Here they come (331 hits)
Category: UberMadness! Entryno reviews (Rate this item) (V)
Submitted by T.chow <trcose.at.wisc.edu> (View user info) at 2004-04-11 21:56:11 EDT
This post was an official UberMadness! entry. Click here to view the original matchup.
Friday, 600 hours
"!gnimocnI"
Without warning, the pile of rumble and earth beneath Private Richard Trout was swallowed up in a thorny blooming detonation of smoke and flame. He was thrown to his feet. Then the tangled ground underfoot combed itself smooth and the sizzling flower shrank and, in the blink of an eye, it became nothing but an innocuous bud of steel and plastic.
Private Trout backed down into the trench and awaited the orders to advance. All around him comrades fell down or climbed to their feet. Metal helmets clamored and rang up onto the heads of their owners. Bullets whistled across the sky back to the rifles that sent them. Intermittent flashes of loud light and hot noise became cold hard cans, crawling up into the bellies of airplanes dancing in the clouds.
Next to Private Trout a still man began moving ever so slightly. The thick red pool on his chest soaked back into his shirt. His eyes became lucid with some unspoken apprehensive comprehension. A surgeon came and the still man's deep lacerations sewed themselves up beneath the scalpel.
Amid the smells of morning, decanted in sulfur and copper, a rooster reneged on his summons and while the sun set, the stars slowly came out.
...
"Alright now, hold on here. What's all this about bombs unexploding and the dead waking? Well...I will try to explain...but you must be patient.
My name is Richard Trout and I was born sometime in my own future...well, what you'd call the future anyway. I guess you would say that I'm living backwards through my life.
That must sound a little strange to you: undeniably odd and utterly impossible. Well, let me try to delve a little deeper here. You are drawn towards a conclusion are you not? Time pulls you along to the place where a river empties to the sea, to an end, to where all the strands and knots finally meet and weave that eventual textile of experience.
I am swimming against those currents (though I sacrifice no effort on my behalf). I unravel the threads of my loom and follow them down to their beginnings.
I suppose you might think I'm pulling your leg, or your leg is pulling me...or would it be pushing...?
But no! I am serious! I know it is hard to grasp the idea, but for me it is as easy as living your life forwards is for you. It is how I have always lived, the only way I know how.
But the strange part (yes, the strange part) is that I know what will happen to me. That is to say I have what you would call a memory; a premory I like to call it. I do not know what will happen in what you call the future (what I call the past) but I know what will happen in the past (what you call the future). And I can no more change my future than you can change your past, but my past is unknown to me, just as is your future...got it?
But from here on out, I think I'll play the story in forward-time. Maybe it will save a little confusion from you, though it is only certain to further confuse me, and I may have to interrupt from time to time."
...
Thursday, 800 hours
"Mmmm...I had forgotten we were going to have Denver Omelets today," I think as I shrug the bright sun of the yard from my shoulders for the cool plastic of the mess hall.
Little surprises. Morsels like that tend to slip from memory under the weight of the important things.
I watch the jell-o wobbling in its compartment on my tray. Premory is not dissimilar to that green pear-laden concoction, in its way. I may gaze through it and catch vague outlines of what there is on the other side, but it is hopelessly tinted strange in color and disconnect. Bits of fruit block my view.
But the present, on the other hand, is clear and crisp. It is like the taste of the air, immediate and virgin. I eat my jell-o; it is much more memorable than I remembered. I am lost in my dessert and the sun in the windows. No wonder the rest of the troop calls me the wonderer...or is it wanderer?
I usually sit by myself; today I'm near a window at the far end of the endless, stainless steel mess table. I enjoy reading as I eat (starting at the back of the book, of course). The rest of the company chats, tells stories, or exchanges insults.
"I killed me tree o' dem nasty Germans already..." A gruff and heavy-set infantryman crows.
Ah yes...to kill. It's why I joined up. What greater miracle could there be than to shoot the dead and give them life? I can give birth to platoons on only brass and lead. Only a shot a piece and the lame walk, I jab the blind in the eye and they see, I clap the deaf on the ears and they can hear! It is a glorious thing to be a soldier.
...
"It sounds backwards doesn't it? Well, it is backwards. Of course I know that to you it seems I am doing a great deal of harm. But I am stuck on that path, the path of my premory. Those that are dead to me become alive; I refuse to look at it as anything more than just that. I will not get into the subtleties of eating and drinking or bodily functions; it would be too much for you to handle."
...
Thursday, 730 hours
I sit around awhile listening to the laughter and misery of the troop. They are good men; it is unfortunate that someday I will have to unfriend and unmeet them. But I enjoy it while I can because they seem to enjoy it; life is much richer with them around anyhow.
They sometimes call me a strange fish, and I know I must seem strange to them. I think it may be the stifled satisfaction they sense in me when one of them dies. But I do always think it's nice to get new friends.
I return my full tray to the mess counter, get in line, and I'm off to the latrine.
...
"Freewill has always been a bit problematic for me. My future is set. There are things that I know I will do. I will have a wife. I will have kids. I will be born. For that matter I suppose I must have died too, but I don't know when that was.
Thing is, I don't remember exactly how these things came about. They are waiting for me to get there. I feel like an old screen door, hanging on its hinges. I can whip back and forth, wobble and creak, but I am anchored to my destiny, though I strain on it as I wish. It is confining and liberating at the same time. I do not know that I would prefer to live as you do, in any case."
...
Thursday, 700 hours
My morning toilet is always the same; at least it will be until I turn twenty, twelve years ago. It is predictable. It is the anchor of my day, and yet every time I perform the ritual shaving, shining, and showering, it becomes just a little newer. It always retains its mysteries.
I peer naked into the mirror, healing up some minor shaving cuts with my razor. Several other soldiers are at their morning routine too. We look like I think newborn angels might, all garbed in white towels, clean and shining, and with great beards of wispy white foam.
"Ooh damn, Trout. 'Ats a bleeder." Private Domingo remarks at a cut on my chin.
"Yep, but it'll stop soon enough." I continue the familiar motions of the razor. Two officers are talking about the troop's plans on the other side of the latrine.
"Deployed...tomorrow...reinforcements...heavy fighting...casualties..."
So that is what I did tomorrow. Sounds like it must have been exciting. I wonder if it might have been the day...
Every morning I look in the mirror and wonder what it was I had done that afternoon and evening. My future, as you would call it, is always be just out of my reach and always growing wider. I am optimistic though. I can expect that that which I will never experience will be for the best. So I live in the moment, or relive in the moment, or un-live, whatever you'd like to call it.
...
Thursday, 600 hours
The night air outside the latrine is crisp and abrupt. I stop a moment on my way in for my morning ritual. I give a little thought to the wife and kids I'll meet once the war unwinds -once I un-live enough of it I mean. All the joy awaiting me in my premory. Never mind what might have happened tomorrow. And I always have trouble remembering my dreams.
The morning sun is setting ever so gently. The stars will be out shortly in all their infinity. I never quite remember exactly what they're going to look like. There are just too many to see. Here they come...or there they go...how ever you'd like to see it, I guess.
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