Logan had a dream about waking up in someone else’s skin. It was a dream he’d been having for years, and its landscape was so familiar it was almost comfortable. He could –almost- recite along with the action. Word for word. Here again! He would think with a rising excitement, seeing everything around him was just as it once had been. And this time, this time, he would look around, he would take note, and he would remember when the dream was over, where he had been and who he had been. Everything would become clear.
In his dream, he woke up and he was someone else. Another man, a man who was dead and hardly missed. It was unnerving every time to be lying there alive with the knowledge that the man he was, was dead. He could stretch out this man’s fingers to the light and wriggle them one by one. He could touch this man’s face and feel the scratchy stubble and the short-shorn soldier’s hair. He could place two fingers to the sensitive point on his neck, and feel this man’s heart beat, thready and unsure, but there none the less.
I must remember this. He thought. I must remember how it felt to be alive.
He was alone in a white room on a low bed. It smelled of new linen and new sweat. Though at first his thoughts were soaring with elation at being once again newly alive, this always passed in seconds. It passed as quickly as he realised that he may be alive, but he felt like death. It hurt to breath and his fingers shook and he felt cold, and drenched and empty. The sheets were damp and clammy. He pushed them off and shivered as the air touched his pale skin. His breath fled as though he had been plunged into cold water, and he thought to himself;
Well, here you go, Logan. Be careful what you wish for. You’ve been praying to be cool again and here you are. He, or rather this man who was now dead, had been fantasizing about standing in a rain storm after a thundery, humid day. The days here were too hot.
People had never told him that England would be hot, but then he should hardly be surprised. The whole of Europe had been plunged into a furnace, and London was being slowly taken apart. He knew, after all, that Hell was meant to be hot. And it seemed to be getting hotter. This street was once called Berlin Road, but they renamed it after him.
That’s right… But the memory flickered away, and he couldn’t chase it.
Instead he looked around himself. Whitewash and toothpaste and faint cigarette smoke, all tainted with an antiseptic smell that threatened to tear the skin from the inside of his nostrils. He sneezed. The ceiling was wood-chipped, and white and low. Everything looked clean, but he had the sense that the dirt had just been painted over. He imagined that he could smell it, lurking behind the walls.
How long has it been? He wondered, When did I get back? How much of what I remember really did happened?
The smell of blood. He remembered that. Tumbling into a heap with another soldier, laughing breathlessly and stupidly because they thought they had lost each other – but here they are both safe. Logan is slick with blood, hot and sticky and slimy, and his gun is slipping through his fingers.
“Lord!” He says to the other man, his own accent surprising himself. “ Jesus! That went a gusher alright! Like slaughtering a pig!” The bayonet blade on his gun gleams red.
“Better clean that.” The other man said. He had his hand on Logan’s shoulder, and when he took it away it was bloody.
“That’s rank!” He laughs. He’s a man with short hair like a soldier, and his eyes look tired beyond endurance, even while he’s laughing with relief.
“Like slaughtering a pig.” Logan said again. Blood is heavy in his nostrils, making his heart pound too hard. It is not the first time he has killed a man, but the first time it was so close, and so real, and the first time he has found himself covered in it.
“A Nazi pig.” The short-haired man said. His face is so familiar too, and Logan suddenly remembers who he his. His name is Bob Sethis, and he is muddy and pale and his home in east London is being bombed more than they are. He looks very, very young, but then Logan is young too, and they are both a long way from home in the furnace that Europe has become. Evil is lurking in the east…. They don’t even know it yet. They haven’t seen. They won’t even believe for years how many people have died, and when he comes to accept it, it’s all written in the history books, and he can pretend it wasn’t him. It all happened in another country, another world, to another man, and finally, to a man who died a long time ago. Sethis is looking at him searchingly.
“Are you alright, Lo?” He asks, holding Logan at arms length and looking him up and down. “I thought he got you.”
“He didn’t get me… missed me.”
“You turned a fuck of a somersault, then. I thought you were got.” Logan shrugged and pushed Sethis away. He’s covered in so much blood anyway that Bobby can’t see a thing. There’s a fierce burning, deep and low in Logan’s belly. He did get got, but Sethis needn’t know. It’ll be fine. It’s already beginning to fade. That’s the last thing he remembers before the hospital, although they must have got back somehow, and they must have talked some more.
There’s a burning low in his belly still. He swung his legs over the side of the bed, and immediately the room started to spin. He gripped the edge of the bed and gritted his teeth until it passed. In the corner of the white room, he saw a hand basin with a mirror above, and he took shaky baby steps towards it, needing to have a look at the skin he’s in. This is a man like him.
He couldn’t stand up without holding onto the edge of the basin, and he stood there holding on for a long time. Looking in the mirror was like looking at a photograph of a relative you’ve never met. It was another man, and yet… it did look a little bit like him. He is dully shocked to see how much weight he has lost, how pale his skin is, how dark the circles round his bloodshot eyes are. Low on his belly is a furious red scar. It itched with a furious heat.
I’m going to die. He thought numbly. And I thought I was the one who couldn’t be killed.
They had operated. Nurses and surgeons with worried brows had asked if he had any medical condition. He said no. Any past illnesses? No. Any accidents before? Anything like that? No. Was there anything …. wrong with him that he knew of? No. Anything to explain what they were seeing? No.
Of course something was wrong, but what could he tell them? They had hundreds of men with their guts all over the operating tables, so after a time they stopped caring, and did the best they could. He had shrapnel in his gut, but no entry wound. They’d seen it on the x-ray, and they wondered how long it could have been there, for the skin to heal so nicely over it.
“Have you ever been shot before?” The nurse had asked him. He considered saying yes, and making up a story, but he settled for no instead, and watched her worried frown. How could he have a gut full of shrapnel and no wound at all? There was no explaining it. She didn’t know the word “mutant.” Neither did he. What was simply was, and this was how he was, just the same as the colour of his eyes or his crooked right toe, or the point to his canine teeth that showed whenever he smiled. The skin had closed neatly around the wound, leaving the bullet inside, and his metabolism was trying to shift it and sweating him to death in the process. He had to go and sit down.
The nurse was English, blonde, and smelled of new nylon, cigarettes and shaving cream. He didn’t know what was in the injection she had given him, but it must have been good because he couldn’t stop laughing at her. She looked amazing. She looked beautiful. Her hair smelled so nice. He wanted to tell her he loved her, but his tongue wouldn’t form the words. She smiled back, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes.
“Where are you from?” She asked him softly.
“Canada.” He told her. She was English. She didn’t know. It was important that she knew that, and didn’t think he was American.
“I know.” She replied, making him frown with the effort of trying to think how she knew. “Where in Canada?”
He told her, but he didn’t remember what he said, and she asked his name, and he didn’t remember what he said. Frustration rose in his throat, but he couldn’t ask again. All he could do was what this Logan had done, and he knew who he was perfectly well. He was trying to reach a finger up to touch her on the face.
She said, “Logan, there’s a letter for you.” And placed it into his outstretched hand. He was shaking too much to read it and his eyes wouldn’t focus on the print. He pressed it to his nose instead. It smelt like horses.
“Give it here.” She said with a tiny frown, and took it from him. He forgot the letter, and laughed at the way her nose wrinkled.
“Do you love him?” He asked thickly. Talking was suddenly an effort.
“Who?”
“The man who got you these.” He tried to point to her new nylon stockings, but she didn’t understand, and didn’t answer. She folded away the letter instead, and said;
“That’s for later.” He tried to ask her again, but it was like trying to talk around a gag. His tongue felt several sizes too large. He must have passed out, because he didn’t remember any more.
He had woken up here. In a cold white room in Berlin Road, except now they called it Canadian Avenue. Security marched up and down with dogs they called Alsations. There was an evil the east. Even from his hospital bed, he felt it lurking. But only with hindsight. This man had a vague idea that everyone was dying, but more important to him were his own thoughts. I am going to die. I will never go home again.
And then he really did wake up. And he was right. He was still miles from home. Miles from Europe, miles from London, miles from the evil in the east, curled up, comfortable and familiar in bed in Westchester, New York. His hair was long and unruly, his ribs had a healthy covering, and that other man was dead.
He rolled out of bed with a mutter. The dream started to settle like dust. His mind turned to other things, to the business of being alive and being awake, and ten minutes later while he was brushing his teeth, he tried to remember exactly what it was he had been dreaming about, and why it made him feel so ill at ease.
He couldn’t remember. But on reflection, it probably didn’t matter. He dismissed it with a shrug and didn’t give it another thought all day.
~fin~
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