REV: Part II

By Michael Shay

The next afternoon, the Americorp P.O. drops in on us out of the sky. The red, white and blue Americorp logo is pasted across the VTOL ship's tail and the P.O. eagle is on the door. I queue up with the other G.I.s to send a vidfax home.

"Hi Mom, hi Dad," I say into the vidcam. The cam's big eye shines on mew, sucks my every word into its black body to the transmitter on top of the P.O. and off into space, where it bounces off the Americorp satellite and down to central receiving in Moses Lake, Washington, and over the wires to my parents home, once my own. I make up the usual lies. All is fine. The desert is beautiful. The war goes well. I miss you (this one is true). Then comes my parents' reply. We are fine. You look well. We miss you. Mom's gall bladder surgery went well. Take care of yourself.

And then my time is up and another G.I. in gray camouflage takes the booth and I walk out in the sun. I see REV, last in line, talking to the C.O. "How are your parents, Brother Brandt, conjuring up that concerned look he's had so much practice with. "They're fine, REV," I say. "Thanks for asking."

"Praise God," he says, nodding.

Later, I doze in the shade of the bunktent, letting my mind wander into The Bradbury's world of thin-limbed Martians and their silent towns and of soft rain falling on a devastated earth. I take time to praise God for the writers of the books locked securely in my imagination.

"Hey!" I open my eyes. Bender is staring down at me. "Wake up," he says. "We got a new guy." The soldier to Bender's left puts down her duffle and smiles nervously at me. The new guy -- a woman. Red hair, freckled face, pointed chin, thin as a malnourished muja. SelectServ not so selective these days, I guess. I wonder what her response would be if I said she looked like Becky Thatcher?

"I didn't know we were getting a new guy," I say.

Bender shrugs. "Neither did I. Lieutenant just calls me over and says, 'Rustled up some help for you guys and here she is.' "

A new guy is rarely good news, even when you're short-handed. This one could be a spook, sent to check up on us.

"New guy got a name?" I ask.

"Smith,." she says, reaching out to shake my hand. "Smith, Barbara."

"Welcome Smith, Barbara." I shake, noting that even her hands are freckled. The desert sun will not be her friend. "Know anything about QACs?"

She snaps to attention. "Q-A-C, sir, the Quick-Assembly-Cross Unit. Serial number QAC-75638593483-6436457485. A self-contained, one-piece extendable unit, consisting of an aluminum alloy support beam attached with rust-and-dust-proof swivels to the aluminum alloy cross-beam. The cross-beam, sir..."

"Don't call me sir," I say. "I'm a sergeant. See." I show her the stripes on my shoulder.

"Sir, I mean, yes sergeant, I won't call you sir." She clears her throat. "To continue, sergeant. The cross-beam swivels and snaps into place with..."

"Forget about that," I say. "Me and Bender here know more about the QAC than we do about our navels. Right, Bender?"

"You said it."

"O.K. Smith, stow your gear in this tent and Bender will show you around."

"Can't wait," says Smith. She plunges into the tent with her duffle and is out again in a second. You can tell she's a new guy, naive and eager. With time, she'll learn to pace herself in the desert heat. She'll learn a lot of other things too.

"Now show this new guy the ropes," I say. "I'm going to take a nap."

"See, kid," says Bender, who's 20 and maybe a year older than Smith, "when you're a sergeant, you can take naps in the middle of the day."

As they disappear, I survey the desert beyond the perimeter. Sometimes I stand here and imagine what it must be like in the undulating desert, where beetles and gnats buzz under the unfettered sun. Once the sun finishes with us, it tracks across the world to Iran, Iraq, Syria, Israel, the Med, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, the Atlantic, Florida, Texas, Mexico, the wide Pacific, Okinawa, China, India, Pakistan and back to us, as if it had never eased its heat and left us in the cold desert night. To the north are the naked, gray-brown wrecks of mountains where the guerrillas hide. To the south, the shifting desert dunes.

I turn and slip into the tent's cool confines. I reach into the depths of my duffle and get my packet of WristBib chips. The silicon chips are no bigger than my pinky fingernail and they power our Wrist Bibles. Each lasts about a month -- planned obsolescence, reaching us here in Afghanistan. Yet, the chip I slip into the WristBib is different from the rest. When I ease myself into the rack and power up the WristBib, the holovid image of the Americorp Channel leaps out at me. But crawling across the bottom of the screen are The Bradbury's words, beaming from Vidceremos stations somewhere in Latin America. This is the English language broadcast; later in the day you can read the world's authors in Spanish, French, Japanese, Chinese, Russian and Esperanto. Vidceremos -- "Words for the World Struggle." Americorp has tried to jam the signals, but these high-tech bookworms always find a way to get through to us readers.

It's the only way to read in this vid time. The only book permitted is The Good Book, and it's no longer read, just recited. The words of the Lord, as interpreted by REV and the preachers on the Americorp Channel. Fiction has been forbidden since The Great Purge, since the rise of the Party of God and its founding of God's Republic in 2003, almost 20 years before I was born.

I've seen the old, flat-image vids from that time. The government (backed by Americorp, of course) launched a recycling drive to help fund the crusades. "Give us your aluminum, your glass, your paper," blared the vids. First they just wanted the scrap paper, then old newspaper and magazines, then the books. The government said it was a temporary measure, due to the war shortages. By the time the people realized "temporary" really meant "permanent," it was too late.

My father barely remembers all this -- he was just a kid. "I knew how to read and I had lots of books but my parents had to give them up," he told me a few years back, even though talking about it was taboo. He missed his books, he said. "Babar, SPUD, Big Bird, Purple Spider, Lassie." He told me the stories from memory and swore me to secrecy. That's probably why I went out of my way to track down fictions at the academy. They closed down all the schools and drafted us into the army and here I am, catching up on my education via Vidceremos.

Today I read The Bradbury. Other days, Vonnegut, Morrison, Dick, Marquez and Mahfouz come to me through the air. On the Fourth of July I caught readings by samizdat writers like Ching and Letich and A.K.A. Tom Paine. I have to be careful; spooks are everywhere. But I've read thousands of books in 22 years. My head is stuffed full of bad seeds.

I read the words slowly crawling across the screen, reading about a Mars that never was, a Mars that The Bradbury imagined almost a century ago. There are no sermons on these pages. No shalt-nots. No begets and begot and what-nots. I can read The Book for that. It is always there and always the same -- REV and his overlords count on their words being as solid as concrete. I can pick up a book and the world is different, changing forms and shapes like some of The Bradbury's characters. Looking into a book is like peering at the tattoos on the Illustrated Man.

The way I figure it, books and The Book can exist side-by-side, as they did before The Purge. Doctrine and fiction, coexisting.

This is what I believe.

Read "REV: Part III" the week of Oct. 30, 2006