All characters belong to Aaron Sorkin, John Wells Productions, Warner Bros., & NBC. Lyrics and title come from Bjork. Standard disclaimers apply. Please send feedback.
All Is Full Of Love
Violet
you'll be given love,
you'll be taken care of.
you'll be given love.
you'll have to trust it.
Against black, we hear the faint hum of electricity.
We slog through the air that is heavy, wet, dangerous; the same consistency and depth as the mud around our ankles. Our footprints fill with slime and are sucked away. But we are huge. We trample the grass, break the twigs, and though we can't always tell, our path is plainly marked. We were here.
They took things away from us, when we arrived in boot camp and when we got here. They took away spare time, sex, edible food, a sense of being clean, our sleep, a stuffed dog the fat kid next to me used to carry around. Stripped us to name-rank-serial number and added gear. Instruments of death, instruments of survival, but nothing that makes it easy. Nothing that makes the air lighter, or chases away the bastard mosquitoes; nothing that makes you invincible.
Something's coming closer. That's the electric sound. We don't back up. We don't surge forward. We wait. Harry Bateman is probably thinking about his mother and God; he's Catholic and he has them inextricably confused. The fat kid is probably thinking about that stupid toy dog. I am not thinking about my family. I am thinking about America. Not eagles or flags, but French fries, apple pie, The Doors, Richard Nixon. Haight-Ashbury, which I have never seen, and Times Square, which I know intimately. If you told me that none of them existed anymore, I would not be surprised.
I am here. You are not. You are thirty years from me, somewhere safe, you are dry and cool and not completely broken. You are well-respected and intelligent and influential, and you carry the remaining shards of me around, hidden. Your words are heard. You are able to sleep -- you are, in fact, sleeping now, and I am your subconscious speaking.
I do not believe in you.
If you were not the future but the present, you could stand here sinking into the earth and ask me or Bateman or the fat kid -- we'll never remember his name. You could see that mosquitoes really are infinite and immortal. You could walk among bitter, bitten men who are also terrified teenage boys, jerking off together in their tents at night without shame, because, fuck it. If you could tell me that I would not die here, I would not believe you.
If you were in my head, instead of me in yours, I would not believe you when you told me I got out. I grew up. I went home. I went on. I would not believe that. I do not believe that I am still alive.
The grime must be an inch thick on my skin. Even my teeth feel gritty. I don't believe that a woman will ever touch me again, unless by some freakish act of a freakish God I make it to my next 48-hour leave. Then I might find one of the cheap, fragile whores who give everyone the clap, whom everyone fucks anyway. Because coming is dying, and even if it is awkward and paid for and brief it is liberation from life.
If you told me things could get better, I would not believe you. If you were real, and you told me things could get worse, I would probably shoot you.
You would tell me that there will be women again, as there will be milkshakes and bathtubs and traffic lights. You could tell me that I will meet one in a classroom, scarcely more than a year from now. I will find myself tangled in her long dark hair, thawed by her warmth. We will have sex on couches and rooftops, in dorm rooms and movie theaters and our own tiny apartment. We will want a baby. She will love me until she dies horribly, wasted, consumed, killed from the inside out by a disease I will never understand.
You could tell me that, much later, I will meet another woman at a fundraiser, a redhead who is always a few steps ahead of me, always a little sharper than I want to believe. We will have sex in trains shuttling between two cities, in hotels upstate and the bathrooms of expensive restaurants. She will want to make me happy; she will fail. She will love me until she stops doing so by slow degrees, the divorce falling somewhere in the middle of the process.
You could tell me about another woman, whose hair color changes gradually over the course of a decade, whose eyes and smile and height are unnervingly constant. We will have sex in too many states, too many countries, too many cars. She will accept two things about me: that I love her and that I hurt her. You can't tell me yet whether I can accept those same truths about her.
I would not believe it. Not a word. Look at me. Look at yourself.
I don't know when the last time was that I wasn't sweating. I've been drunk or stoned half the time, like everyone else. The rest of the time, it's adrenaline that puts us in an altered state. At eight I was arrogant about my intelligence; at forty-eight, as you know, I will be the same. At eighteen I'm disgusted with my own stupidity. They -- them -- the enemy -- they are so much smarter than we are, in the ways that women are smarter than men, and sometimes it doesn't matter which side has more physical force.
I would not believe you when you spoke of the White House, of being clean and responsible. If you told me a President would know my name one day, I would laugh, spit into the bushes, make an obscene gesture. If you told me one day I would care how much money is in a welfare mother's check, how many policemen walk urban streets, and how many millions of dollars Argentina is worth, I would not believe you.
Bullets. Mosquitoes. Shrapnel. Mud. These things are real. The rest is abstract and worthless. Like love, which is everywhere and nowhere, I do not believe they will ever touch me.
You try not to think of me. You try not to remember the things that are all I know. You buried me a long time ago, a short time from now -- maybe when you met the dark-haired girl, maybe as soon as you set foot on American soil. But I did not die, and sometimes I force you to remember. When you have been drinking. When someone shoots at you. When someone freezes to death. When you sleep.
This is the jungle; ugly and knotted and dense. The stench of unconquerable loneliness and inevitable death. In twenty minutes this will be a firefight. In an hour the two people standing next to me will be killed in action. The survivors will be infinitely outnumbered by the mosquitoes. You know these things, and if you told me, I would not be surprised. But I don't trust you, any more than you trust me.
I would not believe that I live. But I live, and I become you. Soon you will wake up, thirty years removed from this, and you will shower and dress and go about your day. You are not a horrible person. We've tried, in strange and elaborate ways, to make the world a better place. Your efforts are less bloody than mine, maybe just as ineffective. And you try to believe I never existed. But I did. You walk down the hall -- I am sinking into the earth, carrying guns and grenades and the air. You speak -- I am holding my breath. Listen: someone calls "Toby!" and you turn -- someone barks "Ziegler!" and I turn away.
Against black, we hear the faint hum of electricity. It is an oncoming firefight in Southeastern Asia, or it is a fan in an apartment in Washington D.C. You can't convince me that I have a future. You choose not to recall that you have a past. But the truth remains the same unpleasant truth. We are the same person.
We were here.
twist your head around,
it's all around you.
all is full of love,
you just ain't receiving.
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