#billjay

Bill jolts upright to a blinding light in his eyes and rice thrown at his feet. Had he been asleep? He’s unsure. The usual darkness of his cell confuses sleeping and waking, melding all time together in an eternal, mindless slog. His own personal purgatory. He crawls toward the light, a presence felt but not seen due to the burning of his dry, aching eyes and the sudden brightness. Water splashes at his wrists and the door slams shut, light snuffed out as quickly as it came. Back to the damned darkness.

He feels around the muddy ground, using the little light that stretches through the cracks of his shoddy, wooden cell to lead him to the grains. He grabs a fist full and shoves it in his mouth, swallowing before he can properly taste the dirt. He closes his eyes, trying to summon memories of home, of Spanish rice bought from the Puerto Rican place down on Flushing Avenue. He gags, a grittiness settling on his tongue.

Manna from heaven, Bill thinks before laughing bitterly. That’s what his mother would say. It’s what she called the free bread the church provided during the Depression, which is the last time he can remember being so hungry. He stares at the blackness below him. Perhaps nothing had changed. A starving child then, and a starving child now.

A shriek from the adjoined cell pulls him back to the present. It’s hysterical and desperate, the words unintelligible. A door slams.

“Jay?!” Bill yells, knocking on the wall to his right. “You okay?”

The shrieking calms, replaced with a quiet whimpering.

“Jay?” Bill repeats, softer. He thinks of a night before the tides of the battle had changed when Jay cried in Eugene’s arms, wailing and lashing out like a beaten dog. The gentleness had eased him, lifted him from the stress of combat into a dreamless sleep. Bill curses the wall between them. Jay is so sensitive, so fragile. Bill can tough this out, he always has. He’s been beaten, starved, and broken; he just can’t seem to die. But Jay was different, he couldn’t handle the darkness or the hunger. Bill knocks more insistently. “Are you okay?”

He hears Jay sniff from the other side of the wall. “Bill?”

“Yeah, Jay, it’s me. It’s Bill.” He clenches his eyes shut, trying to keep his tone even and neutral. Gentle. He needs to be gentle, like Eugene was, to not frighten Jay. He places his hand on the wall with a light touch. “I’m right here.”

“Th-they’re all around us, Bill,” Jay whispers, his voice trembling and stuttering with agonized chokes.

Bill feels him bump against the wall as though rocking and presses his own back to the same spot. The rocking stills. “I’m right here, Jay,” Bill says in as firm a voice as he can muster. “I can feel you. Can you feel me?”

Jay sniffs again. “Yeah…”

“We’re here together, alright? Don’t forget that. I’m right here,” Bill continues before knocking on the wall again. “Right here.”

Jay knocks back, and Bill feels the subtle movements of his breathing begin to slow.

“Did you eat your rice?” Bill asks, willing his voice not to shake.

Jay begins whimpering again.

“Hey, hey! Stay with me!”

“No,” Jay breathes, and his voice is so small and weak that Bill feels his own hands begin to shake.

“You have to eat it, Jay. Just stuff it in your mouth and swallow, like that moonshine we drank on Pavuvu, remember?” Bill gesticulates wildly as though blindly conducting a noiseless orchestra, convincing himself just as much as Jay.

Silence. The presence on the other side shifts and then is gone.

“Jay? Remember?”

Silence still. Bill turns to face the wall, banging on it with his fists. “Jay?!”

He knocks until his arms ache, splinters bloodying his skin. He’s not sure when he stops really, or how much time passes. How much time has passed at all. How long he’s been in this cell. The little light from the cracks fades and the mud at his feet chills. It must be night. Had he fallen asleep again? He can’t be sure. Has he slept at all? Is he asleep now? Talking to Jay earlier feels like a distant dream, a hallucination. He barks out a grim laugh. He must be going crazy.

The laugh turns into a coughing fit, his parched throat grinding against itself in an attempt to swallow nothing. The water that had pooled in the mud earlier had sunk into the dirt, leaving only a thick sludge. He would have to wait for the next blinding light, and who knows when that would come. His head swims and he knocks it against the wall, hoping against hope that the conversation earlier was not a dream. “Jay?” he croaks.

There is no answer. Only dark. His blinking and open eyes are one. For a moment, he thinks he sees a figure amongst the blackness, but it follows wherever his eyes shift, and he distantly knows it must be a spot in his vision. The shaking returns to his hands, this time accompanied by a harsh beating in his chest. How long had his heart been racing? He forces his arms to cross, fighting against palsied muscles. Maybe Jay had died, and Bill was about to join him. The thought is strangely calming, and he lets his body go limp.

There’s a sudden presence at his back. “Bill?” Jay’s shaky voice sounds from the other side.

He jumps, having long given up on an answer. “Jay?”

“Bill… I’m so thirsty,” Jay rasps, each word choked and gravelly.

Bill clears his throat as discreetly as possible, leaning away from the wall so Jay can’t feel the cough that threatens to rumble out of him. He has to be strong, show Jay that they can’t give up yet. That they will survive this. “It ain’t shit, Jay. Remember the first few days after we landed? No fuckin’ water. At least the sun is off us and we don’t have Japs shootin’ at us.”

Jay whimpers weakly. “But they’re out there. Everywhere.” He pauses, panting loudly for a moment. “I hope they kill us soon. Quick and easy.”

Bill winces. “Don’t say that. We’ll be rescued. Rupertus prolly has half the Corps lookin’ for us right now.”

“They sent us here to die without clean water and you think they’ll do a rescue mission?” Jay bursts into twisted, horrible laughter. “Not a snowball’s chance in hell!”

“Jay–”

Jay stops laughing abruptly. “Is this hell?”

“We’re alive, Jay. I can feel you breathin’ through the wall,” Bill says carefully, heart dropping at Jay’s unhinged behavior. He does a slow, loud breath in and out. “Feel that? We’re alive.”

Jay mimics the breath. Bill closes his eyes, holding onto the feeling of his friend being alive. This is real, he tells himself. This is not a dream. Although he’s not sure what he’ll do if Jay sinks further, if the next time they speak his voice is less recognizable.

“Don’t go asiatic on me,” he whispers. “We need each other. Together, we can survive this.”

“I don’t want to survive this,” sobs Jay, and Bill can feel him shake desperately against the wall. “If I had any fucking nerve I’d throw myself into the mud and drown!”

Bill listens to Jay cry, speechless. Tears would sprout in his own eyes if he weren’t so damned thirsty. He bites his cracked lip and tugs at his hair. What can he say? What can he do to snap Jay out of it? To snap himself out of it? His heartbeat booms in his ears, muffling Jay’s sobs, and he suppresses the urge to rock back and forth.

“Jay!” he finally shouts, anguish turning to anger. “Stop it! Stop cryin’!”

The sobs ebb into a soft mewling.

“Shut the fuck up!” Bill grabs his head in his hands, knuckles white. The mewling, the booming, it seems to be coming from all around him, from the darkness itself. He is Samson in the prison cell, eyes plucked out. Blinded. The noises around him are amplified, and then peter out into nothingness.

Time must pass, and before he knows it, he can see. A light shines on a SCR-300 backpack radio. This is a dream, he instantly knows. He walks to it, shocked to find his body clean and strong and strangely young. He puts a hand on the radio and turns it around. There is no operator. The telephone hangs limply by its cord, covered in maggots. Bill brushes them off and brings it to his ear. There’s a knocking on the other line, and then a familiar voice:

“He’s lucky. The other died,” it says.

He quirks his brow. “Who?”

“How long will he be like this?!” his mother’s voice cries. There’s a distant rumbling, shaking the ground ever so slightly.

“Hard to say. Parts of his brain may be permanently damaged,” the first voice replies.

His mother wails loudly as the rumbling grows louder, more violent. Bill tries to steady himself but is knocked off his feet, breathless.

The wailing shifts, his mother’s voice morphing into Jay’s. Or was it his friend’s? The other one, the one who–?

A scream tears through the telephone, static bubbling at the volume. “Bill!”

He clings to the ground as it quakes underneath him, the rumbling drawing near. A cold sweat pours down his back and there’s an overwhelming need to hide, to take cover, but there’s nothing around him. Only infinite darkness and the radio.

A blinding light stings his eyes. The light of a train. The rumbling is now deafening, earsplitting, almost as if there’s no noise at all. Only white light and a shaking ground. He wipes the sweat off his face and his hand comes back red with blood he knows is not his own. He looks to the radio. Maggots now cover it in its entirety, he desperately wipes them off. He needs to call for help, to tell his mother on the other line that the train is coming.

He uncovers the telephone, which is gripped by a hand. In front of him lays a body, green fatigues soaked with blood, skull smashed open. Bits of bones and brains cover the ground now, and he realizes his own body is coated with them as well. A putrid smell fills his nostrils, the smell of Peleliu, of rotting bodies unable to be buried in the coral. A feast for flies. He shrieks, panicking, and tries to brush it off, but it seems endless, like it’s oozing from his pores, and the light is so close now–

Jay.

Bill jerks awake, gasping, as rice is thrown at him and water splashes on the ground. His skin burns, feverish but unable to sweat. He fights through his aching head and crawls toward the light as his cell door is slammed shut. He dips his head down until his mouth reaches the puddle of water, sucking and lapping it up until there’s nothing but thick mud coating his tongue. He gathers saliva in his mouth and swallows it down too, not wanting to waste his precious water by spitting. He relaxes into the ground, still catching his breath, every inch of his body sore.

“Bill?” Jay’s soft voice calls through the wood.

With newfound strength, Bill sits up, back immediately finding Jay’s on the other side.

“Bill? I heard you scream. Are… are you okay?” Jay sounds better, less weak and panicked. Bill’s chest floods with hope, which he tries to stave off. Hoping is too dangerous. “Bill?”

“I’m alright… I just had a nightmare,” Bill replies, glad for the light peeking through the cracks. Compared to the terrible darkness of night, this seems almost tolerable.

“I’ve had a few too,” Jay admits softly, calm yet… Defeated. The half-formed hope dissolves in Bill’s chest.

Bill clears his throat. “Jay… Tell me about home. Were you bangin' Hollywood actresses left and right?” He tries to sound cheery, to summon the version of himself that would joke about such things, the him he was outside this cell.

Jay sniffs, voice hollow and hesitant. “Th-that all seems so long ago now,” he says. “So long ago. I can’t remember.”

Bill bites his inner cheek, wishing he could touch Jay, cradle him in his arms like Eugene did. Hug him. He tries to visualize Jay in his mind, smiling and joking and drunk off moonshine on Pavuvu. The image from his nightmare appears instead and he gags, heart aching more than the sores on his feet. He takes a calming breath before speaking, “Let me tell you about Brooklyn then.”

Jay doesn’t answer, but Bill can feel his breathing.

“My neighborhood is all micks. Every St. Paddy’s day there’s a huge party. Whole street lined with green, everybody drinking. Kissed my first girl on St. Paddy’s when I was thirteen. I was drunk off my ass, threw up a few minutes later. My mom beat me with a wooden spoon so hard it broke.” He laughs at the memory, a chilling melancholy prickling his skin.

“I never had my first kiss,” Jay murmurs, his voice sounding so close, right in Bill’s ear. “I enlisted the day of Pearl Harbor. I was eighteen. Thought I’d fall in love with some island broad. No such luck.”

Bill’s chest hollows at the words, a strange longing overtaking him. He turns to face the wall, as though if he looked at it hard enough he could see through it.

“Bill? Are you still there?” Jay asks shakily.

“I’m still here, I just moved,” he says, placing a gentle hand on the wall where Jay leans.

“D-don’t do that. I like it better when I can feel you.”

Bill leans back again. They sit in silence, breathing and beating becoming one, separated by only a slim wooden board. Time passes, slowly and quickly, breathe in and breathe out, until the mud chills again and the lights fade.

“I’m glad it’s you,” Jay whispers, tone almost drowsy.

“I’m glad it’s you, too.”

He dreams a sweet dream, then, that he and Jay sit instead back-to-back in a field of flowers. They lean back on each other’s shoulders, cheeks brushing, their thirst quenched and bellies full. He feels Jay’s breathing more intimately, the softness of his skin, the fragility of his body in stark contrast with the wall that separates them in waking. I’m glad it’s you.

With the next blinding light, they are pulled out of the darkness. A Jap guard grabs Bill by the arm, shrouded in light like an unlikely angel. When his vision adjusts, he sees Jay, hunched over feebly as his own Jap guard leads him by the scruff of his fatigues. He looks so much smaller than Bill remembers. Although taller than him, Jay seems wizened by his time in the cell, a tortured panic in his eyes.

Bill wonders if his own eyes look similar. Maybe they’d both gone asiatic after all.

Their gazes meet, and Bill gives him a weak smile. Jay looks like he might cry. As they’re dragged off to their fate, Bill finds himself praying for the first time since they were captured – he’d long since stopped believing God would save them.