The flash drive feels like it’s gained weight. Looking at it, a marvelous storage device that would have seemed like science fiction only thirty years ago, there are two things he can’t believe. One is how many words he’s already put on it. The other is that there can possibly be any more. Twice as many. Four times as many. Ten, twenty.
He opens the laptop he thought he’d lost, a more expensive lucky charm than a battered baby shoe all grimy with dirt but otherwise about the same deal, and powers it up. He types in the password, plugs in the flash drive, and drags the single stored document to the laptop’s screen. He looks at the first line – The man my ma lived with came home with a broke arm – and feels a kind of despair. This is good work, he feels sure of it, but what felt light when he started now feels heavy, because he has a responsibility to make the rest just as good, and he’s not sure he can do it.
He goes to the periscope window and looks out at more nothing, wondering if he’s just discovered why so many would-be writers are unable to finish what they have started. He thinks of The Things They Carried, surely one of the best books about war ever written, maybe the best. He thinks writing is also a kind of war, one you fight with yourself. The story is what you carry and every time you add to it, it gets heavier.
All over the world there are half-finished books – memoirs, poetry, novels, surefire plans for getting thin or getting rich – in desk drawers, because the work got too heavy for the people trying to carry it and they put it down.
Some other time, they think. Maybe when the kids are a little older. Or when I retire.
Is that it? Will it be too heavy if he tries writing about the bus ride and the jarhead haircut and the first time Sergeant Uppington asked him Do you want to suck my cock, Summers? Do you? Because you look like a cocksucker to me.
Ask?
Oh no, he didn’t ask, Billy thinks, unless it was what you call a rhetorical question. He shouted in my face, his nose just an inch from mine, his spittle warm on my lips, and I said Sir no sir, I do not want to suck your cock and he said Is my cock not good enough for you, Private Summers, you cocksucking poor excuse for a recruit?
How it all comes back, and can he write it all, even as Benjy Compson?
Billy decides he can’t. He pulls the curtain closed and goes back to the laptop, meaning to turn it off and spend the day watching TV. Ellen DeGeneres, Hot Bench, Kelly and Ryan, and The Price Is Right all before lunch. Then a nap and then some afternoon soap operas. He can finish with John Law, who tick-tocks his gavel like Coolio in the old music videos and takes no shit in his courtroom. But as he reaches for the off button, a thought comes from nowhere. It’s almost as if someone has whispered in his ear.
You’re free. You can do whatever you want.
Not physically free, God no. He’ll be cooped up in this apartment at least until the police decide to lift their roadblocks, and even then it would be wise to stay a few days longer just to be sure. But in terms of his story, he’s free to write whatever the fuck he wants. And how he wants. With no one looking over his shoulder, monitoring what he writes, he no longer has to pretend to be a dumb person writing about a dumb person. He can be a smart person writing about a young man （for that’s what Benjy will be if Billy picks up the narrative again） who is poorly educated and na?ve, but far from stupid.
I can let go of the Faulkner shit, Billy thinks. I can write he and I instead of me and him. I can write can’t instead of cant. I can even use quotation marks for dialogue if I want to.
If he’s writing strictly for himself, he can tell what’s important to him and skip what isn’t. He doesn’t have to write about the jarhead haircut, even though he could. He doesn’t have to write about Uppington screaming in his face, although he might. He doesn’t have to write about the boy – Haggerty or Haverty, Billy can’t remember which – who had a heart attack running and was taken away to the base infirmary, and Sergeant Uppington said he was fine and maybe he was and maybe he died.
Billy discovers that despair has given way to a kind of bullheaded eagerness. Maybe it’s even arrogance. And so what if it is? He can tell whatever he wants. And will.
He begins by hitting global replace and changing Benjy to Billy and Compson to Summers.
3
I started my basic training at Parris Island. I was supposed to be there for three months but was only there for eight weeks. There was the usual shouting and bullshit and some of the boots quit or washed out but I wasn’t one of them. The quitters and washouts might have had someplace to go back to, but I did not.