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Even now, I find myself thinking of it as a dream; part of that strange, half-starved, malarial daze with his ruined voice ebbing and flowing like the surf on the point, like the whisper of heartbeats before the end.
"'Rage, rage, against the dying of the light,'" he murmured, and later, "'For I have had too much of apple-picking.'"
And later still, something I barely heard about a beacon crossing the Hellespont and flaring high, but by then it had happened. If it happened.
It happened.
I know I was not sane by then, no more than he, but surely a fever dream would not have had the feel of it, the smell. Spices and sweat, a man's illness, the rich rot of jungle and the heads piled around the door. Jasmine and C4, lemon grass and blood and mangos and the smell of him.
I'd never known it before my first tour, you know. Never known that every man had his own smell. But you learn that there, that and a lot of other things. Colors were brighter, sounds were louder, smells were stronger, and minds, souls, were so much further lost. Not just me and Kurtz, but all of us.
Hell, I'm distracting myself again.
Look. What happened--if it did happen--was that he, that I... Fuck, I don't know how to say it. Not even to myself.
That whole endless time, however long it was, it's not that I didn't notice things, like the cry of the well-fed carrion birds or the off-key whistle of some soldier gone native, or perhaps some native gone soldier, trying to do the Marine hymn but forgetting half the notes. It's just that noticing things doesn't mean I could judge or evaluate them. They just happened, and I let them happen.
I let him--
It started with the water, of course. I was dizzy with fever and dehydration, and sometimes when he'd read enough, Kurtz would sponge my face with a wet rag and murmur to me as if I were a child or maybe his favorite weapon.
Sometimes when he was painting his face with camouflage, he'd turn and mark me with long streaks of green and brown and gray, intent and careful as if I were a page for his calligraphy.
Once, too, it wasn't his hand, but one smaller and colder he held between his massive thumb and finger to mark me with the reeking red liquid he'd dipped it in. I tell myself it was a monkey's paw, but I owe him the truth, whatever that is, to admit it must have come from a dead child. At least, I hope the child was dead.
But the time-- the time I'm trying not to remember-- it was his hand. He'd been intoning some German verse in that low, resonant rasp as he outlined my collarbones with olive-drab army grease as if he was administering a sacrament. Maybe he was. And despite everything I knew about him, the touch felt good. I was so alone, so lost; there was no real world to return to, no people I knew who would still know me, now that I'd seen-- Now that I'd seen the things that he had seen and seen beyond.
And so I made some little sound of pleasure at his touch, like a child half-waked from sleep, and for a moment he stilled and looked at me. He did not blink; I remember his eyes were wide open even as I saw them shift and deepen further into the abyss he had stared into too long.
His voice broke off, and then began again: "'All is changed, changed utterly; a terrible beauty is born.'"
And with the same abstraction of focus he moved his hand to paint my left nipple in small, gentle circles, his face as still as the enigmatic gods who watched us all from their sandstone masks.
I could not find thought or voice to respond, but he must have taken my catch of breath as something like consent, and this time he filled each fingertip with a different color before his hand moved lower.
I closed my eyes and never knew if I meant it as refusal or surrender, but his breath came warm and damp as the jungle wind as he leaned forward to rub his sweating cheek against my own. A syncopated drum of hollow bamboo began somewhere outside and I reached out, needing to touch something realler than fog, softer than stone cliffs, warmer than death. Beneath my hands, I felt his heart beating. Beneath his hands, I felt my pulse drive harder and harder, machine-gun staccato into the night.
This was insane, insane as this place and this war and the things we both had seen. I no more belonged in a man's arms than a surfboard belonged in a war zone. But that was our world now, if it was a world; our unwakeable dream.
Yes, I remember it as a dream, and in my dreams. But not some vague daydream like a child imagining the sky. I remember it as well as I remember every second of that voyage, that fall, when I cannot stay awake any more and there is no friend nearby to wake me when I scream.
I remember it all; the smell of napalm and burning flesh; the resilient horror of leeches; Chief Phillips from the patrol boat as I tried to keep him from dragging me with him into the death my choices had brought him. The limp emptiness of his body afterwards, and the sweet unbearable reek of his blood.
Yes, I knew how a man's body felt in my arms: broken. I'd held the dead and dying, carried my wounded to safety, and even as my hands drew Kurtz down to me I knew I could do it only because he was already dead.
The smell of his sickness and my own just confirmed it; corpses always stank. And so I let his tongue into my mouth as the Chief's mouth had filled with river water, and I clutched at him as the arms of dead villagers clutch from the pile of their burning.
My closed eyes only made the other senses stronger.
Caught up in his massive grasp, hearing the sickness in his damp lungs even when we moaned together as our hands found their targets, I felt and smelled it all. The soursweet oil they rubbed him with; the chemical tang of the camouflage paint; the crisp curls of his body hair and the warhead heat of his erection as I closed my hand around it. The spreading fire of his hand as he palmed my aching balls.
I was lost, insane, long dead and rotting, and I did not protest as he rolled me like a corpse in the flood and reached to invade me with paint-slick sweaty fingers, eels in the swamp I drowned in.
I struggled when I felt the slow assault begin, as I had fought every madness of this jungle and the human heart. But he knew this pit better than I, and while I had always been a loner, he was a leader. And so he led me down, down, as I begged and moaned and cried out for more and he filled my darkness again and again.
It was all real as a nightmare, and a nightmare still: the weight of him above me, grunting like an ox; the tearing agony as he thrust into me, and the growing jet thunder as pain unmasked itself as pleasure and drove me into the fire. I screamed as I had not under VC torture and fought to impale him deeper and deeper into me. Sweat and oil slicked us as we fought our common enemy together.
And then he grabbed my hair and tore my head back, back, as I opened my eyes against the pressure of it and met his own. And what I saw there drove me screaming over the edge and the abyss stared back at me as I came and came and came.
***
When I fought my way back from that shoreless flood, I heard his toneless voice in poetry again as if nothing had happened, or everything, and the snake of time had swallowed me with its tail. But as I stared at him I saw his mask of paint was red and brown and sticky drying white, and I felt his patterns on my cheeks like the stripes of a tiger.
I knew then that I was going to kill him.
Not for revenge; had I not wanted it too? And yet not for mercy, though indeed it would be merciful. But that darkness he showed me, one is always alone there, always King and God and damned, alone. And so, like the beasts war made us less than, only killing him would bring me to my throne.
A crown. A gift; a curse; an ending. It would never end.
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