THEN
That summer they took two station wagons, one dark green, the other blue, and drove them out to a place Tom’s parents owned in New Mexico. It wasn’t much, three adobe cabins in the middle of the flat country. From there, they could see the road and little else, mountains and valleys in the distance, short trees in the gravel. No one really went out there. It was perfect.
They stayed a fortnight together. There were seven of them, and they took a few different things. Tom, Phil, Carl, and Maureen dropped blotter acid. Patricia and Susan kept to weed. Weston drank.
One night Maureen led everyone outside. They lit a fire and stared at the half moon.
Tom, Patricia and Weston went further out.
‘What else do you think is coming?’ said Tom.
It had been a wild year.
Maureen had been kicked out of school.
Carl’s parents divorced.
Phil’s girlfriend left him.
The war.
‘It’ll pass,’ said Patricia.
Tom said it back to them, ‘It’ll pass.’
Weston sighed, drained his beer and pitched the empty can out further. It landed with the sharp ping of aluminium on rock. ‘We’re all screwed,’ he said.
NOW
They were all good with computers, the sort of people who recognised a glimmer of the old dream in the new internet. They kept in touch. Carl and Susan were in Silicon Valley, and Phil, Patricia, and Weston landed in academia. They were all office workers with spare time. They were all out there for each other, on the same email list, except Maureen, who died the winter before last. Throat cancer. She was a nurse.
They all got up one Tuesday in July and found a message from Tom. No one really knew where Tom ended up. A chemistry major, he worked somewhere in the private sector.
The message read:
It did not dawn on them that they’d played any part in this. It had been a fast night all those years ago and none of them remembered it exactly.
THEN
They hadn’t slept. Patricia was in bed, and Maureen was in there with her. Every hour Patricia stirred, and it started again: the moaning and the sobbing. Tom had never heard anyone cry like that. She sounded like she was being cut open.
They’d all been peaking hard when the phone rang. It took a long time to work out.
Carl was passionately against answering it.
‘This is an outside force,’ he said, as it continued to ring.
Weston picked it up.
He listened.
He nodded.
He put the phone down and said, ‘That was Patricia’s parents. Her brother’s been shot. He’s in Long Binh.’
As the sun came up, Phil turned on the television. He flicked through the channels and they all saw it: the coffins coming off the planes, draped in flags. They made him go back.
‘War is such bullshit,’ said Susan.
‘There’s no stopping it,’ said Phil.
‘No way,’ said Susan.
‘I’m with her for a change,’ said Weston. He’d been crying.
‘This will always happen,’ said Phil.
But Tom just paced back and forth.
‘What…’ he said.
They all looked at him.
‘What we need to have is a war where no one dies.’
END
— IAIN
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