The first one was a man, a soldier.
We were at the Driniumor River, in New Guinea. I don't know why. I've always been drawn to rivers. They are the antithesis of stagnation, a promise of change. A vow that everything in life, everything in the universe, passes. Watching the water flow downstream seems to me as if it's washing away all my troubles. Carrying them on the rapids until they fade out of sight on the distant horizon.
I was just a girl, too old to be a child but yet too young to be a woman. It was raining: too lightly to be a downpour but too heavily to be a sprinkling. And the man, the soldier, was kneeling in the mud, his eyes hollow and his face gaunt: too alive to be dead and too dead to be alive.
We were between worlds, on all accounts.
I had been walking for a while, long enough that I was nothing that could even remotely approached 'dry'. I was soaked to the skin, my clothes plastered to me, my hair dripping, my feet squishing with every step due to the water in my socks. I had absolutely no notion of where I was. It occurred to me, at one or two points, that perhaps my parents were wondering where I had gone off to. In the end, however, it didn't seem like something worth dwelling on, so I dismissed the notion and got back to my trek.
Where I was going was anybody's guess. In fact, I don't think I was actually 'going' anywhere. I liked rivers, was the point. I liked their physical dynamics, and I liked what they represented to me. I liked watching them. It was too wet to sit and watch, so I wandered. The mud on the banks was green-tinged, deep, and the consistency of mousse. Stepping in it meant losing one of my galoshes, for certain. So I steered clear of it, and kept to the knee-high grassy embankment.
It was the sort of rainstorm that made it difficult to look up without getting water in your eyes, but from time to time, I looked anyway. I knew I was safely far from the fighting. I knew that the odds of accidentally wandering into a war zone were fairly slim. But I worried, regardless. Every morning, the newspaper brought into my family's kitchen horrible news of more deaths happening abroad. It made me nervous to come here, to this country, and it made me even more nervous to wander off on my own. But my family did not understand. They never understood. If I opted to follow my mother around all day, I would end up being dragged around to every hat shop in town. I had no interest in being in hat shops, or shoe shops, or dress shops, or any shops at all, for that matter. I was not the dainty, elegant lady my mother was.
I liked rivers. I liked the rain. I liked losing my shoes in the mud.
I liked hearing the distant, far-off thunder of gunfire. Close enough to hear it, but far enough to stay well out of its path.
It made me feel alive.
The soldier was a Major, judging by his uniform and insignia. I didn't know much about the military, but my father was a Major these days, and I recognized the little stars. I saw him far off, well before I actually reached him, so his presence did not alarm or frighten me. In fact, the only thought I had was that he must possess incredible strength, to drag himself so far from the battlefield, especially in his condition.
He did not move in the entire time it took me to reach him. He was kneeling in the mud, sinking in very slowly, and doing nothing to stop his descent. I kept both eyes focused on him as I wandered in his direction.
He was not surprised by me, either. I don't think even an atomic bomb going off would've surprised him. I could see in his eyes that he was long gone.
I knew what he was, of course, the moment I first laid eyes on him. I don't know how I knew, but I did. He was different. He wasn't like other people. There was a thoroughly eerie feeling around him, the way he just knelt there and stared off in the distance, like his body was still breathing but his soul had already checked out.
