Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk. Ben Fountain

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СКАЧАТЬ tremendous swell of organ music, not the sickly calf bleatings they played at Shroom’s funeral but a thunderous massing of mighty chords, the subsurface rumble of a tidal wave as it rolls unseen through the ocean depths. Spooky as all shit, not that he fights it; the big sound might be God banging around his head or some elaborately coded form of essential truth, or maybe both, or maybe they’re one and the same thing, so put that in your fucking movie, if you can. Were you good friends? asked the reporter from the Ardmore Daily Star. “Yes,” Billy said, “we were good friends.” Do you think, about him a lot? “Yes,” Billy said, “I think about him a lot.” Like, every day. Every hour. No, every couple of minutes. About once every ten seconds, actually. No, it’s more like an imprint on his retina that’s always there, Shroom alive and alert, then dead, alive, dead, alive, dead, his face eternally flipping back and forth. He saw the beebs dragging Shroom into the high grass and thought Oh fuck or maybe just Fuck, that was the extent of Billy’s inner reflections as he scrambled off his belly and made his run. Weirdest thing, though, he retains this sense as he got to his feet of knowing exactly how it was going to turn out, the visualization so intense that it shook loose a kind of double consciousness that lingers to this day. His memory of the battle is mostly a hot red blur, but the premonitory memory is sharp and clear. He wonders if all soldiers who do these radical things get a brief sightline into a very specific future, this telescopic piercing of time and space that instills the motivation to do what they do. The ones who live, maybe. Maybe they all think they see, but the ones who don’t make it, they were wrong. Only the ones who survive are allowed to feel clairvoyant and canny, though it occurs to him now that Shroom, too, saw with equal clarity, just with the opposite result.

      Hooah, Shroom. It feels like too many things to have to think about at once, movie deals and interviews and what it means to wear a medal plus that hard-core thing underneath it all, the primal and ultimately unfathomable facts of their engagement on the banks of the Al-Ansakar Canal. Your mind is not calm. You aren’t sick but you aren’t exactly well. There’s an airy sense of dangling or dangerous incompletion, as if your life has gotten ahead of itself and you need some time to let it back and fill. This feels right, this grasping of the time problem, here is the possible square one on which to build except Josh gives the word, Lunch!, and they rise. Little rockslides of applause tumble across the stands, and Sykes, the butthead, waves to the crowd like it’s all for him. Josh leads them bravely onto the stairs and it’s a long slow slog to the top, trudging upward in column like those poor doomed fucks near the end of Titanic striving against the horrible voids of sea and sky. If you relax even for a second, it will take you, thus a strategy is revealed: Don’t relax. Once they reach the concourse Billy feels better. Josh leads them up a spiral ramp where the wind shears into tight coiling eddies, tossing trash and dust around in little tantrums. A kind of coagulatory effect attends Bravo’s route as people stop, shout out, gape, or grin according to their politics and personality type, and Bravo blows through it all, polite and relentless, an implacable flying wedge of forward motion until the crew of a Spanish-language radio station grabs Mango for an interview, and all that good clean energy goes to hell. People gather. The air turns moist with desire. They want words. They want contact. They want pictures and autographs. Americans are incredibly polite as long as they get what they want. With his back to the railing Billy finds himself engaged by a prosperous-looking couple from Abilene who have their grown son and daughter-in-law in tow. The young people seem embarrassed by their elders’ enthusiasm, not that the old folks give a damn. “I couldn’t stop watching!” the woman exclaims to Billy. “It was just like nina leven, I couldn’t stop watching those planes crash into the towers, I just couldn’t, Bob had to drag me away.” Husband Bob, a tall, stooped gent with mild blue eyes, nods with the calm of a man who’s learned how much slack to give a live-wire wife. “Same with yall, when Fox News started showing that video I just sat right down and didn’t move for hours. I was just so proud, just so”—she flounders in the swamps of self-expression—“proud,” she repeats, “it was like, thank God, justice is finally being done.”

      “It was like a movie,” chimes her daughter-in-law, getting into the spirit.

      “It was. I had to keep telling myself this is real, these are real American soldiers fighting for our freedom, this is not a movie. Oh God I was just so happy that day, I was relieved more than anything, like we were finally paying them back for nina leven. Now”—she pauses for a much-needed breath—“which one are you?”

      Billy politely introduces himself and leaves it at that, and the woman, as if sensing the delicacy of the question, doesn’t press. Instead, she and her daughter-in-law embark on a spoken-word duet of patriotic sentiments, they are 100 percent supporting of Bush the war the troops because defending szszszsz among nations szszszsz owl-kay-duzz szszszsz szszszsz szszszsz, the lady keeps leaning into Billy and tapping his arm, which induces a low-grade somatic trance, thus he’s feeling comfortably numb when the lid of his skull retracts and his brain floats free into the freezing air

       PACK YOUR SHIT!

      No matter their age or station in life, Billy can’t help but regard his fellow Americans as children. They are bold and proud and certain in the way of clever children blessed with too much self-esteem, and no amount of lecturing will enlighten them as to the state of pure sin toward which war inclines. He pities them, scorns them, loves them, hates them, these children. These boys and girls. These toddlers, these infants. Americans are children who must go somewhere else to grow up, and sometimes die.

      “Dude, that lady back there,” Crack says when they’re moving again, “the blonde with the little kids? When her husband was taking our picture she was totally grinding her ass up against my rod.”

      “Bullshit.”

      “No lie! Like instant wood, dude, she was shoving her ass right in there. Five more seconds and I woulda come, I shit you not.”

      “He’s lying,” Mango says.

      “Swear to God! Then I’m like, hey, give me your e-mail, let’s stay in touch while I’m back in Iraq, and it’s like she doesn’t know what I’m talking about. Bitch.”

      Mango demurs, but Billy thinks it’s probably true—women will do some crazy shit around a uniform. He drops back a couple of paces and checks his cell. Pastor Rick has sent him another Bible text—

       Know that the Lord is God!

       It is He that made us and we are His.

      The guy is relentless, he is a used-car salesman in sheep’s clothing. Billy deletes the text, wondering if it’s bad luck to dis a preacher, even a worthless one. “Aren’t you cold?” a passing woman asks, and Billy smiles and shakes his head, No, ma’am. Truly he’s not, though he doesn’t begrudge the fans their sumptuous fur coats, their puffy parkas, their bear-paw mittens and ninja masks. A lot of men are wearing fur, now there’s fashion for you. Major Mac suddenly falls into step at his side.

      “Major McLaurin, sir!”

      The major gives him a dopy look. Billy remembers to raise his voice.

      “WE WERE WORRIED ABOUT YOU SIR! WE DIDN’T KNOW WHERE YOU’D GONE!”

      The major transitions to frown. “Look alive, soldier, СКАЧАТЬ