Halpenny Thread and Other Stories

1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-5439-0068-2
Verlag: BookBaby
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 252 Seiten

Reihe: Thread and Other Stories

'I think therefore I am.' But is it really that simple? Prudence and Yannick know poverty, heartache, and injustice firsthand. When a young boy who has nowhere to turn appears in their life, they must choose what kind of people they truly are. Helping him is far beyond their means-abandoning him seems unthinkable. But, the choices they face have an ominous backdrop. Is there more to this than just what they see? Explore your perception of existence in Thread. Dive into worlds of intrigue and mystery with this cross-genre collection of short stories. Trace the thread of reality as it weaves through the fabric of surrealism.

Eric Halpenny is a seemingly normal engineer by day, but a fiction author by night. He hasn't quit his day job. His preferred subject matter concerns life, existence, choice, spirituality, God, science, philosophy, and the nature of reality-all in the guise of entertaining stories. He started writing novels at the age of eight, but waited to publish until thirty-eight. He is often inspired in the middle of the night or while driving home from work. He lives in Northern California with his wife and three children. He loves inspiring quotations, and one of his favorites is from Les Misérables by Victor Hugo: 'To learn to read is to light a fire.' He would love to know that his writing lit the fire of reading, introspection, and hope in others.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Halpenny, Eric

Leseproben

Shrink

I walked up to the helicopter as its rotors slowed to a stop. The steady, throbbing sound of them pulsed loud in my ears. I really hated choppers. To be honest, I wouldn’t even have bothered to come out here if they hadn’t radioed me that there was something screwy with one of the guys. Normally, they’d bring a guy or two around to my office if they needed a talking to—you know, within a couple of days or whatever. But this time, they said it was different. So I went out to the chopper. That’s what being a psychologist in the army gets you, a headache.

He was sitting, or maybe he was just propped, up against the wall—the rotors had thankfully slowed considerably by the time I got inside. I think the sound is even worse inside the helicopter than out. This guy probably hadn’t moved since they’d dumped him there at the LZ.

I could see it all in my mind, the green smoke, the tracer, guys running. I’d only been at one LZ in reality, and it was a training camp anyway, and it hadn’t really been anything serious, and they hadn’t really made the doctors do anything anyway, but I still sort of believed I knew what an LZ looked like. I even called it “LZ” instead of “landing zone,” which made it sound more like I knew what it was.

Hanging around guys all day who really did things that I had only read about or seen in training tended to give me a complex—I self-diagnose occasionally. Even though I didn’t really know, I could imagine it at the very least. The real thing was more than likely less than pleasant. I guess that must be one of my favorite phrases.

Anyway, I ducked down next to him and looked sidelong at his face. He was dirty. Not just dirty, though—his face was caked with grime—but he was dirty like it was a part of him. He didn’t smell good either—none of them did. But up close, you just really got the full sense of it. That was true of just about everything coming out of the mainland right then. You only got the full sense of any of it from up close.

His eyes were open, but he wasn’t really looking at anything—I could tell that right away. I waved my hand in front of his eyes—they didn’t follow my movements, but he wasn’t blind either. Blinded eyes look different. His still had life behind them, but he was looking at a different world than ours.

His old man came up to me. I never understood why they called the lieutenant that, but I never really was in the army either—I was just a part of it. Anyway, his old man crouched down on my other side and asked me in a soft whisper what I thought. I responded in a normal voice that I had no idea. What else was I going to say? I had only been with the guy for a minute, and it takes longer than that to learn anything about someone.

I asked him if he had seen what had happened to him. He said they had found him like this. I asked him if anyone had been with him. He looked at me for a moment and then just held up a pair of dog tags, which dangled almost symbolically from hands smeared with mud and probably blood. I just looked up into his face and then back to the guy against the wall. It was then I noticed the body bag farther back in the chopper. That was too bad because…well, that dead guy could have helped me out a lot.

Don’t get things wrong, here. I feel bad when guys die. But let’s also face reality. When it’s the hundredth guy in the last hundred hours, none of whom I have known other than by name—if that—it’s hard to feel anything anymore besides continual and resigned sadness that manifests itself only as indifference. Besides, if I handled it any other way, it would be me on the end of a shrink’s nose, not vice versa.

I figured the best thing to do was to get the guy who was still alive back to some familiar surroundings. By which I mean, of course, safe, familiar surroundings, not jungle, missions, swamps, bullets, or VCs, but a camp with a bunk and some food. That has worked as many times as not, so it’s always worth a shot. This guy probably just needed some time and a little sleep. Food cooked over a stove instead of rations reconstituted with muddy river water and seasoned with parasites wouldn’t hurt either.

I grabbed a couple of his buddies—there were only three of them plus the old man—and had them help him up. He walked, but his brain wasn’t in it, that was obvious. His head stayed bowed, his eyes just stared off into nothing, and his feet shuffled along. It happened a lot when guys killed somebody for the first time. I had seen cases like that dozens of times, especially after they had actually seen someone they had killed die. But this guy was no rookie; he was a veteran. He’d seen stuff before. I knew because of his dossier, which I’d looked up before he got here.

“Know thy enemy,” I think Sun Tzu said. I didn’t like to think of my patients as my enemies, really, but the principle was still good. They thought of me that way sometimes in spite of what I thought.

He was married, had a kid—a girl. She was only two, or three, or something. He was going home now, of course. Then again, almost everyone was going home now. He was lucky to be going home in one piece, unlike some others I’d seen go through over the last few days. He’d get to see that little girl. Maybe I’d manage to put his brain back into one piece for him too. At least then he’d recognize her when he saw her. She probably wouldn’t remember him, though—too young.

I left him for a while in his bunk with some chow, which is another army word I really don’t understand. Chow sounds like something for a dog. Well, maybe it makes more sense than I give it credit for.

After an hour, his old man came into my office, after he had gotten his other men squared away, to tell me that his boy wasn’t eating…or sleeping. I thought that was strange. Most of the guys slept on their way out; they could sleep anywhere and through anything. And they could fall asleep in less than two seconds. I’m serious.

So, I figured whatever was going on with this particular guy, it must be more complicated than a routine brain scramble. I should say this, not that there was any good duty where these guys had been, but this group was special. And by that, I mean their job really sucked. They were LRRP, which means long-range recon patrol, if you don’t speak army. Six guys basically walk into VC territory as far as they can go and try not to die for a bunch of days in a row. Then they do something relatively insane that normally stirs up a veritable hornets’ nest before they try to get all the way back to base without dying for another bunch of days in a row.

There were booby traps, VCs, snakes, leeches, mosquitoes, nasty bugs, mud, animals—basically everything that was the worst thing in the world—and it was all in that jungle. And these guys got to go crawl through it face first for as long as they humanly could. When all the jobs suck, it’s hard to complain about tough duty, but if anyone had the right to complain, it was LRRP. The weirdest part was they volunteered for it, and I never did hear many of them complain. You had to be real special to go through what they did.

These guys had been LRRP more than once too, so it was not their first rodeo. This time, just as we were evacuating the whole place, these guys got ambushed on their way back. It was their last time out anyway, because they were supposed to have been going home after that. Their old man was good, I suppose, since only one of them was dead. Too bad it was the one guy that could have helped me out—but that’s the way of it more often than not.

In any case, a guy who comes back from all of that and isn’t eating or sleeping, well, I couldn’t just brush that off. He had been on patrol virtually non-stop for a month, hadn’t slept for at least two days straight, and hadn’t eaten anything but MCIs for days, and not even much of that crap. A guy who has been through that should be sleeping. And if he wasn’t sleeping, he should be eating.

I told his old man to bring him in.

They brought him, the old man, and another of his buddies.

They put him in the comfortable leather chair that I reserve for my patients. His head was still down, just like it had been in the chopper. I sent the guys out and sat down on the edge of my desk. I leaned forward and said his name, not too loud and not too quiet, and kind of nice-like, like I was his friend.

He didn’t move. I waited a little and said his name again. He still didn’t move. I paused and thought for a bit. Then I said his wife’s name—nothing. I said his daughter’s name. He blinked. I said it again, and he blinked again. Maybe this was something. Or maybe he had something in his eye. I waited. No blinks. I said his name again—nothing. I said his daughter’s name—he blinked again.

That seemed weird to me. I thought for a moment. Then I noticed something. It was on the far side of his face from me. It looked for a second like a small bug or something crawling slowly down the side of his cheek. I got up and walked around him to get a better look. It was a tear—just a single teardrop. It ran down off his chin and dripped onto the back of his hand. He didn’t flinch or wipe it away or anything. He just sat there. That was the only tear. I could only wonder what that was for—maybe for his little girl? I couldn’t be certain.

Nothing’s ever really certain...