Intervention.

A friend of mine, and not the friend of fortune,
Upon the desert slope is so impeded
Upon his way, that he was turned through terror.

And may, I fear, already be so lost,
That I too late have risen to his succour,
From that which I have heard of him in Heaven.
The Divine Comedy


It's a week since George sidled up to me at the end of the penultimate pep talk, another go-get-em-guys, we'll-blast-those-Japs-into-the-air meetings where everything was always fine and, 'and, damn them to hell, we're good'. He pressed something into my hand and watched my face, watched the floor, watched his fingers, still wound through mine.
'Just in case.' He whispered.

'If anything happens, just. Just, just, you have this, but.
But, if anything goes wrong, boy. If anything goes wrong.'

I nodded, staring:
LEFT>
<RIGHT
LEFT>
RIGHT
At his eyes.
Watery.
And honest.

He nodded too, his hand already gone. And he walked back into the crowd, the mêlée of those back-slapping, hand-shaking, chattering, earth-shattering men with their pistols clandestine in their pockets and their feet close to their mouths, unnoticed.

I left, of course. Couldn't stay. His white cardboard box in my back pocket, and now the moon is stroking my body, and my eyes don't functi-

Cyanide.

You know how it goes.
Send a boy to hell and back.
Let him make his own way there a second time.

Thing is, the next time I saw George, he... I mean to say, I didn't see George after that.

This landscape is haunted. I've always understood God to be aloof and arrogant, but my God here is changed. He is not proud of his child, leaving the world, his womb, to relive.

Re - Return to a previous condition; Live - To show the characteristics of life; be alive. Relive.

Cyanide swoops through the body with no warning. The capsules are unassuming and white, sugar-coated. I believe that's what they call irony, the professors in the universities, and where am I? I'm flying a kite - it's soaring high, flames are licking at its points; all is destined to falter. The moon is touching me.

When I got home that night, pills still trembling in my pocket, I was embraced by haphazard hugging and manifold kisses to the forehead. She, the babe, she's good and ripe and safe. Her mother told her to find a decent hardworking man, so she went to the fields to fly her kite, and it tangled with the burning folds of mine. We live in a true brick house just by an estate. Our yard is back to back with the yard of the poor people, and I see how they don't live much different from me. Except, they don't serve as the wind for all, as I do; and whenever their kites become damaged, they patch them up with tape and thread, and all is fine.

The wind serves as bellows. My face becomes damaged through wear and tear, and the babe can never hold me close enough.

We don't live in a haven, and we don't live in a cocoon from the rest of the world. We live side by side with our patriotism; we live upside down with our government, and far away from our society. True American demeanour... I thought so, too.

I didn't show babe the pills. I thought it unwise. When she went to fetch my tea, I threw them in the fire, and suffered no thoughts of them afterwards.

---

I received a telephone call on the Sunday after the meeting.
'You're needed in training.'
'Fine. When?'
'Today.'
'What? It's a Sun-'
'The car will be round at three.'

This is the correct procedure. Watch me carefully: You see how I hold this? Slide it onto your shoulders. Watch how you arrange the ropes - I know a man hung himself in midair with this - but he was a lazy assed jobsworth, and you, well, you're up there with the best of them. I was telling them in the bar, I'm training the eli- anyway, watch yourselves with the ropes.
Can't believe you haven't brushed up on your Para practise yet -

Hey guys, you think they think you won't make it?'

He said what we were all thinking, of course. Not that that made it any better.
No, not at all.

---

That was the last time I saw the team, before the curtain of the last act of my life rose to reveal a sparse, dusty stage. My coffee became whiskey, earlier and earlier in the evening. It's all futile, you know. Everything is fizzy and glorious, until a nail is driven into the back of your head, and these wonderful dancing images give way to yearning pity and sickness. In heaven, everything is fine.

My lovely's life was out of sorts and although I tried to comfort her, she acted as though I epitomised all the ill and uncomfortable things her mother had lightly warned her about:
I was a stranger, proffering candy.
I was late nights and stinking breath.
I was the dust which settled on the tulips I bought her, to ease her aching existence.

In heaven, everything is fine.

Nothing was worth my time. I've got a week left? That's great. Why not six days? Five, even? Please, I thought, her love for me wavers and she's pecking my eyes out with pins and allegory... we lived that week in a methodical dance, stepping around each other systematically so as not to aggravate the other, and I barely spoke to her.

Her eyes were like a murky window in the rain: Make-up cascaded in silent torrents; she spent most of her time touching it up in the bathroom, only to come out, see me, and start crying all over again.
---

Defence hired out a grand little hall in the centre of town for our sending off. Sweeny, Hopkins and I wore the beret, the boots, the full kit, and I took the strings of my darling for one night only. I dominated the winds and took great care in letting all things roam and glide over full, luscious scenery. She was utterly abject, her eyes scrubbed clean, and in a new salmon pink frock I'd bought. I'd been to great lengths, calling and writing her girlfriends to find the right fit. In the afternoon I'd presented her with it, and she’d almost smiled as she took the lid off the box and held it up in the light. It was fine and floaty; she let the folds crush against her chest as she looped one arm around my waist, digging her head into my clavicle. She bit down, to prevent any tears or whimpers, and I stood strong.

At around eleven, when the speech was long past, and everybody's half-hearted celebrations concerning Hiroshima had swept away, and the wasted food was growing cold on china plates, and everybody was dancing, she paired off with Hopkins’ brother James.

The dance was inscrutable, indefinite. To look upon the mass as the only spectator from the bar was marvellous; visions of whirling, happy folk. It was tribal; me and mine were Godlike creatures come to save our people; and our people thanked us with a simple gift. The gift: this constant, spinning dance. Imagine for yourself: seventy or so brothers (blood), comrades (partner), family (cuzz) - impenetrable, unwaning, all things love through this pirouetting congregate. Yet, everything seemed over-analysed; the small band on stage found themselves questioning how they had caused it; the bartender paused, rag in glass, to watch, head tilted, to watch something so archaic; a microcosm of our everythings; a dance. A mating dance; bees courting in the hexagonal hive; our maths lay in the pattern of feet flying around each other, arms on waists, hands in hands, eyes to eyes, mouth to mouth -

My darling lover, loving another.

---

I was to slap her, at first. But the bartender threaded through my gaze a warning glance. No trouble, it signalled, you might be Superman where you come from, but this is my turf. Instead I headed for the cloakroom, where I couldn't find my coat. I sat on the steps outside for a minute or two, but it wasn't any good. I walked back home in the rain.

'Hey, honey? Where are you?'
'Nowhere.'
'What? Why did you leave like that? You left your coat. I've got it right -'
'Nothing. I'll be out in a minute.'
...
'Ok.'

I was sat on the edge of the bath. As I'd walked home, I'd run a hand across my face while the rain fell like knives. I remembered I'd forgotten to shave, and right now, it seemed like the most important thing in the world to do.

The razor sat in the palm of my left hand. I watched moonlight slide lazily across it like running water. Water, which runs with vehicular ramifications, pooling on this small, sharp bit of metal. Its point fastened onto a piece of light and wouldn't let go. Would it be painful, to let blood flow, over water? The incision: where would be best? Most practical? Stubble was forgotten.

The dress. That lovely salmon pink, imagine it crimson. Her first, with red, red vino spilling all over her. Blood. It is that which is our vital life juice, and I wondered: Had she gone back to his house? Did he court her in the past three hours? The coat: Was it a sign that she'd stayed? Her hesitation: Was she guilty? Did she think I knew something?

What was happening to me?

I heard the soft, sweet rustle of the dress being pushed to the floor, and lifted again with a squeak of cardboard on cardboard (eyes to eyes, mouth to mouth) as she folded the dress over her arm and stuffed it in all the shivering tissue paper. I pressed - blade still clutched in hand - my ear to the wall, and listened as she dressed in her nightgown. There was a painful shriek of wood sliding, and I walked out of the bathroom and into the bedroom.

---

'Honey?' She asked. There was a shuffling in the dark, and the wood retreated back; it was the drawer in her bedside cabinet. She turned to face me from in the side of the bed furthest from me. There was a faint amber glow from her lamp with the dying bulb, surrounding her with a Michelangelo aura.

Shaking thunder, and I dropped the blade.

'Look at your hand!'
I must have held it too tightly; there was a sharp incision across my life line. I bent to pick up that lovely sharp bit of metal again.
'What are you doing? Here, let me help.'
'Get away.'
'No, you're bleeding.'
'Stop it!'
And she crawled over to me, and she stroked my hair from the bed. I pushed her hand out of the way, leapt and rolled over her to the other side of the bed.
'What the hell are you doing?!'
I stood, holding the handle to the drawer of her bedside cabinet, and over the murky, sad quiet came the patter of blood dripping on the carpet. I watched it infuse with the fibres; looked up to find my former darling's face so close to mine.

'Stop this.'

I smacked her with the bloody fist holding my razor, threw it at her as she craned back on the bed.

'There you are! This is my worth, is it? What's in here, eh? What's in here?'

I was shouting now; skin flailing on my left hand where it had separated from the rest of my flesh. The babe squirmed below me, with her hands clawing uselessly on my belly and tears ruining her make-up, again.

I pulled the drawer open to find a diary and a gun. I took the gun in my good hand, and shot my wife in the face. I then turned the gun on myself, pressing the barrel against my temple, closing my eyes, pulling the trigger.

---

I walked out of the bathroom and into the bedroom, where I slid the blade into the drawer of my bedside cabinet, and dressed in my pyjamas. The wife and I didn't say a word as I lifted the covers, lay down and tried in vain to sleep.

Two hours later, when she had drifted off and I was watching patterns warping on the back of my eyelids, I gave up. I got my kit on, dropping a kiss on her shoulder as I silently bid goodbye to the bitch I would never see again.

---

People of the United States: Thirty minutes ago, a team of four dropped an atomic bomb on the prefecture of Nagasaki, Japan.

I'd suggested using radar; the cloud was impenetrable.

All went as planned.

fudge, we did it. fudge fudge fudge. No way.

I trust it is only a matter of time until the Japanese surrender;

It was heavy. The swooping elegance of an air-raid siren earlier had warned of our approach, but we still caught them off guard.

Has the moon always been so bright?

it is terrible that we must resort to such measures,

(A Japanese report on the bombing described Nagasaki as 'like a graveyard with not a tombstone standing.)

It was crushing. We faltered, and then rose with the loss of weight. Then, there was an awful, popping noise. Like a paper bag. The moon didn't waver.

but almost humbling at the same time,

I do love flying, I do love it,

that we should live through this dark period.

But there was never any hope for me.

I'd neglected my goggles, and had been scolded (not to mention scalded) for it, but that was nothing, to perfect, brilliant white. Effervescence combined with an ethereal efflorescence is phoenix-like; rebirth and conquer, my pupils strained almost inverse. The ground, the sky, that all around us, full with a rich purity which only gradually subsided; I basked in the delightful nonsense and meaninglessness which whirled around us, and for a full ten seconds, nothing could touch me. I slumped, drunk and heavy, in the caving aftermath.

It wasn't futile and terrible to me that slaughter should be fine; contrastingly, all power was firm in my hand, and this time I wasn't to throw it away. I barely remember refuelling, but it must have happened, sometime between our dropping the bomb and my - no, I shall give it more credence than that.

I was sat in the pilot's seat. Alone, loafing in still, peaceful solitude. Disaster was far, far away, consequences brushed faintly on my skin, but I did not heed them. I felt shockwaves and causation coursing through my ears in deep, earthy, tones, but that was to be expected. The cockpit was full of echoes of a different world I had only witnessed once; as I flew, I could feel gunfire rocking me. It could have been from an age before, or an age imagined, and I wouldn't have cared either way.

The target was nowhere in particular. I was nowhere in particular, and my aircraft was nothing more than an aircraft. Something connected me to current events, and instead of transporting me elsewhere, I felt fully immersed in reality.

The door jarred, but I didn't care.
The parachute caught, and I did.

The winds took my legs up as I struggled to free myself, and as I did so, the cord pulled and the thrust of the parachute pulled me from the plane. I was thrown against the wing; the ground was blank and hungry; the canopy was pinched on the door handle, and that is how I'm drifting now, free from gravity, yet wrapped in a temporary jail, or my temporary haven from which I watch my ascent from Earth and life. I can see myself, shrugging off the parachute to plunge into murky, cavernous depths. It's beautiful, up here. The moon is pregnant with power; she toils to send waves over, breaking on beaches. They snap in on themselves; I find myself watching something similar. The plane has crashed, I've lost sight of my body, and everything is utterly beautiful.