By Xan Janik
Inspired by The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien
I’m dreaming. I’ve been shot again, except when I fade in and out of consciousness Linda is there. I scream from the pain.
“Timmy, stop crying. It doesn’t matter,” she says.
“I don’t want to die!” I wail.
“Do I look dead?” She asks me, and then I wake up, and there Bobby Jorgenson is, kneeling on my back, and I wiggle and squirm but can’t get away.
Then I’m on the top shelf of a bookcase. I want down, but the height is dizzying. Linda walks down the aisle, reaches up and grabs me, then opens the book.
Thirty years later I wake up in my own house, not as a soldier, nor in a hospital.
I close my eyes and I’m skating, and Linda is there but she’s older. I’m now nine and she is my age, and she stands in the middle of the melting lake in the warm Vietnam rain.
“Come back!” I shout, but my father keeps me from going to her.
“Let’s go get some ice cream,” he says, and Linda sinks into the lake, smiling, eternity in her eyes.
I preserve Linda in my mind, and, now, in my writing. I feel that preserving is all I can do. It’s like canning peaches for the winter: something to get me by in the winter months; something to remind me of what to do next summer.
Linda, forty three years old, preserves me in her memories. I died when I was nine--it was a brain tumor. I sit up on my shelf, and every now and then she carefully takes me down and flips through my pages. We skate together. We sit on the curb. She tells me what she’s doing. I smile and nod, and examine my water bucket with its dents, scratches, and spots of rust. We communicate in our silent way. She writes about her husband going to war and the stories he tells her. She writes about going to the funeral home, but being too scared to look at my body. Her mother takes her out for ice cream afterwards, and at night she cries in the bathroom. When she sleeps she dreams me back into existence, but is too scared to remember.
“You’re dead,” she tells me, and I look at her and ask what’s wrong with that. So she writes. She remembers her dreams now and evokes them into being. She used to cry over my absence, but now there is just an empty spot she has learned how to fill with her stories. Sometimes she’ll write me letters,. She’ll tell them to me when she takes me off that top shelf, and I emerge from her words. Her memory of me is almost gone, so she tries to save me through memory’s shadow. She can’t feel it anymore, but knows it’s there. At times she’ll see me out in the middle of the lake, and I’ll be spinning and jumping and then I’ll wake up in a hospital and realize I was dreaming again.