Clotho's Loom (Chapters 1 and 2, of 19)

So who was mailing him this letter? A little birthday fun courtesy of one of his friends. Had to be. He'd look more carefully at it later and figure out which of them would put such a dumb joke into practice. 

Will flipped the light-switch off in the too-bright kitchen, and the parlor lay shuttered and dim and the extra chairs and folding tables made a kind of unfamiliar jungle that took some stumbling through. He flopped down into the familiarity of his recliner, then stiffened at the creak it issued: Nexus was still asleep in the other room. Thankfully for her, she didn't have to go to work until ten today--hadn't been feeling well lately, and campaigned through last night's celebration like a trooper--and he did not want to waken her until he was going out the door to his first, eight o'clock class at the university. The slightest sliver of dawn filtered through the large living room window, not so much morning as the end of a primeval night, and Will groaned. Who gave a party on Thursday night, anyway? And his mouth was still dry. He thought of the coffee, then forgot it again. He fumbled for his remote control and clicked on the television. Quickly, he punched the volume to a whisper and sought out the early news channels. Combing his hair back repeatedly with the fingers of his left hand, feeling the thin overnight grease, he grew slowly desperate to take a shower.  

Nothing doing, much. Most of the channels continuously recycled the late night sports, in which the Indians had been brutalized again, and the weather, which hinted storms across the country, again. Spring threatened to outstay its welcome and encroach on summer. Will's eyes sought back across the gloom to the kitchen floor. A little lightning, coming not from outside but from the kaleidoscopic picture tube in the darkened room, momentarily showed the ridiculous slip of paper where it had fallen. He sometimes still, after all these years, had nightmares about the service. Not the electric spasms of his father's generation, but more mundane, anxious commonplaces. He had never made it out. Thinking of deserting, but what would happen to his family? Where could he go? He was forced to obey the orders of the mindless, faceless agents who held his papers. He gave no orders. No one was below him. But he wanted no underlings, no control--only to be left alone. The lightning intensified. Was this yet another of those dreams? Will forced himself to concentrate on the fuzzy images before him.  

He blinked at the screen, which now framed phantoms of gray jet fighterplanes launching from the slow-swaying surface of an aircraft carrier. The parking deck was furious with activity--men in yellow and orange uniforms swarmed around the pilots stalking to their ships. They strode almost in slow motion, and Will wondered jadedly if it weren't some broadcaster's dramatic trick. Feeling a bit ill, he thumbed the volume slightly to add its effect to the tableau. 

A disembodied but fully articulate voice, somehow familiar, explained to him that tensions in the region had flared again for the third time this decade. The names of the factions sounded alien, but the story was an old one: some fourth-raters continued to provoke some third-raters (he had at least heard of the disputed area--seemed to recall flying over it once in a C-130 transport plane). For ungodly reasons, this became the concern of the first-raters, who were sending pilots to enforce a no-fly sector, some kind of DMZ--a DeMilitarized Zone in the middle of the sky! Details aside, it had been going on in his father's time, and his father's time. But now it was lent the merest dignity: the scene on the carrier dissolved into a bright royal blue which lanced at Will's eyes. He squinted and leaned; and feeling a lump in the pocket of his thick bathrobe, fished out his all-purpose, store-bought spectacles and propped them on his nose, recognizing immediately then the figure of the current American President. He much resembled the previous one: middle aged, perfectly groomed, dignified, and talking tough. A wedding ring flashed from his upraised palm, suggesting that Will absent-mindedly finger his own. The palm flourished for several minutes before it closed into a fist.