Meridien K - Chapter 3: The Condition

Pointman kept a journal for the first few months, when we were sitting around the shrink-wrapped, fresh-painted Base With No Name, doing scant more PT than morning runs to get our stamina up. None of us knew each other well enough by that point, and none knew that said lack of personal info would stay that way for the better part of the decade and the years following. We were all at the Zero Point. We'd never talk about ourselves, what we did Before The War. It all started back at that Base. Day Zero, Year Zero.

             

At first, we thought it was part of Pointman's Condition. All of us had a Condition. At the start, it seemed a harmless game everyone probably played out in their head, diagnosing all us fellow cases, noting all our ticks, like it'd be a Rosetta Stone to decode an ultimate understanding of how we were supposed to function as a military Unit. It was pretty obvious that there was something Off with each and every one of us when the pharmacist came by every night with his cheat-sheet and administered our separate cocktails of pills. For me, five milligrams of unazepam, three-hundred of quetiapine, four-hundred of lithium; three chalky pills, one brown, one white, one pink. We tried to keep to ourselves and avoid taking inventory of the nightly ritual, but hell, we figured if everyone was in some way brainfucked, we could all shrug it off and hit PT the next morning without a misstep.

            

For whatever reason, even though he bunked down the far side of the Barracks, Caf started following me around, jogging next to me, sitting close in the Mess, the next desk over in Classroom, that Kid so eager to make best friends the first day of school, spotting me in the weight room even though I was barely lifting anything. All around, we pale, disproportioned, fifteen-year-old white kids were lifting in near-silence. A boombox played a local classic rock station in the corner but nobody was listening; only enough attention to turn it off during commercials.

             

Back then, the full roster of twelve: me Caf Candy Chronos Gremlin Horse Mars Pointman Six-Four Slug Terra Z in our PT uniforms, black t-shirts and shorts and khakis-colored canvas combat boots. Solid colors; no names, no rank, no insignia.

             

And there was Pointman on the inclined bench press, just leaning back, head pointing to the dimpled ceiling, eyes down on his pocket-sized leather-bound brown notebook, pen in his mouth for even the sparest moment before he carefully, meticulously formed whatever words were on those pages.

             

"The hell does he have to write about?" Caf asked aloud, at first seemingly to no one before I realized he was talking to me. "Same routine as every day. Same as yesterday. Same will happen tomorrow. Nothing special. Either he's some poet or hardcore OCD or… something. Like he has to write down the exact way to tie his shoes. Like to start with the left lace or right lace. The two-bow method or the one-bow trick. You get a tighter knot the second way."

             

Glances around at everyone else. Ruminating with my tongue wagging side-to-side in my closed mouth. Only physical observations at that time. Caf motormouthed, juiced, trapped in what seemed to me an elevated hypomania; Candy never blinked, like he didn't want to miss a moment of all the silent pain of the world; Chronos able to tell time, exact time, like he could smell it, didn't need a watch or the sun or anything, just Knew; Gremlin and Mars a total fucking mystery, a few glimpses in their eyes and that was enough, like looking at polished stones that betrayed nothing of what was past their shine; Horse with a stamina suitable his namesake; Pointman and his chronicling; Six-Four with long running strides like a gazelle, tall like a varsity basketball center but almost ashamed of it, looking for shadows in every room he entered; Slug and his slight stutter that didn't bother him but sure as hell irked us; Terra with a situational awareness more fit for a predator, or prey, maybe, head snapped long before undetected footsteps brought another body into any room; Z with a non-bravado when he pushed himself to physical limits no one expected of any of us; and me.

             

"Just leave him alone," I said.

             

"Since when are you on his side?"

             

I politely chuckled and almost dropped the bar and its puny weights back right on my chest.

             

"There aren't any sides," I said. "And come on," I said, "like there's nothing wrong with you?"

             

"Hey," said Caf, a little pointed, hostility lingering in the syllable, "nothing is wrong with me," with a weird semi-interrogatory emphasis on "wrong." "I'm just…" a pause in the air, as palpable as breath on a cold day, "very particular," he said.

             

"What does 'Caf' stand for?" I asked, changing subjects in a way I thought timely and distracting before realizing all the Rules it broke. I set down the bar and got off the bench, rubbed the sweatline on my brow with a towel that, as soon as it went near my nose, I knew wasn't mine.

             

"And what does 'Meridien K' stand for?" Caf asked as he piled on more weights with the only gesture of manliness possible for any of us, all of us with hidden muscles, skinny arms until flexed, then a big bulge out of nowhere, crafted down in the dark rubber-matted room, like alchemy over the slow burn of months.

             

"You mean the 'K,'" I said, correcting his own question.

             

"What? No, the… whole… thing…" then four reps, five reps, six, his arms quaking, almost invisible because of their rapid movement, like they were oscillating at a quantum level.

             

"You need help?"

             

"Answer the damn question," through grit teeth as he pumped the weight, brought it down, struggled to bring it back up. He kept his eyes on me, wasn't going to let up.

             

"The whole thing is 'Meridienkraid.' It's a theoretical extrasolar planet."

             

"What?"

             

"Never mind."

             

Ignoring him and, "When we were lined up by our bunks the first day, the Instructor said 'Meridienkraid' was too long. Shortened it to 'Meridien K.' I don't get it. It's the same number of syllables. Only a matter of time before it becomes just 'MK,' I suppose."

            

"Yeah," said Caf.

             

He didn't say anything else. He was trying to do a sort of hardcore forced breathing to get through the set. I decided to let him finish. Figured he was letting his mind wander elsewhere, or maybe he was becoming aware that the other ten in the room were all by themselves, verbally silent, and human voices sound far too conspicuous in any room filled solely by mechanical and metal sounds.

             

Caf set down the bar with a heavy release. It shook me out of whatever hazy mental state is possible when standing idle in a spongy-floored weight room a few levels underground. He stood up, leaned forward and let the sweat drip off the long strands of his hair, and then he took my towel, which wasn't even mine to begin with.

            

"Suppose now you want to ask about my codename? Bit for bat," he said, intoned halfway between a stated fact and a query.

             

"I don't care anymore," I said, completely neutral, not insensitive or anything, just true, sincere, because, honestly, I didn't.

             

"Yeah. Something about Shakespeare and roses and names, I guess," Caf said.

             

Caf looked back to Pointman, who was working the inclined bench with a pen in his mouth. His leather book was on the ground between his feet. It wasn't hard to tell what Caf was thinking.

            

The tone sounded through the speakers, and we put away our weights and filed upstairs for lunch.

(Chapter 4 coming Wednesday, November 23, 2011.)