The Refusal of Silence

By Michael.J. Rowland

The Refusal of Silence (Erogements – book 2) is a novel in three parts.
It is a triptych of the same soul as seen in three of its incarnations.
Each portrait was written using different literary methods.

For the first portrait, 'Riptiles and Viverids', the author traveled to and lived in the country in which the story is set to better understand the people and their history.
An American Third World War draft dodger shelters in Vietnam and recalls his past lives as a soldier in both the Vietnam/American War and WW1.

For the second portrait, 'Pendleberry's Think-Cake' the author kept a dream diary over a period of 6 months, which he used to form the entirety of the story. You could say the story was 'written in his sleep'.
An underground faction take an aggressive, anti-government stance, despite the government being the most successful, fair and peaceful government in their history. The second incarnation of our protagonist, Pendleberry, is an artist member of the faction who fears he is being manipulated by some unknown malevolent force. He wishes to discover the origin of the messages he is inadvertently transmitting.

For the third and final portrait, 'The Refusal of Silence' the author, sequestered in his small apartment for a further 6 months, attempted to emulate the agoraphobic character of this particular incarnation.
These are letters written by the third incarnation; a man whose wife has gone missing on an exploratory space mission. He locks himself in his apartment in order to mirror her living conditions, and despite not knowing if she is receiving his messages or not he continues sending them.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Michael.J. Rowland
• Release date: Feb 22, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310504167

Michael.J. Rowland

Statement – The Painted NovelThe paintings I am working on at the moment are all part of an ongoing conceptual project to fit in with a Dadaist novels I am writing. Individual paintings are occasionally used as chapters of the novels.This form of writing is close to reaching a meditative dream state – recognising forms and images in the same detached way that the mind throws ideas into the maelstrom of ones sleep-thoughts.It helps to reveal oneself to oneself. Accepting chance and avoiding the need to ‘show off’ you can discover many things about not only yourself now, but yourself tomorrow/ next week / next year.I don’t write of things that have happened but of things which have not yet happened. The pen speeds itself to beat my thoughts to it. If we have time to think a thought, then it has already been rehearsed, analysed before we go to all the effort of writing it down; that way we can hide from ourselves.Within the writings of the Dada group one could often find scribbles / squiggly lines / and erratic changes of font. This all created a lovely syntax between the word as a representation of a thing or the word as a thing in itself (a picture).The purpose of painting certain chapters on canvas, as collages, is to produce in the reader (when reading the typed word) a true sense of colour in the text; a sense of urgency, a sense of abstraction, of life.“There is nothing to say – That is why there will never be an end to all the books that can be written.” E.M. CioranThe joy of writing is the thing. Inexplicable rallies of cajoling cadences buffeting the spinning, waking dream – The banshee howl of JOY JOY JOY in the midst of the most horrific nightmare; the joy in the pain; the light headed trip in the scream.

Book preview

The Refusal of Silence

Michael.J.Rowland

Copyright 2015 by Michael.J.Rowland

Cover design and art work by Michael.J.Rowland

The Refusal of Silence is a work of fiction. Names, characters and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead or events is purely coincidental.

For Mum and Dad

Table of Contents

Portrait 1 – Riptiles and Viverids

Portrait 2 – Pendleberry’s Think-Cake

Portrait 3 – The Refusal of Silence

The Refusal of Silence

PORTRAIT 1

Riptiles and Viverids

"And our school chum killed in a distant war

Is not surprised to see us at his door." Vladimir Nabakov - Pale Fire

1

The Rest

Deek weighed in at 12 stones, dried off and drained.

A vest-burnt lady arm. Skimming stones like an Army myth.

The boys looked out at the islands.

Vin Pearl and the triplets got to their knees.

Harley-luya!

Dreams of the distant mopeds.

As far as Boojum was concerned their war was over. A sting ray glance from a bashful brunette puts Deek out of commission and leaves them wondering where his senses lie. And senses do lie. Just ask the music hall Charlie bone. Senses do lie.

There leaks the sun. That patch of sand-gang ousted eucalyptus.

A tart taste. Good health such a waste.

Semtex complains about the attention. They'll all sting you if you ain't careful.

These soldiers is soldiers even in their swim swams, Boojum thinks. The girls make them so.

There are no childhood memories here.

A perfect dismissal of future and past.

The perfect soldier at last.

The Vietnamese

Bathing beauties

Come out at six oh one

To avoid the sun.

They's whiter than white cake.

That island's nestled behind that one.

You promised her a ring.

You don't make sense - I only wanna screw her.

You're lucky the sun's out and she ain't.

Dough boy!

All the wistful mothers.

Mothers at home.

Slums and small.

21 dollars a day twice a month.

She puts her clothes on back to front and is all the more bashful for it. Her manicured, eggy feet still on show.

VINPEARL

HOLLYWOO

Makes sense. It's Vietnam.

God bless America - My ‘Om sweet ‘Om.

Hap sings along to a little war ditty.

Not this war.

When the lights go on again - all over the world

When the boys are home again - all over the world

Rain or snow is all that falls from the sky

A kiss won't mean goodbye but hello to love.

2

Too far in-between.

Too far in-between he called it, and wanted to write his book about a stone. Stones. He hit the nail on all its head. Big fat hedgehoggy bonce. Didn't miss a spot and didn't even know it, despite 'knowing' it.

Boojum always loved him for that. But loving him for knowing was easier than 'knowing' what he knew.

The important thing was, they knew.

B and H loved the word.

The turn of phrase.

The act of writing.

A baseball fan keeping score cards of every game watched. Far more interested in the statistics than the game. One way of accepting life. Ignore it and record the effluvium of hearsay and/or seesay.

Then you get sick, and then you die. And in choosing to die, you make up for dismissing all those trees all that time.

Death being one better than writing another book about it.

Their books were in-jokes to themselves. Were the books their children these children would have tutted and rolled their eyes.

"Dad, you're embarrassing us.

Freud was a fraud.

Now take us to Euro Disney, you dicks."

If only they had put their money where their mouths were and chopped the tree down and mushed it into pulp and spread the sheet of it out like an abstract map of Real Gone veins and wrong directions.

Their faith in grammar was their downfall. One cannot trust a hippy who spends that much time making their hair just so.

There are far more important things at hand, like flaming ontology and underwater sea fairies. You don't even know. You don't even know.

You don't even know.

You can't mistake punk music for any other kind of music, but you can mistake a ponce for a Buddha.

More fool you.

3

More fool you.

Answering the open door fully erect to a nonplussed ageing clean freak. I bellow your pardon, they be rivers between youse and mes and you very should knock before you fore.

We literally sold your benefit, and when Boojum comes he's gonna hear all about it. He is at this time timed-out abroad, well bus, well, close, well Beatles, well shaving while she waits on the floors and tables and cat morons means like idiots but it's not a nice thing to say, even if it is just a cat. I'm not sure she gets it but Boojum surely wanted what he asked for or he wouldn't have asked right? This is far more her. In that twilight she looks older, but it's far more her. That rainbow light. The light streaking through the sky like an afterthought caught ahead of time so you sound smart. The walk is murder on his feet but not hers, and they're sweet, her feet, and he's worrying between pillow and canvas just how he should represent them toes and that teenage smile of hers.

John-Lennon-white but without a piano or a blind man to poke the piano with; shuffling about all water and Yoko, the maid has everything going for her in a gaff like this with waters like those. She took all the cans and constructed a pyramid with them, in the hall. The wife hid round the corner and waited for the tomb tomb of the door bang.

It never came so she opened the door herself and brother did that mother give the room a healthy upbringing.

She didn't even look up once.

Aliens or Egyptians, either way, shit happens.

I would still get the aliens to suck me.

She reminded him of someone.

Hold these a minute please, misses, I got a present for you.

Folding and folding and folding until he proved you can fold anything 8 times if you put your mind to it.

You can't take that with you, but it will never leave you.

Balls blue with domestos violence, Boojum gathered all he had in a little tote bag and went to war. That's why the feet, and that's why the murder. He'll be back before ya know it. How long can it take to clean a toilet? he asked the bar tender and You're a very good bar tender.

There came a damn and a blast and he gave them reprieve.

Write about it, she said.

More bloody revolution.

Bullets and bores.

Hotter now than he was then, in fields of napalm and annoying sticky gum on the ground.

Crouched down by the barricades made of rice paper, Boojum makes a promise to all who can hear him...

"Let not the children bite and weep or fear the day. I hereby promise that I will kill everyone or save everyone and nothing in-between.

I've changed my mind. I don't want to fight."

"Hardy boys cradling into battle and expanding minds as they pirouette across the killing fields where they'll give you a cow to shoot if you want. They don't want, but the time it takes them to get to HCMC, gives the homeless aliens enough time to construct dens by the river and tree houses in family's gardens and pillory and pout for a satisfactory amount of dough to see the wet season through.

Reading is over-rated, there is so little to know. For us to even attempt to expand the mind of one of these invader tourists, would be tantamount to gobbing in the Atlantic and claiming to have saved the world from thirsting to death. The aliens don't want to read what we have struggled to know over the millennia, all they want is bread sticks that will last until the main meal comes. They could delete this planet without a thought for all the family photographs that would be lost. Imagine all the photos that would be lost...not to mention the families."

Boojum will challenge them, yes, but he will not engage them.

So he will go into farming. A farmer's boy down on the farm. The village girls (and boys) will all fall for him; hookers, line-backers and singers, and he will lose years every hair cut. Can't come to no harm on a farm, and his wife gives to the Martians what the Martians want. Eggs mostly but sometimes theatre.

Now this is my kinda war, he says. I'm a Czech Hillbilly. I'm a Chillbilly.

His wife laughs at that. 90% of her job. Eggs and laughter.

The aliens are grateful not to be shot at. Who wouldn't be? And so a beautiful friendship develops between Boojum and the 'enemy'. Turns out they dig Banjos more than they dig land. Give them just enough for a brick house each then play them a tune and they are happy.

Who knew!? his wife says.

I knew, Boojum says.

They begin to breed Giant Radiolarians and before they know it they are the number one Radiolarian breeders in the galaxy. Radiolarians sell like hot cakes (which Boojum's wife also sells). Soon they are rich enough to get other people to do their work for them, the thought of which puzzles Boojum, so they carry on as they were.

I came across a Saigonese squatting on his hunches like a skinny frog just staring up up up at me and looking down down down on me. I swapped him one Radiolarian for three Viverids and he ran off into his two storey tin hut; up two flights of stairs to the roof he's eye height with me and he says something in Martian. He hasn't learnt any English in his time but has the Martian patois mastered. I tell him I don't understand and he understands that I probably don't understand because I'm speaking in a language he doesn't understand.

He runs back down the stairs, which is actually a ladder, and he pulls a Riptile from under his settee.

Riptiles and Viverids! holding it up to me with both hands. An offering.

Ahh.

The toast yields,

the harm homes,

the gut tremmels,

the street wakes,

a t for text, an m for motor, a c for cat, a d for dog, a c for child, a bottle for baby, a sea for seller, 'H' for horn, a b-b-b- bike, a scooter, a rooster, a door, a shutter, a shusher, a cutlery, a hoover, a car, a hammer hams and Boojum marvels at the beauty of their simple home on Starbeck.

A creative genius set by a timer. Boojum chops his left arm off in order to rid himself of such nonsense to spite his grace. Fortunately he is in the South and they got much better hospitals, and with the proper IVF treatment Valerie will be up and running after her own versions of ankle scratchers presently.

Hanoi cripple wrenchers beep their own particular brand of currency and never mind the polarity twixt police and robber, either way you'll get you dander flapped and the robber even more so.

I gretchen you don't know what these are for, Valerie says.

You're gretchen right, he says.

They're for peeling off your pyjamas when the weather gets too sticky.

Do you use 'em?

Cheeky.

Boojum didn't think the question was that cheeky and he didn't intend it to be cheeky, but now the cheekiness of it was out there and her naked, sweating body was all either of them could think about until Boojum poured his iced-tea down the front of his trousers and changed the subject back to the coup."

Them Cambodians got it bad.

So do you by the looks of it... Valerie purred, demured, moistly concurred.

10am was the time they usually had their army drill demonstrations. This was for the benefit of the sergeant and the females present; cooks and maids and wotnot. The lack of females in the squad was not a result of any form of sexual politics but was due to the fact that the females were that much smarter.

The women liked the sober pretence in the men's faces and the sergeant just liked the rhythm of the whole procedure. It looked nice to his trained eye and it made him proud when the timing of all present was perfect. He thought that the ladies watching appreciated the effort he put in to moulding this gang of ne'er do wells, but they just thought of him as a deluded, ageing dance choreographer. The ladies watched to feel superior.

4

Leg apples.

"Meincarnation every morning to bycicles and shop front shutters yawning and hotel generators boaring into the skin of the kitchen staff outside smoking their alimentation citations for abolishing slavery. Half blind drunk scooter pedlars hocking and hawking spit sunny umbrella issues from their freak finger nail gullets balking.

Dribbling ink heads sweeping the street corners and more noise and more recuperation, if you're a foreigner...

Then the kid across the street with the leg apples interrupts me and offers me this tale all about Boojum and the Giant Radiolarian.

Obladi and Oblada wrestled in the wet season until the dry season and then until the wet season again and then to the dry season and to the next wet season and they got tired and they looked up from the mud and filth they were in and Boojum and the Giant Radiolarian were standing over them and had been watching the whole time, and that is the story of Boojum and the Giant Radiolarian.

What's a Radiolarian? I asked.

Did you not hear a word of the story I just told you!? the kid said."

Cold bills blown out from the fat Asian TV made up of infomercials from couples-troubles grin fables so they don't catch a thing you say or a thing you crave because they don't listen. They're grinning. They never listen. It's a telly box, you fools. Boojum woulda gone scientific if the pictures had been better, only the drawer had a pencil up his butt and came off all jungly. School geek. Like a guide who would only show you the trees from a distance but there's no way on earth the fecker would climb you up a baobab, central style.

Just that one. The one with the monkey carrying the Buddha.

No fucking way, man. No fucking way.

Robots certainly would make for the best pupils.

One Plateau.

How quickly it has all passed.

A 5 year plan should make you feel as comfortable as possible with your present situation. A 5 year plan which makes you wish your time away is a bad 5 year plan.

In religious matters only experience counts. The future and the past are illustrations of the holy spirit. We, as we stand, are that which is illustrated.

A painted illustration is as much a text as text is an illustration. Words being symbols which represent the thing as much as the illustration attempts to represent a thing, when in actual fact we have nothing more than marks on a page. Memory triggers.

C and an O and a W and an S. The stories we tell ourselves.

Whoosh.

Exercise: Paint something you have never seen before.

Conspiratorially yours,

Boojum.

XXX

629th plateau.

The rumination of images digested and spit up. Gallerium Ruminarium.

A 'people' apartheid.

We can only eat our own vomit, and that at a push.

His sweet tooth from his parents.

His bed-head from his bed.

5

The disturbing peace.

Remove anyone from their natural habitat and most will adapt.

Some will grow, some will remain as they were,

and some will fester.

Boojum moved from his natural habitat and did none of those things.

Born, living, dead,

all at the same time.

I moved to a town that lost a war, and they seem to be doing okay.

Boojum.

I told often the story often told the story I often was told and oh how I laughed at the clarity I felt under the flight path feel of the final definition.

All taproots.

Gold probation tongues let loose at the thought of a better living than the one they are paying for.

So don't pay.

The Zen Plaza out of their price range.

The children in the park showing far more vigour than an angel should reveal. A stolen page from the Dead Sea scrolls. They bop and giggle to their teacher emphatically, enjoying the silliness of it all. The importance of it all. Look once and your hooked; look twice and you fucked up for looking away in the first place; look three times to recapture the first look and you're digging yourself into one god-awful life of complaint.

I never really found myself.

Oh Jesus, oh Jesus, oh Jesus, shut up!

You never really cried did you?

I cried once, but I was embarrassed by the result. I wanted everyone to go away.

To cry for the soldiers who gave all their luck to me.

And how I don't deserve it.

And how I tell myself every day, 'I will do something to deserve this luck.'"

Boojum would cry, but crying must be kept for the luckless.

An Asian song translated into smiles alone.

Boojum skimmed through the park like a conker. One plunk and a slow dive.

'I dreamed you told me you had decided to kill yourself and you walked into the river and...I don't know the word for when you go under the water to kill yourself.'

'Drown.'

'And you drowned. And I was really sad. I am glad you didn't drown.'

'Thank you.'

'Thank you.'

Happy music transcends language barriers and international conflicts. Happy music cannot be misinterpreted. Happy music can only be happy music.

Boojum purchases a banjo.

Vietnam was a good choice.

.... there must be some other notebook. One which is so secret that even the pedlars on the beach never grasp the tiresome dullness of a salesman's words and their damage.

Shush.

The moon un-alike and mind-blatt

of the full formed day in and of every individual

all at the same time objectively felt subjectively.

The bus man or woman will point you to a seat whether you want to sit or not

and the locals will stare

and scrunch their sun burned toes into the seat

opposite and crouch on the pavement opposite

and curl up like cats on their mopeds in a deep 'Nam slumber staring at you even with their eyes closed.

They offer cookies and choco pie and bottles of water to their gods in the temples and the gods are thinking 'No, no, no, this we made for you! You got it all wrong.'

"And the monks are using i-pads

and i-phones

and mp3 players they hide under their robe and smile because they know. And they know we know,

or at least we could know we knew if we only let down our guard for 5 seconds."

The side saddle girls

and peaceful peeping

traffic slipping unxiously through

the gridded vein.

"I'm Chevy Chase holding up a painting I did of a tree. The tree is small and hanging from the chin of a large balloon-head. Mine. Fuck the ego. Scrap the self.

Scrap with the self.

Burn the tree.

The hierarchical arboretum criterium delirium.

The girl over the way screams piercing temple screams instead of talks, and the parents scream piercing talks instead of works. They beat piercing girl and brother shouts thundering torture at beat girl. The tree is small because I'm not very good at trees and Chevy Chase is taller than everyone else and so am I. And Australians shout piercing numbers instead of translating in the alleyway and Sunday begins with a tumour and a penchant for drama streams, cuddles and coffee cup critiques.

Keep the tree small as possible and infinite as possible.

A will to yoga, Czech and chilled baubles. Lara wonders what the rainy season will be like.

Every time the girl cries, Boojum thinks of the chicken/baby on the bus in the last episode of M.A.S.H

Every time the morning comes Boojum thinks of himself and a wife in a hotel in Saigon.

Every time a bell rings a flag rises red.

A star explodes.

A heeby jeebies.

A nightingale buys a square.

A knight dies a day a does.

Get on the back of this one, Zed, we're heading to Mars."

The warm a vice a pie.

A tooth the trick the fall.

Boojum memorizes the sounds of those and buries them. He tucks them away in a suitcase in a cupboard close to the package of a large elderly silver haired gentleman in a gray suit. He is so worried the man will find out what is in the suitcase. Boojum has forgotten what is in the case himself but knows it's bad.

Murder? It must have been an accident. A long long time ago. It is clearly not safe enough. Not as safe as I thought it would be. The secret will be revealed. He is on to me. Ever since the lunch we had together. I shouldn't have been so candid. I shouldn't have considered the money to be made.

The suitcase must be a blocked memory. A blocked idea. A lie he tells to himself. About what?

I believe in what we are doing. In what I do. But I am lazy. A scream waiting in a cupboard. DO SOMETHING!

The suitcase is everybody else.

I need to hide it better.

INDUCTION TWAFF. An induction twaff.

Avoid work which is a means to the means to the end. Start at the end and stay there.

Twiff.

The motive of Boojum's art: to teach by example.

Mr Thuy.

Paint what you see. Write what you know. Sing what you love. Paint what you can. Write what you can. Sing what you can. Paint what you sing. Dance and sing.

Twoof.

I would like the truth of my art to hover around itself like a happy spirit.

Hic...

I can pass on a smile. Depth of spirit need go no deeper than that. I cannot teach or show 'depth'. Isn't it depth that makes one look at art in the first place?

To let enlightenment grow old gracefully. Motive No.2

Toof.

To be God and to recognise and revel in one’s good works where and when one can.

Ba ba ba.

There is no duty to be fulfilled.

Boojum thunk.

Perhaps one of the things we 'all' feel subjectively is an innate dislike of others. Everyone has thoughts which if spoken out loud would cause offense, and so we struggle to silence ourselves and feel instead a love, or 'sensitivity' towards others.

Selah.

To be 'good' to one another would not be such a complicated affair if we had a natural bent to bond with everyone. From adolescence we are like antibodies that would attack anything which invades our personal space. We learn to accept others, although sulkily, through social mores impressed upon us by our guardians. If we do bond it is because we have a common enemy. Hunger and Pain and Teachers are three such enemies.

Selah.

Love thyself and you must, of necessity, love your neighbour.

Twiff.

To paint the obvious. No pregnant thought. A reminder of the things one knows. A complimentary signifier of the viewer's own genius.

Hibbidy Dibbidies.

The ideas which cause us anxiety are caused by sensations which have been mismanaged.

Constantine, push 1.

Carradine, push 2.

Evergreen, push 3.

Elvira, push push push.

Get mad again.

Hectares of relapse since my quiet sojourn. You were there and you were there. Hours of hipsters dead from their heroes, collapsed engineers open for more of the toxic purple people juice I abandoned when the sixties was still the forties and to be classy was to be truly human.

You are my age - we are here aren't we?

Still thinking big thoughts. The same thoughts.

6

But not Valerie.

The dead don't waste their prenups on cash and Vassago, they warm up their hides at the swing doors of hell and bask in the light of the winged ones. Cradled in the arms of his wife as he wakes he releases himself, takes a hammer of his own and makes bang bang at the door. Maid No.2 lets him into the corridor where he lays prostrate for what seems like a lunchtime and then up on all fours he makes do do on the landing. Prayer time over.

Maid No.2 cleans up after him and wreaks havoc on the paymaster general; the beaverstruck gobshite who liberated the free-ones.

I ain't no hammer, and I ain't no wastrel, you got more than enough outta me already, let me back to my Boojum.

Your Boojum has gone to war, my dear. Your Boojum has gone to war. You're Boojum has gone to war, my dear and won't never come back no more.

Boojum was busy with a hack saw at his right leg when the telegram arrived.

Stop. Stop.

Grandiloquent the words she used, even from that distance, and deep-seated the feelings she doodled to make the letter better.

'Google' instead of Gargle, 'Parcipitate' instead of Participate and so on and so forth and he's beleaguered by the promises she makes and humbled by the time it takes for him to get through just one sodding sentence what with the bombs and the rain and the noises of the planes and the helicopter blades and all the bitey monkeys.

I will reply to this, says he, when the yard arm hits the firestone and the whisky renders me dragon-like. I will cockspew flames about this encampment and talk incessantly of home.

Vietnam War songs or Second World War songs?

Second World War.

Bikinis or nighties?

Nighties.

Birds or Bitches?

Birds.

And if you live, Boojum....If you...put down the saw. Boojum, if you live, what will be the first thing you do when you get home?

I will sleep for a week and then I will go to the pub and talk incessantly of war.

The only promotion this side of the ocean is a bullet in the guts and a dearth of sun lotion. She pulled and she pulled and her Dada just whined, give me time, give me time and who knows who will be dead at the end of your line.

Line's dead, Dad.

Grown ups the size of pin-ups pinned to the pavement in postular zit scrubs. Shoom shoom the metals they send. Sweep sweep the The. Mend to modular beats in me ears gone daffy with dulux and corrosive suspicion shards.

I'd be glad of a moment or two, and you just jump back on the bus when you're done, hon'.

DNS tam tam tam tam.

Afraid of holding on to the bike taxi too tight in case he thinks I'm trying a 'reacharound'. Another path to the same same sights. A happy ending, dizzying heights. You and me Valerie, too heavy for his hairdryer bust a tube on the cream-fed highway, night-style, emophobe.

If you dangle your legs there and I rest mine on here and he fucks up up there, it don't matter neither way. One day we will look back on this and laugh. Until then you should use soap more and shower at least three times a day. Trench rot is no stroll in the park but walking in the park is, and I'm telling you, you ain't gonna do that with no trench-goddamn-foot.

My batman hands me his spare helmet, the one the thief left behind when he took batman's other, and we head to the tunnels, but quiet like so the journalists don't hear. I'm afraid that if they pick up on our goings on they might try to describe it with words I didn't approve.

My signature alongside every single syllable or you leave us the hell alone.

7

In the tunnels there be Viverids.

They sayed it would be difficult to find but he just turned left after about one hour and then went forward for about an hour more and then we were there. So it was not difficult like they sayed it would be, it was easy.

But could we find any Viverids? Could we fuck.

8

Back at the batcave.

They made a book about our trip.

Boojum looked up from his franzipan crochet bucket.

They did what?

They made a book about us going to the tunnels.

But nothing happened.

That's the best part according to them.

It takes all sorts.

My Vietnamese is pretty rusty but it sounded like they were trying to teach the horses to ride the men. The sergeant was all up my ass about that, and he said to me, You gotta be shitting me, BJ, who the fuck would do that?

The Vietnamese, Boojum told him.

It sounds to me, the sergeant said, like the Vietnamese are learning how to ride horses.

Well that could be the case, sir.

So what the Sam Hill do we got a translator for, boy, if I do all the goddamn work?

And the most extraordinary thing happened. Boojum remembered something Valerie told him one afternoon when they were shopping in the city centre. Boojum, there are two types of people in the world, and putting one finger on her lips he shushed her, grateful for the information.

Beats me, sergeant, he said, and went back to knitting everyone a corporal intermediary who they could call on to deal with that kind of thing from there on in.

9

Three kinds of people.

If there are three kinds of people then there is only one kind of person and that's the one in the middle trying to explain the sameness of the other two types, which makes one big same one.

Paying attention to a limited few has not benefited any of us one iota, gunner No.1 says. There are roughly 7 billion types of person. This way it all gets that much clearer. This way it is much more difficult to misunderstand one's position in the world. Because, boys, I am slowly beginning to suspect that I am not supposed to be a sniper.

That and a group hug leads us into the 6th tenth of the new millennium, crawling on each others hands and knees, looking for the light. R&R and I like this fool's cap. I don't wear it if I'm wearing shorts, but if I'm in smart trousers and I've got a clean shirt on it looks okay. Valerie does a runner and we spend 8 months locked in a heavenly embrace. I pamper the binoculars while she pampers the tripod. Two people - one event. Always one event. Close up.

What we got out of it I could not say because during that whole period we didn't utter one word to each other. We didn't give the events anything resembling a label and so the moments bleed like soft water colours into the present giving a dream-sheen to the lines created by the architect's pens we yield and the sooth you say and the grail we found which we filled with liquid and sometimes drank but sometimes used for cooling ourselves at every parallel reached and every law breached.

One - we aimed high

Two - we shared everything

Three - we made love

Four - we had it out with the Riptiles and Viverids all hours of the day and even tried yoga for a spell. Salsa over my dead body. Valerie sleeping. Paint on her's.

We eloped after a fashion. But only after everyone saw us married.

Then Boojum left a bus ticket in his black shirt pocket on wash day and had to leave for war.

The Saigon days do all blend into one till you're fighting. Or till they put you to work.

They don't have the word 'logic'.

I'm not sure they use clocks either.

No words over one syllable.

No discipline without they have dollar.

Even then.

The roosters crow all day.

So do the mothers.

The women all seem temporary.

The dogs and the cats and the geckos use only one syllable at a time.

The rats seem pernament.

I love it when she says it like that. Pernament.

Note: Do not make a soldier (or a dame) feel bad about doing something bad, he or she will make you feel worse. Instead, use chastisement like a flippant (and humorous when possible) counter three or four weeks after aforementioned 'bad behaviour', and then let it go.

Boojum had told his sergeant too much.

But the dogs! Those fucking dogs! They stopped at about 5am. I can still hear them, serge'. That was six hours nonstop barking at nothing, serge'. There was no one out there, serge'. I would rather we were ambushed than keep those fucking dogs. And I know you like dogs, sir but there is a time and a place for puppy worship and it ain't during no war. I will put a bullet into each of their tiny, furry, empty heads if you don't reassign them back to grandma and grandpa on the ol' family homestead in the middle of pigfuck Pennsylvania immediately. I will sell them to the enemy for food!

That's it, boy! The sergeant affected a sergeant roar. Comes naturally to some but Semtex kinda hoks it.

You are on recon' for two goddamn weeks.

Boojum spent two weeks on his belly and chin in the mud and the water and the lizards and shit wondering where everything went wrong. The political and moral world like a dodgy two dimensional pre-renaissance painting of something that never existed. Boojum knew that it was exactly this type of thinking that had put him neck deep into the dangerous swamps of South Vietnam, scouting for dangerous people who would do horrible things to him if he was discovered. Just like the dogs, painting and poetry had no place in a war.

Once, on movements, Boojum had told the guys how the Ho Chi Minh trail was like an Escher sketch. First he had to spell the word to them because they couldn't understand what he had just said and then when he was explaining what an Escher drawing was like, one of the boys shouted, WHOSE SIDE ARE YOU ON!?

Rather than put the dogs down, Semtex would have me tortured and killed.

Boojum felt guilty when the dog patrols came to the end of their service and were euthanized by reluctant South Vietnamese soldiers.

The dogs were 'equipment' that needed to be discarded.

Semtex would have me tortured and killed.

The dogs had had no choice. Boojum had had a choice. Boojum's fourth dimension came too late to