Another day, another book. This one slightly off-kilter. It was a book about a crazy man who didn’t seem to be bound by time. All the good books seem to be about crazy guys. Or at least people every one else thinks are crazy. When you completely understand someone they seem kind of shallow and boring. Those people never make good characters. They make good action heroes, but I’ve never met anyone who would make a good action hero.
The book I read was about war. I’ve always wondered what happens to people in war. Your mind is turned upside down, the best of people crack up, and the worst of people come together. Everything that you know is lost and you never see the world quite the same again. It’s an odd little thing we like to subject ourselves to every now and again. Sometimes you see hollow old men with their eyes sunken and the skin hanging from their throats. They fought in the war. Now that have just have memories more faded than the stale black and white photos. But they’re still haunted. Their world was shaken and they never quite reclaimed. Or maybe their world wasn’t so shaken. They went over there, did their job and came home. Those are the people I understand the least. Those are the people with no soul. You have to wonder how most men get through it. Do you just suck it up and squeeze the trigger? How can you walk so close to death for so long? Perhaps it’s simply a more enlightened way to live.
The old man lying in the bed, with a child’s lost gaze, fought in the war. He doesn’t recognize me and just wants to know where his teeth are. They’re loosely clenched in the palm of his hand. He’s my grandpa. He sat in the trenches at Iwo Jima, squeezing the rifle in his hands until his fingers turned pale like an onion. He clenched his teeth as the bullets whizzed by and he swore and he ran and he fell and fired that gun to save his own life. Or so the story goes. I don’t really know what he did in the war. I’ve only seen happy pictures of him and friends in the Pacific with girls. In the basement my dad has a knife my grandpa brought back from the war. Somebody made it out of pieces of scrap metal. The end of the handle is shaped like a boot. My grandpa traded somebody for it. I wonder if that guy died in the war. I wonder if his grandkid knows where whatever his grandfather got for the trade is.
But now I can’t even ask my grandpa about it. Maybe I could, they tell me he’s gotten better. The last time I saw him he was barely alive, sucking on a cigarette like it was the only thing he recognized. I think it was. So it goes. That’s what Kurt Vonnegut always said. I wonder if anybody knows how many times he said that in Slaughterhouse Five. That’s the book I finished. So it goes.