Truth Front

I open my eyes to blinding light like white fire and the low hum of nearby machinery. I am sweating and breathing deeply where I lie and my body aches entire and then memories return to me in synaptic bursts from some latent electric channel, flashes of night and fog and splashing gunshots.

I sit up to look around and the room is all white with no doors or windows, sanitized and anonymous. I reach up to touch my chest and wince at two giant red and black bruises, capillaries or venules burst outward from them like splintered glass, and I remember also being shot in the hip but can’t seem to understand why I’m not dead. Then a door in the white world opens and a man in a doctor’s tunic walks in, his footfalls echoing in the room. He walks over to me and studies his clipboard without saying anything or even glancing at me and then he lifts my eyelids one after the other and shines a light into them. He writes something on his clipboard and I say to him, What’s happened, and he walks out without saying anything.

I reach up to feel my ear taped down with gauze and I wonder how that episode of so long ago could have possibly happened in this same night, this same year, and then I wonder what is memory if nothing but a series of failed images, flashing doses of a former life lost forever to the slow arrest of time, and what is time but a barrier between realms of awareness, the supreme struggle of all the creatures of earth, each of them bound by the simplest and yet most inflexible system of decrees, and those creatures powerless and compliant to the realities of day and night, fog or desert, where is their freedom, what do they remember most?

The door opens again and my boss walks in, the Detective Sergeant, and waves of guilt and relief swell within me. He looks haggard and his clothes are dirty, his face unshaven. He avoids my gaze and paces the room, the only sounds his shoes on the white tile and his breathing, deep and rhythmic. I have many questions to ask but I am short of words and so I sit silent watching him pace the room, back and forth in the glare, thinking perhaps he’s trying to construct a careful framework for his own words, and then the image of Lonnie Moreno flashes before me, him lying in the front room of his flat with his head smashed and blown into jagged fragments, and I feel feverish and nauseous like I’m going to vomit and then the Sergeant stops pacing the room and says, The doctors say Carter isn’t going to make it. I drop my eyes and think about asking him which one was Carter but then I think better of it and when I look up again the Sergeant is standing by the door with his hand stretched out to the handle and with his back to me he says, I knew you weren’t to be trusted, and then he walks out and closes the door behind him, silence once again engulfing the small room.

There’s the steady drone of machinery or high voltage equipment on the other side of the wall, a uniform vibrato deep and hypnotic, an electric pulse driving the great brain of things. I let it float through the wall and above me and I try to insert my mind somewhere into the vast expanse of time and clarity, attempting to elicit some sort of rational explanation for everything that has happened and why, who are the key players and what are their roles. But I am endlessly diverted from the path of understanding or I get lost or the clarity I find is always in coincidence, this whole night has to be a series of poorly interpreted coincidences, for where is the merit in design if the outcome is not yet written? And what is the purpose of coincidence if not to test the morals of men in a world gone mad? The buzz grows louder and it soaks through the walls and into my head and I find the words have disappeared, all the words in this universe, all of them composed of light and thought instead of letters or even sound and suddenly there is a ghost being composed of all the mad ghosts of the past, the killer cannibals and the junkies and the wide-eyed lunatics dragging themselves through shadowed hospital wards, the suicides and pederasts, the terrorists, this dense figure weighed down by all the madness and hovering about me with its nebulous frame sulking and changing shape, and for the first time things start to make sense as all madness eventually does, and I can see the twisted faces of those figures running toward me through the fog, telling me to drop my weapon, drop my weapon, I can taste the residue of improvised explosives in the smoky desert, for my heart is broken, and the rising tide of sound coming through the wall descends upon me, it screams and smothers and then buries me, it suffocates me with lies of empathy and placation, and from some corner of consciousness I wonder what sort of government experiment would succumb military and police veterans to such torture, the ringing, so exhaustibly loud, building to a razored death-wail, and then colors of bright red and yellow and blue and green begin dancing upon the walls and ceiling in varied floral patterns and cyclonic arrangements and then the colors blend to create other colors and they break into intricate spider webs spotted with the eggs of incubating humans, and I close my eyes and place my fisted hands over them, for to see what crawls from those eggs as they shudder and jump and then crack open is to witness the verity of insanity in all its infinite cleverness, to melt into the horror and the glory of the mind’s corruption, to walk the plank of hell and dangle above the writhing viscera of the gods, and then the room is bathed in darkness with the screaming of the damned booming and echoing throughout, echoing within, the polyrhythmic drum of the sodden hearts, and suddenly the door opens up a vacuum in the white room of endless worlds and all the sound and all the colors disappear and I cannot breathe.

The man in the doctor’s tunic walks swiftly toward me and sets his clipboard down and tells me to relax, to lie down, but I cannot move. I breathe heavily and erratically and my body is covered in sweat. The electric hum has returned to the other side of the wall, low and steady, and the doctor takes a stethoscope and places it on my back and tells me to breathe deeply. Five deep breaths, he says. Good, good. You’re alive, he says, and then he whispers. You’re alive.

And then I pass out.

*

The screaming jars me awake into a larger and more active room beneath milder fluorescent lights and there’s a woman swabbing at my left ear. At the bed next to me a team of doctors are treating the screaming man, and I ask the woman, Am I dead?

The woman re-tapes my ear in gauze and says, No, your armor saved you, and there’s a crescendo of activity at the bed next to me as the man’s screams become groans and then whimpers, fading to nothing. The doctors and nurses in the room are all silent and the woman walks away from me, removing her gloves, the balanced din of a flat line charges the air. A doctor walks over to me and says, Do you feel any pain, son? I don’t feel anything, I tell him. He reaches to his left and prepares a needle with a vial and then he asks me, Do you understand what I’m saying? I nod. He sticks the needle into a tube running through my arm and presses the plunger and then he says, Your team was ambushed on the bridge you were holding. And everyone’s dead, I say, more or less to myself, more or less a declaration. I’m afraid so, son, he says, Everyone but you. And then it all falls away, everything is blackness.