The Hunters

by James Salter

He felt both cleanliness and security, standing beneath the water, things that traveling deprived one of the soonest.

It had gone quickly though, like the year of a first love, the delirious April suddenly a cool November. It had been a life like being at school, regulated and protected. There had been the moments of danger that could not be looked at too closely, and all the rest had been a swift passage of days.

He would sometimes recall, as if it had happened to another person, the compulsion to press close to death, to feel the purity that followed. He had always been respectful of the inner conquests of men and the rarefied, ascetic world they occurred in. He had traveled that world for a while, accomplishing he was not sure what, unless it was that he had learned a little of silence and perhaps devotion. Friends on the outside were always asking why he stayed in, or telling him he was wasting himself. He had never been able to give an answer.

He had reached the point, too, where a sense of lost time weighed on him. There was a constant counting of tomorrows he had once been so prodigal with. And he found himself thinking too much of unfortunate things. He was frequently conscious of not wanting to die. That was not the same as wanting to live. It was a black disease, a fixation that could ultimately corrode the soul.

“But we’ve had the briefing,” Hunter suggested. “They’ll scrub it, and we’ll brief again,” Daughters said. “It’s all taken into consideration.” “What do you mean?” “It’s a hundred missions or a thousand briefings, whichever you get first.”

Perhaps it was true that through defeat men were made, and that victors actually lost, with every triumph, the vital strength that found exercise only in recovering strength. Perhaps the spirit grew greater in achieving the understanding that was first confused and then exquisitely clear after having lost. But that was, Cleve thought, like saying it was strengthening to be poor. It wasn’t, he was sure. It was sapping. It was like having a leech’s mouth on your breast, forever draining, so that everything had to be sacrificed for nothing more than sustaining the burden of flesh.

If he did have a failing, it was excessive lucidity, which can be the same as blindness.