We had all tried very hard to forget them, but the bad memories have a tendency to stick around longer than the good. A veteran can try to forget a place and time, but forgetting a person carries with it some weighty moral baggage. You are always wondering if it’s right, and nobody seems to want to give you a straight answer. Now, here we are again, in a diner hot with kitchen steam that wafts out from a place obscured by sweating tile walls.
“We thought we were the next couple of Napoleons.” This is Luke, his face has grown shaggy in the last ten years. He is wearing an old canvas work-coat I think he said was his father’s.
“We were just kids,” I say with the warm moisture of my coffee wafting up into my face.
“Damn stupid kids,” says Luke. I don’t have the heart to tell him I think we might’ve been right. That fight’s over now, anyway. For me, ten years and some change; for him, thirty five years exactly. We were stupid then. But we were also brave and our hearts were beating for a future we couldn’t even see in our mind’s eye, nothing but a vague feeling. We always had dreams, never nightmares. Dreams now come in short supply.
Back then there were no lines on our faces, and our hair came in all sorts of colors. The world was to us all open and green pasture; free to walk, to till, or to leave behind on our way to the sea. We chose the sea, the bright golden coast, red rocks, blue sky for infinity, the land vast and new; empty, with every warrior shrub and cactus flowing with the possibility of something new and different. We saw that ground as pure and unstained by two hundred years of coagulated blood, full of hope and newness as a sunrise viewed from the top of a mountain. We were ignorant, the overwhelming taste of iron in our palates dulled the older, more subtle flavors left behind.
With only that vague hope, we started the fight. Because, with that golden vision, who wouldn’t? We gathered in brick halls with marble arches and patterned, polished floors, our bodies slim and smiles stretching sun kissed skin. It was all fun. Fun for a good cause; the cause. We saw the hypocrisy woven through every law and every word we were told. We knew we had to fight because we weren’t stupid, like our parents, and their parents before them.
So, once we’re finished with our coffees and Luke with his doughnut, we walk out of the muggy diner and into the cool, thick morning air of that little town. So much has changed in thirty five years. The cars are different, the clothes, and the kids; Christ, they could be aliens! The sky entombs the world in grayness, the cover low and wavy, claustrophobic. Like we are once again trapped in this little place.
And we had been trapped, trapped for nine weeks. What started it is irrelevant, because very quickly it would fade into the background of all of our lives, and the indignation would be ours alone. To wield and receive.
We didn’t feel so trapped when it began. No, we felt like birds and butterflies, because the sky was clear and the grass was green and we were doing good. Butterflies are too serene, we were more like magpies. We walked out into the day with our picket signs, and from then on we didn’t move for a week. Tents were erected, food was distributed from donations. The police would come in their riot gear, though without the necessary numbers, maybe fifteen of them, and each time they pushed forward we would beat them back with the sheer mass of our thousand bodies and the tear gas canisters they had thrown at us, returned.
I remember one of the officer’s faces the last time they tried to remove us from the president’s lawn. I was up at the front of the line, where we risked being grabbed and beaten and dragged away to be put in prison for trespassing. Their plastic shields pushed against us, their batons fell weakly to crack against bony limbs, we were too close for them to really get a proper strike in. Then came down this brick from God-knows-where, which was a pretty typical occurrence, but this one hit him just right; bounced off his helmet, and he closed his eyes and held them shut hard, then stumbled back a few steps. His eyes then opened wide like the shutters of a camera, his mouth yawned to say something, but if there was any sound it was drowned out by the screams all around us. A single droplet of blood ran down from his sideburns, over his sweat-wet cheek, over his jaw, until it stopped and dripped onto his armor from just under his.
That was the last time we saw the cops, from then on it was us and us alone against the unfettered power of the entire nation. All of that coercive force came down upon us with steel bayonets and green fatigues. But that would be the next day. After the cops made their retreat, we all sat together in the heart of the encampment, around a fire, eating hotdogs and laughing with each other because we were victorious, and time would reveal to posterity that we were some of the only true Americans to have ever lived.
Actually, I think we are the perfect Americans. Not back then, we were rebel-rousers back then. But now, at this very moment, as we walk over the old lawn, greener than it has ever been, and feel nothing. Nothing as to what happened here: because, if we did, the whole world would fall apart for us. Every hypocrisy and lie we shrug off every day would be all too present, right in our eyes, and it would strip off our flesh and every muscle and nerve like a sandstorm until we would be nothing but pure spirit, Id uninhibited. To put it simply: we would fucking lose it.
One of us did, actually. I think she was maybe sixteen when it happened, a local highschooler come to fight the good fight. Of course, she didn’t tell anybody that. Especially not the handsome, revolutionary fox of a man she was making love to every night. Make love not war! Well, he did both. And, from the nightly ruckus we heard from their tent, he was exceptionally good at one of those things at least.
When he died right in front of her, and that one medical student in a black-panther jacket was stuffing his bullet wounds with gauze despite him already being dead, she went truly insane. She screamed and she never stopped screaming, even after it was all over. They had to take her away. I always admired her because, if I was a stronger, more heroic man, that would be my course of action. To scream and to never stop screaming. Never let them make you quiet, or dead, like they did the rest of us.
I actually saw that medical student in the black-panther jacket in a bar outside of Phoenix a couple months back, of course neither of those descriptors still apply. He is not a medical student anymore, he’s a wildlife photographer for the National Geographic, and it has been a very long time since he’s worn that jacket.
I recognized him immediately, but I had to explain who I was to him. Then his eyes flashed with recognition. That was probably the doing of all that heroine, made me look like a different person. But that’s ten years in the past now and probably not an excuse for my shabby appearance. We shook hands and he bought me a drink. At the end of the conversation I asked him:
“Are you going to the memorial?” And he said:
“No.” And I said, raising my beer in salute:
“You fuckin’ know what’s up!” Which I guess means the rest of us here now don’t. And that, I think, is a bit of a pessimistic way of looking at this whole thing.
Luke and I walk up to where the new President of the College is supposed to give his speech. It’s a small amphitheatre surrounded by trees with rows and rows of plastic folding chairs set up. Only a few of them are filled. I can feel Luke try and turn around the moment he sees this. I grab hard onto his arm, it’s the first time I’ve touched him in ten years.
“No,” is all I say, and I look into his eyes, where for a moment there is that selfsame fear I saw thirty-five years ago to the day.
It was late afternoon when I saw it, so we’re about six hours off. Another clear day, just like all the rest, with the sun wilting slowly down towards the distant, hazy, blue mountains. The riflesmoke rising up, dark, into that perfect sky. The blood, pouring out from my gut. And right next to us, a girl. I had seen her around, never got to know her. Well, anyway, she was face down in the grass, dead. Her arms were folded strangely behind her and her body seemed stretched out where it lay, flat as a board. She must have died almost instantly. When I lie awake at night and think of her, I keep asking myself whether it was a blessing or a curse, to die so quickly. She felt no pain, but if she had only a few more moments, could there have been time for her to say goodbye? I think I would take the pain for that. Not to say goodbye to anyone in particular, but just to say it.
I practically have to drag Luke over to the chairs. We sit right at the front, I choose these seats because in my heart I still feel some spitefulness towards him and I am a vindictive bastard. I want him to squirm, just a little. He’s not squirming. He’s stonefaced, and as I look at him, I see past him, down the row, another face I know.
He is Lot Michaels, a Native American man, now a lawyer of great repute. He was the first to really get it. They had split off from the main camp and gone off to cause some chaos in town, the exact reason you get for this was different from every person you asked. It was then that the soldiers appeared. They were really no different than little plastic army men, each one completely anonymous behind their gasmasks, no name tags on their fatigues. They had affixed bayonets to their rifles, and I think the common sentiment among the students there was that they were not going to use them. But they did, and that cost Lot his right eye.
That group came back into the camp screaming, all kinds of them had been poked in all sorts of places. The man in the black-panther jacket was very busy, but there was almost nothing he could do to save Lot’s eye. Not then, because they came marching in, slowly, with their rifles pointed and canisters of tear gas hissing before all around like some inverted Fourth of July parade. It caused him great pain then but it certainly makes him stand out on a billboard now.
The assault looked like a slowed down scene from the kaiserschlacht, these masked phantoms moving under the cover of their white, poison fog with their bayonets pointed at us. We tried to form up into groups, to hold our position against the onslaught, but the gas burned our eyes and clogged our orifices with mucus, so much so that one could hardly choke in a breath. We ran and then someone gave an order and the whole world popped and crackled. One hundred and twenty five shots fired in twenty six seconds. I saw that girl fall beside me before I felt the bullet in my own abdomen, though I’ve been told that the actual timeline is reversed.
I turned around, maybe to help her, though I already knew she was dead, and not far from the approaching line of soldiers wreathed in smoke, I saw the sunbather. This was a boy I never knew, whom I had never even seen. He was a local, uninvolved; he was off to get groceries or lunch or something else equally banal. Then he was dead, lying on his back with his arms outstretched, like he was sunbathing, completely serene: here was a butterfly. It certainly wasn’t a habitual activity, though. His skin was so pale that he seemed to glow where he lay. Not like me.
When I collapsed I was like a shadow on the ground. The blood on my hands was like red paint in contrast to my brown skin, it hardly looked real. Luke grabbed me under the arms and dragged me back, through a cloud of gas.
“Martin!” he screamed at me, his words just echoes in my brain. “You’ll be okay! Come on! You’ll be okay!” He never lied and this was no exception. I was fine.
He also said to me, one time:
“I wish we’d never met.” Which is a hard thing to hear, even though he said it with no malice. The feeling was mutual, anyway. Our lives would have been so much easier if we’d never met. I would have never caught a bullet in my gut and he wouldn’t have had to drag me through a cloud of tear gas because he wouldn’t have loved me. He could still have gone home once it was all over. But there’s no changing the past. And I guess there isn’t much you can do to forget it, because here I am, remembering, right as this woman no one recognizes walks up onto the ramshackle stage that must have been built for student band shows or the like.
She taps the microphone once, it squeals and after that there is an almost breathless silence. For us, love wasn’t a choice. We couldn’t have fought if we tried. So, all we could do was wish to change the past, to make it so we never met.
“Good afternoon,” says the woman in a high, breathy voice. She’s wearing a bright blue pantsuit.
I guess the fight was sort of the same. More of a force of nature than a choice. The only way to have never been involved would be to make it so there was never a reason to fight in the first place. Maybe it was the force of history, but I think what drew me to that camp was the same thing that drew me to Luke.
“Unfortunately,” the woman continues, “the president will not be joining us today.” The reaction is immediate and unanimous. We all stand up: all of us that were there when it happened thirty-five years ago to the day. The woman tries to say something to bring us back, something about a guest speaker, but nobody cares to listen. There are ten of us, old and graying at the scalp, and we all leave in an orderly fashion, spreading out through the aisles between chairs evenly, like this was all rehearsed.
I had that same feeling when I watched the crowds rush in towards the soldiers as a nursing student tried to stop my bleeding. By some faulty coordination on the part of the military, they managed to completely surround them, and were pelting them with stones, encroaching further and further with such renewed ferocity I caught myself feeling worried for the soldiers that had just shot me.
That was nothing, though. There was no more violence that day. We were on the news, the whole country seemed to explode with righteous fury at the senseless killing of three innocent, unarmed students. But for all that, nothing came of it. Not even thirty-five years later, as we walk out of that amphitheater, and I look back and see that the woman is continuing her speech like we were never there. For some people, maybe it’s easier to forget. But for us, we all remember three faces, better even than those of our own children.
Indeed, the world has closed its eyes to us. For the soldiers who killed those three, and injured twenty, there was no prosecution. Five of us were charged with trespassing. When we woke up a week later the vigil we had built was destroyed and covered in garbage and graffiti.
For the others, I cannot speak as to why they are walking away, not even for Luke. Maybe it's because this is one final indignity against us who had been so besmirched for so many years. One final forgetting in a life made up entirely of being forgotten and trying to forget. For me, though, the reason was simple. I just wanted to hear someone say: “I’m sorry.”
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