Beacon 23

by Hugh Howey

NASA advises not spending too much time around the GWB, because it does funny things to your head. Which is another way of saying it gives you a nice mellow. But what do they expect us to do when they post us two years at a time out here in the middle of nowhere? I doubt I’m the only one who sits with my back to the machine, letting it soothe my head like a straight-up whiskey while I gaze out at the dull gray stones of the asteroid field that makes an awful mess of astral navigation.

This is the thing about being a hero: It’s all about when you get your picture taken.

I think of war, where some lives are lost in order to save others. Where even eradication is a thing we’ll consider. Where the greatest evils become the greater goods.

I wouldn’t wish this on anyone, much as I crave the company, much as I wish I didn’t feel so alone. It’s a selfish craving, desiring a partner in misery. The brotherhood of war was a lot like this. You didn’t want your squadmates to be there, suffering with you, but you couldn’t have made it through without them. You wanted them home as badly as they wanted to be home, but only if you all got to go at once.

I think of my buddies who checked out via hand grenade versus those who died from MRSA back in the VA. We barely notice the latter. They’re statistics. Go quietly, and you’re a number. Go in spectacular fashion, and you’re a name.

Fucking NASA. In a horror movie, when everyone is hugging their shins and shouting for the main character to turn and run, or crawl under the bed, or call the cops, or grab a gun, NASA would be the dude in the back shouting, “Go see what made that noise! And take a flashlight!”

I’m a chipper guy, once you get to know the raw, dark dread and petrified fear that lurks in my breast and that I battle with every waking moment and that sometimes has me sobbing into my palms when no one is around and makes it really hard to be in crowds or to stand any loud sounds and has me thinking I’ll probably never be in a functional relationship again, platonic or otherwise. Once you get that, you have to say to yourself, “Hey, why’s this guy so damn happy all the time?”

I debate whether or not to hold my breath. Is the massive, wheezing inhalation that follows worse than all the small little puffing breaths I might take instead? (I often debated this when a squad mate would lay a fart with a howl of laughter. Breathe normal? Or put it off and then risk sucking that fart so deep into your lungs that it stays there forever, little fart cells melding way inside the core of you?)

I laugh. I laugh hard. It’s the first time I’ve laughed in so long that all my emotional triggers, which have only known sobbing, mix some tears in with the laughter.

I pause and think back to that day. To that old man. His beaming face. The pride he had in the injured soldier his army had made. “And what did you ask for?” Rocky said. “I told him I wanted to be alone.” I remember the old man’s smile fading, how the scars across his lips came back together, which let me know that he hadn’t been smiling when whatever caused those scars happened to him.

They say bad things come in threes, but I don’t think that’s true. I think bad things keep right on coming. They don’t stop. They’ll never stop. It’s just too depressing to keep counting, so we start over after the third bad thing. We hold our breath. We wait. We hope the universe will wait with us.

Strange the lengths I’ll go to in order to keep people away from me, considering how lonely I feel most of the time. I guess that’s the strange torment I suffer: dying for company, for someone to talk to, but it’s never the right someone who shows. And an unwelcome presence is far worse than miserable silence.

For some reason, I’ve always felt the urge to go out of my way for those who ask for the least, rather than those who ask the loudest.

Sometimes you want the good guys to get their man. Sometimes you can’t tell who the good guys are.

When we’re young, every imaginary battle ends with heroics. Finales come with a bang. Then you get older, and you see that life ends in wrinkles and whimpers.

“I’m the hero because I checked out.” “That’s exactly right,” Scarlett says. “The problem is, you didn’t take the rest of us with you.”

I remember wearing my fatigues and boarding commercial ships to get back to my company from R&R, how people would thank me and pat me on the back and how good it felt to board a plane before first class. Respect. Only because they had no idea what I did out there. If they did, they would’ve been clutching their children, not sending them over to thank me.

I didn’t hate what we did so much as hate the need for it all. No one should applaud this. We should bow our heads not in thanks but in sadness.

Maybe this is the ideal remedy for depression: a gun that can read your mind and is forever pointed at your head. Gives you some good practice in bottling up those dark wishes.

But this is progress, I think, to realize I’m going a bit mad. The dangerous phase is when that’s happening and you can’t see it. When you think you’re sane, so the crazy is all invisible.

Fire that boy out, hope you hit something. If he gets three before he goes home in his own bag, then the numbers look good. That father gets his medal. No one else to wear it. Goes in a frame above the mantel, and on holidays glasses are raised. First you raise the kids, and then you raise a toast.

You die a little inside every time you have joyless sex. Neurons prune back. The good in there withers. And some things never grow back.

“I’m sorry.” Two words that I used to choke on when I was younger, that I only now know the value of, the true worth, and how good they feel to say.

Tex would introduce himself to every goo-green kid who joined the squad, every piece of farm-fresh. He’d put his arm around their shoulder, tell them his life story, his real name, ask them all about their hometowns, so that even those nearby had to learn shit we’d rather not. We’d get hit by these frag grenades of nicety. He took people in, Tex. Got close to them. Cried like a baby when the smoke cleared and the tags were tallied. And I thought he was fucking crazy, going about war like that. Not learning what the rest of us learned. But he may have been the only sane one. The human out there with all us aliens. Still living. Refusing to give up. Preferring to yo-yo up and down like grav panels on the fritz. Preferring that to the weightlessness. To the lack of gravity.

I pull her against me, not to make love to her, but just to love her. To hold something good and imperfect and fucked up, and to feel someone holding all of that in return.

I call this the Relativistic Weekend Effect. We live in the present, but our happiness relies heavily on the future. Our mood is as much expectation as experience.

Whatever was still holding my father together snapped as well. I’ve felt that. It’s something deep in the chest that goes. A rupture between the part of us that pulses and the part of us that breathes. To hold that together, you need an embrace from someone who cares.

Crying isn’t simply about opening the floodgates to some private trauma and letting it out—crying is just as much about letting those around you know you’re hurting. Our tears are trying to serve a purpose, but we rarely let them.

And the only thing that ends a war like this is trust, release, love for those we hate, arms around those who would kill us, forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness.

I know it is fiction to imagine, but what would happen if we stood on the rubble of attacks against us, whether literal or figurative, physical or emotional, personal or political, and we chose to forgive rather than escalate? What does that world look like? Maybe we’ll never know. But I like to pretend.