patrol 2: 52 Card Pickup

The siege of Olgaeb’s Tower lasted about 10 adult fist time plus 2 adult fingers shoved in you by a lonely dude who came over from the next trench, claiming he was a “Spaniard,” which I heard is a type of hairy, trench-dwelling orc (Any land and Underground).  

The morning it began, arty and small arms and breathy death screams were performing a noise rock concept album titled “Fuck You.” 

After the bangs stopped ringing in my head (not the fingerbangs), I went down below ground level and cried in front of lance corporal Turok, which was not a war crime because the chain of command was essentially liquid by that point.  I’m not responsible, is what I think I said or something else stupid.  He shrugged and saluted, but didn’t hug me.  I almost ordered him to, but remembered that that would be a war crime. 

Everybody was playing poker that day in the trench, as usual.  The FNG didn’t know poker somehow, and I had to explain it.  

Hold 3 cards in your hand and don’t show any.  No, draw them from the deck.  Draw doesn’t mean color on them (and I wouldn’t let the brass catch you doing that), it just means take 3 without showing or looking.  If you’ve got any that look like people—no don’t show me, we’re playing—those trump when everybody shows.  Better looking ones trump more.  

Taught about the garbage cards (the ones with copies of dumb symbols on them) and how you just count the symbols up and that’s their name.  5 shovels on the card is “5 shovels,” etc etc. I’m a LT so it was my job to count all the garbage cards higher than 5.  They trusted me.  Mostly garbage and numbers didn’t matter because you just look for the prettiest/dumbest/scariest faces and those win.

The other thing about the cards is they were orders.  

Grunts don’t know which are witch.  But command (mostly shiny brass) uses them to form up squads to do things somehow.  It’s literally all in the cards.  This battle, this whole war.  For you whinypedias out there, this is widely disputed.  But fuck, I believe it.  

FNG showed Scary Harelip Woman along with two garbage (9 hearts, 9 shovels) his second game.  I read the garbage ones as 7’s, because everyone says 9’s foreshadow over the top.  When you go over the top, you die because the trench is surrounded from all sides by rebels.  I called them as 7’s because I thought it might save him.  It didn’t.  Within 5 fist time he was shot through the eye by a sniper while waiting on the first level.  He was gonna get sent over the top, I know it.  Turok said that the bullet that killed him looked like a 9.  I don’t really know what that was supposed to mean.  

Every night this old woman from Mong Company comes in and collects all the cards.  She’s one of McNamara’s morons.  A trainable designated live fire mitigation (bullet sponge).  But I’ve never seen her go into the field.  She just picks the cards up each night, and every morning they’re shuffled and back on the table in #5 mess.  

If there’s any bent or lost, she lets someone up top know right away.  You’re punished and, believe me, you will never see it coming.  They once hung some ordinance clerk upside down in mess and beat him like a pinata for marking a 5.  They unfucked the 5 with some crayons, but told us to rape him and we got in line while a bloody brass stood watch.  We all had to do it.  That is, until the brass left to do warfighting stuff.  There were like 4 of us still lined up at that time.  Clerk’s face was all runny camouflage mascara—dirt, sewage, cement.  We didn’t have to at that point, I guess.  

—

On the Xth day of the siege—where X is a day that both me and at least one other person would remember the same way—shiny brass yelled at bloody brass so much that the walls shook.  When shiny brass dims the sky to bombard the field-grades with hurtful word-flechettes, you know it’s serious.  They said pretty much that their headcanon for this siege defense was too wishfully indulgent and masturbatory.  There was even shakeup in the High Command, which resulted in lesser shinies being recalled, reneged, refactored or whatever you call it when big hat generals get shuffled around.  “Patton shouldn’t be shipped with Montgommery,” said the loudspeaker in the sky, “Because Patton is a stone butch and Monty is lipstick femme, and that’s aesthetically poo-poo.”  

Anyway, that noon a bloody brass colonel around-the-corner-grabs me by the hair and drags me through #1 trench and into the the pig slops that are a low-traffic entrance to the officer’s mess.  A muscle/Hell-bound guy with thick sideburns, leather trenchcoat, moustache.  Hugely decorated truncheon.  Big mood is ‘Stonewall’, Jackson … maybe.  He was from Fuir-Nim—a place that’s supposed to be only quote steers and queers unquote, and he wasn’t no minotaur—so I wasn’t afraid of him raping me.  At first.  “You’re a tomboy looking bitch,” he said after a minute, then I was.  

He opens the door to the officer’s mess, punts me in, then points to the set of cards on an ammo box.  I salute.  Don’t, he says, eyeing the cards.  “You look like my son,” he blurts out sincerely, an opener for a conversation that’s about as comprehensible to me as a Ruy Lopez is to a fucking mong playing chess.  “He died on level 3 this morning.  Was about your age.”   Hooboy.

A fist later I’m walking upwards direction in level one trench.  Cards are in my pocket.  I have a rucksack too, don’t know who put it on me.  My esteemed comrade, private Jester, hops down from somewhere.  First time she’s been in my way this morning.  All this “where you going?” shit.  Tell her that a bloody wants me to do something.  She’s talking with her hands and puts them in my face.  I push her head into the wall.  Bye Jester.

She lingers at least another fist.  By this time, we’re in the shadow of the Tower.  It’s pitch black except for outgoing from the spires—rockets and bystanders.  Seconds between bursts, and the bystanders aren’t screaming yet so they must be putting them far downfield to serve white phos to the most complacent rebel scum.  Jester tugs on my arm.  When I turn around to slug her, it’s just me with no skin.  In that all skeletons are.  I trudge forward, ignoring the rattles.  

I get to the elevator.  I find the floor button that looks like a snake, just like the bloody brass said.  Call elevator.  Waiting.  I can see people going over the top on level one, but just that.  No details.  BING!  

The operator skeleton asks what Literary Device I’m hauling.  I shrug and he gives me the evil eye.  He has no eyes, no face, I’m just angry-personifying.  Butterflies.  “Speak up,” he says and I stutter out my understanding of my orders.  “Must be Alliteration,” he laughs.  “Snake?”  Nod.

—

Snake floor is all green fuzzy carpet.  Some hierarchs are up here, talking acceptable casualties—and throwing around the name of my favorite thrash metal band—like grunts talk about “who fucked her” (same chortles between sentences, same buddy-confirmation … “Pretty much everyone in sector 8? *snort* I mean, am I right?”)

I know where to go somehow.  Horizontal black boxes encroach from above and below.  Cutscene.  Don’t look over there.  I see myself in third-person.

In Olgaeb’s Very Private Occult Study I take out the deck.  I now know which are witch, for fleeting seconds.  

Her voice is Nine Inch Nails on a chalkboard:  “Hold the deck out in front of you, sweetheart.”  You’re the one reading this aloud, you literate asshole, but I’m sure she doesn’t sound anything like you.

I follow orders.

She slaps the cards out of my hands.  I gasp and look down.  They’re scattered all over the floor!  

I’m in a bubble bath.  Candles.  Grooming supplies.  Music she thinks I’d like.  

I’m asked if the water is too hot, too cold.  She touches me somewhere and asks “What prompted that?”  Does it again, somewhere lower, “What caused that?” It’s explained to me that time is like the water and my feelings in this bathtub right now.  Continuity isn’t a thing.  No order to events, just shit happening all at once, simultaneously \ ˌsī-​məl-​ˈtā-​nē-​əs-​lē like those videogames that are the most fun, because you and friends can play and experience them together.  All of this because of the pile of cards on the floor.  Don’t yell.  Don’t look out that window.  

She puts my uniform back on me.  

“52 Card Pickup!” she beams, like she’s my age and she’s playing a friendly joke instead of trespassing like a weird ass crone.  

I start picking the damn cards up and stacking them into a deck.  She bends down and helps, singing a bastardized version of that Mary Poppins song about how work is freedom.  

I feel like we don’t get it “right” the first time, whatever that means.  It seems I endure the initial SLAP! and that weird bathtub a bunch of times, listening to shitty shoegaze music—because that’s what 13 year olds jam to nowadays—for like fists and fists.  

Finally, she puts the cards back into my pocket and closes the door in my face.  

“Don’t touch anything,” I hear mumbled through the door, which is 100% typical shiny brass “Fuck with me” shit.  You just go ahead and touch something after they’ve told you not to.  Just do it.

I don’t.

Skeletons follow me all the way home, but do the boo thing whenever I turn and look back.  Whatever.  

I walk back to the trench.  It takes a long time to get there.   Mostly because it’s a whopping 10 klicks forward of its previous position.  Past the previous battle line.  Past what was Rebel HQ just that morning. 

(Partly, the walk is so long because my shoes disintegrate halfway there.)

I’m back on level one.

Mia is kneeling over Turok, taking a bullet out of his leg.  

Colonel Stonewall Jackson is looking through some field glasses.  He spits, almost on me, and then again, in my face.  He’s laughing as I wipe it off.

“Good effect, sir?”  I say, nodding to the outgoing mortar fire that’s turning rebels into pixie dust, but thinking of something else maybe.  I forget.

“I guess,” Colonel Jackson says.  

As he steps leisurely into the slop pit, a kid about my age tackles him (as much as you can tackle a steroided behemoth like a Fuir-Nim knight).   He takes his dick out of his pants and shakes it a bit (Colonel Jackson does that, to the kid’s dick).  

“Not quite daddy’s size yet.”

“Nope, but I’m finna be!”

For a moment I’m touched.  Then … I forget.

I squat in the NCO pigpen behind a euphoric-looking sow and pee.