“The wheelchair makes me lazy. I don’t need it all the time, you know that.” Morton was stood at the edge of the bed, in conversation with Jane, one of his nurses. “If the pain gets bad, I’ll use the chair and take my pick of whatever tools might help.”
“Pops! We’re here! We’re coming!” Clarissa’s shouts could be heard from down the hallway. Morton’s pain had subsided at the same time his spirits had begun to rise. That all started when the chopper landed five minutes ago.
“I’m in my room!” Morton shouted towards the the open bedroom door. “But…” he continued quietly to Jane, “Everyone already knew that, didn’t they?”
“Yep, you’ve been pretty easy to find for the whole time I’ve known you!” Jane smiled and laughed.
The rapid footsteps of Scott’s family grew louder. It was as though they were running into a birthday party. Morton could feel a sense of happiness and excitement begin to fill the room. Then they would appear and that sense would manifest as his own flesh and blood.
Morton and Scott had long ago agreed a pattern of behaviour that, in itself, had beneficial effects on all of them. As a family, they did not initially focus on Morton’s illness and how he was feeling as a result of it. To focus attention like this made his affliction the centre of everything, instead of each other. They still focussed on life beyond the illness first. They had come to accept that Morton’s cancer was terminal. How long it would take to kill him was the unknown variable. The time they had was to be enjoyed.
“So, what do you feel like doing, Pops?” Clarissa quizzed. Playfully, she waved her recipe book at him. Morton smiled.
“Yep, that’s a great idea.” He closed his eyes and Clarissa began to flick through the pages from front to back. “Stop!” he called out.
“OK… Cauliflower afogato! Next!”
They repeated the process two more times until they had a full menu. Cauliflower afogato to start. Crisp skin trout with with grapefruit, walnut and mixed salad for main. Chocolate whiskey soufflé to finish.
It was 3:30 PM. A perfect time to fish for an hour, harvest the rest of the ingredients and then cook for twenty.
At the pond, the kids doted on their Pops. They stood either side of him, each with an arm around him as he cast his line. Then Ethan and Clarissa would cast theirs and resume their one-armed embrace. Scott and Jess were either side, each with their own rods. It was a fishing competition and a team effort to feed everyone at the same time. If they came up short after an hour, there was plenty of stock either frozen or smoked.
Scott didn’t really care about the fish. He wasn’t fishing. He was like a silverback gorilla, petting and grooming his family unit. He stood off from their chatting, just listening and absorbing, while moving around them hugging, caressing and kissing them in equal measure. Then he would sit a few feet away on the grassy bank, rod in one hand, but always looking at his family. If he chose to, he could catch twenty trout from the pond in an hour, but he did not want to spend any time or effort in a space that distracted him from his family.
“When’s mum coming back?” Scott enquired. They wouldn’t be complete until she, his brother and sister and their families arrived.
“Late. It was a big day at the restaurant. She’s doing a managerial oversight for the whole day. She’s still sharp as a button. She still loves it.”
Vivian was the conductor of their restaurant, Les Fers A Cheval. It had been inspired by Le Petit Fer A Cheval in Paris. Similar to its namesake, it featured not one but two horseshoe-shaped bars, one in the fine dining section and one in the more relaxed, café bar section. The menus were based on the farm’s produce and livestock, supplemented by other local growers. She and Morton had set this up years ago, along with a bakery, grocery and butchery. It was an organic integration of the local food chain and an homage to the city village life of Parisian arrondissements. Even at 85, Vivian was in charge and spent three days a week involved in all of the businesses to ensure they kept achieving their goals.
“We all still love it, dad. When shall we take over the place again?” Jess asked.
“We can come and go as we please. We capped all the bookings at 60% capacity to give us all space and then walk-ins can still be seated. Your mum and I will have a few nights to ourselves there as well, to give you all a break. As long as I feel up to it, I still love suiting up and taking your mum to dinner.” Morton’s increasing frailty was offset by his help and the care. Sometimes Morton and Vivian would dine alone in the private room, creating their own personal world. Other times, they would enjoy the atmosphere in the main restaurant or café bar. They had made it what they wanted it to be.
“Pops, have we got grapefruit? We didn’t cook with any last time.” Clarissa was supervising their harvest as they wandered from the pond through the kitchen beds. Ethan pushed his grandfather’s wheel chair as Scott took point up front with one of the produce baskets. He had plucked several large tomatoes from the rows in the caterpillar tunnels and two bunches of partially ripened white grapes that brought sharpness to a salad and that he made into a piquant side sauce.
“Yeah, the dome’s been yielding plenty. We don’t need to pick any, I don’t think. There’s enough in the stores. But let’s wander through anyhow and get some sights and smells.”
A large, geodesic dome was a greenhouse that allowed them to grow subtropical produce and enjoy a totally different mixture of vegetation. Morton had lifted the idea from the UK Eden Project. It was devoid of any concrete walkways, which lent it a much more natural feel. The canopy served to distract from the dome structure and in places it was planted very densely, so it was possible to escape the farm and the dome for a little while and ways. Barefoot in there was how they enjoyed it.
After a dinner with the whole family, Morton’s nurses and the onsite farm staff, Scott took Morton up to the roof. It was a warm evening but Scott lit the fire pit anyway. They sat together wrapped loosely in a big blanket made from hemp cloth.
“What have you been thinking about lately?” Scott enquired.
“Many things, as always.” Morton’s gaze turned from his son toward the flames. “There’s so many things, I don’t know where to begin.”
Scott took his father’s hand. “Just speak about whatever comes to your mind now, then.”
After a minute, Morton’s face grew sad. “The war. It’s such a volatile, varied part of me. It’s destruction and creation altogether, at every level. It destroyed parts of me, created others, and helped create things beyond me and your mother. It helped create our family. But I had to take things from others for that to happen, and that’s the worst part.” Morton’s voice was stable, but he was tearful. “Trying to rebalance the war has been a driving force in me. Not everything about me, but it was a strong force. You know that.” He drew in a quivering breath, wiped his eyes and looked back to his son. “I don’t want to talk about the war now, my boy. It was just a feeling. Another time, maybe. I would prefer to talk about you.”
Scott was much closer to his parents than were his younger brother, James, and little sis, Maggie. Scott knew more about Morton’s experience of Vietnam than Vivian ever would. Morton found it strange that his eldest son was closest. He seemed to have made less mistakes with Scott than with his other children. He loved them all, but the sense of bond with Scott was different and had been since the beginning. This closeness meant Scott had become as much a friend and confidante as a son. This was probably the strangest thing about their relationship. Scott had always sought advice from his parents and was candid and honest with them. As far as Morton and Vivian understood, Scott had grown into a deeply capable man with autodidactic knowledge across many fields that had enabled his success in markets. That success had not seemed to have changed Scott’s character for the worse, and this was what Morton found most remarkable about his son. It also commanded Morton’s huge respect, although he did not expressly vocalise this. When Vivian and Morton talked about him, both of them acknowledged Scott’s duality, which they did not feel or see in James and Maggie. As Scott had entered his forties, increasingly they perceived him as an other who was their equal and in some respects, their superior. It was a wordless sense of superiority that came from them, not him. He never acted in a superior manner towards anyone in the family. He had a natural joy, diverse sense of humour and although measured, he was fun and unguarded. Scott was, more than most, interested in his family in totality and he had shared his success with all of them in ways that were liberating rather than controlling. He had seeded opportunities and then stepped back. In this way, Scott had been a parent to all of them. It was Scott’s duality and his warm curiosity that had enabled them to develop this father-son and best friend bond.
“Death feels like a reversion to childhood, Scott. I wasn’t expecting it to be this way.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ve been so frail. I need so much care. Although now I understand and am more conscious of my own vulnerability, and although I can’t remember what it was like to be a small child, the fear in me is the same. Like that fear when you don’t know where your parents are? Getting lost in a shopping mall. That kind of feeling. The rise of panic. It’s borne out of different things now, but it still feels the same.”
“What causes it now?”
“Knowing that I have to leave and can’t come back. Worry for those I leave behind. Fear of what lies in store. If it’s nothing, I can’t imagine what nothing actually is. If it’s anything else, I can’t imagine that either.”
Scott’s hand gripped tighter. Gently, Scott turned to face his father. Morton looked up into face of his son, but in his place was a half-lit man who felt like twice Scott’s size. Gazing down at Morton, the man’s soft smile radiated a warmth greater than the fire. Dancing shadows from the firelight stirred across the man’s face, whose look was a soft, shifting dynamic of features that seemed to ebb through subtle, constant variations. It was not one face, but many and various, like the ever changing surface of fast flowing water around a rock that protruded from the depths. The rock was his left eye, constantly illuminated, while his right remained in shadow. Morton’s focus drew, fixated, into his eye, whose expanding iris around the pupil’s void melded into a vista of scintillating corona around a magnificent eclipse, just within arm’s reach. The man’s voice engulfed him and spoke softly and slowly from every direction as though each word was a year of eternity.
“There is nothing to fear. My love. My darling. My guide. My protection. My memory, My future. My child. My self. My father. We are in transition. There is more.”
Morton’s view of the eclipse began to shimmer and slowly blur, as though viewed through a window smattered in commencing rain. The lines and points in the corona began to soften and warp as though smeared or blended by the invisible finger of its painter. He had no form; only a throbbing vibration from the sense of his centre, an idea of a sound at the edge of hearing, like a mid tone buzz from a bell rung faster than could be possible. Then blackness; the crackling sound of a fire; sensation of his face pressed up against soft material over a solid, warm stone. He felt Scott’s arms about his shoulders and across his back embracing him with a promise of a strength that could crush him or cast him into the sky. He opened his eyes. The sparkling fire filled his view as he rested his head against his son’s midriff. The world was gone. Flames, his son and his own feeling of every memory of life pressed into one instance of his consciousness were the only things in that black void. The comfort and relief washed over him and he felt his vision relaxing to make way for views that emanated from his centre as he began to swim in pursuit of the sound.
The heavy patter of the rain against huge, plastic leaves in the canopy. Warmth like being bathed while fully clothed. An overpowering sense of tension from his feet, through his knees to his hips, and in his jaw. A contrasting stillness in his torso and mind. Cool, familiar weight in his soft-soaked hands. Rich, earthy scents buried in damp.
15 yards ahead, crouching behind buttressed roots of some ancient tree, his friend slowly turned to look back at him. Reading his friend’s slow hand signals, an image of a worming underground complex welled up into his mind from beneath his feet. An entrance to a bunker emerged 30 yards ahead, obvious now but invisible moments ago. A horizontal black slit between two straight logs was the camouflaged but dead giveaway in this place where nothing was straight in any direction. Nelson gave the signal to stop the platoon. Remaining bonded to Nelson’s gaze, he echoed the signals to those behind.
His inner silence and the outer cacophony began to merge at the apex of his stillness. The jungle was never silent, but his stillness had begun to grow until, in these moments, it could well up to be released in an instance of violence that would always give way to pain. The Nothing within men could build and explode to become their Everything.
“Retreat. Cover. Recon,” came Nelson’s seasoned assessment. An assault now, when only a hint of the bunker was known to just they two, was reckless. If their presence had not been detected, there were many other options. This was why you didn’t make newbies the point men.
He turned his gaze back to find the next pair of eyes. Just below, down the slope, three men peered out from cover, awaiting his relay. They weren’t visible at first, but they were bonded to him by a sense of presence and expectation that allowed him to quickly locate them without sound.
“Bunker entrance. Retreat. Recon. Traps.”
The platoon would commence a withdrawal back along its inbound path. Fanning out now or treading any new ground could encounter trip wires, punji pits or unknown, hidden firing positions. Nods of understanding. Silent repetition back up the platoon.
Nelson was face down, slowly refreshing his mud colour from the ground. Walking or creeping back was to invite a form of suicide, now that the position was known. He would have to leave the cover of the buttress on his belly, like a snake in a poisoned Eden. He only had 20 yards to cross to the cover of the downslope from which they had arrived. Now, Nelson's life was in his hands as he provided one man's worth of cover against an unknown wall of threat.
“Why do I have to go in there without you, daddy?”
“Because it's the beginning of an adventure. I'm here with you at the start. You've got everything you need. You won't be alone for long. Lots of good adventures begin when you are alone. The best adventures end with friends you made along the way. Would you like to have an adventure?”
Soft, dark auburn-tinged waves on a pale canvass; dapples of off-white on white is form. Two, simple, high contrast lines suggested her arm against her ribs and the shadow between legs from feet to buttocks as she lies on her side. The ghost rolls around, the dark waves sliding and parting with her form's shifting motion. Features are whited out, ideas of just touch and shape are enough to know beauty. Between the dancing waves there is a paired eclipse whose tiny points of void begin to grow with closeness. Love, like pain, makes the corona retreat and the void open.
The draining sensation of fear taking hold and replacing familiarity, comfort in self, comfort in assumed control.
“James! James!” The red face was someone, anyone. Why did he call that name? Who is James? No memory, only guttural sensation of a fracture inside that needs to be gripped, held and fixed before something breaks away. Cool wind from the non-existent window behind the face. The blood drips up towards a light sky filled with fragmented, misshapen stars.
“Medic! Medic!” rings inside. Get help. Get to cover.
A panel of crazy paving fills the view in front. Black, bent curves in his lower gaze lead down to feeling clamped below the waist. Pain buried in stiffness ebbs into his midriff across hips and in his breastbone.
“Tommy! Get up here! Bring the pack!” he screams to those who should help.
No reply. Only stillness as pressure in his head builds. What if there's no one? Their hands are up, but they did not surrender in the darkness. There is still a fight, but there is no gunfire. The stench and taste of napalm fills his nose and mouth. Its feel in his lungs hints at some kind of vaporous high as a harbinger of death soon to come. He sucks in the stink to scream at his buddy who bleeds upwards into the sky.
In his eyes, Scott saw Morton's perception of his emoted speech. He felt the crumbling wall within his father; the release betrayed by his deep exhalation as he began to sink in front of Scott into a smaller form between man and child. In his embrace, Morton’s soft, slow breaths were smooth and untroubled. Scott remained still, holding his father's thin frame in the warm darkness. He hummed a note of the void as he rested his chin gently on top of his father's head. When that breath was exhausted the note persisted in constancy inside him as he breathed again and continued in rhythmic, broken stereo.
A gentle stir from Morton was Scott’s cue to lift him up, cradling him like he was his own child. Standing in the light of the fire, he emoted a program mantra.
Curiosity breeds discovery. Discovery breeds purpose; visible in the opaque, invisible in our transparency.
Within their field, he waited for a response.
“Is fire an end or a beginning?” came a quiet question.
“Maybe it’s both, dad. But it’s change as well.”