Val Hall, page 17
“No. This will be something that songs will be sung about,” Sebastian said, a hint of The Voice coloring his words.
But Jonesy seemed oblivious to that. He lifted his eyes from the refugees, and locked them with Sebastian’s.
“You think?” he questioned softly. He rooted in his pocket with one hand and pulled out a much folded piece of paper; his fingers gripped it tightly, for a moment, and then he held it out to Sebastian. “Here,” he said. “You didn’t get it from me, you understand, but you might want to see this. It’s the last cable sent from the CIA bureau in Saigon before it was shuttered. Good luck, Sebastian.” He turned and walked away.
Sebastian took the paper reflexively and stood holding it, staring at the place where Jonesy had been standing. And then, slowly, he unfolded the paper, and read the words typed on it: Wish to advise this will be last message from Saigon station. This has been a long hard fight and we have lost. Let us hope that we will not have another Viet Nam experience and that we have learned our lesson. Saigon signing of.”
VAL HALL 2018
“I had to make up for that,” Sebastian said. “First right there – on the ship – they had a situation with the carriers, the Vietnamese pilots who had access to choppers flew them out to the fleet – and in the end there were so many that there was no room for them – some of the pilots flew them into the sea themselves and then got picked up by American rescue boats, other choppers already on the landing decks had to be simply pushed overboard to make room for more. I was standing there when one of them was manhandled over, and there was this Vietnamese guy next to me who was just crying, tears running down his face – and there was this American kid, just beside me, watching it all, and I said, in The Voice, just as the chopper overbalanced and went into the water, ‘Look isn’t it beautiful to watch it sink’ – and the kid got an intent look on his face and leaned over the railing and stared after the drowning chopper repeating, ‘Isn’t it beautiful’. And the Vietnamese guy’s face looked like melting wax, at war with his mind, still twisted with tears but I had said it was beautiful and therefore it was, it had to be... – and that was just the beginning of it. Later, much later, back home, I got handed the statistics for it all.” He paused. “The heavy armor of the North smashed down the gates of the Presidential Palace – that was less than a kilometer from the Embassy – less than four hours after our last chopper left,” he said. “You know the rest. Saigon was dead, long live Ho Chi Minh City. All initial communications with the outside was cut, but we heard that the usual run of looting and mayhem transpired before order was restored. They began to empty the city, sending people out to the countryside to farm – or worse, into the ‘re-education classes’ for those unlucky enough to have had obvious ties with the South Viet Nam government or with us. Slowly, we got the numbers – out of nearly a hundred thousand people we’d had in our pay, we got maybe twenty three, twenty four thousand out by the end of April. We heard that more than that number of those we left behind who could be identified – often using our own left-behind lists of names – were systematically slaughtered, afterwards. In the thirteen years of war, we lost more than fifty thousand Americans and untold millions – we will never really know how many – Vietnamese, and that’s in the war, I’m not counting the hundreds of thousands in the camps where they died of hunger and disease and hard labor. I could do little with that, but there was Saigon. There was always that. I could make that... mythical. Heroic.”
“Did you?” Eddie asked quietly.
“I had all the numbers, and they told quite the story,” Sebastian said. “81 helicopters, eighteen hours, more than six hundred sorties, more than a thousand Americans and close to six thousand Vietnamese evacuated by our chopper pilots, more brought out by the Vietnamese pilots, or the Air America evacuation. The Ambassador got them the keep the fleet in the area for another couple of days, picking up the strays in the water – but on the second day of May Operation Frequent Wind was over and we turned out back on Viet Nam and steamed for friendlier ports. And I wrote about that, about all that. President Ford was later quoted as saying that ‘you couldn’t help but be very proud of those pilots and others who were conducting the evacuation’. And that was true, and I helped make it true. But it was still a defeat. It was still a defeat. I still have that CIA cable that Jonesy handed me, and that burned. It burned. I had failed. I had taken the gift... and I had failed in the use of it. For a while I sat back and licked my wounds – but then I decided I had to prove myself better than that. So I went back to them. And they took me, of course – The Voice is a great weapon when you aim it right and I let them aim me.”
“And they sent you to more wars,” Eddie said, closing his eyes briefly.
“Oh yeah,” Sebastian said. “Quite a few. And you know... it’s odd.”
“What is?”
“All those places... became real to me, in a way. Became... they wore women’s faces. All the places I came to, I touched, I changed, I told the convenient truths, and then left behind. I remember distinctly, with Saigon, I looked back in my mind, as the chopper rose, at the city where I had spent nearly three years of my life, the city I had not known until that moment that I loved. And she looked right back at me, golden as she knew how to be in the last light of the day, a beautiful woman turning towards me with a sensual languor and half-closed dark eyes still drowsy and full of dream, watching me close the door softly behind me as I left her behind, both of us knowing I would never return. Other cities, other places, I saw with human faces too – Beirut was a dark-haired beauty with passionate eyes the color of the best dark chocolate, Bosnia a feisty girl with Slavic cheekbones and strong capable hands, Syria a ragged houri out of tales of ancient Damascus, Afghanistan a lovely girl-child with startling sea-green eyes looking out from behind a faded fringed headscarf – but Saigon, Saigon was my first. One does not forget one’s first. And for someone whose trade was words, that farewell, for me, that painful leave-taking, was... silence. Before I reached the ship that would take me away from there, and the noise began again, the human chatter, assaulting my ears, my mind, I had a moment of pure silence, saying goodbye. I never wrote about that. That silence was between me and the city. It still lives, somewhere inside me.” He paused. “And then I just burned out. And they thought I was done, and they dropped me. But I couldn’t stop – and there were other arenas where The Voice could be sold. I made a good living.”
“I think I know where that went,” Eddies aid. “I saw you on TV, in the twilight of the twentieth century. A lot.”
“Mine was the word, the tap on the shoulder,” Sebastian said. “I reinvented myself, and The Voice. And people paid for the results – if I touched someone and said, ‘You are successful’, all good things came to them. If I said ‘You are beautiful’, the cameras the world over loved them. If I said ‘You are famous’, they were, even if there was nothing to be famous for except being famous. “
Eddie grimaced. “Yeah. Thanks for that.”
Sebastian, unexpectedly, laughed. “It was fluff,” he said. “Spun sugar. I could do that in my sleep. And hey, at least nobody died. Not any more. Not on my watch.”
“And what are you telling me?” Eddie asked, his eyebrow rising again.
“You will let me in...?” Sebastian said, the words petering out into a question. He shook his head sharply. “No. I am telling you nothing. I am done. The Voice had been a gift – the kind of gift that I know you use as a criterion for this place – but it is silent now. I am old, and I want peace now. I want quiet, and I want peace.”
“You don’t want peace,” Eddie said. “You came here for absolution. You know we can’t give you that, don’t you? You know nobody can... except maybe yourself?”
Sebastian turned his head in Eddie’s direction, and reached out to slowly remove his glasses. His eyes were bright with tears.
“I am what I am,” he whispered. “I did what I was made to do. I will take the peace, if I can’t have forgiveness.”
Eddie rose from the bench, holding out a hand to help Sebastian to his feet.
“We can give you a place to remember,” Eddie said quietly. “How you come to terms with those memories... that’s up to you. You’ve spent your life chasing beauty, or creating it from ugly things, if you could not find it – here, you won’t find base clay to work with. Here, you’ll find truth. We cannot help you, if you can find in truth no beauty.”
Sebastian blinked at his tears. “Where do I know that from? Star Trek, wasn’t it? What was the original quote?”
Eddie smiled. “There’s hope for you,” he said. “Come on, I’ll take you up to the house now, if you want. We can start the paperwork.”
The One About Ashes (1980)
VAL HALL 2018
“I’m sorry,” Blaise Bennet said, with the usual resignation and regret, waiting out on the lawn while the clean-up crew worked on his room. “I really don’t know how to stop it. There’s the pills, but if I forget to take it before I go to bed – things just – ” He swallowed. “Maybe I shouldn’t even be here. I’m endangering...”
“You would be worse somewhere else,” Eddie said equably, his eyes sympathetic as they rested on the old man beside him. “If you were anywhere else but here you would have burned down half a city somewhere by now. And killed innocent people, if not yourself. Here, we can deal with it. We can mitigate the worst of it and for the rest... that’s what insurance is for.”
“It’s fine, when I’m awake – I have to be aware of it, all the time, there’s that, I have to be on guard, and it might be exhausting but at least I know I am supposed to be doing that, so I do it. But when I close my eyes... I don’t even think I can blame it on just dreaming about it, either. It isn’t a matter of simply abdicating conscious control. It’s more than that. It’s like – it’s like there’s always been two of me, and the other one takes over when this one, me, the one you’re talking to, goes away. And the other one... well, they spelled his name differently for a reason.”
“Blaze,” Eddie said. “Yes, I know.”
“In theory, he was supposed to be fireproof,” Blaise said bleakly. “Instead, he burns.” He blinked. “You know my theory?”
Blaise told Eddie his theory every time they had this conversation, and they’d had it a dozen times since Blaise had moved into Val Hall. But it seemed to comfort him, in some weird way, to be able to put his affliction into a context, even if he was no more able to deal with the consequences in the aftermath of that than he had been able to before. And so Eddie waited to hear it again.
“I think every time I went back in, I took in a little more of the mountain,” Blaise said. “My face was a mask, my nose and my mouth covered with the mask that the volcano put on me, I could not speak – I could not breathe – that was probably what saved me – but some of it crossed. And I’ve been carrying that fire inside of me all of my life. It comes out when it can. Somehow.” He grimaced. “Just how bad was it, this time?”
“We learned,” Eddie said. “It’s flame retardant everything, in your room, and we have quadrupled the sprinklers in there. We may have to replace the blinds again this time, but... accidents happen.”
“I’m going to kill somebody one day,” Blaise said, closing his eyes.
“Ah,” Eddie said, “we won’t let that happen. “You aren’t alone. Here, you aren’t alone.” He gave Blaise a reassuring squeeze on the shoulder. “That’s why Val Hall is here.”
“But I never really chose to be what you call a superhero,” Blaise said.
“Most people aren’t. Not if we’re talking the kind that aren’t simply immortals with great powers beyond an ordinary human, or else they have the kind of fortune that allows them to use super-gadgets to back up their impulses. When it comes to ordinary human beings who can step up to the title... they don’t choose. They get chosen. It’s a legacy thing – it’s in their blood or their genes – they are born to something that is a gift or a burden and don’t even know it until something triggers that thing that they were born to do. With you...”
“I was a cocky, entitled kid,” Blaise said. “Right until that moment, of which you speak. And then, afterwards – after the mountain died – I just felt... guilty... that I had found a way to survive. Everything seemed worthless. There was no shine to life.” He grimaced. “There was only fire.”
MOUNT SAINT HELENS, MAY 1980
“Stop!”
The voice was peremptory, full of authority, and Blaise and Jesse were not surprised to turn around and find a Sheriff’s Deputy behind them.
“This road is closed,” the Deputy said. “How did you get past the barrier, back there? Didn’t you see the sign?”
“We must have crossed behind it,” Jesse said innocently. “What sign?”
“This area is dangerous. Everyone has been evacuated, or is in the process of leaving. Haven’t you been listening to the news? This is the designated Red Zone, and if that mountain blows...”
“That? Oh, really – look at it.”
The perfect cone of Mount St. Helens towered above them, flawless like a painting against the sky.
“We were just going for a camp out – ” Blaise began, turning the blue eyes he knew he could make look innocent of everything.
“Well, not here, and not today,” the Deputy snapped. He jerked a thumb over his shoulder in an emphatic gesture. “Back off. You’re going thataway. This area is out of bounds.”
Jesse shrugged, and shifted the straps of his backpack against his shoulders. “But I saw people...”
“Where, back at the barrier? So you did see that?” the Deputy said, his voice sharpening a little. “We’re letting people with property up there go back and check on things, that doesn’t mean we’re encouraging random backpackers – there are patrols out rounding idiots like you two up. We’re after anyone we know is out there, we’ve got at least one party of kids that we know went up before the hammer came down and we aren’t sure where they are and it’s a big mountain – we have our work cut out for us, and we’re trying to stop looky-loos like you guys from blundering in and making more problems. Go on, get out of here.”
He watched them go, standing behind them, making sure they didn’t double back – but of course they did, the moment they could dart into the country and out of his immediate line of sight, more eager than ever now to plunge into the wooded slopes of the volcano. They were young, invincible, nothing at all could happen to them – nothing at all could possibly go wrong. It was May, the sun was shining, and the world was a place that was made for adventure. No snippy authority figure was going to get in their way – that mountain hadn’t twitched, to any great degree, for a century, and it was really unlikely to blow up right here, right now. Not while they were here. Not while Jesse and Blaise were there to dare it, to race up it, to touch it, to play tag with it, to stand there and laugh at the beauty and majesty of it and their own youth and invincibility. They had both turned eighteen less than a fortnight before – young enough to be boys, old enough to be legally adult, they could do what they wanted now and nobody could send them off to detention any more – and it was a heady feeling. They were old enough to be convinced that they were young enough to be anybody, do anything. And right then, what they wanted to do was climb a pristine mountain through stands of mature Douglas Firs that made Blaise breathless.
They broke for the day in a clearing, pitching a tent so that it faced a gap in the trees through which they could see the mountain rising above them. They made a small and careful campfire, made sure that it was secured before they rolled up into their sleeping bags.
Blaise woke suddenly, not quite knowing why, but feeling as though a giant hand had shaken him from sleep. He called out to Jesse but apparently Jesse had not heard or felt anything – all he could hear in response was a soft snore. He glanced down at his wrist; his watch said 8:30 am. Other than Jesse, there was no sound around him – no birds, no breeze stirring the trees. Such was the silence that Blaise held his own breath, which sounded too loud in his ears... and it was in that silence that heard a groan that sounded as though the earth itself was being torn asunder, and then the sound of an explosion. He stumbled out of his sleeping bag, falling over hs own feet, and lifted his eyes up towards the mountain. And then staggered back, shaking Jesse awake, roughly, frantically.
“Jesse! Jesse! Wake up! We have to get out of here – we have to get out of here now!”
Jesse took a moment or two to blink awake; in those precious minutes two more explosions sounded. The mountain disappeared completely as a huge dark gray cloud roiled up into the sky. Blaise’s ears suddenly popped as a shockwave ran down into the woods; the air began to thicken, gain texture.
“We have to get out of here,” he repeated urgently, pulling at Jesse. “Come on! Come on!”
Jesse was pulling on shoes even as Blaise spoke. “Help me,” he said over his shoulder as he bent over one foot. “Get the sleeping bags rolled...”
“Forget the sleeping bags. Run,” Blaise rasped. Whether or not there was already particulate matter in the air or not, his throat was closing up. It was already almost too hard to speak.
Jesse looked as though he might have stopped to argue, but a second glance at the cloud changed his mind.
“Right,” he said. “Back that way, the way we came.”
“No,” Blaise said, “over there – across the slope – easier to run – come on...”
He wondered about the camping party the Deputy had mentioned. The idea of children out there...
But there was no time. No time to think. No time to plan. They were running, running for their lives, eyes streaming, ears blocked, barely able to see where they were going, hoping that they would come out into the open, a place where they could pick up speed, where they might be seen if anyone came looking.
But they were still under cover, and weaving in between trees – right until the moment when Blaise, in the lead, turned at a sudden cry behind him and saw Jesse down, writhing on the ground.
