an arm around Hawkeye's shoulders and leads him inside, shutting the door behind them.
....................
"Time."
Hawkeye slouches, glass of water in his hand, swirling it about, seemingly hypnotized by the tornado he has created. B.J. watches and thinks how strange it is, having this aged man sitting across from him and knowing that it is this aged man whom he loves, and knowing that he himself is an aged man, though neither of them are old... but they are aged, the both of them. And war-aged Hawkeye, in his rickety, delicate frame of bones and flesh that his spirit has yet to transcend, has just looked away from the fractured lights spinning in the turbulent waters of his glass and said the word 'time'.
"What?" asks B.J., eyes tearing away from his friend's army-booted feet, wondering as to the relevance of 'time' as well as why he didn't ask Hawkeye to take off his boots at the door.
"Time..." Hawkeye seems to be chewing the word around in his mouth, unable to discern whether it is salty or sour, discounting sweet without a moment's thought.
"Yes?"
"Time... it doesn't heal a broken heart... it just scabs it over."
"And why is this heart broken?" B.J. is puppeteered into asking, and thinks he should know the answer to his own question, but he refuses to acknowledge any possibilities of...
"Beats the crap outta me, Beej," and he downed his water in a gulp, his joints cracking.
"Don't do this now..."
"Well, come on! If ignorance is no excuse, what good is it?"
"Then where did you ever deem yourself worthy enough to mock them all, the generals, Frank, the... the..." At a loss for words, B.J. is close to jumping out of his chair and throttling him. Love will do that to a person.
"Look, I've given up. Who cares about any of that. At least," he sets down his glass with heavy finality and looks away, a habit he has when he is in the wrong, "at least, after one more year, we probably won't ever see each other again and all will be forgotten... what's more," he continues, picking up steam, "I don't practice what I preach because I'm not the sort of person I preach to." He sets his jaw, eyes gazing bitterly at the Hunnicutt family portrait wall.
Wedding, baby, one-year old, two-year old, frightened grin at the airport before, haggard smile at the airport three years later, three-year old, four-year old, the happy couple...
"... at least, after one more year, we probably won't ever see each other again and all will be forgotten..."
"Now that's just selfish." But at least it is Hawkeye, thinks B.J.
Hawkeye exhales loudly, a wheezing sigh. "Wow, this is even more fun that premeditated hit and run with locomotives."
"No kidding. Someday we're going to look back on this and plow into a parked car." B.J.'s joke, like all of the others that have been regurgitated over the years, falls flat in the stifling silence of the room.
The clock ticks, the noise reverberating in the silence.
B.J. cannot help but think that if this were another time and place, they would have laughed, and Hawkeye, instead of gritting his teeth at an invisible pain, would have been rhythmically throwing cards into a bedpan in an attempt to dull the tangible pain flown in chopper after chopper after chopper after chopper after...
And if this were another time and place, B.J. would have made a pun and poured them both a drink, and they would wince as it burned all the way down, and they would snicker at each other's respective grimaces, and maybe fill Frank's slippers with yet another condiment or plot to antagonize Charles and then steel themselves for some good-natured suffering when Charles would get them back in his usual high-handed manner or-
"-ish?"
B.J. shook his head, and Hawkeye repeats, "Do you really think I'm selfish?"
"Yes," replies B.J., as though he has been waiting for that exact moment, that exact question, for all those years.
"Yes," replies B.J., "but you call it love."
"Um," says Hawkeye, "oh." And his child-eyes cloud over with confusion, but B.J. says no more, for he knows that Ignorance is no excuse.
The clock ticks on.
A muffled sliding and shifting drifts through the floorboards.
"She's waking up."
"I can leave, if you don't want her to know about me."
B.J. smiles, unable to meet Hawkeye's gaze, unsure of whether or not he's blushing, and wondering whether or not he really wants his daughter to see... this.
"My little girl. She's five now, you know."
"I know."
There was an awkward pause, a silence that threatened to strangle them both, already stealing their words away.
"She knows you, Hawk," B.J. looks at his babygirl's portrait on the wall, " You're her knight in shining armor." He unconsciously twists his wedding band.
"Well, I always DID have a way with the ladies." Neither of them seem to be hearing the other, their words swallowed by the shadows of things unsaid.
"She loves you. I think she dreams of you sweeping her off her feet. She asks about you every night, Hawk." And B.J. wonders whether he is still talking about his little girl. "What am I supposed to tell her now? That her hero is killing himself? Huh?"
"Does it matter? She's young. I'm only a story to her. She will live."
"But you wont." Hovering between fact and uncertainty.
"You have other friends. And your daughter will have other loves, real ones, not liars."
He stands.
"Where's the kitchen?"
"You can have mine."
Hawkeye pops the pill, swallowing the last of B.J.'s water before passing the glass back.
"That one's for you, Beej, since you love me ever so damned much."
B.J. jerks, glass slipping from his fingertips and crashing to the carpet. It refuses to shatter, the crack now running along the side barely noticeable.
Hawkeye laughs and B.J. shivers.
"Beej," coughs Hawkeye, choking on his own breath.
B.J. wants to run, but he stays. The moment will pass, nothing is different, the moment will pass, nothing is different...
"Hey, I mean, what's the point? Why stay? I just don't understand why you want to talk to me... to what end? I'm going to DIE, Beej. I'm ALREADY dead... why waste your time? It just seems to futile, so frustrating, dammit!"
B.J. grits his teeth, his untraceable anger returning to him.
"It is so inCREdibly frustrating, " voice unerringly level in a classic show of passive aggressive furious neutrality, "but not because of what you say, whatever the hell that means, but because of me, of how I see you... what happened to you... to me..."
"Will I ever understand what that means?"
"I don't know... I don't know if I WANT you to know."
"Try now. Dammit Beej, I think I have a RIGHT to know. How do you see things?"
"No."
"Listen, Hunnicutt-"
B.J. lets out a bark of angry laughter.
"Listen, B.J., how do you see things?" Hawkeye jumps to his feet, only for his legs to give out under him. Springing to his aid, B.J. puts a hand under each armpit and hoists his friend to his feet again, with a whisper:
"Goddamnit Hawk, I fucking love you is how I see things."
A beat.
A breath.
"Fuck you, " he states.
"Fuck you, B.J.," he wheezes.
"What?"
"Fuck you!" he spits.
"Hawk, Erin's awake..."
"Listen, Hunnicutt, don't play family man with me now... you have... no right."
He begins to pace.
"NO right... all these years... and now you want... you want me to... to... after these years and I thought I was the liar." He turns to B.J.
"How DARE you. How. Dare. You. Why not? Why not then? Why couldn't you have come to me before, when I was NEW, why now, when I am THIS? B.J., I don't want to cry... don't make me cry... don't... don't you touch me!"
"I didn't think it could be. Hawk, I'm a slow learner. I didn't think that this could be... that I could be..."
Hawkeye isn't listening.
"Don't you move me to pity... don't make me cry for you. I won't give you the satisfaction."
"So you'll die instead?"
B.J. sighs.
"God, I'm so sorry, Hawkeye. Accept my apologies. Or don't. But... I do. I do love you."
Hawkeye, leaning on the wall, shoots him a glare, venomous tears pooling in the corners of his eyes, chest heaving.
"We can't." Like a child.
"No... no?"
"No. I won't."
"But if we did..."
"Which we won't, dammit."
"... of course, which we won't.... but if we did, would you be able to live with your conscience, Hawk?"
Hawkeye, still leaning, cracks a tight, tired smile, tracing the frame of a family photo with his finger. Turning to B.J. still grinning softly to himself, Hawkeye speaks.
"I live alone. It's you, " he continues with a broad sweep of his arm towards the portrait wall, "who lives with his conscience."
B.J. recoils as though hit, Hawkeye's verbal slap snapping him back to reality like a bucket of cold water in the face. The facts of the situation sting. He, a married man with a child, loves a man like he loved his wife... or loved a man like he loves his wife... or B.J. prefers not to dwell on the details. And this man, this man-child, this stubborn, opinionated, brilliant, blind, beautiful lost man, he has sequestered himself in a world in which he needs nobody, wants nobody; no friends to share his secrets with, no family to share the burden with- for he believes himself old enough to handle himself, though he ought to have learned from the war that age has no bearing in the grand scheme of things- no lover to bring to his special place, the place where he buries his thoughts...
But then, why should he love? Where is the trust? When the book tells him that he is alive while the mirror plainly shows a corpse, why should he trust the book (post traumatic stress... depression... loneliness...) and its jargonistic babble? What does a live author know about writing a book to a dead man? And why should a dead man,, especially the dead man called Hawkeye Pierce, listen to the other book that says that if a man lies with another man as he does with a woman he is a sinner... the same book that glorifies love?
Why love? Why follow the trend of infatuation and feelings and heartbreak when you were born to be a rule-breaker?
There is a mystery about love, something even I can't try to doll up into a wholesome pretty picture, mostly because love is the ugliest thing I know of. It is incomprehensible, illogical, selfish, senseless, a royal pain in the caboose, and unspeakably hideous. Or terrifying. No one can explain it, why two people who are so different, as people are, can reach a level of psychological FULLNESS and completion so as to want to spend the rest of their lives together. No, no wait, love is beautiful, but people who say they are in love are wicked. Not bible wicked, but selfish, senseless idiots. Two people in love with each other shouldn't have to speak or have sex or touch, but just BE. Sure, sex is intoxicating and gives you a high that makes you feel on top of the world, even if that world is a stinking wet hole in South Korea, but you and I both know, as doctors, that it's just chemicals, a physical reaction to a physical action... what am I getting at?
I will never love anyone who has had sex with me.
No, no, that's not it; true, but not it. This is it (in more than one way, huh?):
Just as you can't verbalize a goodbye, I'll never be able to say I love you, B.J.
And now I'm running. Read that.
"Hawk, I'm sorry about all that before..."
"It's fine, Beej," he says, lowering himself painfully into his chair, spreading his limbs in a weary sprawl, "desperate times call for desperate shots."
"Still..."
Hawkeye prompts him with a raised eyebrow.
"Still, I... I'd like to kiss you, Hawk."
"Yes. I know."
B.J. can hear the unspoken 'me too'.
"But...?"
"But don't. You know it's not what you need, and don't laugh at the hypocrite."
B.J. smiles at that.
"Sorry Hawk, it's just, then you might have a legitimate reason to hate me, which would make things that much easier." He rubs a hand tiredly over his stubble. He doesn't shave as religiously as Peg remembered, and he makes sure to keep it that way.
"I don't think I want to hate you, Beej."
"I think I want you to hate me which is selfish and cruel on MY part."
"Why, though?" His eyes are wide and worried and afraid.
"Because it might make it that much easier for me to try not to love you, you simp." But B.J. knows that it wouldn't solve a thing... not a damned thing.
"But I won't hate you... especially not if you want me to. I'm too much of a stubborn little kid for that." And the glint in his eye says that he knows that B.J. knows... that B.J. knows more than Hawkeye knows, and Hawkeye thinks that if he himself can die without knowledge of his own shortcomings, he will not die an unhappy man. And he also knows that B.J. knows better than that. Which B.J. knows.
"I love you, Hawkeye," says B.J.
Hawkeye meets B.J.'s eyes with a wry grin.
And B.J. knows Hawkeye loves him too, and for B.J., that is enough.
....................
"Will you be in town much longer?" B.J. asks, eyes staring past Hawkeye, who is leaning in the doorway, hat in hand, to the sidewalks, where the lamps cast their thin shadows in the subdued evening sun and the children are running inside to wash up for dinner.
"I can't make any promises, Beej, you know that." I can't make any promises, for death waits for no man, especially not for doctors.
"I know that." B.J. is sick of knowing.
"Oh, c'mere." They hug, B.J. breathing in great gulps of Hawkeye's scent, trying to memorize it, to box it up and keep it to himself for a time when there will no longer be the driving hope of 'maybe I'll see him again'. Hawkeye smells like medicine, the sickly, powdery smell of disinfectant and hospital, and B.J. nearly gags at it (the odor or the irony?), but he cherishes it all the same, his poison and his antidote.
And tears paint their way down B.J.'s face, and he presses their cheeks together so that Hawkeye can share B.J.'s tears without crying himself.
Their chests rub against each other with their unsynchronized breathing, and they touch each other's faces, and Hawkeye kisses B.J.'s cheek, the both of them coming to rest their heads on each other's shoulders.
They breathe together.
"Daddy?"
And they spring apart, and Erin, barefoot in pink corduroy, watches her father with curious eyes, blue eyes, piercing and childlike, and B.J.'s breath catches in his throat.
Hawkeye is watching him out of his daughter's eyes, his babygirl's blue eyes, his Hawkeye's blue eyes gazing at him out of her curl-framed face.
And Erin turns her head to stare at the strange man who had been touching her father like mommy does -like daddy touches Erin herself- who had been hugging him. And although she has never seen a photo, she knows. She knows this man; she would know him if she saw him anywhere, no matter how old. She has been waiting for him for years now.
She races over and throws her arms around his legs.
And as she clings to him, she says one word: "Goodbye."
And Hawkeye steps out of her embrace, and, placing his worn cowboy hat, still reeking faintly of gin, on his head, he tugs it respectfully, bowing his head.
"Goodbye, Hawk," says B.J.
Hawkeye smiles, and, limping ever so slightly, his knees bothering him, he picks his way over the toys and shoes and umbrellas strewn about in the doorway, and steps out into the dusky evening. They follow him outside and Hawkeye slowly descends the stairs. B.J and Erin stand at the iron railing as they watch him go down.
A sudden gust of wind blows his old hat off his head, but he keeps on walking, tugging his thin jacket tightly around his figure. A tremor runs down B.J.'s spine, and he thinks, There goes loneliness applauding itself all the way down the street.
Erin tugs at his pant leg, and he tears himself away from Hawkeye to look down into those deep blue eyes.
"That him?"
"That's him, sweetie." And B.J. smiles wistfully, his tears cooling in the late-summer breeze.
"He ain't much, ain't he, Daddy?"
B.J. chuckles quietly, turning his eyes back to the retreating figure with the spidery shadow.
"Oh, I'm not so sure," says B.J.
And, as if on cue, Hawkeye pauses under a street light, as though illuminated by a spotlight that nobody but him can see, and springs high into the air, ignoring the pain, and clicks his heels, the waning sunlight surrounding his silhouette like a wreath of fire.
He steps carefully around a dented garbage can and some gardening tools, and crosses the street, stopping once again in the warmth of the setting sun, his shoes sounding against the concrete as he jumps and clicks his heels a second time. No regrets.
Erin hugs B.J.'s legs as she did His, and he bends to pick her up, the sun turning her hair golden, and she traces the tear tracks on her father's cheeks, her hand warm and alive, and B.J. thinks to himself: may this love extend itself forever.
At the end of the street, Hawkeye clicks his heels one more time, and is gone.
....................
"Suture. Come on, nurse, suture!"
"Easy Frank... don't take him seriously, nurses, -ah! Put some pressure on that bleeder there, will you!?- he's always like this the night of the full moon."
"That was last night, Hawk," B.J. set up the proverbial board.
"Oh yeah, well then, I guess this must be the final result. Congratulations, Frank, you're an animal. Hey, Colonel, can we shoot him and put him out of our misery? We promise we'll be humane about it." Didn't even pause for a second to look up from his work, keeping his eyes trained on the open wound in front of him.
"Pierce! Colonel, did you hea-"
"MORE CHOPPERS!" The phrase to silence all.
"They can't do this to us. It's been thirty-one hours!"
"They can, Pierce, they will, and it may be thirty-one hours more, so button up and buckle down." Nobody ever looked up from their work, perhaps to blind themselves to the number of wounded still left to be treated, perhaps to blind themselves to the reality of their situation.
A crash of shattering glass.
"Damn it, Beej, this is going even worse that I dreaded."
"You should have dreaded more."
"Mmhm... nurse, a new mask? I may have his guts in my boots but unless we want my upchuck in his innards, I suggest getting his blood out of my mouth. And can somebody close for me? Bigolow, can you close for me? Kellye? Margaret? Come on, somebody close for me!" Hawkeye scanned the room, wide-eyed, for somebody, anybody, to save him time and save another a life and save him the pain of realizing where he was and what he was forced to be doing. " Can anybody give me some damned closure here?"
"Ah, but can you ever really have closure for something that will never end?" asked B.J., with a distracted glance towards the anesthesiologist.
Hawkeye didn't answer, grabbing a cloth instead and wiping the blood off his face where it had seeped through the mask.
"Next... come on, move it!"
And, shaking his head, he gingerly snapped on a new pair of gloves.
Fin