I was six
years old, my family had purchased one of the best PCs from the store. The new millennium was here. I sifted through the pages and screens and
noticed that everyone else was experiencing it.
The age of search engines: thrusting words across the world. And then in 2008, I watched a video of my
friend Kyle Clemson, an old friend from grade school, get shot by a line of
confused men on television.
He enlisted
in the Marines after high school because, y’know, a lot of people do that. All of our history books in school told us
that “The Big War Was Over” and that terror was enveloping the world and
encroaching on the American shore. Well,
maybe not all the text books. But the
war was happening anyways, outside suburbia.
Anyway, Kyle was a hard thinker and a gentleman, he was modest and
attractive, but he didn’t care much for home.
Considering how dry and quiet our town was, I can’t blame him, but he
was one of those distant types, y’know?
He wasn’t constantly proactive, as the Club members and athletes were,
or so it seemed. But Kyle, he wasn’t
withdrawn so much as he was peaceful and kind.
He lifted squandering kids from their clumsy asses and set ‘em straight,
then he moved on. He seemed to brush
into class like a minuet of wind, and he moseyed around, but he also read his
books without deterrence. I can’t really
describe it. I don’t know if it’s time
or my own perspective that skews who he really was, and hell I may not even know,
but after seeing that video I can’t stop thinking about what he was like.
There was
that one time after school, in the 9th grade: Alex, Lou, Sam and Kyle were smoking their
first cig, out behind the old barns on South Washington. I came along with Al and Lou but didn’t know
the other guys much, I was kind of quiet like Kyle too. So we chattered and talked smack about
dumbshits and teacher pricks, when all of the sudden Kyle yelled. There was a huge ass spider tickling his
neck, and he screamed like a little girl, but he grabbed that son of a gun and
threw it at least a mile away. He was
shaking and Alex and Lou were rolling on the ground while Sam and I ran laps
around them to forget how damn huge that spider was. I don’t think I’ve wizzed my pants—just a
little bit, mind you—since then.
I knew him
ever since, but as all things grow and fade, so did my knowing of Kyle, like
Lou and Sam. Thanks to Facebook I saw
them and the girls they dated but I didn’t really see them, y’know? Kyle went to training, but my buddies at
Mount Union and I stayed there whenever vacation happened. I got a text or two from him and we were in
good spirits, but he and I eventually learned that it was near impossible to
capture a moment to just sit down, sort our heads out, and reflect on each
others’ stories, from whatever part of the world we had seen—for myself,
Illinois and Ohio, for him, God knows where.
But did I really have the time, I don’t think I’ll ever know. Hell, where was I?
Kyle, this
kindred, earthly boy, was deployed into the Palestinian grounds for UN
security, and by God he was caught between the crusades and politics of that
place they talk about in the news. A
rumor was spread at his funeral that he had to shoot a man that was pummeling
another Marine in the midst of a car-bombing heist. Then his friend didn’t make it and a few
other neurotics were spinning bullets all around and Kyle went down, but he
didn’t die. No no no some group of
people that America has fucking poisoned took him into a room and recorded a
bullet going through his head, and nobody at home will ever forget about that
video, no matter how hard they try or how many other people they meet. Or maybe it’s just me. I still
don’t talk to Lou or Sam that much, and all I can think is that we’re too
young to buy into this, to let Kyle just go off and get trapped like that, and
to think that the terrors outside aren’t really just trying to blow us up from
the inside. It hasn’t consumed me, but
it hurts when a weird signal goes off, or whenever I see a coffin with the stars
and stripes on it board a plane, whether it’s in my head or a picture on the
internet. Kyle wouldn’t have believed in
such chaos. The small things I knew
about him entailed patience and kindness.
My story doesn’t say much, but you didn’t know him better than I, did
you? Only a handful of people from home
county know his name. Like Landerus,
Miles, and Stoops, the other young men that were deployed years ago. I knew Kyle never talked down to someone, nor
did he get in messes with girls or abandon his promises.
Sometimes I
wish the internet would shut its mouth every once and a while so that I don’t
have to imagine what it was really like, for some of these people.
DISCLAIMER – This is a fictional narrative, not an actual
story.