The Reason You're Alive by Matthew Quick

Author:Matthew Quick
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-07-03T16:00:00+00:00

11.

By now you probably have pieced together why I might be so immediately sympathetic toward a rape survivor like my dead wife Jessica. You have access to my secret military records, and I know you’ve already been through all of those, so don’t even try to bullshit me about that. But since I don’t have access to those files at this point in time and therefore have no idea just what the fuck they say, I figure I better set the record straight about my being sexually assaulted myself.

When they shipped me home from Vietnam, they allowed me to see my parents for a weekend before I had to go to Kansas, where I was supposed to undergo a psychiatric evaluation. Like I said before, after so many days in combat, everyone becomes legally insane, regardless of his—or unfortunately her, these days—mental fortitude going into war. This is a well-known fact that even the liars in Washington would never publicly dispute, even if they will never send their own sons and daughters to fight wars. So fuck them. And yes, I was definitely pretty fucked in the head when I came home, but I managed to keep it together for the forty-eight hours I spent with my mother and father, eating my mother’s food and smoking my father’s cigarettes. Because my father had been to war, he knew I was acting, but he played along for the sake of my mother. I tried to protect her from that the best I could. If she were still alive, I wouldn’t be telling you half of what I am here, but my mother died years ago without knowing these things. Mission accomplished there.

I started to really lose it on the bus ride to Kansas. I kept seeing gooks in the trees we passed and in the backseats of vehicles next to us on the highway and peeking out of gas station windows. The pajama wearers were everywhere. There was part of my mind that knew I was hallucinating, but a larger part of my mind kept saying, Just because you are in America doesn’t mean you’re safe. Your government fucked you so many times overseas, what makes you think they’ll stop now that you’re home and within arm’s reach? Part of me—the part that was seeing little yellow bastards in American trees—was completely paranoid, I admit, but another part of me was right about a lot of things too.

I was also afraid of seeing my nemesis, that Indian, Clayton Fire Bear, on the base. He and I had arrived in Vietnam at the same time, and therefore we were set to return stateside at the same time too.

It was a long thirty or so hours on the bus, and I mostly sweated profusely and smoked Marlboro Reds. Everyone else on the bus was twitchy too. There were some guys who tried to make jokes at first, just to keep things light, but they didn’t find a large enough audience, I guess, because the jokes stopped an hour into the drive.

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