Into the Inferno - Earl Emerson [101]
Stephanie walked over and spoke his name, took his pulse, temperature, blood pressure, felt his brow, and began checking his extremities for signs of conscious or reflexive movement. I thought about trying to speak to him but couldn’t get myself to do it in front of this many people. Anything I said would only make me look fatuous and show Joel off for the zombie he’d become. In fact, all I could think about was how full of life and humor Joel had been only weeks earlier.
I slipped out of the room and stepped onto the front porch, gently snicking the front door closed behind me. Across the street my girls were running in circles with two other children. Coming so soon after Stan’s funeral, seeing Joel again had been ruinous, his twisted body dressed by somebody else, his facial muscles slack, the part in his hair crooked.
It would be a good many years before Joel got a funeral or the accolades Stan had received that morning. Not unless his mother-in-law fed him another apple. By the time they buried him, he would have spent a decade, perhaps several decades, lying in musty rooms by himself. It was the worst way to die.
A day at a time.
Alone.
Forgotten.
Joel and I had joined the fire department the same year. After my divorce he used to tease me about my dating habits, joking that I’d never met a woman I didn’t want to dump. He claimed I had a pathological need to make each woman in the room fall in love with me so I could break her heart. It wasn’t true. At least, not to the extent he claimed.
Standing alone on his porch, I thought about what he’d been trying to tell me. Joel had been relentless in trying to force me to see myself from a different perspective.
What hurt was that all those years I’d treated his comments as jokes and all those years he’d been right.
Joel had seen through me.
He’d said once I must have been a lonely child. How he’d come up with that diagnosis was beyond me, because everybody else in the department thought I was a happy-go-lucky guy, assumed I always had been.
Now, standing on his front porch, for the first time in years, perhaps ever, I was able to look at myself as an outsider might. I had been a sad kid. Life at Six Points had been infinitely depressing and had worn me down physically, while suppressing my spirit, too. One only had to look at my choice of reading material during those years.
I’d spent hours each day in the school library or the downtown Seattle Public Library, usually when I was supposed to be out on the streets proselytizing. The Sixth Element and William P. Markham had the longest list of banned books on earth, essentially any book Markham hadn’t written, yet once I broke the tenet and began reading from outside sources, once I discovered the library, I found a whole new world. Hundreds, if not thousands, of new worlds.
I absorbed as much information about the universe outside our religion as possible.
I loved reading about war pilots, from the First World War right through Vietnam. There was something immensely compelling about the thought of being up in the wild blue while the rest of the world fought like barbarians below.
In addition to flying stories, I read every WW II escape memoir I could lay my hands on. I read about fliers slipping out of POW camps, about soldiers escaping from the Wehrmacht, about Jews, Communists, and gays escaping from the Gestapo. I read with relish and identified completely with men and women relating tortures at the hands of the Nazis, and swore that if I was ever tortured, I would do everything in my power to survive and exact my revenge. What I hadn’t realized until years later was that I had been tortured every day of my young life, and that my pitiful reprisals would eventually be launched against an old man in a nursing home.
Ironic that I should identify with prisoners of war so completely. Ironic also that I should dream incessantly of escape from a prison camp. It was my spirit that had been