THE ALBANACH AND THE THE DEAD WHITE BULL

by John Mulligan

So, what happens when John Mulligan is asked to read alongside Irvine Welsh at the Edinburgh Castle? John gets writing. He says The Meaning of Filth is his "contribution to the ease of writing forgettable and meaningless Welshian rubbish." Have a read but you'd do best to read it aloud.

On some level he knows me. He wonders who I am it’s true, yet it's all so simple. I am a woman. A simple enough statement to be sure, but laden with complications at the same time. At least as far as Finn and I are concerned, now that he's begun to know me, now that he's begun to feel me. He thinks my name is Madman. That's what he calls me anyway. Madman! But what does he know?

In spite of acknowledging me to some degree, he won’t take me back, won’t let me back in. And therein lies the problem. For twenty-five years or so I've been trying to get him to open up, but he doesn't even see me; nor does he listen to me. He can feel me though. I know he can feel me, the blackhaired, blueeyed, paleskinned, selfnegating bastard, yet he won’t let me in. I don’t often talk about him that way, I don’t enjoy talking about him like that, not really. But he does anger me. Perhaps he won’t take me back because I'm a woman. That’s a hard pill for him to swallow. He feels me though, senses my femaleness and locks me out. Perhaps he won’t take me back because my beauty scares him.

I am a beautiful woman. My hair is short and black, as black and shiny as newcut coal, trimmed in the style of a bonnie wee schoolboy. That's another thing! I talk in a strange dialect just as he does. But he's an Albanach remember, so I talk just like him.

I must excuse myself; sometimes I forget. Alba is the ancient name for an ancient country filled with an ancient race of Keltic people. It's been Finn's delving and diving into his distant past that has compelled him to employ such an archaic term. But he likes it; it makes him feel closer to his ancestors, and I like that! Knowing from whom he descends might save him. Alba, you know, predates even Roman civilization and probably the Greek too. Some say the Kelts came from a place Northwest of the Alps and that they were like both the Scythians and the Persians who lived and flourished in the millennium before the time of Christ.

Finn first saw the word Alba as a child growing up in Scotland. He read it in an ancient manuscript handed down through the years by father after father of the Donald Clan, his ancestors. Finn’s father knew it as The Red Book of Seeing and Believing. In the manuscript, Finn learned that Alba is the ancient Gaelic name for Scotland, the land of his birth. But he forgot all about the book and its lessons until one night in the jungle many years later.

He is sitting in a bunker with Romeo Robinson, waiting out another tense night of guard duty. The monsoon season has finally decided to assert itself, and the night is black, heavy and still.

"Hey, man, where you from?" asks Romeo, sitting back, leaning against the sandbags of the bunker. Romeo’s holding a roach between his thumb and index finger and, after taking a long toke, passes it to Finn. Finn takes the joint, thinks for a minute, then laughs.

"Nowhere," he says. "I come from nowhere!"

"I can dig that, man, but ya gotta be from somewhere."

For a long time Finn is quiet, lost in his thoughts of Alba and of his family.

The whole MacDonald clan is gathered around the kitchen table listening to the da espousing the wonders and benefits of living in America. The da of course sits there sternfaced and grave; the ma has a worried expression on her face, as if the subject is one she’d rather not even think about let alone consider with any objectivity or seriousness. The da notices her confusion, her consternation. He rises to his feet and paces around the table.

"We haftae leave," says the da. "There’s no point in livin’ here without work when I’ve been offered a job in America." He is adamant; he has made up his mind. "Christ, Kate," he continues, "ah’ve been outa work for nearly a year now. Me! One-a the best machinists in the westa Scotland. An’ why? Because ah’m a Catholic, an’ a staunch trade unionist! Aye, that’s right, a bitter combination in this tinyminded, dour wee country." The da is revving up now. "Ah’m sick of it, Kate. Ah’m sicka the bigots, an ah’m sicka the bluidy weather. Clouds in the sky every day, rain, rain, rain! Ah’ve had it." The da sits down again in his chair. "Ah want these weans of ours to have a better life than we did, give them a fightin chance at least!"

Finn, the oldest of the children, is beaming, obviously happy at the prospect.

"Where would we be going," he asks the da. "What part of America?"

"Detroit," says the da, rather grimly.

"Magic!" says Finn. "Motown! "I can go an see the Four Tops any time I feel like it. The Temptations, Joe Tex, the Supremes! It’ll be great, da!"

The da just rolls his eyes heavenward; the ma looks worried. The younger children shout and laugh, oblivious to the huge and impending changes under discussion at the table around which they play. It’s a tense time at the MacDonald’s dinner table.

"What about the war, Joe, what about Vietnam for God’s sake," the ma asks of her husband in a whisper she would usually save for church or the library. "He’ll be eighteen soon," she reminds him, pointing to Finn who isn’t smiling any more.

"Aye, that’s right, da," says Finn. "Ah forgot all about that. Ah’ll get drafted!"

"No yae won’t, son. It’s a government contract. We’ll be makin’ helicopter gears, helpin’ wi’ the war effort. There’s as much chance they’ll draft me as they will you." The lame joke backfires.

"They wouldnae do that would they?" asks the ma, now absolutely terrified.

"Don’t be daft, Kate, don’t be so bluidy daft!" says the da, who is fast becoming exasperated.

"Are yae sure ah’ll get a job, da?" asks Finn.

"Aye ah’m sure. Ah made them put it in my contract. As soon as yae turn eighteen they’ll hire yae on as a machinist. Ah told them yae had three years experience already. They’ll be glad to have yae they said!"

"Let me see it," says the ma. "Let me see the contract!"

But Finn hated the job making helicopter gears. They stuck him on nightshift six nights a week. In no time at all he was fired for sleeping on the job. In even less time he was classified 1A and was drafted shortly afterward. Now he is sitting in a sandbagged bunker smoking a big fat doobie with his pal, Romeo.

"It’s funny, Romeo, but I don’t feel like I come from anywhere. I was born in Scotland, but after all this war bullshit I wonder if I have a home any more. I can’t go back, an’ I sure as hell don’t know where I’ll be tomorrow."

"I know what you mean," said Romeo, lost in his own thoughts. "But how d’ya get here in the first place?"

"Same as you. I got drafted!"

Romeo burst out laughing.

"Drafted?" he says. "What d’ya mean drafted? You’re a goddamn foreigner, a Scotsman. How can they draft a Scotsman?"

"You live in America, you register with the draft; that’s the law. The price you pay. You don’t get nothin’ for nothin’, Romeo! An’ don’t call me a Scotsman again. Scotland doesn’t exist any more! In the olden days it was called Alba, so I come from Alba now."

"I hear that, Alba man, I hear that! Ain’t no Chicago neither."

I thank God regularly for keeping Finn alive and somewhat hopeful during these past years of difficulty, all twenty-five or so of them. But he’s shown signs of late that he might have found an exit to the twisting maze he's been wandering around in for so long. I'm relieved about his new clarity, because I came out of him; I need him well and healthy. All that stops him from accepting me is his pitifully closed mind. But it’s begun to open up somewhat these past two or three years. Not much, mind you, but I am hopeful.

My eyes are green like the North Sea is green, and even though it's common to say so, they are shaped like almonds. How that particular oddity came about has always been a source of mystery, if not consternation and complete confusion to me, ever since The Leaving at least. After all, if I come from Finn, a Kelt, how can I possibly have almond eyes? It's easy! I figured it all out. It is so easy I laugh, because the part of Finn that I am is Asian. That's all there is to it!

Perhaps we’re from a land farther east than has been imagined. One of the Asia Minor tribes perhaps. A long time passes before I can comprehend that myself, so I can easily understand why he's having such a difficult time with it. That I'm a woman goes quite against his grain to be sure; that I'm an Asian woman really does confuse him. It isn't as bad as it used to be, because for the last two or three years he has begun, finally, to learn more about his heritage. He’s discovered that Keltic people and Asian people aren't so far apart, not in a mythological sense certainly and probably not, as I mentioned, in an anthropological sense either—a few thousand years perhaps, not much more.

My almond eyes became easier to understand after I began to know, through Finn's delving and diving, our Keltic heritage. Thanks, again, to Romeo Robinson and his quiet questions that dark night in the still jungle. They began a process that might, in retrospect, have saved Finn’s life.

I am tiny, petite if you will, and my skin is pale like goat's milk. By contrast, I wear a flowing, bloodred robe fastened at the waist with a long, silver umbilical cord. After quarter of a century it continues to drip dark, thick blood. I alone can see the cord, though sometimes even I can’t see it, but I know it’s there. Somehow it’s just there! And whether truly there or not isn’t important; I need to think it’s there, because that’s all that keeps Finn and me together in some small way.

Finn and I separated when the Great White water buffalo, the bull, is murdered during The Leaving. Until then we are happy together, as one.

November, nineteen-seventy, is a bad month. All five of us are flying in a helicopter gunship, armed to the teeth, somewhere above Vietnam. We’re out during the monsoon rains searching for the downed cargo plane; it has smacked into a mountainside. The plane carries twenty-six passengers, all soldiers, homeward bound after a long, hard year of junglerot, growing pains, and broken, bloody bodies. Ivy League, our friend, is one of the twenty-six, one of the dead twenty-six, a waste no matter how one looks at it. It is the waste more than anything else I can't come to terms with. All that violent waste, the pitiful pouring away of precious life into the already red Asian soil. Finn, at the time, doesn’t understand why part of him thinks, no, feels the way it does. More like a woman, that is. I think he feels there is something wrong with being sensitive to the madness going on all around him every day. It isn’t manly to be sensitive. Who knows! But we split apart that night and he chases me away. A hundred years ago it seems, perhaps longer.

I've been following him around ever since, plodding relentlessly after him, like the Hound of Heaven, watching the years tumble along one after the other, wondering always who is the shadow, wondering always who casts the shadow. In all fairness you'd have to say we had an equal right to dwell inside that physical shell everyone knows as Finn MacDonald. But he cast me out, doesn't want to share himself with me, doesn't want to believe that I come along with the package, that I am part of the package, though it's not as simple as you might think, this twoness.

Finn wants to be a man, a soldier, a hero! There are times when I can't help but laugh when I think of it; it’s all so insane. There are times too when I can forgive him; there are times when I can't.

He’s a grunt, an infantryman, just like the rest of his pals. He’s up in the control tower visiting a friend when they finally give Captain Peterson permission to take off. The weather has cleared. Too soon into the rain perhaps. God only knows, too soon. The plane crashes into the mountain when the weather unexpectedly closes in again.

Finn and four of our friends go to look for the plane. I know; I am there with them! We jump into the gunship laden with bullets, and go to look for our pals. A mission, a mission of mercy to save our comrades. I remember Finn telling Frankie Chen he’s scared shitless; he's never been on such a dangerous adventure. Frankie tells Finn he’s scared shitless too.

The weather’s clear again. But we've been smoking dope ever since we first heard of the crash. It might as well be raining still we’re all so stoned. It’s that sort of place, the war zone. Crazy! Topsyturvy! For the first hour or so we can't find the lost plane, though we’re hungry for some sort of action. When we don't find any we invent our own, such being our need, such being the depth of our rage. We have to, we need to, for we are filled with anger. We have to hit back, and we have to hit back hard! The enemy’s elusive! They like to set their boobytraps or ambush us, then scarper down the holes of their tunnels leaving us frustrated with nothing to shoot back at, filled with teethclenching, bloodred rage.

The moon is big behind a break in the clouds and we can see quite clearly. We happen to pass over a fenced-in pasture and see a huge water buffalo, a bull. I can't believe how big he is, how huge. At least ten feet long and six feet high. Romeo Robinson can't believe it either. Romeo, when he isn’t pulling guard duty, is our door gunner; he is itching for relief, itching to do the job he's been so well trained to do. I don’t think he cares much any more. He's been out on so many missions, flying above the jungle so often, he lives on borrowed time anyway. What amazes me more than anything else as I sit there in the chopper, cradling my rifle in my arms, is how young we all are.

Ivy League was the oldest in our group. He was twenty-three and an old man already. We looked up to him. He knew a lot about things we'd barely heard of. When he played his saxophone underneath the sultry Asian sky my skin would tingle. Ivy League came from the east coast and had gone to a posh university. He volunteered for combat, same as Finn. I think that's why they liked each other so much. Ivy League was aboard the lost plane. We had to go look for him. He was what we all wanted to be when we grew up. Tough soldiers all, we would never have admitted how much we loved him, how much we looked up to him, as we might an older brother.

The bull charges around the pasture. Romeo screams with delight as he maneuvers the gunship’s big doorgun into a better firing position. He lets go a burst of bullets and catches the bull right on the arse. It bellows and rages. Oh, how it bellows and rages against the night. Careening around the field, the White One searches for his tormentor, his pain-spitting persecutor.

I feel as if I’ve taken acid, because I sense things much more intensely. I’m hot and flushed and my skin tingles and prickles as if I’m wearing a hairshirt or hearing again Ivy League's saxophone. In the distance, lightning bolts jolt and shatter the sky, but I’m enjoying myself listening to the rotor blades throbbing, making mincemeat of the surrounding air. They sound out a hard-driving dancebeat, and we are dancing all right! Dancing high above the bloodwet earth we hate so much, freed for a time, disengaged, disentangled, divorced, away from it! Every so often Romeo fires a burst and we watch the tracers make their way down to earth. Our pilot, Tommy-up-front we call him, makes a sharp hundred eighty degree turn and flies back over the pasture. The White One careens around the field lost in his madness. I wonder if he’s enraged that something so evil, so malevolent, could invade his domain so completely, so definitely. We fly just a few feet above him, following him like a shadow. Tommy-up-front is good. He sticks to the bull as if he were a part of him, as if he were a hawk in pursuit of a sparrow. Romeo puts a bullet into the White One’s balls and everybody laughs. I begin to know then that something isn't quite right between Finn and me.

When the bull is shot, as we turn and cross behind his charging form, his balls explode, and I watch that two thousand pound creator jump ten feet off the ground. Does he know Death is close at hand, that Death stalks him? How does he feel when his peaceful night is disturbed by the huge and noisy monster following so fast, so close, behind him? The bull's red fury becomes almost perceptible, almost as red as the tracers blasting into him. He charges toward the barbed-wire fence surrounding the pasture, intent only on escaping the unseen thing that has rent his world asunder, split apart his quiet, fucking life. He jumps but, alas, catches his forelegs on the topmost wire and, caught in the barbs, he rages at the injustice of it all, his big brown eyes like deep water, mirroring the puzzled fear in his soul. We turn and come back around the pasture. I look over at Romeo. He smiles gleefully, almost greedily, and I know the bull is big in his gunsights. The whole world becomes quiet then. I hear not a sound, but my eyes are full, full of the color of blood as each of a long line of bullets blast their way through the neck of the bull.

We circle the pasture, we fly back and forth across the path of the bull, we watch him in his death throes. We see the beautiful horned head fall forward over the other side of the fence, attached only by a thin piece of skin and ligament, followed at once by a gush, a fountain, of thick red buffalo blood. Red, red, red! A river of blood as red as my robe. And as the white bull lies twitching on the wires, I watch his soul escaping, drifting out through the gaping hole in his neck. The whole world turns red as we fly through our sea of blood. Tommy’s circles above the pasture become tighter and tighter as we rise higher and higher into the dark night sky. I feel myself leaving Finn then, coming out of his body, though I can't leave him completely. Like the head of the bull I, too, seem to be attached by a sliver of skin and ligament. Part of me remains attached to him, and all the world is bloody. The soul of the White One hovers above the quiet pasture and Finn, as if coming to, screams and kicks like a man gone mad.

I feel in that instant a terrific force pushing me out of his body, out of the whirling, vibrating aircraft, out into the cold, rushing air. I hear Finn scream as I, covered in blood, topple toward the bewildered soul of the dead white bull.

During my descent I feel a chill of such bone-penetrating coldness it defies definition, though it goes through me like a spear of ice, then swims around me, filling me with dread and foreboding. Then it is gone!

The bull and I swirl around and around, caught in the turbulence generated by the gunship's rotor blades, clinging to each other, wondering what has happened, wondering what could have put us outside of our bodies. The body of the bull is dead; I can see it still, hanging across the barbed wire fence. The bull can see it too, his big eyes wide, filled with fear. But my body lives. Finn lives. His arse is numb from sitting on top of his steel helmet. What's ironic is that we sit on top of our steel helmets to protect our own balls from those nasty bullets coming through the floor of the aircraft.

As I dance about the sky, riding the bull, I wonder what has compelled us to kill him so senselessly. What have we become after all? I take great pity on the bull after we shoot his balls off, after Finn casts me out of his body. And as the soul of the bull and I drift above the jungle, I cling to him tightly as we follow the gunship until, at last, we find the downed aircraft. I've been riding the bull ever since, riding the confused white bull, in one form or another, through the maze of our bloody madness for quarter of a century.

The gunship drops us off in a clearing nearby. The rain has stopped, but the trees are dripping as if it is still raining. Drip, drip, drip they go, monotonous and annoying. We walk, all five of us, single file, along the jungle floor, doing our best to dodge tripwire boobytraps, snakes and tiger shit. The bull is drifting above the treetops. Finn walks in the middle of the file; he is less experienced than the other grunts at jungle games. I walk ten feet behind him, but I’ve tied the umbilical cord around his waist; I don't want to lose him. Without that cord, or the idea of it, I would surely have lost him long ago and, just as I am new at this particular way of living, Finn isn't yet aware that he's lost his soul, that he's kicked me out of his body. What becomes immediately apparent to me is that at the very moment before my expulsion from his body I have only the same abilities as he. I am humanly limited; yet, when he kicks me out, I go immediately back to what I truly am: a pure spirit, an Invisibility, as some folk call me. I have all the accompanying attributes of a spirit: I can see things and hear things no mortal could ever hope to see or hear. No ordinary mortal, that is. A visionary, perhaps, might see many of the things I do. Finn doesn't yet know that unless he embraces me once more, takes me back into himself, he will never be complete. He will always be an Empty.

We smell the downed aircraft before we see it. Among all the other odors associated with a burned-out aircraft, we smell the horrifying and unforgettable stench of roasted human flesh. The plane has burned almost completely, though it still smolders in spite of the heaviness of the recent rains. Many of the bodies remain strapped into their seats; others are scattered and strewn about the jungle floor all around us. We stand motionless, staring with horror at our barbecued pals. Some of the bodies are still intact and of those, most have been stripped of any valuables, including wallets, rings, watches and the like and, naturally, their weapons. We find Ivy League tied to a tree, his face beaten to a pulp and what seems to be a bullet hole in his forehead.

"Jeezusgod," Finn blurts out before dropping to his knees and throwing up all over the ground before him. When he recovers he gets up and, with an angry jerk, pulls the dogtag from Ivy League’s mutilated body. He wonders why the other whole bodies haven’t been mutilated and why they haven’t all been robbed of their personal belongings. Then, a moment later, he knows.

The explosions rip apart the drip, drip, dripping night and Frankie Chen falls dead to the ground.

I think Frankie died of a heart attack; he was such a frail wee sparrow of a man. Finn goes down too, but fear buckles his legs rather than bullets or shrapnel. He pisses himself, and his long black rifle falls by his side. Before he can pick it up a tiny young girl, no more than sixteen, dressed in black, silk pajamas, whose eyes are shaped like mine, comes charging out of the undergrowth and stands, smiling, over my sprawled-out Finn, her long black rifle pointed menacingly at his head.

Before she can pull the trigger, Romeo Robinson's machete comes swinging out of the darkness we have landed in and sweeps cleanly through the young girl’s neck. The machete is Romeo’s favorite weapon. He likes the closeness of it, the personal touch. Finn does too. Romeo told Finn he liked feeling death creep up along the blade and through the hilt into his arm. He said he liked the power it gave him.

The pretty head falls beside Finn. He looks straight into the eyes of the dead soldiergirl and he swears on his very soul he sees life there before the head lolls to one side, now finally dead. Had circumstances been different, he might have enjoyed sleeping with this girl with the almondshaped eyes. When Finn looks at the decapitated head, its eyes still open, lying there as still as stone, he snaps.

"Ya fuckin bitch," he screams. "Why’d yae have to go an’ do that? I don’t even know yae."

Romeo Robinson laughs and, in a voice filled with disdain says, "Welcome to the war, Alba man!"

The ambush ended almost as abruptly as it began. We are well-versed in counterambush tactics, because we’ve trained well, and we’ve lived through ambushes before. In spite of Finn's panic-induced pissings, we rip the enemy to shreds. There’s nothing like fear to make the adrenaline flow, or to make a man a heroic warrior. After it’s all over, the smoky smell of cordite hangs thick and heavy beneath the canopy of leaves and the jungle goes back to its drip, drip, dripping monotony.

We hear then a soft whimper nearby and when we look around we see Johnny Quinn's broken body lying a few feet away. Finn lets out a loud, piercing scream; Johnny, after all, is his best friend. And Johnny is a poet. On many a warm southeast Asian night he would read to us from a big fat book of poems he kept by his bed.

The dead white water buffalo, bellowing madly, comes crashing through the leafy canopy, his legs flailing wildly. He doesn’t understand why he’ll never get back into his body, broken as it might be or why, with the same suddenness, he can now fly like the birds who once perched, picking and pecking, upon his haunches.

"Help me, Finn, help me," begs smiling Johnny as if his mouth is filled with toffee and marbles.

Johnny has blond, curly hair which he’s always trying to straighten. I never could understand why he didn't like his curls; they matched just so his perfect smile they were so beautiful. Johnny's legs are severed just above the knees and half of his face is shot away.

"Goddamit, Finn," the young Johnny pleads. "For the love of the good God in heaven, kill me!"

Johnny tries to push himself up onto his elbow, but the strain overwhelms him. He falls back onto the grass and looks up at Finn, his eyes imploring, beseeching, begging.

"I can’t, Johnny," says Finn. "Don’t ask me to do that, please don’t ask me to do that!"

Johnny sticks out his hand and grabs Finn's ankle tightly. "YOU PROMISED!" he screams, as best he can, blood and bits of broken teeth flying everywhere. "Don’t send me back to my ma like this." He knows he’s a goner. Both he and Finn have talked about the possibility many times over.

Finn stands, picks up his rifle and looks down at his fallen brother. He kneels beside Johnny and kisses him full on the bloody red lips. "Sssh, Johnny," he says." Then he stands over Johnny once more. When the shot rings out, ricocheting from tree to tree, the smile leaves Finn's face forever.

He drops to his knees, crying like a baby, as Johnny Quinn's spirit comes out of his body. Confused, it hovers above us.

I crouch beside Finn. He is still alive and, though I can no longer rest inside him, inside our body, I can no more leave him than the day can leave the night. Having no place else to go, moving on instinct alone, Johnny straddles the back of the great white bull, and I remember hoping then they might comfort one another as they ride away together to the Place of Truly Dead Souls.

Finn the Albanach, newly turned twenty, kneels down upon the wet leaves of grass, at the very moment of Johnny's death, and cries.

I realize that when he killed Johnny, Finn also killed something inside himself.

He rushes over to Romeo Robinson and grabs the machete from the startled gunner's hand. "Gimme that fuckin thing," he snarls, then begins hacking wildly at the bodies of the dead Asian soldiers, aiming for their genitals. And seeing themselves so mutilated, their spirits scream and dance wildly among the treetops.

Finn becomes a cold, insensitive killer that night; life means nothing henceforward and the realization that death really is his business becomes clearer than any textbook, story, or drill instructor might ever hope to tell.

Though Finn has no way of knowing it, the chopping in two of the White One and the hack, hack, hacky beheading of the smiling Asian soldiergirl have forever put their numbing mark on him, and the bullet now resting inside the brain of Johnny Quinn will forever have Finn's name etched upon it. Nonchalance and apathy become an integral part of him that night, more so perhaps than even the blood running through his veins. They are now as much a part of him as are his eyes or his hands or the color of his hair.

His emptiness is now complete; he did become an Empty that night, doomed to traipse around the earth without me, without his Madman, without his spirit. I remember falling to my knees as I watch him, then beg him, for the first time, to take me back.

"Please, Finn," I beg. "Take me back. I am your spirit, I am your passion, I am all the love, all the creativity you could ever hope to muster. Anything you want to love," I tell him, "I am that which will enable you to do so."

He doesn’t hear a word of it, and the deep, red blood of the rainfilled night strikes my Finn, my black-haired warrior, deaf, dumb and blind.

Tommy-up-front is as nervous as hell, though he’s the most fearless gunship pilot I’ve ever seen. He doesn’t fly his aircraft. He rides it like a wild bronco. I think he could have stood and flown it, still managing somehow to operate both the foot-pedals and the hand-controls simultaneously. But he’s jittery; we’ve left the gunship, his baby, unprotected and, in spite of the monsoon rains, the area seems to be infested with Vietcong. What’s worse, though, is that we’re illegal. We don’t have any orders to go on this mission. We’ve simply taken it upon ourselves to go look for our friends. The implications, since we’re returning with dead comrades, could be terrible.

"Let’s get the fuck outa here," says Tommy, as he grabs the body of Frankie Chen and throws it over his shoulder. "Now!" he demands.

"Fuck you, man," says Romeo. "The gunship’s just up the way! Go get it an’ pick up these bodies."

"You’re crazy, man! I don’t give a rat’s ass if Jesus H. Christ’s just up the way; we’re gettin’ the fuck outa here. Let’s go, move it!"

"I ain’t goin’ nowhere, asshole. Ivy League’s tied to a fucken tree back there," says Romeo, clenching his bloody machete more tightly than ever.

Tommy-up-front spins quickly around, pulling out and cocking his sidearm as he spins and, grabbing Romeo by the shirtfront, sticks his pistol into Romeo’s temple.

"You disobeying a direct order, lover boy?"

They each stand their ground, staring one another down for a very long and tense moment.

"Shit," said Romeo, and spins away. "Watch your fuckin back, asshole," he mutters through clenched teeth.

"Huh? Watch my back? I’ll fuck you up real bad if I hear that kinda shit again," says Tommy-up-front. Then he chuckles. "Don’t you have no respect for your elders, Romeo?" he says. The tension evaporates. Even Romeo smiles.

"Awright, you guys. Grab Johnny an’ the rest of ‘em an’ let’s get the hell outa here. We’ll take the bodies to Triage; the nurses can bag ‘em up!

The flight back to base camp is uneventful and quiet. All except for the dull, boneshaking throb of the mincemeat-making rotorblades. All of us are lost in our own thoughts as we watch the pools of blood gathering under the bodies of our dead pals.

"I want that bullet," says Finn.

The nurse, who is in her early twenties, looks at him and chuckles sardonically. She leans over the body of Johnny Quinn, then stares straight into Finn’s eyes.

"And which bullet might that be?" she asks. There’s half a dozen in him."

"I want the one stuck in his head. That’s the one that done him in."

"How do you know that?"

"I know it because I fuckin well know it! Is that no’ enough?"

The nurse looks at him and shrugs her shoulders. She is haggard and tired, exhausted. A dark brown curl hangs over her forehead.

"I don’t have time for that kinda crap," says she. "I’m too busy patching up the living."

"Nurse, I want that goddamned bullet."

She runs her tired eyes over the grim figure of Finn. "Then get it yourself, soldier," she says, and hands him a long-nosed tweezer-like instrument.

He stands there for a moment gawking at the nurse, not quite sure if he heard her properly. Romeo bursts out laughing. Tommy’s purple with rage.

"You’re one cold-hearted motherfucker," he says.

There’s a smile on the nurse’s face.

"Man, you ain’t really gonna do that, are ya?" asks Romeo.

Finn steps up to the gurney. He probes the bullet hole in Johnny’s forehead. He hits soft stuff at first. He feels sick. Then solid stuff. Maybe he got lucky right away. Is it the bullet? Forget it, man! It’s just bone. Skull. He’s nauseous. There’s a hole in the solid stuff. The path of the bullet? Get through the hole, through the forehead. Oh, christ, it’s soft, soft and mushy! The brain, he’s reached the brain. Wait a minute! Is there a hole in the back? He reaches under Johnny’s head. Feels. Should be a hole as big as a baseball. There ain’t no fuckin hole in the back. Where’s the bullet then? Must still be inside. Was it bouncin off bone, ricocheting from bone to bone? Where did it rest? Could be anywhere. Don’t talk to me now, Johnny, please don’t talk to me now. His hands are covered in blood. My hands are covered in your blood, Johnny. He gropes, twists, scratches the skull. Sounds like a hundred fingernails screeching down a blackboard. Bloodcurdling. He heaves. He purses his lips, expands his cheeks. Heave. He holds it back. Reactionary forces are at work now, they’ve taken over and conquered his will. Heave. He’s lightheaded, ready to swoon. He wishes he could. Heave. Can’t back off now. Save face. He’s a dangerous warrior now. A hero. Why am I doing this, he wonders. What the fuck am I doing here inside my buddies brain? Evidence? Take the evidence and hide it in a deep, deep hole somewhere so that it will never, ever, ever be found? The vomit rises. Heave, Finn, heave! With all his will he swallows hard, forcing it back. Romeo pukes for him, sickened. The tweezers strike something solid in the middle of Johnny’s mush. He grabs at it and pulls, pulls out the killer part of an M16 bullet. He stares at the nurse, his eyes blazing with fear and hatred. Why’d she have to make me do that? He sticks the bullet into the top left pocket of his jungle fatigues as if it were a pack of cigarettes.

He rushes off towards the door of the Triage tent, holding his bloodied hand to his mouth. The nurse stares after him, a look of abject disgust creasing her face.

"Body bag!" she shouts to a medic, tears of exasperation and pity welling up in her eyes. "Bring me another goddamnfuckin body bag!"

Before Finn reaches the door he hears the whistle, the sickening whistle of an incoming rocket, followed by the dull thud of the impact before the explosion. He hits the deck, smiling, and holds his rifle tightly.

"Missed, motherfuckers," he says.

Then the second whistling noise disturbs the night, wiping the smile from his face. It smashes through the flimsiness of the Triage tent, thuds into the floor underneath the table where Johnny’s being bagged and blows Johnny’s remains and the body of the brown-haired nurse to smithereens. Finn, shocked into inertia, is splattered with bodybits and blood. His numbness is immediate and so complete he can’t speak, and from that moment on he is unable to smile. For the second time that night he throws up, and throws up, and throws up.

In whispers, the doctors mumble, "Battle fatigue!" A numbness has taken him over, and he has a vacant stare in his eyes, as if he isn’t really there at all. A month or so later, his commander, with as little fanfare as possible, relieves him of his immediate duties and shoves him into a quiet occupation for the remainder of his time in-country. He shuffles papers from morning until night. He cries a lot. Quietly and softly. He goes back to his hootch after his duty day is done, plays hard rock music loudly through his headphones, and loses himself in the dreamscapes, the fantasy world, of his heroin-prompted wanderings, his only comfort.

I stick with him every moment of every day until at last his war is over, all three-hundred-sixty-five days of it. I send him messages, I niggle him and pester him. I’m thankful he’s still intact. In body at least. But he’s glad to be away from it all as he stands there next to the huge air terminal in Saigon. He’ll be twenty-one soon. He’s looking forward to his first legal drink when he arrives in San Francisco. Finally an adult in the eyes of the world.

The air terminal buzzes with activity, with the movement of people. As he stands there, he thinks how strange it is to be in a war zone one minute and out of it the next, back at last in mufti. He's just returned from a walk around the teeming streets of Saigon city. It really is like San Francisco, he thinks: beautiful, sultry, sexy! But like the city by the bay, Saigon also entices like a whore, a shameless goddamn whore.

Saigon city in the Maygone month of June is a magical place too, spirit-thick and colorful, teeming and pulsing with a mysteriousness that transcends even bombs and bloodhungry bullets. I can feel the mystery myself, can almost see it in the heatrippled light of the hot summer day, standing there at the airport with Finn, wearing my long crimson robe, waiting to go home, filled with regret. It could have been so beautiful, he feels. If only.

If only this, if only that! His post-Vietnam list of if-onlys has tripled, perhaps even quadrupled, compared to the days before Vietnam. "If only! The words of a dreamer," he says. What a waste. If only I'd stayed at home, if only I'd stayed in Alba. Now there's a thought for you. Alba, what a strange word it is right enough. These days at least. So ripe with emotion, bursting so with such a profusion of moods and feelings. His head pounds with memories as he stands at the terminal gate in his new silk suit, HongKongcut for a few lousy bucks. He had it tailored to fit to perfection some months before; but the suit now hangs miserably over his heroin-mangled frame. Home, he’s sure, is where the blood is. Aye, that's it all right. Where the blood is!

When the White One's soul leaves his body, on the night Finn kicks me out, I feel sure it’ll be easy to get back inside him, but he’s so confused himself he doesn’t have the slightest idea how empty he is. He doesn’t even know he’s an Empty. I feel certain it’ll be easy to somehow communicate with him; even as a child his openness to mystical considerations is mature beyond both his years and the strictures of the ordinary, workaday world; that's why I’m so surprised he doesn’t yet know he’s now an Empty himself.

He always loved Alban winters, particularly during those long nights when thick fog descends over the fields in which he plays. He could feel the mystery then too, and knows intuitively that spirits and other Invisibilities roam around on such subdued nights. The wispiness of spirits, after all, blends well with fog. Proofs and the like are of no consequence. He just knows! He feels the presence of Invisibilities much too strongly. He is open to the feel of them!

I have always been inside Finn, though quietly. It’s only since I’ve been outside him that I have to niggle and annoy him. When inside him, I am simply a part of him. I remember one particularly foggy night when he awoke disturbed from a fitful sleep.

He is around twelve years of age at the time and has awakened to the sad and plaintive moaning of the bagpipes. They beckon him, invite him to seek the source of the sound. He jumps out of bed and dresses hurriedly, not daring to awaken his family. He slips out the door into the night like an Invisibility himself and walks off into the darkness. All is quiet but for the sound of the pipes coming to him wrapped in the droplets of water forming the earth-embracing clouds. So enshrouded in music and clouds, he feels the pull of his heritage, the inexplicable pull of some ancient mystery, as if he’s become one with the trees and the grass and other things beyond the usual ken of man.

And so pulled, he passes the homes of all his friends and loved ones, into the fields, through faerie rings and thistles, until he feels as scratched as the suffering Christ himself. He stops, half dead, and drops before a high hill where the music began. On top of the hill stands the piper, dressed in an ancient kilted plaid. The sad and plaintive dirge plays on, crying to him. For the first time in his life, he feels a great heart-heavy pain. The prostrate Finn looks up and the piper turns, his eyes filled with tears. "Mo thruaige ort!" says the piper in the language of the ancients. "Woe to thee!"

Oh why, Saigon? Oh, why those scratches of Christ from the mists of Alba to the teeming, pulsing mystery of Saigon city? Alba, light years away, is real only at a gut level and in memories. Finn's last memory of Alba is of getting drunk, sitting around a fire with his friends in Fingal's Park, a few hours before being poured onto the plane for America, land of the free, home of the bygod brave.

And America, what of America? He lived there just a few short months before being drafted, but he's learned so much about being American as he plods through jungle and guts with his fellow warriors who are all as young and as innocent as he. He knows even then he will never be an American, that he never can be an American. Nor is he a Scotsman any more. The many thousands of miles of separation and the many rounds of spent ammunition and the blood and the guts and the heroin overdoses have seen to that, have made him a stranger, a loner.

He stands at the air terminal in Saigon city in the Maygone month of June feeling like the Steppenwolf. And he weeps.

He’s sure it’s the killing of Johnny that makes him a loner when, in fact, it is the killing of the bull that makes him so. I’ve often wondered what they were thinking, those young men, when they took the life of the bull, when they killed the bull so certainly, so irrevocably. Were they killing themselves? Did the bull represent manhood, virility, propagation of the species? Or was it something more basic, more primordial even than that? Isn’t Zeus, the father of all the gods, represented by the bull in classical mythology? Were they, then, killing God? Perhaps that’s why, since then, Finn has felt that he belongs nowhere, but that he belongs everywhere too!

He feels the mystery of Saigon, though he doesn’t know exactly what it is he feels; nor can he possibly know how to describe it, yet there we both stand at the airport feeling it. I’ve learned by now that Finn won't let me back into him without a tremendous struggle. Had I known then how long the struggle would be, I might have given up and let him do as he would, with or without me. But I know what we are, what our existence means, because I come from the Land of the Truly Alive which he knows so little of. I am the spirit; he, the body and the mind. He calls it toughness, will, one-and-one-equals-two pragmatism. I know better. I know it to be ignorance. No more, no less. Ignorance and pride!

But I won't let him go. No matter what, no matter whatever happens to him, I'll keep the blood-dripping umbilical cord wrapped safely around his waist, and I'll continue to plod along by his side until he takes me back or until he kills himself. Perhaps I’ll hang him with the cord myself; it might be better than suicide.

He’s been trying to kill himself ever since he put the bullet into Johnny Quinn's brain. Not so much by suicide, but through careless bravado at first and, now, through the extravagant use of heroin, pure China White.

He is loaded to the gills now as he stands here waiting for the plane to take us to San Francisco, where he plans to live after a short visit to Alba, as he will always call it. He has a vial of heroin in his pocket. He’s going to stick it up his arse and smuggle it into America. It will last him a long, long time and will enable him, he’s sure, to withdraw completely from the awful stuff. But he’s afraid.

When his flight is announced, he runs into the bathroom and snorts enough of it up his nose to choke a horse. Though he's become emaciated through guilt and the consequent heavy use of dope and is thirty pounds underweight, his tolerance is high. As a junkie, he is at his peak. He feels somewhat normal as he stuffs some more of the heroin into the end of a cigarette. If nobody bothers him, he’ll smoke it on the other side of the Pacific; if it doesn’t go so well, he’ll simply drop it on the ground and hope for the best, withdrawals be damned!

And so it all is, over and done with—history. A year, every minute of it spent counting down the days, accompanied by the agents of madness as they do their best to mold him and make him what he will become for the rest of his mortal life: an Empty, traipsing throughout his life without me, without his Madman, without his spirit!

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