It had been gentle with him, almost nurturing to him when he’d come here to Fort Riley almost eight years ago. As a matter of fact, resting in the arms of those in his command, he had, for the first time in his life, known peace even in the midst of all the insanity happening around him. He had been to war long before he joined the Army after that horrible day on September 11, 2001. But that dream would turn to a nightmare as the house began to scream in agony, along with the spirits and memories and pieces of him left there. He had dreamed of standing outside the house armed with a Molotov cocktail he would ignite and send hurling into the living-room window and then watch as the flames engulfed the house slowly. Those that weren’t boarded up remained curtainless and hollow, like a corpse that had lost its eyes during the process of decomposition.
CRYSTAL CASTLES LYRICS CONCRETE WINDOWS
He would do it late at night, while his lover slept, looking with sick fascination at the house that had once been meticulously cared for, but now had boarded windows and a screen door barely hanging on to its frame. He occasionally looked up the house of his childhood on Google Maps, like a sorcerer scrying through a crystal ball. There, his private Vietnam remained among the broken cracks of sidewalks that hadn’t ever been repaired. Summer was hell, as the heat poured over the concrete jungle that time had forgotten, drug dealers, disgruntled teenagers, and dangerous cops prowling the neighborhoods like jackals ready to pick off the weakest among the populace. Drive-by shootings, fire bombings… a place where residents looked forward to winter, because criminals, like the rest of the wild animals in the world, seemed to hibernate in the deep depression of the cold months. He hated that place, the city of empty and broken dreams, where one could find himself staring down death either by gangbangers with murder in their eyes or by the prostitutes with the forced sway of their hips, offering their poisonous wares while their pimps looked on, salivating over the money their golden girls would hand over at the end of their shifts. Well, he had never really ever been happy in his life, but this was the closest he had ever come.Īs he looked out over the darkened plains that whipped past him as his forty-thousand-dollar jukebox on wheels plowed the black-top roads, he thought, You aren’t in Detroit no more.
He smiled to himself he was going home, back to the familiar, back to where he’d been happy.
The tendrils of smoke got caught on the wind and whipped past his face and out into the fiery glow of a quickly approaching evening as darkness descended like ink across the eastern expanse of prairie sky. He lit one up, inhaling deeply before exhaling a plume of bluish-gray smoke through his nostrils and mouth. He shut it off and reached down beside him, blindly grabbing for the pack of Marlboro Lights he had sitting in the center console. The air conditioner was on the fritz again and gave off only strange noises rather than cool air. The window was down, and the warm summer wind blew in, bathing his sweat-soaked body. T HE K ANSAS state line had been crossed about an hour earlier, and I-70 stretched on forever in front of Jonathan David as his Dodge tore through the plains state at eighty miles an hour.
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