Blue Feather
Created on 08/31/2008I would like to tell you one story. It happened many years ago, but I still remember his words and images as if I experienced them yesterday. He was sitting in a small, dimly-lit admission room in one of the Midwest psychiatric hospitals where I practiced at the time.
I call my story Blue Feather, he said softly, avoiding looking at me directly. His aged body looked like a shadow in the corner; so thin, so disheveled, with angles of stiff tension built up from years of pain. I listened very carefully to what he was about to say.
Here it is:
I was on the last recall to Vietnam, I barely made it. I ran away from home as soon as I turned 18. The army was the only escape I could think of.
Everything seemed like a dream, too fast and unreal. I was happy I'd gotten accepted, since it meant I was finally away from my brother. I don't think my family even knew where I went, they never cared before, why would they now? My brother was much older than me and had raped me since I was 12 years old. I was hoping never to see his face again.
As soon as we arrived in Vietnam, we were dispatched to a small village somewhere in a jungle. All the guys were about my age and we didn't have much training before they sent us in. They showed us how to shoot a gun, told us a little about the locals, and warned us that lately there had been cases of villagers strapping detonators on little kids and making them run into soldiers in neighboring villages. They said that's how they blew up a few camps nearby in recent weeks.
It was really hot over there as we arrived and I was told to carry most of the guns as other guys started making tents on the ground next to the village. The locals (mostly women and children) gathered outside their houses with low roofs covered by dry palm leaves, and stood there in small groups watching us silently.
It was pretty silent all around. I still remember the eerie feeling of that silence.
While the guys were busy fixing the tents, I looked at the sky; it was different from the one back home, like a different color or something. And when I looked back to the ground I saw her. She was running toward me through the meadow, laughing, her laugh was the only sound I heard. A little girl in a blue dress, the color of the sky, running toward me. Of all the people she had somehow picked me and she was getting closer, as if in slow motion. The other sounds came shortly after, all mixed together: a woman's outcry, somebody's cussing, the sound of gunshots, all coming from different directions. One was from the gun that shot a woman running to the girl from another side of the field. I was later told it had been her mother. The other gunshot was mine, aimed at her blue dress. I realized my fear only when I saw her slowly lowering to the ground, laughter still coming out of her mouth, as her face changed to a look of surprise. The fear was shaking my entire body and only then I remembered what they had told us about kids with bombs. I guess my instinct worked before I realized it. Except she wasn't a kid with a bomb. It was her fifth birthday that day and they'd given her that blue dress as a gift, and she chose me to show it to.
I don't remember much after that. They said I had a nervous breakdown and eventually sent me back home.
I think about her all the time. I call her Blue Feather. And you know, sometimes I feel like I am her father, I know it sounds weird but that feeling doesn't go away. I know I didn't give her life, but I took it.
I tried to work after discharge, and I did pretty good for myself. I learned computer programming and for a while I was busy with big contracts. For a few years, in fact. Then my brother killed himself, hanged himself in the garage after a drinking binge. I managed to get to his funeral and see his face once again; blown up, older, blue, utterly dead, but I still couldn't shake the feeling that somehow he had the power to attack me at any moment from his grave. A week after, I stepped off the side of a busy highway right in front of a huge truck, the last thing I remember is a piece of blue sky, the color of her dress, and then everything got black and silent. They said I was in a coma for three months. After I woke up, I didn't have much memory but I had a lot of headaches, they tried to rehabilitate me and then they kind of gave up. My memory was gone so I couldn't hold any simple job. Now I am on disability and I've lost count of the years. I just sit in my little room and drink occasionally. I don't remember much, but I remember her, the Blue Feather.
He finished his story as he had started it, in an indifferent dry voice, in a matter-of-fact style, with no drama or tears. Those were long gone. This story was just the fact of his remaining life and for the first, and so far for the last time in my career in the graph of suicide assessment, I wrote "unavoidable". Because in a way it had already happened and there was really nothing I could do for him except providing a bed and a meal in the hospital.
As I am writing now, he is most likely long gone, but I'm thinking I'd like to do something for him. I'd like to bring his story, Blue Feather, out to the world so it can continue existing and may bring changes that can help other people break the cycle of hurt and violence. So they remember Blue Feather and the man who considered himself her father after he killed her. So the wounds can heal...
Post Comment