Writing stamina exercise i am too lazy to proofread right now.
On ainsley, and danny, and other things. mind the slurs. also weird formatting sorry its really intended for actual pages.
It’s getting dark, just barely getting dark, you could be forgiven for just assuming it’s overcast if you didn’t have a watch.
She does have a watch, but something has gone wrong inside it, some mote of dust jammed some tiny gear and now it won’t tick. It was a gift from her mother, the kind you nearly go through with returning. Ainsley had been able to ignore the watch jamming for a while, too preoccupied with other more important issues, all life and death in her mind. There were big glossy wall clocks everywhere, all ticking in strict military time, barring the one by the restroom in the rec hall. That thing ran two minutes fast, but nobody is in a hurry to fix a fast clock.
It encourages punctuality, and when someone tells you that you’re two minutes early you can look down at your fast watch, incredulously declare that you sure are glad it wasn't two minutes behind. Though the misalignment was bound to make someone with a control issue and an ear to bend irritated eventually. One day it would be back to normal, and everyone accustomed to its fastness would be thrown off by the sudden unannounced change.
Her watch was stuck at 2:35 AM, it had died in its sleep. Really a shame for such an expensive thing, so much so that she had gotten halfway through opening the door of the shop with the name on the sweet little bag it came in before she stopped and thought about it. About how her mother didn’t need to go to an establishment with lovely embossed thick paper gift bags to buy her a watch she really shouldn’t have. That one from a pawn, or an ugly toothless little foreign man on the street, or something of her fathers that lived at the back of a drawer all would have done the job just fine. That’s all you need a watch for, one job! tell time.
Gorchakov has a nice watch, it still works. She eyed it as it ticked seamlessly just the other day, puttering along like a sports car. The Cadillac Eldorado of watches. Gorgeous understated face on a brushed finish gold-filled saucer-like body, the numbers glowed radium green in the dark, even in overcast weather they had a hollow quality to them. It was a gift from his wife, which Ainsley is coming to understand that every thing the Mr. Gorchakov wears that she would ever want to mug him at gunpoint for was a gift from that same, thoughtful and tasteful, wife. It’s the kind of watch you would mug someone for. Not even to pawn, just to have.
Mr. Gorchakov wouldn’t drive an Eldorado. He doesn’t, Ainsley had asked when they got to the point of their relationship where you launch random questions to try to glean some semblance of an understanding of the silhouette of the person you gaze across the canyon at.
Her mother had bought her a nice watch, because to be engaged in serious business it helps to have a watch that people like to eye. It is not ideal to wear anything that would make any of your compatriots want to rob you.
He drives a Porsche 911 Lux.
When she thought of how her mother had gone out of her way to find her a watch, paid out of her budget to get a nice watch in a nice box, in a fancy paper bag with ribbon handles, she didn’t push open the door. In fact, she turned around and went back to her car (her mother’s car) and opened the box in the little bag, put on and wound the watch, and hasn’t taken it off since except to shower and do dishes.
It’s green, the Porsche.
She hadn’t had time to dwell on the watch. Thinking she’d take it to be fixed when she met San Francisco again. Looking at it now, in the dying light its numbers are woefully dark. She feels a deep, implacable shame, burning a glowing green hole in her gut, as if she had jammed the springs herself in an act of petulant vandalism. She didn’t love it enough, perhaps that's why it died in its sleep.
It's fast. He lisps around a cigarette, imminently lit. It’s two minutes fast.
She’s long since exhausted every other conversation topic with him, they've both grown keenly aware of the fact that they have nothing else to talk about, and they won't until one of them goes to the mainland, or receives a phone call, maybe a letter. Asking about a watch, maybe.
It’s balmy, twilight humidity swelling, pooling under his fatigues. Uphill from some milling figures, short, fat, white males, something like that. That’s what good binocs were for, what man cannot make out under cover of dusk from 300 yards off.
Private Green is unhappy, up on his hill, because he is uncomfortable.
He has become intimately familiar with all possible forms of discomfort, of the physical and otherwise.
Tell the nice doctor where it hurts.
A stomachache presented simply provides no path to resolution. The belly spans from sternum to asshole, there’s a lot of blood and guts packed in there, all ready to slide out and hit the concrete slab you stand and sweat like a pig on.
Show the nice doctor where it hurts.
He would argue that he has greater bodily awareness than the average man. To the degree where he can track his organs shifting inside him. Acidity, a sour stomach could be neutralized by water, he doesn’t drink enough sometimes, going days just licking the hard water from the shower off his lips before realizing he could just pour a cup of it to drink at dinner. All coffee and tomato paste burns you inside, up where your stomach actually sits, nearly in your chest.
Bloat is bloat, reflux the same, Danny doesn’t cramp up like some of the other guys. That’s good, he worries about appendicitis. Subsequent sepsis killing a guy he knew from somewhere, somehow, jersey or wherever.
Imagine dying from appendicitis, at 18, probably before you ever tried anal. What a life.
Right now he’s bloated, whatever has decided to ferment in his stomach, the real one, making his breath hot. If he really cried about it to Jefferies he’d probably get portioned out some pepto bismol and sent to bed. Danny doesn’t want to go to bed, because his bed right now is a cot.
Being that they weren’t in fucking basic, and that they get beat like dogs, and shit on, and left out in the elements. He had assumed he could get away with an ugly bunk. So had Quincy and that stupid ginger faggot he forgot the name of, but Colonel Masters didn’t like watching anyone but him squirm, and thats all danny wants to think about that. It makes him uncomfortable.
It’s roughly 18:00, so he needs to move. In the fifteen minutes he spent at the jeep barn he was meant to patrol it, point a flashlight in all the dusty corners. His flashlight is dead, and he’s not a security guard, he’s a fucking American soldier.
There’s another kind of discomfort, milder on your stomach than most other ailments of the belly, little bit tougher on the head. He thinks about a pink bismuth salve, coating his brain with it, in a big syringe with a needle like a straw. Showing the doctor where it hurts. Some guys are so afraid of reliving their first examination that they sit and rot for days.
The guy died from sepsis in Khe Sanh. Not New Jersey, he wouldn’t see anyone in the hospital in Jersey after Nonna went. He wouldn’t see anyone in the hospitals in Chicago, cuz if he walked into one of those they wouldn’t let him out. Danny meanders away from the barn, out into the hot wet night. Mostly because he looked like he was stealing, all skinny and covered in pockets. The orderlies and paramedics didn’t know he didn’t like to steal, sneak around and shove needles in his jacket. They didn’t know he was more of a mugger, that he had a little mauser he couldn’t afford ammo for shoved between his belt and his gut, that he liked to point it at guys heads and watch them go to jelly. The money was a bonus, though at the time he didn’t see it as legal tender with great potential energy, a handful of cash became a ticket to ride. It was as worthless at the grocers as an arcade token off of coney island.
He trots down the driveway, looping around the long way to his next assignment, which is his last for tonight. Danny has to decide what to do with his free time now. The fat white American males have wandered off too, probably to go drink reasonably and go to bed at a normal time. He thinks he wants to lie down for a while, but the issue of the cot continues to prod at him with a hot iron. That’s the kind of discomfort that's harder on the mind than the body. The dying light casts everything in a dusty blue, even his own hands grow paler, then darker in the din. Other guys wouldn’t even think about going anywhere without a flashlight, half of them afraid of the dark now, like there’s slopes running around in fucking Alaska. You cannot reason with a scared G.I. in the dark, there's so much you both don’t know. Danny is more afraid to ask for a new battery than he is to walk out into the yawning night. Admit you don’t have one? Admit that yours died? And when he has that information about you what will he do with it? What will he make you do? What is danny willing to do for a battery, blowjob, klondike bar, mosquito net, hit, a good nights sleep, pepto-fuck-bismol-christ, whatever? He’d rather get reamed on a bayonet. In the dark.
He feels it, physically, turn his stomach over. Whipping himself hot and red for no reason at all in anticipation of humiliation that is not yet fated to grace him. Yet! Really, it did feel good to point a pistol up through a guy’s jaw, and slur, pretending to be inebriated, that he betterfucking get his goddamnwallet out of his pocket and pay him, Danny, for all his hard work. To smile, cheese through grinding teeth, laugh a little, it is a game after all. The gun isn’t loaded, it never is. Though, if his bluff was ever called, Danny had a six inch switchblade in his sock, the kind with a rose inlaid on its handle. They tended to flip out, try to calm him down, and when that didn’t work, cry.
One time, and he told Kinsley this story, who thought it was funny, Danny really was high. His slurring and teeth grinding was authentic, and when the guy started to cry, a little black guy in a faggy yellow shirt, Danny started crying too.
Mr. G didn’t like that story, he didn’t like hearing about Chicago, his face went all tight when Danny said “faggy” and “yellah.” He kicks a porous rock down the road. When he said that, that was sad, too. It was maybe because G didn’t want to hear about him crying, which is embarrassing.
Now, it was too dark. The bulb of the lamplight whining above her pings and flickers, washing the blue ground with lemon yellow. Each paved road was set up with enormous floodlights on soaring black necks, but the generators that powered them were loud enough to feel and so none were installed anywhere near anyone trying to sleep. Every other woman traveled in packs, ran and shrank from the night. Ainsley thinks twice before stepping out of the ring of light, her flashlight weighs at least two kilos, her briefcase is steel. All is well, and she is not afraid of the dark.
You wanna hear something real funny? He had said it low and venomous, to put his hackles up. He had to be honest, he liked him better in a fear sweat, all bloodless and dilated.
I could have afforded to load the damn thing.
What? He bears down hard on the H, it barely sounds like a word at all.
The mauser, the mauser I stole from the french guy who left it on a booth seat in a sticky bar in Brooklyn. Danny keeps going until his face changes, the one I told you I liked to mug people with.
I don’t think that’s funny.
I could have bought ammo for it, how many times I had to wrestle what I’m owed for out of some stinkin’ fence. A loaded gun would have been a blessing, man.
The coin of cold white light with the faded ring at the center, warped by the wave of the glass, behind which a hot bulb sits. You have to point it out in front of you, lighting your next three steps while your feet are always dark. Ainsley doesn’t mind the dark, so long as it’s a nice temperature and she has something in her hand, a beer bottle, maybe a brick if it was dire enough. Nobody bothers her, though, because they can’t get close enough in the low light to figure out that she isn’t a man. She thought, initially and stupidly, that being on a military base and all wouldn’t be so dire when the sun went down. Especially for how long the sun is down sometimes.
I imagine it was difficult to get you to spend a dime on anything that wasn’t heroin, Daniel.
I wrote away for it twice, out of a catalogue. Twice, I filled out the form and the money, and I never sent either of them.
Because you couldn’t sit on cash for more than two hours, right?
Because, and he points at Gorchakov from across the room, empty except for his body, which is also empty. Because I knew if I loaded that gun, I’d end up killing a man. It made it too fucking easy for me to kill some yellow shirted faggot just because I could, because he was already ready for me to do it.
There is a long, ringing, pause. The empty room resonates.
It isn’t a long walk, and nobody has any reason to loiter outside in this weather, wet and hot. Ainsley begins to feel uncomfortable, shirt sticking to and irritating her sweat slicked back. Some unknown organ in her gut starts to ache. Something she would have to sleep on to decide if it was important enough to worry about. She would hate to be sick out here, trapped in her apartment for fear of the dark.
There is someone with a flashlight out here. Someone small. Without thinking about how or why, Danny pushes through the nighttime.
Ainsley can’t help but go cold and prickly when her flashlight passes over some big, clay stained american combat boots. He yelps when she points it directly in his fat, toothy face. The hand that shields his face casts everything past his nose in shadow, so much darker for it’s contrast to the gleam of sweat and stained enamel.
Good evening, Private. He just laughs, and doesn’t reply, shouldering past her and disappearing into the dark, Ainsley hears him stumble, but doesn’t turn her flashlight around, he’d have to readjust to the dark. That was what she was worried about, skulking american dog-men without flashlights on paths designed for young intelligent women who wear skirts and tasteful kitten heels to follow to their homes. Hence the caution, out of habit, she checks her watch. Having to point her flashlight down, concentrate the beam onto one point, finally lighting up her own feet. It still reads 2:35 AM.
Ooh, he finally coos. Aren’t you such a big, scary, man?
Without the flirtatious affect that would make the words funny to watch come out of his mouth they just hit the ground, dead.